Beard of the Week LXI: Some Guys and Some Dolls
This week's beard* belongs to Clay Boyce, artistic director, chair, and founder of Park Players, a group in Birmingham, Alabama, that performs live outdoor theatre. For example, next year is a big Shakespeare year with "As You Like It" and "Taming of the Shrew" on the playbill.
In addition to his chairing and directing, Mr. Boyce likes to act, too. In the 2006-2007 season at the CenterStage Theatre–apparently also in Birmingham, Alabama, although their website never actually says where they are located†–he performed in "Guys and Dolls", playing the part of Harry the Horse. Here is his admirably brief biography from the program for that show:
Clay is the artistic director and founder of Park Players (www.bhamparkplayers.com). He was last seen as Mark Transom in That Darn Plot! and in July he'll be directing Blackpool and Parrish being presented at the theatre at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Some of his favorite roles have been Rutledge in 1776, Fagin in Oliver!, the title role in Hamlet and Uncle Arvide in Guys and Dolls. He would like to thank his wife, Vicki and his daughter, Victoria for all the love and support they give him to do this foolishness!
The point of this week's BoW, I may now reveal, is "this foolishness", specifically the role of Harry the Horse in "Guys and Dolls", which I now know I will be performing next March.
We had our audition / hazing ritual yesterday (Sunday) for our spring show, the aforementioned "Guys and Dolls". It was fun and we had a good turn out. I am more of a character actor (yikes! "actor", he said!) than a romantic lead–lots more–and I can read music and count, so I often end up doing the complicated ensemble bits (some that spring to mind: "Tom, Dick, or Harry", from "Kiss Me, Kate"; "Je suis bidin' mon temps", from "Crazy for You"; "Sign it, Lily", from "On the Twentieth Century"), and I like singing the complicated ensemble bits, too.
Gosh, the only reason I mentioned all that was to provide my excuse for why I chose to use Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" as my audition piece. You know it? Of course you do: music by Sir Arthur Sullivan ("The Major-General's Song" from "Pirates of Penzance": "I am the very model of a modern major-general…."), and the lyrics by Lehrer consist almost entirely of the names of the chemical elements. If you'd like to hear it, may I suggest this animated version? Anyway, I made it through at a break-neck pace but without error.
"Guys and Dolls" is a show I know practically nothing about, although it's relatively popular. The music and lyrics are by Frank Loesser; the book is based on stories by Damon Runyon. I'm reading the synopsis right now at Wikipedia, but you can read it as well as I can.
And that's what I did this weekend.
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* Mr. Boyce's beard is delightfully shaded in tones of brown, gray, and white, a color combination that we usually refer to as "granite". The photograph is credited to Angela Karen; source.
† I'm getting seriously deranged by organizations, particularly newspapers, that create websites that have a strong local viewpoint but that never, ever specify on their websites where that locality is! Evidently they don't realize that people outside their city might actually see their websites on the internets.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Look! Up in the Sky!
All sorts of stuff has been going on up in the sky lately. There's just so much to look at.
For instance, NASA sent word today (SpaceWeather for 6 December 2008) that the SOHO spacecraft, the orbiting solar observatory,* has only hours ago taken this picture (like this one, which I've cropped quite a bit; full-sized source here) of a massive solar prominence. They also link to some additional amazingly beautiful photographs of the prominence taken by other people with solar telescopes: from Mark Walters of Four Crosses, Powys, Wales, UK; from Emiel Veldhuis of Zwolle, the Netherlands; from Robert Arnold of Isle of Skye, Scotland; from M. Ugro et al. of South Portland, Maine.
Now, you may remember the giant meteorite that made an appearance last week over British Columbia. There's been another (a "superbolide"), this time in Colorado. From the same SpaceWeather page as above:
Astronomer Chris Peterson photographed the event using a dedicated all-sky meteor camera in the town of Guffey, near Colorado Springs.
"In seven years of operation, this is the brightest fireball I've ever recorded," says Peterson. "I estimate the terminal explosion at magnitude -18, more than 100 times brighter than a full Moon."
Here's an animation of some of the photographs of the event.
Finally, more pretty pictures. There was some excitement earlier this week on Monday (1 December 2008), when there was, at sunset, a beautiful conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and a crescent moon. We had clear, cold skies that evening and beautiful viewing of the event, which really was remarkably pretty. NASA has a "Conjunction Gallery" of very lovely photographs of the event submitted astronomy enthusiasts. Visit when you have some time to look and ooh and aah.
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* About SOHO's orbit, from the project page at NASA:
SOHO is in orbit between the Earth and the Sun. It is about 150,703,456 kilometers (92 million miles) from the Sun and only about 1,528,483 Kilometers (1 million miles) from the Earth (three times farther than the moon). This orbit is around a mathematical point between the Earth and the Sun known as the Lagrange point or the L1 point. The L1 point is a point of [gravitational] equilibrium between the Earth's and Sun's gravitational field, that is to say that the pull is equal from both the Sun and the Earth. The L1 point is a point of unstable equilibrium (like a bowl round side up with a marble balanced on it). As a result, we have to compensate for perturbations due to the pull of the planets and the Earth's moon. Every few months we use a little fuel to fine tune our orbit and keep it from getting too far off track. This is known as "station keeping manoeuvres"
No spacecraft is actually orbiting at the L1 point. For SOHO there are two main reasons: the unstable orbit at the L1 point and facility of communication in a halo orbit. If SOHO was sitting directly at the L1 point, it would always be right in front of the Sun. The trouble is that the Sun is very noisy at radio wavelengths, which would make it very difficult to tune into the radio telemetry from the spacecraft. By putting it into a halo orbit, we can place it so that it's always a few degrees away from the Sun, making radio reception much easier.
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Fundamentalist Innumeracy II
Now, a very brief follow-up to yesterday's bit ("Leaving the Lifestyle, Baby!") about innumeracy among fundamentalist christians.
As Pam Spaulding tells the story ("Daddy D's hissy fit over WaPo conservative columnist Kathleen Parker"), James Dobson, of the so-called "Focus on the Family" organization, was upset when Ms. Parker wrote in the Washington Post that the problem with the Republican Party is that it has been taken over by "the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP", what she refers to as "armband religion". Apparently Mr. Dobson felt that he was being included in the "oogedy-boogedy branch" (almost certainly); such an identification could easily come about from the exceedingly large religion armband he wears.
Anyway, Dobson spouted some words that he seemed sure would put Ms. Parker in her place, words that we don't need to give any more light or air to, except that we were amused to read (quoted at Pam's place, linked above):
That both Obama and marriage won in California and Florida makes it clear that many who pulled the lever for the "change" he espoused also pulled it for the stability provided by marriage as recognized for millennia in all civilized societies.
Oooh, doesn't "millenia" sound a lot like "forever"? It means a thousand years, of course, and "thousand" at time in history has been used to mean a very great many.
Literally–this will come as no surprise–there's quite a bit wrong with the assertion about "marriage as recognized for millennia in all civilized societies."
There's the time-frame, of course. Too many millennia and the idea goes back before the time of Adam and Eve, that god-given model for a perfect "marriage" (did anyone ever see their marriage certificate?). We don't know that Dobson is a young-earth creationist who believes the planet was created in 4004 BCE, but it seems likely.
Regardless, the reference to "millennia" takes us easily back into the ever-popular "biblical" times, when everything was perfect. Including, one presumes, the perfectly bigamous marriages mentioned in the book itself. Oh dear. Perhaps those societies were not "civilized". I'm guessing that the standard in Mr. Dobson's mind for whether a civilization is "civilized" is its opinion about "traditional marriage".
There's also the equivocation over "all", as in "all civilizations". This can be a great deal of fun and lead to many–thousands of!–arguments. Provided he feels he can pinpoint one moment in each "civilization" when his assertion was true, Mr. Dobson will feel justified in saying "all civilizations", realizing that saying it that way also sounds a great deal like "for every civilization for all times". Tsk tsk.
Anyway, the hyperbole continues to grow. I won't be surprised to hear "recognized for millennia" mutate into "recognized for millions of years" sometime soon. It could happen so very easily among those with no sense of what "thousands of years" and "millennia" actually are, and it could be so very, very amusing.
In: All, Faaabulosity, Laughing Matters
Doing Some Twenty on Ninety
Recently I read Bunny Crumpacker's* Perfect Figures : The Lore of Numbers and How we Learned to Count (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2007, 271 pages). I never quite decided whether I liked it or not, but I rather enjoyed the reading of it. Mostly it was engaging, but the style took me a while to loosen up and enjoy. For more you are welcome to my book note.
Regardless of the overall effect, there were plenty of amusing bits and I have, naturally, kept a few to share with you.
This first item we should probably file under "the more things change, the more they stay the same". The time was apparently late July 1918 (per this page of waltz history).
The waltz grew out of the ländler, a German country dance in three-quarter. time. The word waltz is from an old German word, walzen, which meant "to roll," "turn," or "glide." The ländler involved a certain amount of countryish hopping and jumping, but the waltz polished all that with a gliding grace that had enormous appeal for the young men and women who first danced it.
It also meant that the man held the woman in a light embrace as they danced–scandal! The aristocratic dances that preceded it–the minuets, polonaises, and quadrilles–kept the partners at a decorous distance from each other. but waltzers had to hold on to each other as they swooped around the dance floor. The waltz was banned in parts of southern Germany and Switzerland. Religious leaders everywhere considered it to be vulgar and sinful.
When the waltz reached England, the Times of London considered it necessary to write an editorial about its lasciviousness. "It is quite sufficient to cast ones eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." On to the tango! [pp. 70–71]
Despite all that it seems that Queen Victoria was a devotee of the waltz.
Next, for our delectation, a bit of unexpected rudeness from St. Jerome (I figure him for the most sour saint in the bunch, if not the biggest sourpuss in history) and a fun euphemism that some hip-hopsters might like to consider. The topic at hand is ways to count to high numbers on the hands.
Finger numbers eventually began to have meanings beyond pure numeration. Saint Jerome wrote that the finger-counting sign for thirty meant marriage. The tip of the index finger was held against the tip of the thumb–thus, he wrote, "a tender kiss represents the husband and the wife." Sixty, with the index finger bent over the thumb on the left hand, so that its second joint touched the thumb's tip, represented a widow "in sadness and tribulation." One hundred ("pay close attention, gentle reader," he wrote), used the same fingers on the right hand, with the tip of the index finger touching the bottom section of the thumb and the space between them closed, "shows the crown of virginity."
Less tenderly, in ancient Persia a poet wrote of the battle between two noblemen. "They fight day and night to decide which army shall do a twenty on the other's ninety." The hand sign for twenty placed the thumb of the right hand between the index and third fingers, so that it protruded (a relative of today's erect middle finger). The ninety, on the right hand, involved curling the index finger so that its tip touched the bottom of the thumb, leaving a small round hole (not the closed virgin's crown, but now open, perhaps an anus) between the two fingers. Doing the twenty on the ninety wasn't a nice thing to say, even for a poet. [p. 79]
Next, from the chapter on "11", some mocking of conspiracy theorists and god-fearing wackos, who might be the same people.
The World Trade Towers were eleven incarnate, and an amazing eleven aura has risen up around them since the terrible day on which they fell. The cult of eleven begins with the attack that took place on September 11. In numbers, the date is known as 9/11, and nine plus one plus one is eleven. The first plane to hit the North Tower was American Airlines Flight 11. It had ninety-two passengers; nine plus two is eleven. Flight 77 hit the Pentagon; seventy-seven is eleven times seven; it held sixty-five passengers; five plus six is eleven. September 11 is the 254th day of the year; two plus five plus four is eleven. After September 11, 111 days remain until the end of the year. The emergency code for telephones is 911–nine-one-one, which is eleven, or nine-eleven. The state of New York was the eleventh state to join the Union; New York City is spelled with eleven letters. Afghanistan, where bin Laden was thought to be hiding, has eleven letters. The Twin Towers looked like an eleven. And each tower had 110 floors, which is eleven times ten.
Is this an amazing series of coincidences? Or, as some believe, is it a message from God? But surely, if God wanted to send us a message–about our wicked ways, or the coming of the Messiah, or the Second Coming and the imminent end of the world–he wouldn't send it in code. He spoke clearly–albeit through an angel–to Mary, among others; he spoke directly to Moses, and left his words chiseled in stone. Why would he bother with coeds? Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11; many more suffered their loss and were left to grieve. It's hard to imagine a god counting the letters in New York City and deciding that those thousands of people, and all who loved them, should suffer as they did so that eleven could stand as a warning. Skywriting would have been a lot better. [pp. 192–193]
Since this is a book about numbers, here are a few fun facts from number theory that might earn one a free beer some night at the bar.
The Fibonacci numbers have a happy–and odd–eleven quirk. Any ten Fibonacci numbers in a sequence will always add up to a number that's divisible by eleven. The first ten numbers: 1 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 5 + 8 + 13 + 21 + 34 + 55 = 143, and 143 divided by 11 is 13. Or, to use higher numbers, continuing the sequence: 55 + 89 + 144 + 233 + 377 + 610 + 987 + 1,597 + 2,584 + 4,181 = 10,857, and 10,857 divided by 11 is 987. There's more: the sum of any sequence of ten Fibonacci numbers when divided by eleven always gives a number that is the seventh number in the sequence. In the first example above, 13 is the seventh number in the sequence; in the second, 987 is. Is this more Fibonacci magic? Absolutely. [pp. 196–197]
Finally, a whirlwind explanation of the archaic English monetary system, for those of us who still read older English novels and never quite caught on to all the names for the money, names that seem to proliferate like nicknames for characters in Russian novels.
The English pound in the duodecimal system (adjective, relating to the number twelve, from the Latin duodecimus, "twelfth," from duodecim, "twelve," from duo, "two," and decem, "ten") was divided into 240 pence. The singular of pence is penny, and the symbol for penny is p, so for the five pence, the Brits write "5 p," which they pronounce "five pee".
Each twelve pence was equal to one shilling, and twenty shillings made a pound. Which doesn't say anything about farthings, bobs, florins, crowns, or guineas. There were four farthings to a penny (or two halfpennies). Farthings, halfpennies, and pennies were all kn9own as coppers–because, yes, there were all made of copper. A florin was worth two shillings. A shilling was the same as a bob (and bob wasn't used in the plural–fifteen shillings was fifteen bob); a five-shilling piece was a crown; a guinea was worth just over a pound. A sovereign was a gold pound coin. Quid is the slang term for pound; the plural of pound is pounds, but the plural of quid is still quid. [pp 202–203]
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* I don't plan to make fun of Bunny's name, but I do have two of her earlier books–both cookbooks, by the way, of nostalgic, vintage recipes–and I have always thought her name delightfully outlandish.
Churches' Tax Exempt Status: Not a Constitutional Right
San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, in his first extensive explanation about his role in the passage of Proposition 8, on Wednesday defended the church's actions in the successful ballot initiative.
"Religious leaders in America have the constitutional right to speak out on issues of public policy," Niederauer wrote in a statement posted on the archdiocese's Web site.
[Matthai Kuruvilam, "S.F. archbishop defends role in Prop. 8 passage", San Francisco Chronicle, 4 December 2008.]
This is a curiously specious argument, a strawman that has been getting more and more straw stuffed into it ever since right-thinking people started objecting to the idea that gay and lesbian people should be excluded from their constitutional right to petition the government for redress. This disenfranchisement is the fundamental problem with California's proposition 8, just as it was with Colorado's Amendment 2 some 15 years ago, and for which the US Supreme Court struck it down.
The Mormon Church, and now the Catholic Church, would like us to think that they are back in the Roman Arena being persecuted by fierce gay lions that want to rend their constitutional rights asunder with their big, gay teeth. This, they believe, is persecution when, in fact, it's what they usually recognize as "the marketplace of ideas".
Nobody is censoring the churches, especially since "censoring" is something that can only be done by the government, not some people, not The People. It's odd how economic boycotts are so popular with the religious right, but lose popularity when the boycott is against them. I suspect the main difference is that boycotts from the right-thinking people actually work.
But, of course, this is not persecution, this is known as "actions have consequences", and those consequences come in the form of intense disapprobation by the society the churches would rather control. It's part of the free exchange of ideas about the vilification of same-sex relationships, condemnation that comes much closer to persecution than anything either of those religious sects face.
There has been no argument about whether churches, or church leaders, may comment on public policy. None whatsoever. That's the strawman.
On the other hand, there has been intense discussion of whether churches, which are corporations, should be allowed to retain their tax-exempt status when they meddle in politics.
As corporations, it's questionable whether churches really do have a constitutional right to political speech, but it's an argument that's irrelevant to this discussion.
What is relevant is that the US Supreme Court has, several times (I'll trip over the references again someday), found that churches do not have a constitutional right to avoid paying taxes. Tax-exempt status is a privilege graciously extended by the US government to churches and other organizations in recognition of their benefits to society; in exchange, tax-exempt organizations agree not to meddling in politics.
Perhaps tax-exempt status should be taken away from churches, at least those in violation of the rule against partisan politicking. It's all part of the "actions have consequences" discussion, and it's the reason that the Mormon Church, and now the Catholic Church, would really, really like you to believe that this is about their perceived constitutional right to political speech.
Leaving the Lifestyle, Baby!
The one trait that religious fundamentalists share, that I notice the most, is innumeracy. They have no sense of the size of numbers, or the place of numbers in the world, and it makes them look silly.
Their problem starts, of course, with numbers in the bible. Once upon a time, say 2500 years ago or so when the parables and myths in their infallible book were taking shape, large numbers were still a new idea (recall that zero was not to be invented for at least millennium yet) and, in fact, many of the large-number names that we use today, necessary for describing our nation's debt, for instance, hadn't been invented. For many cultures, counting was still at the one, two, three, many stage.
And thus it was that there are many references to numbers like forty thousand, a popular biblical number, which is a combination of "forty", a mystical number at the time, and "thousand", meaning really big. These numbers were not meant literally as counts of anything, of course, but that's confusing to a literalist.
Then there are the creationists who are convinced that the Earth was created in -4004 (forty hundred and a four is a pretty fabulous number, no?), which creates a bit of conflict with every known fact about the earth, the sun, and the rest of the universe. But their god has a sense of humor that way.
More recently there has been the growth industry in creating fabulous numbers for the time interval during which marriage–between a man and woman–has been traditional and unchanging. What started at a thousand years (does that sound precise, or does it sound more like "really big number" = "virtually forever"?), then it moved to two-thousand years, then over four-thousand years (i.e., late creation, the week before Adam & Eve who, however, don't actually seem to have been married). I've even heard ten-thousand years, but that's an embarrassing number for young-earth creationists since it's before the beginning of the world. One could be biblical and say forty-thousand years, but perhaps it's best just to go with "forever".
But, it should go without saying that, at least in this country, traditional marriage as it is practiced today is not the same as traditional marriage as it was practiced in, oh, 1965. Think Loving v. Virginia and remember that black people and white people were forbidden to marry. At the time, by the way, this was upheld as very, very biblical. Black people have been such a nuisance for fundamentalists.
And now, another fine example of fundamentalist innumeracy. Andy Towle reminded me of the case of one Crystal Dixon, formerly employed at the University of Toledo ("Fired UT HR Administrator Crystal Dixon Files Lawsuit", Towleroad, 3 December 2008). She was let go after she published an opinion piece (mandated by her god) in the Toledo Free Press badmouthing gay people. The University thought that she might not be unbiased in her job, VP of human resources.
Anyway, we're reminded that at the time she wrote the following:
As a Black woman … I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are civil rights victims. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. Daily thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle.
Let's avoid for the moment the silly notion that gay people can simply click their heels three times, say "there's no lifestyle like the straight lifestyle", and "leave" it. (I'm sure this is just one of the twelve impossible things Ms. Dixon believes before breakfast every day.)
Instead, let's look at this latest in fundamentalist innumeracy. Consider the assertion that "Daily thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle." Woa! Thousands!! Hallelujah!!!
Just imagine, thousands "leaving the lifestyle" (I'm hearing them singing "I'm Leaving the Lifestyle, Baby!"), every single day. How many thousands? Let's be generous, allow for a bit of hyperbole, and imagine that it's just one thousand who leave, one measly, little, thousand. ("Forty thousand" would have been a much more symbolic number, of course.)
One thousand each day. Seven thousand each week. Thirty thousand each month. An amazing three-hundred-and-sixty-five thousand every year! (An extra thousand for leap years, except in 2000.)
That is so exciting. Especially since, with a population in the US of roughly 300,000,000, and a gay and lesbian population of perhaps 10,000,000 (let's be generous), we'd run out of homos in about 27 years and 5 months. So, if we reasonably imagine that this mass exodus from teh gay lifestyle began with the election of St. Regan–a most reasonable assumption, I'd say–we'd be running out of homos, oh, right about now.
Right now we'd be down to the last 40 homos or so (a very meaningful number, no?), who do seem to be kicking up quite a fuss, probably because they've only got another few hours left in the lifestyle. Things will be so much easier now: no more recruiting, which is so time-consuming.
Oops, must dash….
In: All, Faaabulosity, Laughing Matters
Beard of the Week LX: Spock's Theremin
This week's beard belongs to Mr. Spock, the venerable half-Vulcan who served as the science officer aboard the Enterprise in "Star Trek", the original television series. It is thought that he has another name that is unpronounceable by humans. In grade school I identified quite a bit with Mr. Spock. Personally I hoped to develop the cool, rational demeanor and analytical outlook he displayed; outwardly, it was because my ears were too big for my head and looked vaguely pointy.
It seems that this episode in which Spock had this beard ("Mirror, Mirror"), is the only time Spock was ever portrayed with a beard (and, in fact, the bearded version is a mean, anti-Spock in a parallel universe–his beard kept viewers clued in about which universe events were happening). I think that's too bad because he looks quite dashing in a beard, but apparently NBC already found the Spock character too "sinister" looking to begin with, and everyone knows beards make men look more sinister.
"Spock's Beard" is also the name of a progressive rock band I'd never heard of until this morning. Isn't it splendid to learn new things?
Surely, in addition to the main characters, one of the most recognizable things from the "Star Trek" series was the theme song. Last night, for reasons we may or may not get to, the conversation happened to turn on the question whether the familiar and unusual timbre of the melody was 1) a woman singing; or 2) a theremin, which sounded like a woman singing?
Happily, Wikipedia was there with the answer:
Coloratura soprano Loulie Jean Norman imitated the sound and feel of the theremin for the theme for Alexander Courage's theme for the original Star Trek TV series. Soprano Elin Carlson sang Norman's part when CBS-Paramount TV remastered the program's title sequence in 2006.
I was relieved. I had always thought it was a woman singing, but it did sound remarkably like a theremin. And now we've arrived at my real object for this piece: Theremin and his theremin. (He never had a beard, it seems, but I would not be thwarted!)
Léon Theremin (1896–1993), born in Russia, started out as Lev Sergeyevich Termen. His name is familiar to many people these days because he invented the "theremin" (here's an interesting short piece about the theremin; or course there's Wikipedia on the theremin, not to mention Theremin World). Theremin invented the instrument in 1919 when he was doing research on developing a proximity sensor in Russia. Lenin loved it. Some ten years later Theremin ended up in New York, patented his instrument, and licensed RCA to build them.
The theremin (played by a "thereminist") is generally deemed to have been the first ever electronic instrument. It also claims the distinction that it is played by the thereminist without being touched. Instead, the thereminist moves her hands near the two antennae of the instrument, one of which controls pitch and the other of which controls volume; capacitive changes between the antennae and the body of the thereminist affect the frequency of oscillators that alter the pitch and volume of the generated tone.
It is a very simple device and the musical sound is not very sophisticated, and yet there's something beguiling in watching a good thereminist perform, and something haunting about the sound.
Most people have heard a theremin and typically haven't recognized it. Most popularly, perhaps, is its appearance in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", by Brian Wilson (YouTube performance), although this appears to be a modified theremin played by actually touching it!
My favorite theremin parts are in the score Miklós Rózsa wrote for the Hitchcock film "Spellbound"–fabulous film, fabulous music, for which Rózsa won an Academy Award. (In a bit, a link where you can hear the "Spellbound" music, with theremin). This movie was the theremin's first outing in such a popular venue–"Spellbound" was the mega-hit, big-budget, highly marketed blockbuster of its day. Later on, of course, the theremin was widely used in science-fiction movies, famously The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet. (On the use of the theremin in film scores, here's a fascinating article by James Wierzbicki: "Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical Voice to Hollywood’s Extraterrestrial 'Others' ").
There seems to have been a resurgence of interest in the theremin in the past few years, or else I've just noticed other people's interest more–the internet can make such things much more visible and seemingly more prevalent. One recent development: a solar-powered theremin that fits in an Altoids box. (Heard, by the way, in the radio program mentioned below.)
Some claim that the new interest began following the release of Steven M. Martin's 1995 documentary, "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey". I don't know about that, but we did watch this film a few weeks ago (we got a copy for rather few dollars–we couldn't pass it up because of the rather lurid cover art more suitable for something like "Plan Leon from Outer Space" perhaps), and it is an outstanding documentary. It's about Theremin and the theremin, and the story is very, very engaging. There's a lot of weird stuff that went on in Theremin's very long life, like the time in the 1930s (I think) when he was snatched from his office in New York City by Russian agents and spirited away to the Soviet Union. Friends thought he was dead, but he reappeared years later. He'd been forced to work for the KGB developing small listening devices.
A few people of interest also show up in the film: Brian Wilson (enjoy watching him try to finish one thought or get to the end of a sentence), Nicolas Slonimsky, Todd Rundergren, Clara Rockmore, and Robert Moog (of the Moog Synthesize–he started out making theremin kits). Of particular interest, I thought, was Clara Rockmore (1911–1998), thought of as probably the greatest thereminist of all time. Listening to her talk in the film is interesting, but more interesting is watching and listening to her play the theremin. Check out her technique! It's great stuff.
Now for one last treat. Here is a link to a 90-minute radio program (and information about it), called "Into the Ether", presented by a British thereminist who performs under the name "Hypnotique". The program is nicely done and filled with audio samples of theremin performances in a wide variety of genres. If you don't have the time for the entire thing, I'll point out that the "Spellbound Concerto", by Miklós Rózsa, from his music for the film, is excerpted at the very beginning of the program and that's a must-hear for thereminophiles, whether new or seasoned.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
One Gay Drop
At the beginning of the week, Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin ("Today In History: 1958 Broadcast On 'The Homosexual In Society'", 24 November 2008) noted the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking radio broadcast in Berkeley, California. He wrote about the broadcast that "This is not only believed to be the first radio broadcast to deal favorably with gay people, it is also believed to be the first to include an actual gay person to speak directly of his experience."
The bulk of the article is an article written just after the event by the late Del Martin for the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a pathfinding group of lesbians. Del Martin became a more familiar name this past summer when she married her long-time partner, Phyllis Lyon, the first same-gender couple married in San Francisco after marriage equality became the law (before it became against the law again, etc.).
The article makes fascinating reading. I pulled out this one small excerpt for a rather different reason. I think this was more noticeable to me since my involvement in marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
"Bisexual invisibility" has been an issue in recent years. In some ways people in more recent decades have rather taken the mere existence of bisexuality for granted, although there seems at times to be widespread disbelief that bisexuals actually exist. It's an uncomfortable situation for self-identified bisexuals.
I was interested to find that it–the existence of bisexuals–did not even come up in the Kinsey report. This was not because of a blind spot or prejudice on the part of Kinsey (so far as I could tell). Instead, it was because Kinsey, by design, refused to describe sexual orientation as such in favor of documenting and measuring that which was objective and quantifiable, namely, heterosexual or homosexual activity.
The famous Kinsey Scale does not really describe a continuum from "heterosexual" to "homosexual" with "bisexual" in the middle. The scale describes a history of behavior with men at one end who had experienced exclusively homosexual activity, men at the other end who had experienced only heterosexual activity, and those with roughly equal experience of both falling in the middle.
Whether there was even the idea of "a bisexual person" available at the time is unclear to me. And that's why this excerpt from Del Martin's article caught my attention. In the section quoted, Dr. Beach enumerates the "varying degrees of homosexual behavior" (which itself seems naive and dated), including the scary "latent homosexual"–scary particularly to those latent ones!
On the subject of bisexual invisibility I was interested to read that "those who find satisfaction in both homosexual and heterosexual behavior" are merely one sub-classification in the broad category "homosexual", what today we would see as the definition of "bisexual". Evidently, at the risk of drawing a parallel between the gay experience in America and the black experience in America, in the 50s–and remember that this broadcast came 10 years after the Kinsey report–there was also a "one-drop" rule for homosexuals: one homosexual experience, even a latent tendency, and you were a homosexual!
WHAT IS A HOMOSEXUAL?
Dr. Frank Beach Jr., anthropologist and professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, deplored the fact that nowhere in the previous discussion had there been a definition of the term “homosexual”. He recounted the varying degrees of homosexual behavior: the latent individual who has tendencies but who manifests no overt behavior, the individual who has one or two experiences in his life time, those who find satisfaction in both homosexual and heterosexual behavior, and those with exclusive homosexual experience.
Don't Forget the Ligatures!
This morning I was reading my current mystery book, David Handler's The Sour Cherry Surprise. I'm enjoying it. It's published by St. Martin's Minotaur (2008, 230 pages). Right now I need to have a brief word with the publisher.
Typeface ligatures were invented for a reason. You have them at your disposal–use them! This morning I noticed that, in the space of about twenty pages, Mr. Handler used the word "trafficker" three time and "scuffled" once. I, the reader, should not be noticing such things, I should be enthralled by the story I'm reading and too engaged to be counting vocabulary words.
The reason that I noticed, you will have guessed by now, is that your typesetter failed to use the familiar "ffi" and "ffl" ligatures. Consequently those words looked more like "traf ficked" and "scuf fled". It was irritating. It was distracting and so unnecessary.
Why, it was annoying enough to make a person write about it in his blog.
In: All, Books, Feeling Peevish
Roger Ebert is Openly Heterosexual
Roger Ebert loved Sean Penn in Gus van Sant's new movie "Milk", about the legendary Harvey Milk.* Not only that, Ebert comes out as straight and makes a useful point:
In 1977, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. Yes, but I have become so weary of the phrase "openly gay." I am openly heterosexual, but this is the first time I have ever said so. Why can't we all be what we prefer? Why can't gays simply be gays, and "unopenly gays" be whatever they want to seem? In 1977, it was not so. Milk made a powerful appeal to closeted gays to come out to their families, friends and co-workers, so the straight world might stop demonizing an abstract idea. But so powerful was the movement he helped inspire that I believe his appeal has now pretty much been heeded, save in certain backward regions of the land that a wise gay or lesbian should soon deprive of their blessings.
[Roger Ebert, "Milk", rogerebert.com, 24 November 2008.]
However, one must note with a some sadness that Milk's call to come out is not quite so universally heeded as Ebert would hope to think, but it's a good thought anyway and we've made obviously incomplete but substantial progress in cutting back on "demonizing an abstract idea" of teh gays.
———-
*Legendary to me, at least. I saw the documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk" at a sensitive time during my own coming-out process and it affected me deeply.
In: All, Faaabulosity, Music & Art
2009 Science-Book Challenge
The time has come to announce the 2009 Science-Book Challenge! (Plus an extra-credit treat about the Mandelbrot Set, below.)
I was pleased with the response to last year's challenge–despite it's eleventh-hour appearance–which I'll discuss at more length as we close in on the end of the year. Our attention right now is on getting the Science-Book Challenge for 2009 off to a good, timely start and recruiting lots of new challengers.
Last year the challenge was adopted, slightly after the fact, by Ars Hermeneutica, the 501(c)(3) science education and research company I'm working on/at/for. This year the SBC begins that way, so the "official" page for the challenge is hosted at Ars: Science-Book Challenge 2009.
Our goal is to encourage the reading of books with some science content and, by telling about them, encourage still more people to read books with science content. The rules of the challenge are easy:
1. Read at least three nonfiction books in 2009 related somehow to the theme "Nature's Wonders". Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or science's relationship with its surrounding culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading.
2. After you've read a book, write a short note about it, giving your opinion of the book. What goes in the note? The things you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it–or avoid it. Naturally, you can read some of the existing Book Notes for ideas. You might like to read our Book-note ratings for ideas about how to evaluate your books.
3. Don't worry if you find that you've read a book someone else has also read; we welcome multiple notes on one title.
4. Get your book note to us and we'll post it with the other notes in our Book Note section. Use the book-note form or the comment form to get in touch with us. Or, leave a comment here where I'll find it.
5. Tell other people about the Science-Book Challenge: http://ArsHermeneutica.org/besieged/Science-Book_Challenge_2009.
This year I'd like to see word of the challenge spread to more people, and to have more people involved. For that I need y'alls help, of course.
As before, if you'd like to let us know you're taking up the challenge, I'll be happy to put your name and blog link in our list at the official page where we can track your progress and find out what books you've read and written about all in one central place. Use one of the contact links in #4 above, or leave a comment here. All those electronic routes will reach me.
To encourage participation and for eye-catching publicity, we have a new banner/table for 2009. Isn't it pretty? Please, feel free to use it on your own blog to publicize the challenge. The image on the tablet is a portion of the fractal Mandelbrot set, created by Kevin Wong (source); Creative Commons License, used with permission.
And now, before everyone goes off to challenge others and choose their reading for next year, a word about what the "Mandelbrot Set" is. It is a mathematical entity, the set of all points in the complex plane that satisfy a rather simple mathematical constraint.* In the image at right (source), the Mandelbrot set is the part of the plane that is not white. (In addition to the mathematical references in the footnote, let me point out this page from the University of Utah, The Mandelbrot Set, which has lots of pretty pictures and a Java applet that lets you explore and make endless beautiful pictures for yourself.)
The set is named for Benoit Mandelbrot, most famously known for inventing and publicizing the idea of fractals, of which this set is a beautiful (mathematically and aesthetically) example. One of the distinguishing features of fractals is their "self-similarity", the property they have that small parts of them, when magnified, look just like the bigger parts.
For instance, look at the region in the previous illustration labeled "2": is a small circle stuck onto the side of the big, kidney-shaped region. If you look closer you can see that there are even tinier circles stuck all over. In fact, all of the circles, no matter how small, have other circles stuck onto them, which have circles stuck onto them, which have…. It's endless. That's what the animation at left (source) is showing. It zooms in on the circle stuck onto the kidney-shaped thing, only to find another circle stuck on at the left side, and on and on and on. That's self-similarity!
The self-similarity is related to the idea that fractals frequently have non-integer dimensions, but that's a topic we need to save for another time. However, it's worth looking at another example (source) of the self-similarity in this stunning animation, another one that zooms in on a section of the set for a total magnification, from beginning to end, of 11 million. And still, the set keeps looking much the same regardless of the magnification, and there's always lots of interesting detail to see (in fact, about the same amount of detail at each magnification–self-similarity again). Watch for it and you'll see sections pass by that bear a remarkable similarity to the background in our 2009 Science-Book Challenge tablet.
Enjoy the animation once or twice or twenty times, but then send your friends here to see it and recruit them for the 2009 Science-Book Challenge!
———-
* The details aren't terribly important, but a complex number 
is in the Mandelbrot set if the absolute value of the iterative sequence 
, starting with 
, is bounded (i.e., there is some finite number that the sequence of values never exceeds). More information is at the Wikepedia entry for Mandelbrot Set. More mathematical details can be found in the Wolfram MathWorld article on the Mandelbrot Set, where there are also some additional very pretty pictures.
Beard of the Week LIX: Accepting PI
This week's beard belongs to Euclid (c. 365 BCE — c. 275 BCE) of Alexandria, Egypt, possibly one of the earliest celebrities to use only one name. Euclid is famous, of course, for writing Elements, his 13-book exposition on geometry and the earliest mathematical textbook and second only to the Bible in the number of editions published through history.
Relying on Euclid this week is a bit of a ruse. Although there are any number of things related to Euclid and the Elements that we could discuss, what I've really been thinking about lately is 
, and I needed a pretext. In fact, it wasn't even exactly that I've been thinking about so much as people's relationship with the idea of .
It's a trivial thing in a way, but I was perplexed to discover that some googler had reached a small article I had written ("Legislating the Value of Pi", about the only actual case in history of an attempt to do so–in Indiana) by searching for "accepted value of pi".
That disturbed me, although I'm finding it difficult to explain why. Let's talk for a moment about the difference between physical constants and mathematical constants.
In physical theory there are any number of "physical constants", numbers (with no units) or quantities (with units) that show up in physical theories and are generally presumed to be the same everywhere in the universe and often described as "fundamental" because they can't be reduced to other other known values. Examples that might be familiar: "c", the speed of light in a vacuum; "G", Newton's universal constant of gravitation; "e", the charge of the electron; ""h", Planck's constant, ubiquitous in quantum mechanics; the list is lengthy. (You can find a long list and a bunch about physical constants at a page maintained by NIST the National Institute of Science and Technology.)
Fundamental physical constants are measured by experiment; that is the only way to establish their value. Some have been measured to extraordinary accuracy, as much as 12 decimal places (or to one part in one-million-million). The NIST website has an "Introduction to the constants for nonexperts", which you might like to have a look at. (I never quite made it to being a fundamentals-constant experimentalist, but I did do high-precision measurement.)
Now, contrast the ontological status of fundamental constants with mathematical constants, things like "", the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle; "e", the base of the natural logarithms; "
", the "golden ratio", and numbers of that ilk. These are numbers that are perfectly well defined by known and exact mathematical relationships. (I once discussed a number of mathematical equations involving "" in "A Big Piece of Pi".)
Now, it may be something odd about the way my mind works (that would be no real surprise), but to me there is a difference in status between fundamental physical constants, which must be measured and will forever be subject to experimental limitations in determining their values, and mathematical constants, which can always be calculated to any desirable precision (number of digits) using exact mathematical expressions.
To me, one can reasonably ask about the "current accepted values" of fundamental physical constants–indeed, you'll see a similar expression ("adopted values") on the NIST page–but that "accepted value" makes no sense when used to describe mathematical constants that simply have not been calculated as yet to the precision one might desire. And so, asking about the "accepted value" of seems like an ill-formed question to me. Your mileage is almost certain to vary, of course.
Well, now that you've made it through that ontological patch of nettles, it's time for some entertainment. In the aforementioned article I had already discussed some of the fascinating mathematical equations involving , so we're just going to have to make do with something a little different, even though it is still an equation involving you know what.
The problem of "Buffon's Needle" was first put forward in the 18th century by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. I like the way Wikipedia states it (or find another discussion here):
Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle [whose length is the same as the width of the strips of wood] onto the floor. What is the probability that the needle will lie across a line between two strips?
Worked it out yet?
You can always measure an approximate value of the probability for yourself with a needle and a sheet of paper on which you have ruled parallel lines separated by the length of the needle. Drop the needle on the paper a whole bunch of times. Divide the number of times the needle lands on a line by the total number of times you dropped the needle. What value do you get closer to the more times you do the drop the needle?
The answer: 
. Exactly.
In: All, Beard of the Week, It's Only Rocket Science
Ambiguous Praise & Extrapolation
I have no idea why it took me so long to read it when it was available from before my birth, but it's only last week that I picked up and read Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics (New York : W.W.Norton & Company, 1954/1993. 142 pages, illustrated by Irving Geis).
It's a good, informative, and entertaining book although I wasn't wild without reservation. However, I think my worst criticism came from my taste in such things: I could have done with less faffing about and brisker exposition. On the other hand, I don't know of another book with quite the same purpose–and it certainly is a noble and necessary purpose–or quite the same brevity and sense of humor, so I thought it was certainly worth the rather short investment of time it needed. There's more in my book note.
You know that I am fascinated by footnotes. In Huff's 142 pages there is but one, but it's a very entertaining digression on praising–or not–with delightful ambiguity. From pages 100–101:
Author Louis Bromfield is said to have a stock reply to critical correspondents when his mail becomes too heavy for individual attention. Without conceding anything and without encouraging further correspondence, it still satisfies almost everyone. The key sentence: "There may be something in what you say."
It reminds me of the minister who achieved great popularity among mothers in his congregation by his flattering comments on babies brought in for christening. But when the mothers compared notes not one could remember what the man had said, only that it had been "something nice." Turned out his invariable remark was, "My!" (beaming) "This is a baby, isn't it!"
On page 142, the final page of the book, he ends with a quotation that he introduces by saying "…in 1874, Mark Twain summed up the nonsense side of extrapolation in Life on the Mississippi:"
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
In: All, Books, Laughing Matters
Recognizing Marriage
I no longer recognize marriage. It's a new thing I'm trying.
Turns out it's fun.
Yesterday I called a woman's spouse her boyfriend.
She says, correcting me, "He's my husband,"
"Oh," I say, "I no longer recognize marriage."The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,
"How's your longtime companion, Jill?"
"She's my wife!"
"Yeah, well, my beliefs don't recognize marriage."Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it's like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another's beliefs.
[excerpt by Tom Ackerman, "I Don't Recognize Your Union: A Marriage Manifesto", Huffington Post, 17 November 2008.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Beard of the Week LVIII: The Big Oyster
This week's beard belongs to Mark Kurlansky, celebrated author of Salt and a number of other books. In fact, one of those other books is my subject at hand or, perhaps, at chin. (Photograph by Sylvia Plachy, which I took from this citation for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction given to Kurlansky.)
I recently read his book The Big Oyster : History on the Half Shell (New York : Ballantine Books, 2006. xx + 307 pages). I found it very appealing–engaging and informative. It is a book about oysters, and New York City since, as he wrote (p. xvi), "The history of New York oysters is a history of New York itself." Incredibly, it's a topic that was worthy of 300 pages. My book note is here. Now, as often happens with interesting books, some leftover excerpts.
Here in two paragraphs, a thumbnail history of how the Dutch lost New York City to the British and the origin of the name "Wall Street", so much in the news lately.
In 1653, the Dutch West India Company ordered the construction of an enormous wall to protect New Amsterdam. Most of the physical labor was done by African slaves owned by the company. The forty-three wealthiest citizens loaned the financing at 10 percent interest, creating both the first Wall Street financial transaction and the first city debt. The wall was made out of fifteen-foot wooden planks and followed present-day Wall Street from the Hudson to the East River with two gates, one at the present-day intersection of Wall and Pearl Streets and the other where Broadway now crosses Wall Street. The settlers of New Amsterdam no longer had open access to the rest of Manhattan.
Today the popularly held belief is that the wall had been built to defend the settlement from Indian attacks. Given the way Indian-settler relations were going, this is not an illogical assumption. But in fact the wall was conceived at the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War to defend against a possible British attack from New England. Why would a maritime people expect another maritime people to attack their seaport from the land side? When the British attack finally came, not surprisingly for the world's leading naval power, it was by sea and the wall was a useless defense. [p. 44]
And here, a quick excursion into how alive is an oyster on the half shell. (Warning: those who like eating oysters that way but are of a queasy persuasion might want to skip this excerpt.)
The muscle that an oyster uses to squeeze its shell closed has extraordinary strength relative to its small size. Oyster shuckers sometimes refer to it as "the heart." They think of it as a vital organ, because once it is cut the oyster easily opens and so is presumed dead — stabbed in the heart. Oyster shuckers may not want consumers to know the truth. All they have done is destroy the oyster's ability to squeeze the ligament. William K. Brooks, the nineteenth-century Maryland pioneer in the study of oysters, said, "A fresh oyster on the half-shell is no more dead than an ox that has been hamstrung." If the oyster is opened carefully, the diner is eating an animal with a working brain, a stomach, intestines, liver and a still-beating heart. As for the "liquor," that water essence of oyster flavor that all good food writers caution to save, it is mostly oyster blood.
Finally, another etymological moment (not that the book is nothing but, just that I like these little stories about how we come to use certain words to mean certain things, especially when it elucidates a bit of history in an interesting way). In this case, the topic is the beginning of oyster cultivation in the NY Harbor, and why those baby oysters are called "spats".
But for oyster cultivation to have the kind of large-scale efficiency that was required for the hungry nineteenth-century market, the oysters would need to be collected and moved at a far earlier stage, when they were tiny swimming creatures. Coste understood that by providing favorable and plentiful attachment material, an oyster farmer could considerably improve on nature's survival rate and raise large quantities of oysters.
Others had quietly taken an early lead. The Japanese and even some in the Naples area had managed to collect seed oysters, as had the Chinese, with woven bamboo. Meso-Americans in coastal Mexico had solved the entire problem years, possibly centuries, earlier using tree branches to collect the tiny swimming young oysters. New York oystermen called these minuscule swimmers spats because they referred to spawning as spitting and they had been spat. [p. 119]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, Food Stuff
Britten's "Serenade"
Awhile back I bought a remaindered copy of a CD containing music by Benjamin Britten, in particular his "Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings", performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson, tenor, Michael Thompson, horn, and Bryden Thomson directing the strings of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.* It's fantastic.
I think I've mentioned before that I frequently am of two minds about Britten: I would like to like him a lot better than I do. I like his approach to composition, the things he wrote–all manner of reasons, but sometimes it seems that actually listening to some of his works is just not as satisfying as I'd like. I'm not sure why that is, but perhaps it is sometimes due to lackluster performance that don't love the music as they should. Of course, the problem could be with Britten himself, but I hate to think so.
Besides, it's not always the case. When I went with Bill to see "Peter Grimes" at the Metropolitan Opera (New York), I loved it and I was happy to find something by Britten I could admire without reservation.
As a piece of music, both for the listener and the performer, this "Serenade" is tough to love. The tenor part is frequently written in a very high register, making it difficult to sound pretty. Of course, "pretty" isn't really the desired effect, either, but I can imagine that a lot of tenors don't feel comfortable sounding less than beautiful. Then, the combination of solo horn and strings is remarkably transparent and exposed which, in musician speak, means something like "life's a bitch because there's no place to hide and they can hear every note!" Play something like a Brahms symphony and there's lots of room for hiding seams and technical shortcomings, but something like this serenade makes every note count, and does it in a musical idiom that's angular and modern but demands an awkward lyricism from the performers. Quite a challenge.
The first recording I ever heard of the work was performed by Peter Pears, tenor, and Dennis Brain# horn, with Britten conducting the orchestra. For years this was the definitive recording and the sentimental favorite, since Britten wrote it for these performers. I found it interesting, lots of the music was gorgeous and haunting, but I didn't really care for the entire piece all that much.
I like it now. The performance on this recording is just perfect and the music is performed with the conviction that it's interesting music worth performing, a priceless quality.
I'm relieved.
———-
* A Chandos recording (CHAN 7112), containing "Les Illuminations", op. 18; "Quatre chansons francais", and the "Serenade for tenor, horn and strings". Felicity Lott, soprano, sings the first two pieces quite admirably.
# I think, but sometimes I think it might have been Barry Tuckwell, although we know that the piece was indeed written at Brain's request. Give me a break: it's been some 30 years since I've heard it.
In: All, Music & Art, Notes to Richard
Kinsey Zero through Sixty
I'm sure I mentioned before the story that I wrote about a year ago for my friend, occasional co-author, and frequent editor Ron Suresha. The story, an episodic "biography" of a copy of the Kinsey Report during it's (so far) sixty-year life, is called "Between Red Covers" (a title that refers to the original book jacket, but also meant to evoke some vague sense of McCarthyism, not to mention the sexual allusion) and publication is upon us.
I wrote the story for an anthology Ron was putting together to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin (Philadelphia : W.B. Saunders Company, 1948. xv + 804 pages), a ground-breaking and quickly notorious work. As research for the story I managed to find an inexpensive first edition (second printing) of the book online and I read it all in November of last year. It was fascinating to read, especially having heard so much about it, not to mention so much that was incorrect about it. I'll remind you that I wrote a book note at the time.
As it happens, mine is the only piece of fiction in the anthology. It's a daunting prospect, but I also feel personally gratified. The anthology is called Kinsey Zero through Sixty: Bisexual Perspectives on Kinsey. It is being published as a special, double-issue of the Journal of Bisexuality by Taylor & Francis (who recently acquired Haworth Press, previous publishers of the Journal of Bisexuality and publisher of one of Ron's previous anthologies, BiGuys, in which I also had a story). The table of contents are here.
Dan Jaffe (an author with whom I've shared the table of contents in a couple of Ron's anthologies) recently published a nice interview with Ron, talking about this newest volume and some of his earlier work at BiblioBuffet: "Ron Suresha: An Interview".
And now, finally, to my pretext for all this self-aggrandizing talk: Ron is having a book-release party for Kinsey Zero to Sixty on Friday, 21 November, in New London, Connecticut. Click on this Facebook Event Page for more information and to see a nice picture of the original dust jacket of the Kinsey Report. I won't be able to make it, alas, but if you're near please drop in, say hi, and meet interesting people. Be sure to give Ron a big hug from me, too.
In: All, Books, Personal Notebook
Nostalgic Travel
Powered by a flight of nostalgia I have revisited the remarkable and virtually unknown Mushroom Planet.*
In my youth my bibliophilic tendencies were awakened by two significant influences: 1) my cub-scout den mother who was the one who introduced me to the public library (as an idea, via the actual instance in Kansas City, KS), which I thereafter visited every two weeks;† and 2) the Scholastic Book Club (SBC).
I don't remember exactly which years or grades were involved, but I seem to have memories of SBC events in sixth grade and probably a few years before that. Periodically (once a month? every two weeks?) we'd get a brochure that offered several book titles in special SBC editions that we could own for ourselves! It was a good way to encourage reading and various other good, civic responsibilities (like consumerism), but it also created my addiction for buying books, I'm sure.
Nevertheless, it was great. I loved reading and owning these books. The prices we paid were something like 40, 50, maybe 75 cents or so; maybe I had a budget of $2, but I don't really remember beyond knowing that I couldn't buy more than 2 or 3 at one time. But over the course of time I had probably a couple dozen titles and treasured every one.
This is about the only title I have remembered for all these years, perhaps because the title is kind of silly: The Incredible Flight to the Mushroom Planet. I don't recall at all what happened in the book, but I know I enjoyed reading it. As I could read from the image of the cover, the book was written by Eleanor Cameron.
And now — quite unlike 40 years ago — thanks to the marvels of the internet and Wikipedia, I know more about Eleanor Frances Butler Cameron (1912-1996) than I ever did. For instance, she was Canadian, but lived most of her life in California, where she married Ian Cameron. The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet was published in 1954 (two years before I was born), and it was only the first of a series of six "mushroom planet" books that Cameron wrote. She wrote one other series of five book (about one Julia Redfern), plus at least four other books.
What a lovely flight that was.
———-
* The trip was made possible by Flickr user jl.incrowd and his "Nostalgia for the Scholastic Book Club, circa '60's & '70's" photo set. Here is the page with this cover.
† After a hiatus of some years, I continue the tradition by visiting our Bowie library virtually every week, on Monday nights. This began as something to do while Isaac was conducting his Monday-night handbell rehearsals. It's also the reason I've gone once a month, on Mondays, to the writer's group meeting, which I've found salubrious. I believe that it was this early exposure to the library, and subsequent experiences with research, that have firmed my notion that librarians are the best people.
In: All, Books, Personal Notebook
Lifestyle Warning
Humor–particularly mockery–can be very effective.
WARNING: This area may contain homosexuals, which are known by the State of California to be harmful to the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.
— A sign seen on the door of Kim Light/Lightbox Gallery in Culver City, California
[Christopher Knight, "Prop. 8 push-back in Culver City", Los Angeles Times, 11 November 2008; via Towleroad.]
Suddenly I'm thinking of all the places that this warning should be used. It certainly would be more useful on a bag of airplane peanuts than those warnings that say the bag of peanuts "may contain peanuts".
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity, Laughing Matters
What Could They Have Been Thinking?
Gosh, this story about the LDS (i.e., Mormon Church) and their opposition to California's proposition 8 — you remember, the one to strip same-sex couples of their already established right to marry — just keeps getting more interesting. I'm not sure I need to fill you in on the details since protests have been breaking out nationwide over the issue, many staged at local Mormon temples.
Oddly, the LDS is not happy about all the exposure they are getting for compelling their membership to fund the "yes on 2" organization to the tune of some $25 million, the escalation that made it the most costly ballot initiative campaign in our nation's history.
Just after election day the LDS put out a press release in which they called on "those involved in the debate over same-sex marriage to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility towards each other." (See, for example, here.) After the vitriol of the anti-gay rhetoric their money bankrolled, that's as amusingly ironic as Republicans who spend an entire election calling democrats traitors, socialists, whatever and then calling for a spirit of bipartisanship. Civility is as civility does.
Now a memo has turned up that reveals that the LDS has been planning a political campaign for the last decade with the objective of defeating, nationwide, progress towards marriage equality for same-sex couples. (See here and here.) One interesting feature of that memo was the realization from the beginning that the LDS might suffer a public-relations nightmare from leading on this issue unless they worked with another large organization. It's unfolding as they had feared, and I'm not upset in the least.
Although the LDS tried to avert scrutiny of their tax-exempt status and federal prohibition against trying to influence elections by "strongly urging" their membership to contribute the $27 million rather than giving it directly themselves, it seems that their many non-monetary actions in direct aid to the cause, and directly contacting California voters, may have contravened California law. (See here.)
Their actions and these revelations have led to quite a few discussions about how to renew the separation of church and state, and a discussion about the undesirability of churches meddling in politics. I encourage those discussions most heartily.
Of course, it's not just the LDS that finds itself in the situation of being held accountable for its homophobic actions. Several organizations and business are already feeling the bite of backlash, as they should for being proud sponsors of this despicable initiative. For inexplicable reasons they seem surprised that their gay and lesbian patrons should be upset when they were merely trying to "protect the traditional meaning of marriage". It's a story that grows with new developments each day, but I'm with Jim Burroway when it comes to being mystified at how naive some of these bigots are to think no one would notice:
Those who voted to disenfranchise their gay and lesbian neighbors have been stunned at the outpouring of anger over the passage of Propositions 8, 102 and 2 (in California, Arizona and Florida, respectively).
It’s mystifying to me, but they seemed genuinely surprised that people that they thought they knew and loved would be angry to see their rights put up to a vote and defeated. It mystifies me because I wonder how many straight people would put up with the idea that their right to marry should be subject to a vote — and they lose that vote? How would they react?
And now many of those people who voted against us and who gave money to a cause to render us second-class citizens, they fall back on the defense that “many of my best friends are gay.”
Well, that doesn’t work anymore. Here’s a news flash: All those gay friends you have? If you supported Prop 8 (or Prop 102 or Amendment 2), they are no longer your friends. You can safely drop that line of defense.
–Jim Burroway, "All Of Those Gay Friends You Say You Have? They Are No Longer Your Friends", Box Turtle Bulletin, 13 November 2008.
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity