I stumbled across the site of Dr Vegeta[1] whose motto is
If you have to ask whether you have published enough, you haven’t.
Since I ask myself this every day, I’d better keep typing.
fn1. Those in the right age cohort (or their parents) will recognise the allusion to DBZ. His SO is called Bulma.
It’s time for the regular Monday message board, where you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. I don’t have anything noteworthy to say about the late Pope, but perhaps you do. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that
is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.
I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.
This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical art music to its institutional successors.
Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, crossed over and intermingled, but not obviously for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).
If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.
fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.
I’ve been badly overstretched for the last few months, with an excessive amount of travel, and one symptom has been a failure to keep up with regular features like this one. I’m gradually getting my life under some control, so I thought I’d try to restart some conversations about books and writing. I have a huge pile of books on my desk, some of which I’ve promised to review. In this category, theres“Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner), “In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati), and Diversity in Development: Reconsidering the Washington Consensus.
I’ve also become interested in philosophical issues relating to causality, which are closely linked to my concerns about uncertainty (in a world with no uncertainty, causality is essentially trivial). Books I’ve found helpful include“Reasoning about Uncertainty” (Joseph Y. Halpern)“Facing the Future: Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World” (Nuel D. Belnap, Michael Perloff, Ming Xu, Nuel Belnap)“Causation and Counterfactuals (Representation and Mind)” (The MIT Press) and“Causality : Models, Reasoning, and Inference” (Judea Pearl)
On the leisure front, I’ve been enjoying Iain Banks series of novels about The Culture, most recently Excession
I hope to extend this post during the week, adding a range of comments on these books over the fold. But feel free to jump in first with your thoughts, recommendations for further reading etc.
Slightly belatedly, I’ve added a link to Mark Bahnisch’s new solo blog (he was formerly on the Troppo team). The title is apparently an allusion to Descartes self-description as a masked philosopher Lots of interesting stuff, as you’d expect. Also, new US blog Democracy Arsenal There’s room for more, so please send suggested links. I don’t promise to link everyone, but I usually link to anyone reasonable who links to me, if requested.
Nine Australian service personnel were killed in a helicopter crash during earthquake relief operations yesterday. This kind of work is always dangerous, and these brave men and women have given their lives to help others in danger. They are an example to us all, and their memory should be honoured.
I wasn’t watching it tick over, but Technorati just passed 1 billion links, of which this blog accounts for 311. Here’s the Technorati Top 100, including Crooked Timber at #59.
I don’t know exactly what to make of this number. A link can be anything from part of an extended debate to a cut-and-pasted item on a blogroll. Still, its obvious that the blogosphere is still growing rapidly and in all dimensions. There’s some more data, here , herehere
This story about GM cotton designed to resist pests without the application of pesticides illustrates the potential benefits of GM technology, applied carefully. On this issue, I think Australian policymakers have struck pretty much the right balance between involuntarily exposing the public to risks they may not choose to bear (as in the US) and stifling technological progress (as in the EU).
Responding to the latest inquiry into bogus intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, Bush says
“Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives,” Bush said.
But in the real world, the threat was overestimated and tens of thousands of innocent lives were lost[1].
fn1. If anyone wants to argue about numbers, they’re probably better off doing so over at Tim Lambert’s blog, but I’ll add just a few. The Iraq body count aggregates media reports of at least 17 000 civilian (including in this context, Iraqi police and troops killed in insurgent attacks) deaths arising from either US military action or insurgent attacks. These are lower-bound estimates, since many deaths have undoubtedly gone unreported. And the ordinary soldiers on both sides who died were also innocent of anything other than obeying the orders of a president who told them they were defending their country against a deadly threat.
I’ve been interested for a while in the extra-game markets for items like weapons, spells and so on created in online games. This story involves two Chinese gameplayers who acquired a highly valuable virtual sword. One of them borrowed it and sold it for about $1000. The other player went to the police without result, and eventually confronted his partner, and in the ensuing argument, pulled a knife and stabbed him to death. It’s sad that this happened, but the most interesting aspect for those not directly involved is the question of whether the seller had committed a crime, and if so what. The following discussion is based on very limited knowledge, so feel free to correct me.
Even if this was a real sword, I doubt that the police would have become involved in the dispute because it was jointly owned, so only a civil action would have been available.
More generally, if the law does become involved in this kind of dispute, it’s unlikely that ordinary property law is the right place to look. Even if your virtual castle may look like genuine, it isn’t real estate. It’s the product of a contract between you and the game’s operators. In many cases, that contract forbids outside resale of items, so your rights are pretty limited. But even in a game like Entropia which encourages such things, your rights over virtual items are defined within a set of rules created by the game operators. If, for example, they arbitrarily confiscated virtual land for which you had paid, your remedy, if any, would be under contract law or (in particularly outrageous cases) the game operators might be prosecuted for fraud.
Of course, all this could change. There’s nothing to stop governments creating new categories of virtual/intellectual property. But, as with intellectual ‘property’ in general, intuitions based on standard (rival, excludable) private goods aren’t likely to provide a good basis for thinking about such things.
There’s more discussion at TerraNova where this kind of issue has been debated before.
John Quiggin 