This thread has dredged up a memory from my own undergraduate days: I was taking Theory and Literature of 20th Century Music (required for music majors), and the professor (Malcolm Brown, IIRC) was discussing the transition from late German Romanticism to Serialism. He played a short movement from something fairly innocuous -- Erwartung or something -- and continued his lecture. A girl in the class suddenly and rudely interrupted him: "Excuse me . . . excuse me!"
"Yes?"
"That music you played. It wasn't very pretty." And she folded her arms and looked around the class, quite pleased with herself.
Dr. Brown stared at her for what seemed like minutes. "Pretty? Pretty? He bounded across the room, and in two giant steps launched himself up the piano bench and on to the top of the piano. He perched on the piano like an eagle and screeched, "Music is not supposed to be pretty!"
About half the class sat there in shock, and the rest of us burst out in spontaneous applause while Dr. Brown awkwardly climbed down off the piano to continue his lecture as though nothing extraordinary had just occurred.
And that is how you instill passion in students. Except in Arizona.
A request: I'm looking for alternatives to Site Meter and Technorati for tracking visitors and links. Any recommendations?
I seem to recall our hosts finding an alternative to Technorati that got the thumbs up, but the search engine didn't return anything, and I couldn't find a link on the front page. (Although I could simply be linkblind.)
(We do still have the East Cambridge "Live Poultry Fresh Killed" sign, however.)
I used to regularly drive past a farm that had a big sign advertising "Rabbits -- Live & Dressed." Try explaining to an excited little girl that they do not sell bunnies in cute costumes.
His point was that if the in-between bits were more interesting, they would distract from the pornography.
A few weeks ago I watched a remarkable ~1970 French film called Morgane et ses nymphs, recently released for the first time to English-speaking audiences as the DVD "Girl Slaves of Morgan le Fay" (Blue Underground, 2005). Two young coeds, driving across France on holiday, somehow cross over into a Faerie Land ruled by the Queen Morgan. It is, for all intents and purposes, a typical Eurotrash softcore lesbian porn film (cf "Emannuelle"), except that the in-between bits recreate a Faerie Land that has the sense of disorientation, horror, and parahuman amorality you find in medieval works like The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer or Le Belle Dame sans Merci. The film also has a dizzily ambiguous sense of gender and sexual politics that could keep academics arguing for decades. All the sex and nudity does slow it down a bit, I suppose.
Actually, to the larger point of this thread, I have in the last few years become fascinated with (continental) European genre films in general. The best of these (e.g., Operazione paure [Kill Baby ... Kill], Profundo rosso, Dr. Orloff's Monster) seem to abandon the conventions of plot almost entirely, and instead present a variety of loosely connected set pieces and striking tableaux vivants separated by long stretches of pure atmospherics. The small bits of plot and exposition that exist serves mostly to confuse the viewer. I find that much preferable to sitting through long, awkward stretches of exposition and plot contrivances and trying to make sense of things.
Of course, cinema is primarily a visual -- rather than narrative -- medium. I'm not sure whether the same approach could be made to work in a novel.
When I joined Sams around 1990, I was digging through the office supply cabinets, which were mostly full of the detritus of the old-school engineering editors who'd recently retired or been laid off. In a box full of half-used gum erasers and broken binder clips, I found a self-inking stamper that printed the single word REJECTED in blood-red ink. Kah-chunk!
As a young copyeditor, this struck me as so psychopathically coldhearted that it sat on my desk as a kind of macabre talisman, like displaying a human skull or a knife that once belonged to Jack the Ripper.
Credit where it's due: I learned that version at the feet of these guys.
There's also a one-syllable displacement, but it's more difficult to sing.[pickups] Oh take me ||
||: Out / to | the ball game | take / / | me / / |
| Out / to | the park buy | me / / | -. |
| Some pea-nuts | and crack-er | jacks / I | don't / /|
| Care / if | I ev-er | get back for | its root, root ||
|| Root / for | the home team | if / / | they / / |
| Don't / win | it's a shame | for / / | / It's one |
| Two / / | three / / | strikes you're out | at the old |
| Ball / / | game / / | -. | (Oh take me) :||
(Hopefully, that hybrid music notation is readable:
|| = double bar
| = single bar
/ = quarter rest
-. = dotted-half rest)
<alcohol type="sake" liter="1"><lurking value="true">In response to Xopher's (and other's) commentary about British witches against Hitler... So, I was just listening to Steve Haberman's commentary track on the DVD of Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim. (Get the new Val Lewton box: Highly recommended for anyone who cares about fantasy or horror.) Apparently, Lewton sent screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen off to New York to find out about Satanism/Witchcraft in New York City. (Yes, I know that Satanism and Wicca are two different things, but I don't think that was well recognized in 1943, even by literate people.) Sure enough, Bodeen manages to score an invite to observe a coven meeting in Greenwich Village c. 1943. Haberman quotes Bodeen many years later as saying a) they were just like the coven in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby: a bunch of old women crocheting and knitting, and old men shrinking in their clothes, and b) that he wouldn't want to have been Hitler, considering all the black imprecatations that the Greenwich Village witches were working against him. So, it wasn't just the British witches who were fighting Hitler; there were a fair number of American witches whose spells fought fascism as well.</lurking></alcohol>
The word UFO (now pronounced /yuwefó/; the former pronunciation /yúwfo/ appears to be obsolete) originally meant "Unidentified Flying Object."
I remember hearing both pronunciations, up until the live-action Gerry Anderson series "UFO" aired on TV. The TV show was unambiguously pronounced "You Eff Oh," and I never heard the "yoofo" pronunciation after that except from old-timers. I'm pretty confident that Gerry Anderson killed the "yoofo" pronunciation.
There are some other SF-related terms that underwent pronunciation changes between 1960 and 1970 that I've always wondered about:
1) Mechanical men were called "RObəts* fairly consistently up through the 1950s. By the end of the 1960s, that pronunciation had disappeared.** Was it because of the popularity of Robbie the Robot?
2) Radiation-challenged humans used to be called "mute ants." I can attest to Peter Cushing and Vincent Price using the "mute-ant" pronunciation as late as 1969 on a BBC radio series. It was a common pronunciation on X Minus One and 2000 Plus. Any idea what triggered the transition to "MYOO-tənt"?
3) I have one old radio show where a non-pigmented person is referred to as an "al-BEE-no." I've no idea whether that was a once-common pronunciation, or a one-time gaff by a radio actor.
*Do you see a box or a schwa? It should be a schwa. I see a box here, even though I see a schwa when I use ə on other websites using Explorer.
**My favorite detail on Futurama: All the really old people (e.g., Professor Farnsworth and his contemporaries) pronounce it "RObət," as though it were an age-related pronunciation.
Serge asks:
Did anybody watched any turkey movies today?
Serge, I believe the ultimate movie in this category is Blood Freak, which is both a turkey of a movie, and a movie that features turkeys. It also features psychoactive drugs, a has-been B-movie strong man, man-turkey vampirism, and, of course, a strong evangelical Christian message. The ultimate "turkey movie." And now I know what we're watching at my sister's house tomorrow.
Re. "Shiny": I haven't seen Serenity, and I haven't see Firefly since the series first aired, but Madeleine's use of "shiny" is consistent with my own ideolect for years and years.
I know it was at least six or seven years ago that I rechristened a bassist I worked with "Shiny" because of his ability to become completely distracted by nearby pieces of technology for hours at a time. (We had a gig once that involved walking past a parked helicopter, and he very nearly made us late. OTOH, he once saved a gig by rewiring an old repurposed console organ with a paperclip, so it was all for the good.)
Wait a sec -- wasn't there some work of children's fiction that had a character who was an anthropomorphized packrat (or was it a magpie?), who could never finish a sentence? He'd say, "Of course I'll help you, Mr.--- Oooh, shiny!" and go running off after scraps of cellophane or whatever. Dim memories of childhood characters from thirty-odd years ago.... But I suspect that might be the source.
I also dimly recall the phrase "easily captivated by bright, shiny objects" as a mildly pejorative euphemism and a minor catchphrase around the same time.
"SeekXL," that is. I thought it rather odd that the poster above copied and pasted Serge's response to my post quite a ways upthread. It must be a smart bot, because it copied the post but removed my name from it.
The URL in the user name goes to some sponsored German search engine thingy.
(Okay, my web jargon is inadequate, but I've seen those fakey search engines, and I know they're ... um ... a bad thing.)
"You hardly even hear about [WWI] in public high schools and colleges these days . . ."
As I remember it, there was no clear explanation of how the war started. I've read about some guy -- the German Crown Prince? -- getting assassinated, but I didn't learn that in school.
Hmm... without looking it up, here's what I recall learning: Europe in the early 20th c. was defined by a complex patchwork of treaties and mutual defense agreements that obligated, for example, nation A to come to the defense of nation B when under attack by nation C, but might also obligate nation A to defend nation C if attacked by nation D. The idea was a kind of pre-nuclear mutually assurred destruction, a deterrent to war. Then, the Austro-Hungarian archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by an immigrant/guestworker from XXXXXX (Poland, maybe? Bohemia? Was there a free Poland at the time?). Austria demanded that country XXXXXX turn over certain suspected conspirators. When country XXXXXX refused, Austria sent troops across the border, and that triggered this chain reaction of treaty obligations all suddenly coming due. If France were obligated to defend XXXXXX, and Germany were obligated to defend Austria, that would explain the Western front.
I'm still not sure how the Ottomans got involved.
Is that even close?
I'm a muscian who plays trumpet and trombone. The natural harmonics are my friends. If you're hearing Amazing Grace, you're not technically hearing 1, 4, 6, and 8. Assuming that the Flatiron Building is in the key of C, the overtone series works out like this:
(0) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
(C) C' G' C" E" G" Bb" C'" D'" E'" F#" ...
Where 0 is the fundamental. So what you're hearing is the second, third, fourth, and just possibly the fifth harmonic. It would take tremendous energy to produce audible harmonics above that in a building, I'd think.
Serge, the total length of the column of air within a toilet is too short to play bugle calls. I suspect if you added about 15 feet of 1 1/2" PVC to the back of it, you could play bugle calls in the tuba range. It would sound something like an alphorn. (see also)
In my adopted city of Cincinnati, there's a bridge built by John Roebling as a kind of proof-of-concept for the Brooklyn Bridge. Locals call it "the singing bridge," because after it was opened to automobile traffic, it was discovered that vehicles traveling at 20-40 MPH across the roadbed excite the higher harmonic frequencies of the suspension cables, creating deep, sighing, musical moans. It's a bit like driving across a giant instrument built by Harry Partch.
There's a 1948 episode of Spike Jones' radio show, "Spotlight Serenade," that features My Old Flame -- first with Paul Frees, and then again with special guest -- ta-da! -- Peter Lorre. I'm listening to it right now -- I suffer pure fanboy meltdown every time I hear it. Datajunkie was offering this as a download a few months ago, but it's expired now. You might check a site like OTRnow.com.
Ajay, don't forget, when the New Madrid fault wipes out the midwest and Ohio valley:
biscwaste and sewage gravy
Kentucky Hot Brown-outs
Burgoop
For me, magic realism is about the power of words as words. It's akin to Magritte's pipe, which is not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe.
An angel trapped in the shed is not an angel trapped in the shed, it's the words "an angel trapped in the shed," and the power that those words have.
I associate magic realism with Latin American writers because the power of words has been a major part of Spanish literary tradition long before the emergence of the magic realism school. If you, like me, are horrible with languages, but have slogged your way, line by line, through a work of fiction or poetry in the original Spanish, then perhaps you had the sense of the weight of words in Spanish literature.
Didn't our hostess, in the early days of Making Light, write a post about a short poem by Lorca, and how the whole poem pivoted around the word mira, which could mean a thousand different things, and seemed to mean all of them at the same time?
In the same way that Magritte's paintings can lift you out of the world of images and into the world of paint and brushstrokes, I find that the best magic realism lifts me out of the story and into the world of words.
Consider the vampire: In a horror story, a vampire is an uncanny, nihilistic force that spreads sickness, decay, death, and corruption in an ever-widening circle until or unless you stop it -- temporarily, at best. (Dracula, Murnau/Herzog's Nosferatu, Carmilla, 1970s Eurotrash lesbian vampires, etc.)
In a fantasy story, OTOH, vampires are a society of immortal beings who live by their own rules and feed on human beings. They might have some magic properties -- sensitivity to sunlight, ability to shapeshift -- but those properties are constrained, rules-based, and predictable. (Buffy, Blade, Lost Boys, etc. etc.)
I think recognizing the difference between Horror vampires and Fantasy vampires is illuminating, because most people -- even non-genre fans -- are aware of the differences between Lugosi/Lee vampires and Spike/Angel vampires.
I've gotten to where I no longer try to determine which emails are legit and which are phishing. I access my bank via my bookmarks; I (very rarely) visit PayPal by clicking the PayPal button on a trusted site.
I ignore all unsolicited email, whether legitimate or not. Is there any reason to think that my bank will start sending me unsolicited email I'm supposed to respond to? Because they haven't yet. (Mostly it's "Internet Banking just got easier!" which means that they've made arbitrary and capricious changes to their UI.)
OTOH, when my own employer's IT dept sent me an email telling me to change my password for security purposes, it was an HTML email with embedded ActiveX controls and blind links to unsecured Word documents with macros. And these clowns are worried about passwords?
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|---|---|
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2005 | 63 |
| 2004 | 44 |
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