Playlist For Eric Ericson (1918-2013)

There's no other description for Eric Ericson that suffices except to say that he was, bar none, the greatest choral conductor of the twentieth century. In 1945, he formed the a cappella Eric Ericson Chamber Choir in Stockholm, and led it until 2003. He lead the Swedish Radio Choir from 1951 to 1982, and the all-male choir Orphei Drangar from 1951 until 1991, and there was not a single important professional choir which he did not guest conduct. Sergiu Celibidache, a conductor as frugal with his praise as he was with fast tempos, called him 'the grand chief of choir of our time' (it probably sounded more idiomatic in French...). 

Ericson, more even than Robert Shaw, is responsible for the international blend of sound which most choirs today have - creating a middle ground between the perfectly straight-toned blend of the English church choir and the full-throated operatic chant of the Russian Orthodox church. His repertoire spanned the entire era of written music, from the earliest pre-polyphony to countless world premieres of choral works from composers as well known as Henze, Penderecki, Dallapiccola, Nono and Ligeti (whose Requiem Ericson premiered and who dedicated his Drei Chorphantasien to Ericson) to dozens if not hundreds of Scandinavian composers. 

Richard Strauss: Der Abend

An Album of Swedish Choir Jazz (probably closer to gospel..)

Francis Poulenc: Tout puissant, tres Saint

Bela Bartok: Four Hungarian Folk Songs

Dimitri Shostakovich: The Ninth of January

Arnold Schoenberg: Friede auf Erden

Einojuhani Rautavaara: Sommarnatten

Conducting as an Old Man

Richard Strauss: Deutsche Motette

Zoltan Kodaly: Jesus and the Traders

Johann Sebastien Bach: Gratias Agimus Tibi

Henry Purcell: Hear My Prayer O Lord

Read More

800 Words: The Productivity of Suffering - Part 2

Some people look and feel younger than their age. I am not one of them. Most people who meet me think I’m nearly forty years old. Fortunately, I’ve been told I looked forty since I was a college freshman, and in recent years, people have told me I look exactly the same as I did as much as seven years ago. Perhaps my age will catch up to my appearance in ten years. But in high school, years before I was fat, the cool kids would call me ‘grandpa’ when they wanted to act like pricks. The truth is that I’ve been told I look and act much older than my age since I was eight years old. But what’s far worse is that I’ve always felt older than my age – sometimes much older. 

I won’t pretend to know what it is in my physiognomy that’s made me feel well over the hill. But the accelerated physiological processes of my body began long before I developed, or kicked, any habits that were particularly unhealthy. In my mind, I can’t escape the fear that the acceleration in ageing began because of the strain of those years when my learning disabilities were at their most severe. Perhaps it was simply a biological response to stress, perhaps it was a medication I took, or perhaps it’s as genetically embedded as the learning disabilities themselves – and perhaps the two are inextricably linked. But whatever the reason, my physical well being has always felt a little too crappy for my age. Even when I was in shape by any standard, I would sweat with a raised pulse at the slightest provocation; I had facial tics galore, pain all around my knees, and occasional heartburn bordering on the severe for an adult in late middle age.

My parents tell me the problem is pure genes and therefore there’s nothing to worry about. My grandparents on my father’s side lived to be nearly ninety, and with a battery of long-term health problems that would kill the constitution of healthier people than they. I certainly hope they’re right.

I marvel at people who look young for their age. I can never help wondering what it is they have that I lack which keeps them young. I have no doubt that physical fitness and diet plays their important roles, but what drives them to the necessary fortitude to sustain a healthy lifestyle? There must be an excitement in living, a permanent state of stimulation and excitement which their faculties possess, a stimulation which my faculties don’t. I’m a bookish guy, and yet the intellectual and emotional stimulation I get from the humanities has never translated into a particular love of any physical activity except for playing music – an activity that’s left me with a hilariously bad back.

Forget anything emotional, I live every day of my life in various states of physical discomfort that would probably impress most people twice my age. I don’t doubt much of it is self-generated, but surely nobody can have damaged themselves this much while still having done everything I have to try to counteract it. I’m always intermittently on diets, exercise regimens, . They never seem to work, and I always seem to give up in frustration after a month, only to find myself trying a new diet/regimen a few weeks later. And yet the craving for food never stops, nor does the physical pain, nor does the fatigue.

Did I become a bookworm because of my physical shape, or did I lose my physical shape because of being a bookworm?  As a child and adolescent, I was short, socially awkward, a terrible student, and something of a loose cannon. Everybody seemed to agree that I exhibited a weird sort of brilliance, but I had no more hope at that age of finding a way to fulfill my potential than the proverbial square peg could hope to fit in the round hole. I had to retreat as far into myself as a child could possibly go in order to find the meaning to life I desperately needed. I derived little pleasure from most social interaction, and still less from school. But as I matured into an adult, something about me changed definitively. I found myself feeling little better physically, yet I found myself a better student as the material I was assigned got more challenging; my former inability to make myself understood by others made me something of a self-deprecating ‘oversharer’, and therefore perhaps a person who makes friends perhaps all too easily, my anger was turned into humor and a wit that most people I know would agree can be rather lethal; I gained 80 pounds between 2000 and 2005, but I couldn’t deny that I felt better and more emotionally whole as a fat man than I ever did as a thin kid. None of the problems of my unfortunate youth disappeared, but they were counterbalanced by a whole new set of skills that grew from the very problems I’d curse every day of my life. What I formerly viewed as my weaknesses began to display their advantages, and I was no longer a freak who longed to be anyone but myself.

I was physically debilitated, but the physical pain which inevitably accompanied my violin playing and conducting made the experience of it that much more intense. The shell of my morose solitude was so hard that it hardened into a kind of performance art for parties, in which I projected an almost cartoonish public image that allowed me to be the most boisterous person in the room. I remain an inconsistent student on my best classroom days, but I compensated for it by the sort of constant reading that only a person who worries he’s an idiot would ever countenance.

Every heel has its Achilles, and it is we, nature’s stepchildren, who are tasked with the burden of finding new ways to mutate the human race so that it may accommodate us. No person who finds the world too pleasant to change will ever find it for us, and if we do not demand a path that includes us, the outcasts among us will die unacknowledged, unfulfilled, and unloved.

But let’s suppose that the circumstances of humanity were to mutate overnight. Let’s just presuppose that the world were subject to a nuclear exchange, or a chain of tsunami, or a colliding asteroid, or the world economy went into superdepression, or a third world war broke out, or half the world population turned into zombies, the entire framework for what constitutes fitness would be stood on its head. Evolution would no longer be survival of the fittest, because who could know what is fit in this new world order? However, it’s almost guaranteed that by the standards of the previous era, the people best disposed towards survival are people who’d be considered ‘unfit’ by today’s standards. To navigate an era of disaster requires a completely different skill set, and no one will know precisely which skill set is required until the disaster’s nature presents itself. It is almost as though evolution is a process of ‘survival of the unfittest’: not a process by which the fittest survive but a process by which some of the unfit become the new fit while those who were once thought fit die out. Surely, many of the previous unfit will die with them, but we should pity those who are fit by current standards, they operate at the peak performance their lives will ever attain, and therefore have nothing worth looking forward to. It is only the unfit, the debilitated, the unhappy, whose hopes for a better life may yet come true. 

Read More

800 Words: The Productivity of Suffering Part 1

There’s a long list of people who deserve severe beatings in this world. But at the forefront of that list is those among you who welcome misfortune because it’s something from which you can learn. Well,… yes, no doubt we can all learn from our misfortunes. Among other things, we can learn that misfortune sucks and there’s no way to extinguish its occurrence.

And yet there is another side to misfortune, one whose importance you often exaggerate, and nearly as often to pernicious ends, but nonetheless your point is impossible to refute.  And that point is simple: if a new advantage to life is to take wing, something else must wilt for the advantage to thrive.  To dumb it down still further – things change.

The rest of us should not be blamed for being fearful of change. Change is the single most terrifying word in any language, a state of existence for which living things have been biologically conditioned to resist for billions of years. We resist change for the simplest of reasons – change might kill us, and often does. Short of death, change is the deadliest disease to befall the face of the Universe since The Big Bang. Not all change will kill us, and some of it blesses us beyond imagining. But it is that very unpredictability of change which so terrifies us. Change is a certainty of existence more inevitable than death, and often far more anxiety provoking.

Even if every disaster in our lives does not herald a new triumph, every triumph must grow from a state of disaster. A hero must rise high so he may fall, and an underdog must start low so he may rise.

But it is only a conservative who automatically equates disaster to change. Not a conservative in the political sense – since political conservatives can sometimes be the most radical of all change agents; rather, conservatives in the sense of how we ought to live. Sometimes these ‘life’ conservatives view change as a disaster because the quality of their great lives would suffer immeasurably, but in many cases, these conservatives are their own best jailers – trapping themselves in comforts and triumphs so much less than what their rewards could be. Yet it can’t be denied, these conservatives have a point. Considering how easily change can (and has) lead to still greater suffering, perhaps it’s best to settle for the small consolations one has and not upset the established order of things.

And yet, what about we (The Royal ‘We’?) in the world whose consolations are clearly not large enough?

But before we go any further, I suppose it must be asked: What is ‘large enough?’ After a certain point, being upset that some people have better lives than you is little more than ‘Rage of the Entitled.’ To give the most obvious example, how can an upper middle class kid from suburban America whose grandparents survived a catastrophe during which their death was almost guaranteed yet flourished in a new country as few ever could in the old one ever be less than joyful at his lot in life? Particularly since so many billions would sell their souls to start life with his advantages. And yet, what if that very prosperity becomes a gold-barred prison from which there is no escape?

If this is the way he sometimes feels, then he’s hardly alone. History is packed to the brim with prosperous nations who felt the need to blow up their blessings, as though the Promised Land at which they arrived was nothing but a broken promise. The Romantics of 1848 started a revolution with the express purpose of blowing up the post-Napoleonic stability. 10 million people died in the Napoleonic Wars, and yet it was the prosperity of peacetime that followed which planted a wish in people to overthrow their greatest achievements. Or why did the first European generation who ever knew a lifetime’s peace rebel against their good fortune by involving themselves in World War I for no good reason  – a war that caused 37 million casualties, or nearly 100 million if you count the Spanish Flu which broke out in its wake; or what about the ‘Baby Boomers’ who blew up the achievements of ‘Greatest Generation’ in the 1960’s? Technically, to compare the casualty list from the 1960’s revolts to World War I is ridiculous. And yet the effect of the 1960’s was to overthrow the New Deal Liberal order and allow it to be replaced with 40 years of conservative governance in which all the goals of the revolutionaries were put still further back. It was no more rational a rebellion than anything in 1848 or World War I, and yet people decided that their prosperity simply wasn’t good enough. Were these simply rebellions of entitlement, or is it part of human nature to smash something that’s too good?

When humans achieve a better state of living, they can’t help but aspire to a state still greater. The poor man imagines a full belly, the rank-and-file soldier an era of peace, but the prosperous man can only yearn for more prosperity. And because prosperity endows those who have it with greater opportunities for leisure time, their yearnings become that much more obsessive.

But prosperity is always relative. The post-WWII prosperity of the United States was built on the sacrifices of the Soviet Union, who lost 27 million people (compared to America’s 405,000) in what the Soviet Union termed The Great Patriotic War. When soldiers returned to America triumphant, it was only the white soldiers who experienced the greatest benefits of the postwar boom. The GI Bill created a new middle class by paying for the educations of 51 percent of World War II veterans who otherwise would never have gone to college. And yet until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, Black veterans would never have been accepted at any college but an all-black. And in 1950, only 37 percent of American women attended any form of college during their lives.

Prosperity is only a condition for those who benefit from it. Perhaps those born into prosperity should be forgiven more than they generally are if they think they’re giving back to the less fortunate in ways that are entirely narcissistic – like protests which set back the causes they promote, or displays of solidarity which 99.99999 % of the world’s less fortunate will neither see nor hear about, or expensive charity fundraisers in which the entertainment costs as much as will ever be donated to charity.

And yet, dear reader, though you live a life of stability and outward contentment, you persist in the idea that your life is not good enough and that some goal at the end of the road is the Holy Grail which shall obviate all those intense yearnings to which you are subject – and rather than improve the lives of those who suffer more than you, you have a natural urge to glorify them… Whether in the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Social Progress, the most valued person is the one whose suffering is the greatest. The mourners shall be comforted, the hungry and thirsty shall be filled, meek shall inherit the earth, and the poor’s is the very Kingdom of Heaven. Unless…of course… the suffering of the mourners, the hungry, the meek, or the poor is occurring too close to your blessings, in which case your natural urge is to do everything you can to distance them from yourself, as the nearness of their suffering invites the possibility that their suffering may invade your joy and bring down the quality of your life to their level.

And yet, perhaps, you should not be so keen to dismiss those plebes surrounding you with saliva dripping from their mouths who wander into cafeterias with shopping bags screaming about socialism. There is a chance, however unlikely, that they are a higher form of life than you. Of course they’re probably not, but there is that small chance that you’re going to learn more from them than they ever could from you – and that doubt should gnaw at you, even if I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. The people with the greatest suffering are the ones who will be the most solicitous of a different solution to their problems, and will therefore develop mechanisms to think more critically, act more boldly, and feel more sensitively. A small percentage of those outcasts, whose presence upon the world stage you glorify even though you’d never want to have lunch with them, will completely change the curvature of the Earth. The rest will in all likelihood continue their suffering until their dying day, with no relief to the omnipresently correct thought that they've experienced such black tribulation to no justifiable end. 

Read More

Playlist: For Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)

He was a fixture on the international music scene for more than fifty years, and in all that time he never got enough credit. Wolfgang Sawallisch was a German conductor who was roughly contemporary with both Herbert von Karajan and Carlos Kleiber, and of the dozens of phlegmatic German kappellmeisters to appear before the world's great orchestras from their generation, Sawallisch was the only contemporary of theirs from a German-speaking land who clearly had the ability to match those two giants.

Not that you could tell from appearances. Karajan and Kleiber had charisma to match their extraordinary talent. But in an era when conductors are measured as much by their aesthetic appearance as any musical acumen, Sawallisch success seemed rather unlikely. While The Guardian's obituary called him suave, it would be difficult for any young American to think of him that way. His reputation in America was always more than a little unfair. In later years his comb-over and aviator glasses made him look more less like a conductor and more like a retired banker sitting on the orchestra board. And towards the end of his career gathered a reputation for musical arch-conservatism that was entirely undeserved considering all the more contemporary German composers he championed when he was head of the Bavarian State Opera. By the time he became music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in his 70's, he was perhaps the textbook example of the geriatric foreign music director - a 'name conductor' (and not a huge name at that) brought to an American city because of past accomplishments in Europe. If he succeeded surprisingly well during his ten years in Philadelphia, it's because his musicmaking was nowhere near as dull or characterless as he seemed. Not eveybody agrees with that assessment, but the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra certainly do.

He wasn't 100% consistent in his ability to get extraordinary performances (who is?), but Sawallisch had a particular combination of forces that worked a kind of miracle. He could draw the most stupefyingly viscral sound from orchestras, yet simultaneously shape it (Georg Solti could have learned a thing or two by watching him). He was not a conductor who went for the sort of individualized interpretations one finds in Furtwangler or Eugen Jochum, he was a thoroughgoing traditionalist who made the best case of any German conductor from his era to keep tradition going.

One look at Sawallisch's baton technique on video is all it takes to realize that this was a conductor with a technique that could hold its own with the greatest stick technicians in music history. But unlike Lorin Maazel or Seiji Ozawa, that stick technique was unfailingly used to shape phrases imaginatively. There's no doubt that Sawallisch could be uncomfortable when he wasn't feeling the music, but in the German masters he knew so well, he was among the greatest there has ever been. Sawallisch was a conductor of the anonymous school whom if he could would always hide behind the music, and yet when the music sounded as well as he made it, why not? He was a kappellmeister, but in very highest sense of the term.

Schumann: Requiem

Strauss: Four Last Songs

Wagner: Siegfried's Funeral March

Strauss: Capriccio

Schumann: Symphony no 4

Britten: War Requiem - Libera Me

Schubert: Symphony no 9 "Great"

Wagner: Siegfried's Rhine Journey

Wagner: Overture and Venusberg Music to Tannhauser

Find Sawallisch's Ring Cycle in this Playlist

Mendelssohn: Elias/Elijah (excerpt - in German)

Beethoven: Ah! Perfido,

Beethoven: Symphony no 6 "Pastoral" (The Storm)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 5 "Emperor"

Beethoven: Symphony no 7 (finale)  (as a very old man, all he needs is a few fingers...)

Mozart: Symphony no 38 "Prague" 

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 22

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 21 "Elvira Madigan" 

Mozart: The Magic Flute

Brahms: Fourth Symphony

Brahms: First Symphony

Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 2

Bruckner: Sixth Symphony

Schubert: Complete Symphonies

Strauss: Don Quixote

Strauss: Symphonia Domestica

Rehearsing Till Eulenspiegel

Rehearsing the Three Boys in The Magic Flute

Conducting Edda Moser as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute

Dvorak: Stabat Mater

Dvorak: Slavonic Dances

Britten: War Requiem - Dies Irae

Tchaikovsky: Symphony no 5 (finale)

Read More

800 Words: Why Plagiarism Is Awesome

I vividly remember reading this New York Times article from three years ago, and thinking to myself that this girl has got to be the most irritating German honors student since the Wittgensteins. It’s about a 17-year-old author-prodigy who was up for a prestigious literary prize with a $20,000 award attached. She was then accused of plagiarism. When asked about it, she released a statement which included a sentence which made it seem as though what she did was the most natural thing in the world: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

I don’t view corporal punishment for minors with anything but horror, and I actually agree with her statement. But I think it was that one word: ‘anyway’,... which nearly made me ram my head through my laptop screen. To defend yourself earnestly against such a charge is expected; and in certain contexts, to claim that the charge is not as serious as it sounds can be admirable. And it’s certainly important for a writer of value to challenge the accepted norms of what a person in that profession should be allowed to do. But to make the tone of that defense so blithe as to pretend that all those centuries of arguments to the contrary are of no value is the kind of arrogance that makes people sympathetic to bookburners. Only a teenager who is a complete little shit in dire need of a metric ruler to the ass would be so certain of the moral rightness of such a position that she would throw around a cultural cliche which has only come into being in the last 15 years as though it’s an unimpeachable scientific fact. And only a young artist of Wagnerian arrogance would do so when she’s up for a prize that could be responsible for feeding many older writers’ families for a couple years. And what’s worst of all, an artist of such immaturity as this one probably believes that she is uttering a prophetic truth which no one understood before such a free thinker was there to illuminate such a shocking truth for her blessed public - as though big-worded processes like intertextuality and recontextualization didn’t exist before the 21st century. So here’s an unoriginal and authentic concept for you Helene Hegemann: Fickdich du wertlos kind!

But let’s face it. Like many kids in dire need of an adult to shut them up, the pischerin has a point. Helene Hegemann is, sadly, absolutely right about the fact that her plagiarism is not a case of theft so long as she doesn’t in her heart of hearts believe it is. If the appropriation is truly meaningful to her - and even more importantly, to the reader - then she was within her rights to appropriate whatever she liked. To greater and lesser extents, every writer does it. Especially this one.

In case you haven’t noticed already, I’m a hopelessly rampant plagiarizer on this blog. At least once a week, I sit at this computer and make sweet, sweaty, filthy love to plagiarism on this site. Many if not most of my insights can usually be read elsewhere on the internet or at your local public library (just ask if you want me to point out which websites, articles, and books I pilfer from) - and I’m sure that occasionally the very sentence structure and choice of adverbs and pronouns remain unchanged.

And so few people read this blog that really... who cares? And even if people did, who should care even so? This idea which professors and editors have that their charges are brilliant enough to always have insights and research of their own is hilarious, especially because editors usually have assistants who do their factchecking for them, and professors usually have grad students who do their research. If I thought there were any chance in hell of a blog like this leading to a well-paying job as a writer at a major magazine, I might write differently. But this is the worst market for journalism since before the invention of the newspaper. And am I really going to apply to grad school for a slightly better chance to succeed were I to apply for the worst job market in the modern history of academia?

On any given day, I read far too many journalistic jeremiads and far too much professorial pontification. I inevitably find myself thinking that this is time better spent going to the gym - a place I have not been in more than three months. But no matter what I read on any given day, I’m rather helpless before the oft-occurring thought that the best-credentialed writers are the true idiots of worldwide discourse.

Professional experts persist in their folly because to relinquish it would be to acknowledge it. The best-credentialed writers are cramped within the worldviews of their professional circles, their perceptions obstructed by prejudices born of too close a proximity with establishment views, and due to their cumbersome erudition they have an overwhelming tendency to mistaken individual trees for the forest. If they cannot retain the ability to see their subject through simple lenses, they will miss the overwhelming signs of change - it simply is not within their ability to see the change for what it is. No Sovietologist predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and no Middle East intelligence expert predicted that Saddam had no weapon of mass destruction.

The ability to say something meaningful about a subject requires the courage to do so in the face of knowledge that what you say may well be overwhelmingly wrong. The ability to say something meaningful about an unknown subject requires the courage to do so in the face of knowledge that the only manner in which you can be proven is wrong. The entire history of knowledge is a synthesis of superficial research, incompetent judgement, and incomplete data. Few academic historians write popular history, few literature professors write for the lay reader, and still fewer scientists seem interested in addressing their findings to a larger public than their colleagues. The idea that original research should be addressed to the amateur as well as the professional is considered completely risible among today's professional intellectuals. And therefore professional circles become an insular club with no outside perspectives to hold them accountable for when their established order is in dire need of change, which is most of the time.

We currently live in a country which drains us of any fortitude we may have to stand up against the tide of received wisdom. Our top universities choose their students particularly for their docility, then train them to parrot the views into which they’ve been indoctrinated. If a business or research facility requires an innovator, they do well not to pick someone with a Harvard degree. But if you want a specialist who knows the ins and outs to the exact detail of his particular specialization and sufficiently timid to leave the thinking of how it might apply elsewhere to other people, hire the MIT grad. There's a reason that so many financial whizzes are Ivy League graduates - it's because they've been trained to be moral autistics. But if a business requires a critical thinker who will think broadly and integrally, they’ll know to look elsewhere. And no one knows this better than Silicon Valley, which has become the last bastion of American innovation by relying on a backbone of intelligent computer programmers who don’t even have college degrees.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s rivals in East Asia are fully credentialed academics who will work at less than a quarter the price of their Yale-and-Columbia-reared peers. They have far more education than their counterparts in Silicon Valley - an education which they probably worked much harder to receive than their Ivy League rivals - but they also have been brought up in a society which encourages them to think outside their views of what is proper (at least in their fields of research). Copyright as we think of it does not exist in most parts of East Asia, and the average Chinese computer specialist will have the experience of rebuilding virtually any American designed electronic product from keyboard chip to microchip to be resold in the Asian market at a fraction of the price. How long is it before they use this experience, no doubt far more educational than any which a Silicon Valley company can offer, to create products that are far more effective and imaginative than those products we now design in America; products which the average Chinese and Indian specialist already understands far better than our own average specialist does?

It is these very standards of professionalism, honorable though they are, which can seal the death warrant of an entire society. It is a tragic truth of being that no culture can hope to innovate when beholden to too many strictures. To succeed requires the risk of failure, and protections against theft are like antibodies, too many of them will deplete the immune system they’re meant to strengthen. And just as sick people have to face uncomfortable truths about their bodies, we have to face some unpleasant truths about our culture: just as America’s insistence on the full rights of workers may have ruined the chance for millions of Americans to be employed in any capacity, and just as America’s insistence on constantly free democratic process may have frozen government’s capacity to act in ways that are to society’s benefit, American society’s insistence on full originality in our artistic, scholastic, and journalistic creators may have ruined the chances for thousands (at least) of Americans to live lives that are creatively meaningful. We don’t want to think in such ways, and to think in such a manner invites us all to fall down all sorts of slippery slopes toward evil, but whether or not we indulge in such thinking, the evidence before us points us so far toward the direction of illiberal thought that we’re placed directly upon that slope whether we wish to be there or not.

The truth of the matter remains, we plagiarize every day. We are nothing but multiples of other people’s thoughts, words, feelings, and actions. We plagiarize each other’s expressions of courtesy, each other’s hairdos, each other’s spirituality, and each other’s bedroom moves. We are the sum total of that material which we learn from each other, and our authentic individual imprint is that particular combination of the material which belongs to us all which each of us cannot help but secrete. To declare that we are capable of originality is to be arrogant enough to declare that we see reality accurately enough to have a thought which we know no one before us ever had. But we perceive only that part of reality which is shown to us - what right have we to claim the mantle of originality?

Goethe, that great German bore of an original genius, once said that the very act of tracing sources is absurd. You “as well might inquire of a well-nourished man as to the oxen, sheep, and pigs he had consumed and from which he had drawn his strength. We have our native talents, it is true, but our development we owe to the thousand outer influences of a great world, from which we appropriate what we can and what suits us.”

A mind is a natural pilfer. It's drive wilts when it fails to find enough other intellects to rob, and its fortitude wilts just as easily when it fails to find other minds to rob it. Great ideas are never the work of a single individual, but a process by which a whole society works them through. It takes a village to raise an idea, and the race is not to the swiftest but to the most complete. Ownership of idea belongs to the person who phrases it best, not first. And from a good phrasing of an idea comes another idea, to whom its authorship is given to the person who phrases that next idea best. For as Goethe says “At bottom, we are all collective natures, pose individually as we may. For how little have we, and are we, that we can in the purest sense call our own!. . . I owe my works by no means to my own wisdom alone, but to thousands of things and persons outside myself, who provide me with the material. Fools and wise men, clear and circumscribed thinkers, childhood, youth, and maturity: all these came to me and told me what they were like, what they thought, how they lived and worked, and what store of experience they had, so that all I had to do was to turn to and reap what others had sown for me.”

This is what it means to live in a community of thought. We are no more responsible for the thoughts that occur to us than we are for any other fact of our existence. We may will ourselves to think a certain things, but we can no more will what we perceive than we can will our heart rate or blood pressure. We can do small things to make them function as we like, but those small gestures (like going to the gym) often serve to show us how powerless our willpower is to control the most basic things about ourselves. Our wills and fates so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, their ends, none of our own.


….I’m particularly proud of those last two sentences.

Read More

ET: Almanac

Professional historians are apt to dismiss contemptuously as "novels" all historical works which are not merely impersonal, laborious collections of material. But after one or two generations at most their own works turn out to be novels, the sole difference being that theirs are empty, boring, uninspired, and liable to be killed by a single "find"; whereas a truly worthy history-novel can never become a "back number" as regards its deeper significance. Herodotus is not a back number, although he recorded for the most part things which every elementary schoolmaster can refute; Montesquieu is not a back number, although his writings are full of palpable errors; Herder is not a back number, although he put forward historical opinions which today are considered amateurish; Winckelmann is not a back number, although his interpretation of Classical Greece was one great misconception; Burckhardt is not a back number, although Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, the present-day pope of Classical philology, has said that his cultural history of Greece "so far as science is concerned has no existence." The point is that even if everything which these men taught should prove erroneous, one truth would always remain and could never become antiquated: the truth as regards the artistic personality behind the work, the important person who experienced these wrong impressions, reflected, and gave form to them. When Schiller writes ten pages of vivid German prose on an episode in the Thirty Years' War which bears no resemblance to what really happened, he does more for historical knowledge than a hundred pages of "reflections based on the latest documents," written without a philosophical outlook and in barbarous German. When Carlyle works up the story of the French Revolution into the drama of a whole people, forced onward by powerful forces and counterforces to fulfil its bloody destiny, he may be said to have written a novel - even a "thriller" - but the mysterious atmosphere of infinite significance in which this poetical work is bathed acts as a magic insulating sheath to preserve it intact from age to age. Then, again, is not Dante's unreal vision of Hell the most competent historical picture of the Middle Ages which we possess to this day? Homer, too, what was he but a historian "with insufficient knowledge of sources"? All the same, he is and always will be right, even though one day it should transpire that no Troy ever existed. 

All our utterances about the past refer equally to ourselves. We can never speak of and never know anything except ourselves. But by sinking ourselves in the past we discover new possibilities of our own ego, enlarge the frontiers of our consciousness, and undergo new if wholly subjective experiences. Therein lies the value and the aim of all historical study. 

- Egon Friedell, Cultural History of the Modern Age

Read More

Back Into The Ghetto - A New Song

When I say that nobody would be curious about the things I write, this is exactly what I mean. For all the cheats in terms of rhyming, metric schemes, and grammar, and for all the excessively dry polemic, this is the best song I've ever written. But it's half in Yiddish, and it requires a Waste Land type of guide in order to help most people understand it (see below). Those who do understand it, after correcting the finer points of the Yiddish grammar I've forgotten since I was a small boy, would probably tell me this song is anti-semitic. 

So here it is, the best song I've ever written:





To the tune of Chussen Kala Mazel Tov


Zo du geyst back into de ghetto mit a freylich herz
Und all der verk it’s gone to vaste to get you outa der
Ven Hitler’s back he’ll know for ver tzu look far you und mir
Zey got you out du tukhes lekker gonif schmuck.

Far all ze’er lives zey had to tip-toe mit a greycer schmertz
And all der alter kockers told them zey hot nicht a prayer
Tzu macht du mer den just a foyler schnook mit no career
A zhid needs more den shkutzes’ kuck und fallen luck.

Und deine girlfriend she hot vanted you tzu be a goy
Und eat dein tuna fish mit-out der crust und rye
But dein mishpoche zogt neyn zo it took about a year
Den you became hagodl narish frummer schvantz.

Ve tsu vil vanted you to be a real nice Jewish boy
Tzu be a cardiologist mit bills so high
But ven ve heard vat our sohn did ve vould rather had a qveer
dan a schmegeg’ who vouldn’t eat our food just vonce.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Und dein complaints about our lives are such geferlekh bull
Gemacht dein tzorn against dein yerushe du b’emes von’t
Did you expect us tzu fall on our knees and azay kvell
Ven you reduce your biltung to some kleyner crumbs

Ve’re rich and spoilt you tell us cuz ve never go tzu shul
Und du hast people pray for us because ve don’t
Und yet you take our money hent-iber-fist tzu feed dein kinder vell
So you can study Toyreh till Moshiach kommt.



You tell us dat ve macht an ayn hore mit our every vort
Und dat ve’ll hound you cuz ve’re critics half tzu death
Und den you join a fucking cult mit a Shabtzkiveynik Rebb'
Und ve’re apikorsim till die end of time.

Und now du machts a ze’er gevalt far every time ve snort
Und ven ve’re in dein heuse ve’re scared to take a breath
Ist deine cult mischpoche better den dein alter spider veb
Vhich you called our heym in vhich you lived far dimes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ve vorked two hundred years tzu get out from ze ghetto
Ve outlived vars, pogroms, und riots all our lives
Vhen ve came tzu Amerike tzo macht a greycer life for you
Ve said religion vould not be our eyntsik firer

Du hast aroysgevorf our hopes just far dein ego
You vant tzu macht us break out in a bunch of hives
Und for der suffering dein kids vill have you just don’t have a clue
Du fucking schmendrick. A chalerya af dir!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

far: for
dein: your
du: you
tzu: to
freylich herz: joyful heart
tukhes lekker: asslicker
gonif: thief
schmuck: ejaculate on the tip of a penis
greycer schmertz: great sorrow
alter kockers: old shitters
foyler schnook: foolish sucker
zhid: derogatory Russian term for Jew
shkutzes: derogatory term among Jews for non-Jewish males
kuck und fallen: shit and fall over it
mispoche: family
hagodl: the great
narish: simple-minded
frummer: orthodox Jew
schvantz: dick
schmegegge: contemptible idiot
geferlekh: terrible
Gemacht: finish
tzorn: wrath
yerushe: birthright, inheritance
azay: really
kvell: to cry out of pride
biltung: education, upbringing
kleyner: small
hent-iber-fist: hand over fist
Toyreh: Torah
Moshiach: Messiah
Ayn hore: Evil Eye
vort: word
Shabtzkiveynik: False Prophet
Rebbe: Rabbi
Apikorsim: Heretics
a ze’er gevalt: a huge scene, a terrible woe
mishpoche: family
heym: home
greycer: greater
eyntsik:only
firer: guide
aroysgevorf: thrown over
schmendrik: idiot, dumbassA chaleriya af dir: A cholera on you!

Read More

Where Does The Catholic Church Go From Here: A Guest Post from a Reader

I have been thinking of Benedict's resignation all day. As a dissenting Catholic with strong views on the subject, allow me a few serious thoughts (even though I too have been joking all day):

1) As is always the case with a conclave, this is a rare opportunity for the Church leadership to examine itself closely - I believe it should be a moment of spiritual catharsis, a confession of sins, so to speak. Though it has countless times throughout the centuries been used as a tool for bribery and manipulation, the sacrament of reconciliation is in many ways the most appealing radical element of Catholic faith - the opportunity to quietly face your demons, accept responsibility for your role in their domination over your life, and to take the necessary penitent steps to reform yourself. It's more than just "say 12 Hail Marys and call me in the morning." It is: I have sinned. These are the circumstances of my sin. I shall now implement this action plan to rectify the wrong I have done and become a better person and therefore closer to God. It is grace through faith and deeds, never only faith.

The last time this was attempted was with Vatican II and Pope John XXIII (also known as the only Pope I revere other than St. Peter). 

2) A genuine moment of reconciliation within the Church has to begin with the insidious culture of child rape. I am not going to water it down and call it mere "sexual abuse." It is rape. To varying degrees of course, but as Todd Akin had to learn the hard way - rape is rape. The highest ranks of the Church hierarchy are responsible for allowing it to occur, going back years. One need only look to the stories coming out of Ireland to understand how far-reaching and systematic this rape was. Other stories are emerging: Germany (where many allege that Ratzinger himself covered up crimes), Fr. Maciel and the Legion of Christ in Mexico; and of course we are aware of the stories in the U.S, from Boston (where Cardinal Law was promptly shipped to a plum assignment in the Vatican) to L.A. (where the moral corruption of Cardinal Mahony has recently been exposed). 

Nothing else cuts to the heart of the leity's lack of faith and trust in their Church's institutions more than this. If you cannot let your son or daughter become an alter-server without thinking twice, then the institution is broken. If the servants of God are shielded from the law of man - then you are dealing with a moral corruption similar to and in fact deeper than a mafia family's attempts to make its own rules. 

No amount of financial settlement can come close to truly addressing the problem - a public papal full confession is the only place it can start. And then the penance must be longed, and absolution earned from deeds and good faith. 

3) From there the Church could then begin to address some of the underlying root causes. Syndicated columnist and former priest James Carroll identifies the fear of and subjugation of sex as a major one. By pushing natural biological sexual urges into the closet, into the realm of shame, they marginalize the people they seek to have authority over. And no one suffers more as a consequence than the ones who must remain celibate. With very rare biological exceptions (some people are indeed asexual), sexual urges are as natural as waking up in the morning. It borders on cruelty to force these individuals to restrain themselves, and heightens the possibility of those urges being acted out in unhealthy ways. 

I don't expect the Church to come all the way over to my beliefs about women's reproductive rights, sexual orientation, or even the role of women in the Church overnight (though the longstanding history of the Church's treatment of women is part of their dysfunction). But they at the very least could give ground on contraception - as they have allowed their scientific understand to evolve over time. And they should remove the celibacy requirement, and allow priests to marry. Just about every other religion allows their pastoral leaders to marry, including the Eastern Orthodox Christian faiths (which only force bishops and the upper echelon to remain celibate). It helps reduce the degree of of the most overwhelming crisis in the church, and it would solve a practical crisis the Church has in recruiting young men into the priesthood. 

4) I don't expect any of this to happen, sadly. After all, at least 90% of the Cardinals were appointed by either John Paul II or Benedict XVI. For all of the popularity of John Paul II, and all of the credit he deserves for confronting totalitarianism (both in the forms of Nazism and Soviet Communism) and for healing the Church's relationship with the Jewish community, his true legacy is in dismantling all of the promising reforms of Vatican II. He crushed dissent (especially the left-wing liberation theologists) and through his personal Luca Brasi, Joseph Ratzinger, enforced a rigid conservative dogma (and a stranger more mystical tendency to make everyone and their mother a saint). For all the ways in which the Church will be praised as forward-thinking if Conclave chooses a non-white pope, that Pope will almost certainly be as rigidly conservative as his two predecessors. 

5) There was, however, one aspect of Benedict's announcement that is underplayed in it's radicalism. While everyone focuses on the fact that almost 700 years has passed since a pope last abdicated (and that was a political move at the conclusion of the Great Schism), that alone is not the reason why Benedict's decision is radical. No, it's radical because the only intellectually honest way it can be viewed is as a repudiation of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Whether he meant it to be or not, we may never know. After all, his thought process may well have been more immediate: he's old, he's tired, and he doesn't want to do it anymore. But even that is a blunt admission of the Pope as a mere mortal. It is a giant crack in the surface of papal infallibility, a doctrine that arose in the 1800s as a political ploy to increase the Vatican's power. It may take another 20-30 years to realize the next step of it, but if the next pope nears age 85 and sees himself as too old, too tired, and too sick to be Pope, it is another clear admission that these men are mortals, not the closest thing to God incarnate on Earth. 

After flip-flopping back and forth on Catholicism and even my faith in God through the years, I still don't know where I land, or even why I still consider myself an adherant of an organization that is so fundamentally corrupt (and that has acted out great evil through the years) that it may not be reformable. But whatever the greater truth of the great beyond is (and I actually do not want to know and do not want to even discuss it), religious institutions are the most influential force in the world at governing human relations. If we want more freedom in the world (and real freedom, not false Rand Paul freedom), we need to reform religious institutions. 

And that alone makes the soul of the Catholic Church worth fighting for, even if those who proclaim to stand for it refuse to fight for it themselves.

Read More

800 Words: The Importance of Making Fun of Religion

(Patton Oswalt on Sky Cake)

One of the weekly fights I get into with my father is over the issue of religion. One of us is always grumbling about religion. Not over the veracity of religion, an issue on which he becomes withering even more quickly than I. The fights are over the issue of religious tolerance, and particularly what constitutes religious tolerance. He believes that the modern willingness to hold religion up to ridicule is a perfect example of the breakdown of the social contract. To him, a culture which is so quick to ridicule believers is a country whose intolerance causes it to become dangerously unstable.

Whenever I hear him make this argument, I can’t help feeling as though my ears are melting. It seems more than a little strange that a person who devoted so much of his life to mocking religion in private should have such an attachment to its public upholdance. But then again, we must give the devil his due and the devil has a fair point. As the American right-wing grows ever more protective of its values and ever more defensive against the onslaught of progress, perhaps seizing every opportunity to make them feel rejected and isolated is not the wisest idea. Furthermore, I  have the same problem Dad does. I love religion nearly as much as I loathe it, and there is always at least a pang of guilt every time I make a withering comment about it.

I love the comfort religion provides, I love its unbroken sense of connection that transcends thousands of miles and thousands of years. Whether one believes in religion or not, (and I certainly can’t), it is one of the few experiences in life in which a person can feel the boundaries of space and time transcended - even if the experience is just an illusion, religion can convince you for a few minutes at a time that there is more to existence than the essence of this crude cruel world, and that all the suffering our world inflicts upon us is not in vain. Even if that isn’t true, we all need to believe that occasionally. And because religion provides so many billions of people with such a stupendous, comforting, dangerous lie as that, it causes people to do things they would otherwise never countenance - not just to kill, rape, and maim, but also to be accepting of others, to forgive those they hate, and to improve the lot of fellow living beings. Religion makes the world a worse place to live, and yet it simultaneously makes the world a better one.

But because religion is such an overwhelmingly powerful illusion, and because the temptation to embrace its irrationalities is so overpowering, religion must always be held accountable for its illogic. To discourage people from talking about its dangers, even from people’s natural inclination to make light of those dangers, is one of the most serious capitulations to the perils of religious belief that the world contains. The fence between self-censorship and imposed censorship can sometimes be a the size of a hair, and if we are unwilling to talk about the problems of religious belief, it can only be a given that religious belief dictates the law of the land. The secularists among us, and even the reform-minded believers, may believe in the separation of Church and State, but religion does not by its very nature. And when given the power of censoring others, even by compelling others to practice self-censorship, it cannot help but exploit that censorship for its own gain.

We live in a country whose very founding was based upon religious tolerance as much as any other precept, and that fundamental right of the United States can never be violated. If the most fervent secularists among us believe there is no danger of that ever happening, then might I suggest they read up on the history of the Soviet Union. But tolerance does not necessarily mean respect or reverence. People should always be reverent of people’s ability to believe exactly what they want, but people should not be reverent of the beliefs themselves. They should always be curious about what believers believe, and always respectful when visiting religious houses of worship; but public discourse is the place where important issues are debated. And if you can’t use humor to make your points, then the debate becomes all too serious and the stakes seem too high. It’s humorlessness, not humor, which causes intolerance.

The fact that we don’t take religion too seriously is what prevents religion from controlling public life. If religion is truly as serious a business as its believers allege, then it must control public life. To take religion seriously enough not to mock it is to pay it the complement of taking it seriously, and religious seriousness has caused thousands of years of Holy War. Because different religious beliefs conflict with one another, only one religion can control public life. There must always be as many checks as possible to prevent one religion from subsuming others. As disgusting as it may seem to believers, the ability to mock religion is to religious believers’ benefit.

Read More

On The Backs of Others - An Old Song

While I work into the wee hours of the morning on two new songs, here's one from the Voices of Washington days that I'm gonna revive at the musical gathering which will occur next Sunday at my house. Not my best effort, but not bad. I wrote it for my chorus to sing as a more poppy standard for an idea that I had called the 'Concert for Washington' that was supposed to be the epochal event that made me into the most important musician from Washington DC since Duke Ellington. Since my self-delusion has known no bounds, it would have probably served me well to remember that I'm from Baltimore. But this was my attempt at a half-parody of Bob Dylan. One singer told me that the end result sounded more like Schoolhouse Rock... Not sure if she meant it as a complement, but if it was meant an insult, there are much, much less flattering ones.




In every country of the world,
It's always boom and bust.
Except the cap'tal cities cuz,
They hold our bonds in trust.

In Them we Trust and Liberty
Because we have no choice,
And if we don't what good is it
Cuz they speak with our voice?

And with our gold they pave our roads
And give us daily bread.
But those who have no gold to spare
Must they put in their share for us to spread?
On the Backs of Others.


But if our share is in Detroit
And Cincinnati too,
How come we can't see where it goes,
Or how it comes to you?

Will it be taken to a place,
Where charity goes to die?
And if it does will we know then
That politicians lie?

Cuz if they don't then we excuse
Th'excesses of the job,
When people smile as they stab,
Remember they climbed up the angry mob,
On the Backs of Others.


They're just like you and me, no doubt
They cook ther'own Sauce Bearnaise,
And caviar and de Foie Gras,
Cuz duck’s a food you braise.

And if they say their not like us
We'll run the dead-beats out,
Cuz we don't like no elite bums
gone tell us what to doubt.

Cuz if we doubt then we will know
That we must then feel shame,
And with such shame we must cast off
the burden that the White Man brought to fame.
On the Backs of Others.




So fat cats get the greenbacks in
Their pockets deep and wide
While children starve and poor men curse
what all good men abide.

For all good men and women too
take note what they observe.
And yet they never see we get
The leaders we deserve.

And when those leaders then exude
An unmistakable whiff,
We put the clothespin on our nose
Close eyes and let them lead us off the cliff.
On the backs of others.

Read More

Sunday Playlist: Sun Records

The Memphis Record Label that founded Rock'n Roll (at least the white half... maybe I can find a Chess Records playlist for the other half)

Part 1:

1 Mystery Train (Little Junior's Blue Flames) SUN 192
2. Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins) SUN 234
3. Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (Jerry Lee Lewis) SUN 267
4. Bear Cat (Rufus Thomas) SUN 181
5. Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash) SUN 232
6. Color And Kind (Look-A Here Baby) (Howlin' Wolf)
7. Flyin Saucers Rock n Roll (Billy Lee Riley) 260
8. Ten Cats Down (The Miller Sisters) 255
9. I Never Knew (Roy Orbison) 
10. Your Cheatin' Heart (Cliff Gleaves)
11. Just Walkin In The Rain (The Prisonaires) 186
12. The Hucklebuck (Earl Hooker)
13. Shake 'Em Up Baby (Frank Ballard)
14. Willing And Ready (Ray Smith)
15. Rock 'n' Roll Ruby (Warren Smith) 239
16. Born To Lose (Carl McVoy)
17. Lonely Weekends (Charlie Rich) PHILLIPS 3550
18. I Need A Man (Barbara Pittman) 253
19. Ubangi Stomp (Carl Mann) 
20. Sadie's Back In Town (Sonny Burgess) PHILLIPS 3551
21. Groovy Train (Wade Cagle & Escorts) 360
22. Don't Be Runnin' Wild (Problem Child) (Ken Cook)
23. Go! Go! Go! (Roy Orbison) 242
24. Red Velvet (The Kirby Sisters)
25. Greyhound Blues (D. A. Hunt) 183
26. I Forgot To Remember To Forget (Charlie Feathers)
27. Lewis Boogie (Jerry Lee Lewis) 301
28. Peace In The Valley (Million Dollar Quartet)
29. Down By The Riverside (Million Dollar Quartet)
30. Who Will The Next Fool Be (Charlie Rich)

Part 2:

1. Great Balls Of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis) 281
2. Matchbox (Carl Perkins) 261
3. Feelin' Good (Little Junior's Blue Flames) 187 
4. Mona Lisa (Carl Mann) phillips 3359
5. Ooby Dooby (alternative version) (Roy Orbison) 242
6. Guess Things Happen That Way (Johnny Cash) 295
7. My Babe (Narvel Felts)
8. It's Me Baby (Malcolm Yelvington)
9. Paralyzed (Million Dollar Quartet)
10. I'll Wait Forever (Anita Wood)
11. Somebody Told Me (Little Milton) 200
12. Rockin' Bandit (Dubbed version) (Ray Smith) 319
13. Pearly Lee (Billy Lee Riley) 277
14. Red Hot (Billy 'The Kid' Emerson) 219
15. Uranium Rock (Alternate Take) (Warren Smith)
16. Raunchy (Bill Justis)
17. Got You On My Mind (The Miller Sisters)
18. Just In Time (Harold Jenkins)
19. Ain't Got No Home (Carl Mann) phillips alt take
20. Ain't Got A Thing (Sonny Burgess) 263
21. Cheese And Crackers (Rosco Gordon)
22. Got Love If You Want It (Warren Smith) 286
23. Feelin' Low (Ernie Chaffin)
24. There's Another Place I Can't Go (Charlie Rich)
25. Handsome Man (Barbara Pittman)
26. How Long Can It Be (Maggie Sue Wimberley)
27. Goin Crazy (Mack Self)
28. Rockin' Daddy (Eddie Bond)
29. Cloudy (Brad Suggs)
30. Goodnight Irene (Johnny Cash)

Read More