SURVIVOR:

How György Ligeti soundtracked 2001, inspired Radiohead and composed music like ‘a knife through Stalin’s heart’ (Gillian Moore,7/03/23, The Guardian)

With Ligeti, however, tragedy is never far away. In his Poème Symphonique (Symphonic Poem) from 1962, 100 mechanical metronomes are set out on the stage in the formation of a symphony orchestra, each one solemnly wound up and set in motion at different speeds by a performer wearing formal evening dress. Ligeti was inspired at the time by the Fluxus movement and it is often billed as a “fun” piece. When the metronomes are let loose, the aural effect of this weird, mechanical orchestra is like rain on a roof or swarms of loud insects. As they gradually wind down, intriguing patterns, rhythms and ticking melodies emerge. By the end, there are only three, then two and then just one solitary metronome – the survivor – ticking away on the stage until it too falls silent. I always find it devastating.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Nature, Nov. 14th, 2024)

[…] the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson (Jeremy Hsu, 14 November 2024, New Scientist)

Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.

“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

STARSHIP PUPPIES:

Whose Future Is It Anyway?: Jess Maginity reviews Jordan S. Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right.” (Jess Maginity, November 12, 2024, LA Review of Books)

IN THE 1970s, a group of French right-wing intellectuals coalesced around the idea that cultural influence, not direct political action, determines the future. Led by Alain de Benoist, the Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE) borrowed heavily from communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci to promote the ideas of what would become the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). At the time Gramsci was writing, communist doctrine theorized culture as something emergent from the economy, and not something with a distinct impact on the organization of a given society. Gramsci disagreed. He argued that ideas, politics, and economics are each active forces in society and while they all impact each other, none of them simply emerges from another. The New Left embraced this paradigm through countercultural movements in the 1960s; what is often overlooked in history books is how a New Right was not far behind. The use of culture as a vehicle for politics (referred to as metapolitics) belongs to neither the Right nor the Left; a culture war needs two adversaries.

In the world of science fiction, this culture war has been evident in online forums, publications, and awards campaigning. The fight is for ownership of the genre. In the mid-2010s, the Hugo awards served as the primary battlefield for this front of the culture war. A group of right-wing science fiction fans and creators calling themselves the Sad Puppies formed a voting bloc to advocate the return to the genre’s supposed roots: pulpy outer-space hero stories. The Sad Puppies’ campaign was a populist one: they argued that elites, disparagingly referred to as “literati,” were pushing a political agenda and were silencing the true values of the people by presenting awards to more underrepresented authors whose stake in the genre was often, the Puppies insinuated, inauthentic. The Rabid Puppies emerged a few years into the Sad Puppies’ efforts. As their name suggests, the Rabid Puppies were unapologetic in their misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Whereas the Sad Puppies wanted the Hugos to celebrate the science fiction they were nostalgic for, the Rabid Puppies wanted to burn the Hugos to the ground. Why did a genre built around speculation and infinite possible futures spark such an impulse towards exclusivity? In his new book, Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, Jordan S. Carroll argues that the stakes of this cultural battlefield boil down to one question: who deserves to write the future? […]

In his introduction, Carroll discusses the close proximity of science fiction to radical right-wing politics since the early 20th century. To some extent, popular culture was always a tool used by the Far Right. Theorists of the French New Right described intentional ideological influence on popular culture aimed at a distant political victory as “metapolitics.” As Andrew Breitbart summarizes, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Carroll describes this tactic, alluding to his focus on speculative genres, as “fascist worldmaking.” The ideology that structures fascist worldmaking is speculative whiteness: “For the alt-right,” Carroll says, “whiteness represents a matrix of possibilities more important than any actual accomplishments the white race may have already achieved.” There are five “myths” that constitute speculative whiteness: first, white people are uniquely good at speculating about the future and innovating in the present; second, nonwhite people are incapable of imagining the future and making long-term plans for the future; third, the true grandeur of whiteness will only be apparent in a high-tech fascist utopia; fourth, science fiction is a genre only white authors are truly able to produce; and fifth, speculative genres have the metapolitical potential of allowing a brainwashed white population to see their racial potential.

Big Sister Is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers, December 28, 1957, National Review)

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler‘s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world (Phil Hebblethwaite, 5 Nov 2024, The Guardian)

In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”

MAN IS FALLEN:

Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, Willie Nelson: What I Learned About Happiness From Country Music (Timothy O’Malley, July 26, 2024, Church Life Journal)

The hobby has made me recognize a couple of things about country music: it is the kind of music that proposes something about the human condition. It means something. It has revealed something, to me, about happiness (and how perilous that condition of contentment is).

The first thing such music has unfolded for me is, in fact, that something is wrong with me. Something is wrong with you. Something about this world is wrong. It is a bit of a cliché at this point: dogs die, trucks break down, and relationships end. But listen for a moment to Miranda Lambert’s “Tinman.” Or Carly Pierce’s recent “Fault Line.” Or Willy Nelson’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms.” Broken hearts rip you apart, such that you would be willing to trade it all to be made of heartless tinman. Love leads to suffering, the kind where once solid relationships become sources of violence. A red-headed stranger may be able to kill you at a moment’s notice, but what he longs for most is to spend the night in the arms of a woman: “Don’t know why, but the one I love left me / Left me lonely and cold and so weak / And I need someone’s arms to hold me / ’Til I’m strong enough to get back on my feet.”

The wrongness of the world is often tinted with the kind of violence more appropriate to a Flannery O’Connor short story than popular music. The murder ballad, “Knoxville Girl,” sung in the haunting blood harmony of the Louvin Brothers, narrates the senseless murder of a young woman. The tale is recounted by the murderer himself, who confesses the deed. There is never a reason described for the murder. He kills, and he pays the price, spending the rest of his life in jail.

Such violence is also addressed by singers who have a definite reason to kill. The erstwhile Dixie Chicks gleefully tell us why Earl must die. More recently, Ashley McBryde speaks to Martha Divine, her father’s mistress: “Honor thy father. Honor thy mother. But the Bible doesn’t say a damn thing about your daddy’s lover.” So, the singer kills Martha Divine—if she is caught, she willl say the devil made her do it. In his “Wait in the Truck,” Hardy describes a murder of an abused woman’s partner. The singer faces the consequences of his murder, spending the rest of his life in jail.

There is something like a gothic sensibility to country music. Violence is lauded not because it is a good, but because the reality is that in this broken world where dogs indeed die, where love does not last forever, there is also the violence of the human heart. There is a genuine tragedy defining the human condition. The only thing to do is to sing about it.

All of this seems to go against any sense of what constitutes naïve happiness (more appropriate to the bubble gum pop of the late nineties). That naïve sense is dreadful: the beginning of happiness is recognizing that you are broken. That you long for something more. Dolly Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue” reveals to anyone who listens to it the terrible irony of heartache. The world is so beautiful, so wonderful. But guess what, you are still going to cry. “The Tennessee Waltz” is beautiful and haunting at once: your sweetheart can be taken from you in a moment’s notice.

How can something so terrifying be sung in such a beautiful way? Rainbows and bunnies are not how country music thinks about reality. Even if the genre employs a stock series of archetypes (the adulterous spouse, the violent lover, the fragility of all relationships), it forces the listener to reckon with the truth that we all eventually figure out: something is wrong. And coming to terms with that wrongness is part of the beauty of human life.

WONDERED WHEN HE’D BRING US ANOTHER:

The Warriors review – Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis come out to play with firecracker musical: This concept album based on Walter Hill’s 1979 film features megastar rappers, Hamilton alumni and styles from metalcore to salsa – it is pulled off with breathtaking brio (Chris Wiegand, 17 Oct 2024, The Guardian)

In their adaptation, a concept album that raises the tantalising prospect of a future staging, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis achieve something similar. The blistering, kaleidoscopic opener is presided over by dancehall dynamo Shenseea as a DJ introducing MCs for each borough. Amid punchy fanfares, they are deftly delineated: Chris Rivers as a raspy Bronx, Nas cranking up intrigue as Queens, Cam’ron smoothly humorous as Manhattan (“when you say New York, we’re actually what you mean”), Busta Rhymes’ explosively gruff Brooklyn and Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah and RZA spinning ethereal suspense for Staten Island, repeating the detail of their arduous route to the Bronx, “taking a train to a boat to another train”. […]

Miranda and Davis deliver the same lurid pulp jolts as the movie, finding equivalents for Hill’s arsenal of whip pans, wipes and slo-mo violence, yet they also share the more sociological perspective of Sol Yurick’s original 1965 novel and in particular his interest in what gangs offer the alienated and alone. (Yurick drew on his experience working for the city’s welfare department.) A majestic-sounding Lauryn Hill’s solo as Cyrus, If You Can Count, uses several of the character’s rallying lines from the screenplay but builds them into something much more resonant. “Nobody’s wasting nobody” becomes a call not just for laying down arms but for recognising the collective potential of every member in this posited gang of gangs. […]

One of the album’s joys is its unexpected pairings, especially how musical theatre stars are matched with acts from other genres. Broadway’s Alex Boniello teams up with Australian metalcore artist Kim Dracula as the Rogues on a rat-a-tat-tat duet, Going Down, that manages to veer from monstrous destruction to soaring anthem and back again. Dracula channels the toddler rage of the film’s arch-villain Luther (original star David Patrick Kelly gets an album cameo as a cop), and as you’d expect his taunt “come out to play” becomes a thunderous hook.

THE WRONG SHIP FOR ANARCHY, BROTHER:

Patrick O’Brian is a Great Conservative Writer: His concern is the problem of right authority (Henry Farrell, Sep 07, 2024, Programmable Matter)

This is counterposed against the Tory notion of the ship as an organic society, in which the rules are administered so as to provide a kind of general comfort, a belief in an order that is undoubtedly harsh but that still provides some comfort in its harshness. When the Articles of War, with their threats of capital punishment are read out:

Death rang through and through the Articles; and even where the words were utterly incomprehensible the death had a fine, comminatory Leviticus ring, and the crew took a grave pleasure in it all; it was what they were used to – it was what they heard the first Sunday in every month and upon all extraordinary occasions such as this. They found it comfortable to their spirits, and when the watch below was dismissed the men looked far more settled.

There is much in this that is alien – even obnoxious – to modern sensibilities. The claim that it is “what they were used to” is regularly invoked throughout the books as justification for this or that sordid practice. But there is also something that the liberals and left could stand to learn from.

If O’Brian is unfair to Bentham – and he certainly is – he is not entirely unfair. And we are all (for values of ‘we’ that encompass most people who I think read this kind of newsletter), Bentham’s children to some greater or lesser degree. We are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions – introducing measures to help the poor or the working class; improving general ‘prosperity’ – than in talking to, or engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help. Even the most supple forms of democratic authority work through abstractions, formalities and complications, rather than face to face relationships. There isn’t an organic relationship between those who rule or at least influence rule, and those who are ruled. We do not like to think of ourselves as exerting authority, but we most certainly are, through collectively and abstractly legitimated forms of coercion.

Conservatism in its attractive form discovers the troubles of this means of organizing society. I think of Chris Arnade, who makes walking into a form of political discovery, spending days and weeks on foot, going through ordinary neighborhoods and seeing and talking to the people there. The implicit, and sometimes explicit reproach to liberals and the professional left is that we don’t much have these kinds of contacts, except for those of us who do it in a professional capacity. And for many of us (myself included) he’s right. The Whiggish mode of organizing society tends towards a radical disconnection.

And that is the burden of O’Brian’s books. He lays out a conservative alternative – an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain – a good exerciser of authority – ought accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be ‘taut,’ perhaps sometimes even a ‘right hard horse,’ but they should never be a tyrant. O’Brian’s claim – again voiced through Maturin – is that this is very unlikely, but not impossible.

there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late: but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see …

[‘Efficient’ in the last sentence presumably meaning not Whiggishness, but the capacity to get what needs to get done, done.]

This is the great theme of the O’Brian books as I read them, and their great contribution too. Condemning them as middlebrow is silly nonsense. They have their faults, as Dickens does – frequent longueurs; sometimes grotesque contrivances of plot. But so too they have their greatness, and the larger part of that greatness comes from their statement of a particular view of human beings, and their perpetual return to the vexed problem of right authority. We exercise authority over each other; sometimes verging on the absolute. How can we do it well, without becoming monstrous?

JOBS MAGA WON’T DO:

The Border Crisis Won’t Be Solved at the Border: If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater (Jack Herrera, November 2024, mTexas Monthly)

For more than a century the threat of arrest—whether by Border Patrol agents in green uniforms or Texas state cops in white Stetsons—has not stopped undocumented workers from moving north. Recently Latin American migrants have kept coming, for the same reason millions of Scots, Irish, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Russians first arrived at Ellis Island. The U.S. economy—the most powerful engine of wealth in human history—has been built on successive waves of foreign-born workers and entrepreneurs. The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.

One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.

Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.

The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally. In a survey conducted this September by another trade group, 77 percent of construction firms with job openings, and 74 percent of those in Texas, reported that they were struggling to fill them.

OTHER THAN DR. NO:

The Ultimate Bond Film Turns 60: “Goldfinger” launched the 007 franchise into global fame—and remains unsurpassed. (Christopher Sandford, September 12, 2024, Modern Age)

First released in the U.K. in September 1964 with a U.S. release to follow in December, the film’s other primary takeaway images are those of a nude young lady killed by being smothered in gold paint, a mute Korean assassin with an unusually lethal bowler hat, and an all-female flying circus, overseen by a blonde-framed vision named Pussy Galore, spraying nerve gas over Fort Knox, all accompanied by a breezily melodramatic title song belted out by Shirley Bassey with the young Jimmy Page, later of Led Zeppelin fame, on guitar.

All rich stuff, you may think, if just a touch on the outré side. The contemporaneous reviews used words like “outlandish,” “ludicrous,” and “absurd, funny, and vile” to describe the film, except for Roger Ebert, who called it “chilling,” and praised Sean Connery—the yardstick by which all his successors as Bond would be measured, often to their disadvantage—for conveying a “verisimilitude” and “sleek assurance” in the role, alongside a gift for deadpan comedy. Revisiting the film years later, Ebert wrote: “Connery . . . had something else that none of [his heirs] could muster: steely toughness. When his eyes narrowed and his body tensed up, you knew the playing was over and the bloodshed was about to begin.” Connery’s performance surmounted even one or two plot twists and chunks of expository dialogue that may seem a touch heavy-going to us today. The title character’s essential game plan is to profit from the economic chaos that will ensue after he’s detonated an atomic bomb over Fort Knox, thus rendering America’s gold reserves radioactive for a precisely stated fifty-eight years. “He’s quite mad, you know,” Bond remarks to Pussy Galore, just in case anyone watching might have considered it a viable get-rich-quick scheme.

I have to say that I’m with Ebert on this one. It’s not just that Connery is perfect as Bond, with a vitality and a humanity (not to mention that widely mimicked Scottish burr) his inheritors in the role could only approximate, some more competently than others. Strange as it may seem, Goldfinger itself, like many of the author Ian Fleming’s tales, wasn’t pure invention. It was inspired by the swashbuckling exploits of the Anglo-Canadian spymaster William Stephenson (1897–1989), whose wartime scheme to relieve the collaborationist Vichy French government of its bullion reserves held on the island of Martinique had come to Fleming’s attention as a young operative with British naval intelligence.