SCALES #14: "The tool to find out who you are"
Hello!
Commencement day in Harvardland. Red-robed folk walking down Mass Ave and around the Square early this morning, which I can't help but smile at. Gown weather today, too: overcast, cool, and drizzly. Some impressive hats amongst family!
Due to the vagaries of the carnet system, turns out there's a hard deadline coming up of when the parts for the experiment borrowed from Switzerland have to be returned, so I'm trying to make the most of the time remaining to collect as much data as possible. It gets the adrenaline going but also doesn't leave much intellectual bandwidth for other thinking.
The latest Meet the Composer closes with David Lang: "That's what music is, the tool to find out who you are." Sarah Kirkland Snider recently published a personal essay about gendered expectations for composers, and how a woman composer writing music in an unabashedly quote-unquote expressive style can have her work—her tool of self-understanding—dismissed as "candy floss". (Also in the archives, Nico Muhly's exasperation with "precious", "twee", "pretentious"—in which he also discusses the much-beloved-in-these-parts "Security Blanket Gesture" he put into Grizzly Bear's "Cheerleader"!)
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Evidence for linguistic commonalities between Ket, a remote Siberian language, and Navajo.
Learned about Edna Lewis and James Hemings in this history of Southern US food.
The mechanics of web advertising now make marginally more sense to me.
That Meet the Composer episode, which is very 2017 in its bafflement at the divisiveness of the 20th-century tonal/atonal, downtown/uptown grudge match.
Rhiannon Giddens on Fresh Air is excellent (via some of the Twitter glosses on, yes, that Atlantic piece, which I think I might be perfectly fine only reading the commentary on?). (And as if on queue, one of Rhiannon's songs just came on over the speakers!)
Perfume Genius on Song Exploder.
"It's great to be alive in Colma," which is 73% graveyards (feat. Mt Auburn Cemetery cameo!).
Links
The phonautograph, patented in 1857, arose from thinking, "we're going to have to find a way to daguerreotype the voice." Playback wasn't really even considered. (h/t 5it)
I would caution that reading about killer robots arms control will probably not brighten your day.
The paintings stolen from the Gardner were not, in fact, for sale on Craigslist.
Most large American cities are becoming more sprawling, except for the very densest fifth.
The terrible injustice of lead poisoning in New Orleans public housing. (Deeply skeptical about the crime rate hypothesis, though.)
"This vision of the nation's capital encaged by a protective geometry of aging obelisks."
Email newsletters of note
Excellent week for newsletters! [Big breath...] Alexander Chee: "Let's all get through this, though. In the meantime, I don't want anymore stories about how authoritarianism starts. All I want is stories about how it ends." Tyler Coates: "(The other thing is that group projects are a scam, yet life is one big group project. Good luck out there!)". Mallory Ortberg: "(N.B. Jemerald, Ben and I have decided, is what ALW insists on calling his head butler, regardless of their given name. There have been seven Jemeralds.)" Anne Helen Petersen: "Every place you think is ewwwwww is much better, much more complex and filled with similarly complex people, than you think it is. So what makes you hold tight to that understanding of it?"
And not a newsletter, but food writer @eminchilli's quickly-expiring tour de pizza in Napoli (see her Instagram story; RIP her Snapchat) was just what I needed.
Science!
Charmed by this story of language and prairie dogs, even if the jury is still out. Filing away the phrase, "some kind of dirt hamster with a brain that barely weighs more than a grape".
"The almost unbelievably grotesque derivation of these two prefixes…"
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So many treasures in the downtown Holyoke streetscape.
All for now!
—Adam