SCALES #32: Darwin to Tahiti
Hello!
Jumping right into The Culture Section this week.
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At the symphony
I saw Thomas Adès conduct the Boston Symphony and the program was so good: Beethoven, Ligeti, Adès, Stravinsky. I was turning around in my head all the ways the 2x2 program could be split up: the first piece of each half set against the second, the entire second half in contrast to the first, the central Ligeti–Adès pairing set against the bookending Beethoven–Stravinsky. One clear connection between the pair of Adès–Stravinsky suites (from Powder Her Face and The Fairy's Kiss, respectively) is the extended quotation of older styles with a tone that falls somewhere between smirking irony and earnest appreciation. I think I was getting a little loopy by the end of the concert, but I just couldn't stop thinking about how often these sorts of grabs at an earlier style show up in music and how hard it is to know what to do with them. Is it an exercise in nostalgia? A subtle dig at the naïveté of yesterday's styles? At best, they throw off sparks as the present grinds against the past.
Also in concert music: Alex Ross reporting on a US–Mexico cross-border performance of John Luther Adams' Inuksuit. Instigator Steven Schick: "John's piece is about sound moving around in whatever geography it takes place in. What would it say about this rocky land by the ocean, which has a human line running through the middle of it?"
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The Idiot
Finished Elif Batuman's college-novel-that-then-explodes, and it spoke to me so much. I found the book hilarious in a Gogolian way: the deadpan observation of never-ending absurdities, the fascination with how arbitrary details endlessly pile up. A lot of the humor arises from the approach of Selin, the protagonist, to the world: a fearlessness in observing the things that make no sense to her.
The book is also very explicitly concerned with language. One manifestation of this is in the way that felt perfectly catered to me: emails taken immensely seriously.
What, too, do I do with a book whose first half is set where I'm at school? The prose describing the Widener steps, "the park near the government school", Café Pamplona, Walden Pond, the Red Line crossing the Longfellow Bridge ("The train emerged briefly from the tunnel and crossed a bridge. The glass turned from distorting mirrors into windows, and you could look out at the world—at starts, water, lights, boats.")—these all read so differently to me for falling in my circuit. If nothing else I want to see whether the upper floors of the Science Center are as labyrinthine as Batuman describes.
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Logan Lucky
For me, there's something really touching about a short scene of a child, onstage and dressed up in a beauty pageant outfit, leading a community in a John Denver song, previously framed as more or less inauthentic despite being carefully crafted, in the middle of a sneaky-clever Soderbergh heist movie, viewed in the tiny in-seat screen of an airplane. An expression of belief in the ability for true feelings and a sense of community to burst out from layers upon layers of artifice.
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Republic of Newsletters
Leah Reich's latest tinyletter dispatch clearly laid out feelings I've been having much more vaguely about the big public-facing social media networks, and how algorithmically mediated uncertainty about who has seen what really messes up any coherent sense of shared presence: "Social media doesn't just create FOMO, it creates the possibility that we will be invisible to the people we most hope will see us and care for us. And that will affect our real friendships."
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Returns
Delighted that a talk I went to about the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (namedrop "enso" if you really want to sound in the know) briefly featured:
- an appearance by Jacob Bjerknes, colleague of Tor Bergeron, our cloud droplet friend from 30, realizing how ocean–atmosphere coupling is at the heart of ENSO,
- as well as a multi-decade timeseries demonstrating how well-correlated ENSO is to variability in the length of day, à la 6, due to exchange of angular momentum between the atmosphere and the solid Earth.
I also learned that due to the long-term existence of meteorological stations, people will rattle of the traditional definition of the Southern Oscillation Index as "Darwin-to-Tahiti".
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Altogether too many diacritrics and dashes this time around.
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—Adam