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Thecheapreporter.com If it happens today, it's news to me.
Marian Sawyer - Jazz-sational tracks, great hall of fame sounds,pure vocal art http://hdlr.fm/pTQQ
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Of One Blood
No sense.
The Music in Writing
I will be exploring the connection of music to literature. As I violinist, I find music to be my instrument of expression of myself and an expression of the unknown. Music is not a magic, or an art, or a science; it is music. Yes I can view it as a medium of human expression, and I can only try to put it into words. I view classical music as untainted by prejudice or bias or money; and because I view it as a gift, a very innate gift, I would like to compare the arts of Hawthorne and James through the lens of the musical effect of language. For me, and perhaps every musician that has come before me, music is what keeps my page clear when I need it to be, or fills it when I do not wish to have anything written upon it by foreign hands. And since I find stringed music and musical notation to be wholly fluid, it is very influential, insofar is it is always straightforward and honest with its intentions. Music is, at its classical roots, still relatively pure--as the tempo and volume are subject to limited change--and therefore less prone to become convoluted and misconstrued like other forms of communication. Especially virtual communication.
Metaphors of music, in the context of literature, therefore, are not attempts to define or limit music to anything, but to examine their shared aesthetic qualities. Psychological studies, such as those by Leonard B. Meyer, try to frame music within four categories: Formalist Expression, Referentialist, and Absolutist for instance. But music existed long before any tags, or categories were placed on it, and despite its achieved perfections like the Baroque and Romantic eras, it saw its fall from its "classical grace" and descended into the wilderness.
Literature shares musical patterns (as far as music theory goes), i.e.
Consonance:Staccato :: Alliteration:Phrasing, or Anthology:Opus :: Book:Piece, and Chapter:Movement :: Tone:Key+Tempo. Words:Notes :: Scenery:Accompaniment, and so on.
And while musical theory, like media, is not a full-body, and entirely real human experience, it comes close. But, that is only if the information is made clear, without using vague and deceptive terminology, which is hard to do, as students of music all learn, agree upon, and share one language, as of now, that is, in addition to any other languages they may know. Music and patterns are based on logical harmony and unity; the vibrations of a musical instrument and the musical notes can spring a heart to life. Because scientific definitions or changing the name of music, can never take away its sounds. A work of literature, can come to life, but it is very internal.
The vibrating notes of music that ring throughout the body of the musician come from simple wood and wires, which have been handcrafted by dedicated artisans. The smell of the lacquered wood, and when the horse's hair of the bow touches and slides across the nickel and silver of the strings, a small dusty ghost of amber rises up and flies away, carrying with it a part of the musician through the air. To take part in this, and to go beyond and take part in it with another person or a group of musicians who are all of one accord and one understanding, of their own free will; that is how I view the perfect medium of communication. Beneficent and effective, sharing of expression. Unadulterated, unaddled, unintrusive, and without deception or hidden intent.
I need to look up the exact words to the passages for the literature that I had in mind. Which I am not going to do right now.
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia!
Just thought I'd share this clip. This show is absolutely hilarious. And you can see here how "NEWS NEWS NEWS" is like a drug to them. That recurring motif of looking for news at the beginning of the episode, or watching the news, or looking at some form of media....not to mention, there's all kinds of light action going on as far as advertising and electricity as a medium.
Also the episode after this one is called "The Anti-Social Network." It's an extended parody of Facebook and can definitely relate to our discussions.
http://www.promptfile.com/l/8E84C36FB1-F969B39B81
...while I grasp desperately at any opportunity to comprehend what in the world is going on. All of my friends get it, but I don’t. ... I KNOW there is NO WAY it is this difficult to understand. Everyone else certainly seems to get it!!! I am hoping that, by the time I finish reading it and I have seen the “big picture” so to speak, I will be able to intelligently contribute to the class’s conversation.
"She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments that made up...even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did "get it" (James 121).
You know you sound exactly like the lady in the story, right?! She hopes that by the time she puts together her little puzzle she'll be able to "intelligently contribute" to the "class's conversation"...Remember how this whole book is basically her eavesdropping on conversation and trying to figure out a way to let people know that she knows, but in a clever way? And how most of the conversations are associated with "class" for her?
"..appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life" (127).
"...her gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in the tangle" (130).
I really think this novel is so weird, and that James had such a knowledge of, or desire to experiment with human psychology and consciousness, that he's literally gotten inside of our heads.
OR, like professor Carey said, maybe we're projecting. Maybe I'm projecting the book onto your post. Either that, or your post is influenced by the book. But if I know that we discussed the book first, and then your post follows and uses some of the same phrasing and language as the book, wouldn't it be remiss not to draw attention to that?
That's much like the way I was going on about magpies and how the character compares herself to that bird, she notices shiny things, much like magpies, and remembers details about people. And 115 years later, there are scientific studies on magpies that use almost identical phrasing and language to give their results.
It's like we've just reinvented the wheel...it's almost like we understand things about nature and our surroundings and ourselves but lack a vocabulary that could ever fully express what we feel or how we observe the world.
Rather than the familiar term/phrase "conscientious objector," the woman in the cage is a "conscientious observer," desiring to fully amass what what life means to those inside and outside of the cage. What is the cage, though? Is it a particular time frame of human experience? Is it a language? Language and culture are related to particular time frames of human experience, so maybe that's the cage. Rather than Mr. Mudge (remember that Mudge means shift, move, budge), maybe James uses the woman as a filter to show how language flits or "moves to and fro" (118) throughout time.
"She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once" (118).
A Little Birdie Told Me (Part III)
Either Henry James already knew, 115 years ago, what we know about consciousness today, or language, such as that used in In the Cage and other old texts heavy in metaphor, has directly influenced scientific and psychological studies.
There have been studies showing that magpies can distinguish individual humans that pose a threat to their nests from humans that have not behaved in a threatening way (Lee, et al.). Yet, while these scholarly and scientific texts seem revelatory, I think that either their originality or their objectivity is questionable, if not both. Take these lines from James's In The Cage:
"...[Mrs. Jordan] was the only member of her [the telegraphist's] circle in whom she recognised an equal. The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of her contact with the human herd... (James 120)
I'm absolutely baffled at what seems to be either a huge coincidence, or the result of that fear and ambivalence with which Darwin and other philosophers and scientists looked upon language. Here's part of an abstract for an article reporting the results of studies in magpies' human recognition:
"...frequent previous exposure to humans in urban habitats contributes to the ability of birds to discriminate among human individuals. This mechanism, along with high cognitive abilities, may predispose some species to learn to discriminate among human individuals." (Lee, et al.)
Is modern science (2008) echoing this work of fiction from 1898???:
Frequent previous exposure = "abundance of her contact"
Humans in urban habitats = "the human herd"
Discriminate among human individuals = "recognized an equal" (implying, also, the recognition of the lesser and the greater, thus discriminating)
The Piano Sonata No.14 "Quasi Una Fantasia" Opus 27 No.2 (Moonlight Sonata)
Movement 1: Adagio sostenuto Movement 2: Allegretto Movement 3: Presto agitato Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Performer: Valentina Lisitsa
There's a very specific form to the beginning of this sonata. Then the first variation comes in at 0:30. The treble clef (right hand) strays from the original phrasing of the piece, making small attempts to move into a major I think?, and the bass clef (left hand) follows slightly for about twenty seconds until around 0:48-0:49 it reacts by trying to reign the right hand back into the initially established minor key.
Just a weird little way to think about the opposing natures of structure vs. fluidity, Pyncheons vs. Maules, Old Ways vs. New Ways, or what have you; the constant struggle between any two opposing forces as the performance of some strange, and almost ritualistic dance. The key thing to notice though, is that in the first movement, the rhythm generally remains the same, keeping with the time signature despite the different intentions of each clef/hand.
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Edit: I didn't even pay attention to the fact that it's really called "Quasi Una Fantasia", or "Almost a Fantasy" in Italian. As if to say that whatever Beethoven was trying to express was almost unreal?
I was thinking earlier today about how a lot of familiar "modern" classical music's tempo, dynamics and expression are written in Italian, even by non-Italian composers. Cool to think how composers use this one language to express their intentions in something so fluid and varied and universal as music.
*Btw if you do listen to the piece a little further, you'll hear echoes of the beginning theme all throughout.
Maybe all of this weird shit that Hawthorne writes is just that…just him being weird and writing weird shit. Writing about some then- current issue, but not really writing about it.
Does this sadden or excite you? If literature gets redefined as just writing that responds to its own moment, consciously and/or unconsciously, how does this make you feel? What gets lost? But also, what new possibilities open?
It both excites and frustrates me, confuses me, even. If literature were to be redefined as just writing that responds to its own moment and to it's own time, then how can we relate to it now? By trying to understand the context in which a novel is written? Surely the context is lost. The context of any book probably changes with every stroke of the author's pen; from the first line of a letter on an author's manuscript to the last period on a printed copy, the context has changed.
"[…] Then also there is the important question of repetition and is there any such thing. Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be.[…]That is what makes life that the insistence is different, no matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different.[…] It is very like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop. A bird's singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but it you listen they too vary their insistence." Gertrude Stein. Lectures in America (1934)
I guess that best sums it up...there's always some message...expressed a million different ways...but still the same message.
"The farmhouse was built of wood, a board outercovering over a framework of logs. It was in reality not one house but a cluster of houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner." Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
One objective reality that manifests itself...in fragmented subjectivity? I don't even know if that makes sense...meh. It's like we're 7 billion split personalities of.....yeah I'm getting way too deep and off track here, but:
"I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon." F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925)
I'm waiting for something similar to pop up in ...Seven Gables (if I haven't already overlooked it), at which point I will likely throw up my hands in surrender and admit that we must be in Limbo. Ohhhh eternal recurrence, what a vicious cycle you are!
Oh yeah, here's that article. Maybe all authors are just narcissists. Amanda Bynes wears a grill, Britney Spears shaves her head, Miley Cyrus becomes a twerkaholic, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Brockden Brown write what turn out to be vague, epic manuscripts that are open to interpretation 200+ years later. I guess that's real celebrity status, because I'm not sure I REALLY see these novels as altruistic gifts to future generations of humanity. When someone achieves a certain zenith, a high point in their career and social status, they fear their inevitable irrelevance. Sometimes, you just have to maintain social relevance.
It's all a matter of perception
When I mentioned the fact that Hepzibah was telling Phoebe (and also us) about Phoebe's history (the part about the china teacups) it made me think about points-of-view. The following article challenges readers to think outside of their own box of perception. The simple tasks that we may be able to do well such as the simple process of "making a pot of coffee or hammering a nail" would be extremely hard to explain to someone who has never even seen these objects before or participated in those processes. Is Hawthorne hitting us with a barrage of what-seem-to-be-symbols for a reason?
This class has introduced a new way to view literature. Frankly, I had never noticed some of the symbolism that we've been pointing out, and I'm sure it's possible to find it in nearly every book, but the fact remains that it is still another lens.
What goes through these authors' minds when they're writing? Are they really getting at some universal message, some "truth" that will remain the same, whether we look at their novels through a Feminist or Marxist or Sociological or Psychoanalytic lens? Or are these lenses cataracts, clouding our vision? The answer to both of these questions, of course, depends on your own perception.
I don't think "canonical" writers could have predicted the emergence of today's English majors. Sometimes--a few times already this semester, and in semesters past--I'll find a passage from an author that seems to repeat almost verbatim what one or two or three of their contemporaries have written. And yes, I've accounted for the fact that sometimes writers plagiarize or "steal" and "borrow" ideas, but those aren't the works of literature to which I'm referring. We pore and pore over literature, and we MIGHT find an interesting or seemingly new topic for a final essay, but usually what I end up with is a tension headache.
Maybe all of this weird shit that Hawthorne writes is just that...just him being weird and writing weird shit. Writing about some then- current issue, but not really writing about it.
[Clearly I was a bit frustrated when typing this post, earlier; but tumblr's supposed to be more relaxed than the class atmosphere, right?]
Maybe Hawthorne is taking us on some sort of instructional journey, and maybe not. What our "destination" could be, I'm not sure. Maybe his "message" will become clearer with time and effort, and maybe it won't. Maybe it will remain just as convoluted as every other "message" in almost every other book in every other English class, and maybe it won't.
Screencast Reflection: Melville's Marginalia
The screencasts were different, in a good way, and challenging...mostly due to the fact that we were multi-tasking throughout most of the recording. Despite the crummy quality of my computer's microphone, everything turned out all right. I will say, though, that screenr would probably work better on a Mac than it would on a PC. As nit-picky as it may be, I didn't like how the mouse jumped across the recorded screen rather than moving smoothly.
Melville's Marginalia, was a bit of a let-down to be honest. The writings could be seen as an insight into the way Melville read during his time, but I think it would have been far more interesting had we seen some of his own scribbles in his own books. Also, the database built up a lot of pomp about all of the markings: some were blank due to erasure, some were just vertical lines drawn beside passages.
LIke we said in our video, if we were more avid Melville reader's we'd probably be able to pick up those subtle cues and pinpoint exact passages in one of his novels that would reflect or would seem to be inspired by his marginalia. Alas, this is not so.
Phew! The National Endowment for the Arts reports that more than half of all Americans are still readingâand even talking about books. Ten other facts about how we read today.
Jones&Noble's Review of Melville's Marginalia Online- Part 2
An analysis of the content, design and structure of the internet database Melville's Marginalia Online.