jameswharris

The Country & The Country–America in 2012

In 2009 China Miéville came out with The City & The City, a fantasy novel about two cultures, living in one physical location, that were so alienated from each other that they believed they lived in two separate cities, even though both cities were located in the same geographical location. Citizens of each city spoke a different language, had different laws and culture, and they had been trained since birth to ignore each other so well that they were invisible to each other.

When I read The City & The City I thought the idea too far out to believe, but the 2012 Presidential election is making me change my mind. This afternoon was I was reading news feeds on my iPad with the app Zite about climate change. There were two kinds of stories. 90% of the stories were science articles about the effects of global warming around the world. Not stories theorizing the coming of global warming, but reports of its effect right now. The rest of the stories were from climate change deniers. They no longer try to attack the science of global warming, they laugh at the the absurdity that anyone should even consider the possibility of climate change. They sneer at liberals who believe these science fictional fantasies. They applaud Romney, Ryan and the Republicans for giving zero thought and time to such Chicken Little fears.

We’re now living in The County & The Country!

What I’m writing now is completely invisible to conservatives. If they read this essay they would only see some silly story that sounds like nonsense. It’s doubtful any would even try to read it. And I’m not writing this to appeal to their reason. I know I’m invisible to them. They can’t hear me.

We have become so polarized in the United States that we can no longer see members of the opposite political party.

I could take the time to list many pro and con articles I read today, but what’s the point, those that see, do – those that don’t, can’t. Anyone can go to Google Alerts and set up a news watch on any topic. Just set up a “climate change” News Alert. You’ll be sent an email once a day with all news of any kind about the topic.

Global warming has been happening for decades. The effects have been felt for decades. Humans change the planet all the time in endless ways. We affect the weather all the time. And it’s all invisible to you if you choose to ignore it. I think even people who understand that climate change is happening refuse to pay attention. People do not want to change their lives. People do not want to make sacrifices. People do not want to believe that bad things are going to happen.

New Scientist has an interesting article that asks: “If 2013 breaks heat record, how will deniers respond?” I often wonder about that. At what point do the people who can’t see climate change suddenly start feeling the heat? Will they ever? How powerful is mind over reality?

The Republican party claims President Obama has been a failure as a leader and now it’s time for Republicans to lead the country. Only they can lead us out of our economic mess. I’ll admit that Obama hasn’t been a great leader. I’ll also admit that Republicans can be great at leading the country. But they are a one trick pony when it comes to leadership. All they know how to do is lower taxes, regardless of the economic impact. Voting Republican means voting to lower taxes on the wealthy. You can be absolutely sure they can lead the country into lower taxes. Whether they can lead us anywhere else is doubtful. But it’s also a 100% guarantee, that they won’t do anything about the environment, other than run away, or stick their heads in the sand.

Voting Republican means: “We want NO leadership on environmental issues. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Nix. Zero. Zilch.”

America is now two countries coexisting in the same spatial plane. There are two cultures, liberals and conservatives. They do not speak the same language. They can not communicate. Conservatives see reality on the North American continent different from liberals. It’s cool and refreshing where Republicans live. All they see is high taxes, wasteful governmental programs, welfare squatters, sin and a black man as President.

They want to grow the defense budget to protect America from any harm when our only real enemy is ourselves and climate change. Is that leadership?

[One reason I don’t give Obama high marks for leadership is he hasn’t lead on climate change. He does accept the problem, he just hasn’t made it a political issue. Read “Obama and Romeny on Climate Change Science” at the Washington Post.]

JWH – 9/3/12.

Pop Music versus Classical Music

Growing up in the 1960s I was programmed to love rock music by AM radios. I never developed an ear for classical music. Last night, three lady friends and I, attended the opening performance for this season of the Memphis Repertory Orchestra. I tried hard to get into the music. It’s not that I hated what I heard, it was enjoyable, even fascinating, but I didn’t get the emotional response from that music that I do from pop music. I’m trying to figure out why.

I thought the performances last night were very good, and plan to attend again. I’m intrigued once again with classical music.

The last performance, “Les Preludes” by Franz Liszt, was my favorite of the evening. I got into it. I could close my eyes and forget my body, and let my mind flow with the music, and it was fairly exciting, going through a range of sounds that often evoked comparisons to real world sounds, like sheets of rain, or movie soundtrack imagery, like a city coming alive in the morning. But even though the music was pleasant and thought provoking, it didn’t push any of my emotional buttons like I’m used with rock music. Why?

I’m not blaming classical music here, I’m blaming me. After reading The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, I’m all too well aware of my perceptual limitations. This is a brain issue. I know other people find this kind of music deeply moving and emotional. Somehow my upbringing has made me colorblind to classical music.

Pop songs are short, usually have a strong backbeat that you can dance to, and they have a hook, a catchy phrase or melody that’s repeated. The emotional mood of a pop song is usually singular, although there’s a few famous examples, like “Hey, Jude,” “A Day in the Life” and “Stairway to Heaven” that change moods in mid-song. Pieces performed last night constantly shifted gears, and only rarely, did a short sequence push one of my buttons. The second soprano, at one point sang a snippet of verses, that I wished someone would make into a whole pop song.

I would guess that fans of classic music must find pop hits musically terse and boring, if not monomelodic. Symphony music is obviously polymelodic.

Classical music is like a long speech and sometimes I’m moved by a few catchy phrases here and there, but for the most part I’m indifferent to most of what’s being said. It’s like listening to a foreign language speaker and occasionally hearing a word I know.

Classical music pieces are like novels with many scenes and pop songs are like short poems that hit you hard with one epiphany.

I would say a symphonic composition is like listening to an entire album of songs that must be perceived as a wholeness. Parts of a classical composition that thrills me often lasts for just a few bars, sometimes only one, and never the 3 minutes common to a pop song.

Obviously, to appreciate classical music requires a different mindset. I assume I am just too poorly educated to appreciate classical music, both in its technical nature, and in the training of my ear for listening enjoyment. I also assume if I worked at it, I could learn to love classical music. I should be embarrassed to admit this, but even pop fluff like Katy Perry or Ke$ha are thousands of times more exciting to me than any classical piece I’ve ever heard, and Bob Dylan is so far beyond them, that I’m in a different world.

My musical upbringing made me primarily attuned to the sound of the guitar, bass, and drums, and secondarily to organ and piano. Later on I picked up a feel for the saxophone, mandolin, banjo, steel guitar, fiddle, trumpet and other instruments as folk, country and jazz influenced rock. Eventually I worked backward in time through jazz and big band eras and acquired a taste for their sounds. I have always liked symphonic music when it was played as movie soundtracks, but I’ve never been able to feel for music written before the 1920s.

To be completely honest, I’ve never learned to love jazz and big band like I do rock and pop, but I have learned to crave their sounds, to hunger for the feelings their tunes pull out of me. Maybe one day I’ll be able to say I’m in the mood for a classical piece.

When I say feel for music, I mean, it makes me high. It stimulates my emotions. I crave it like a drug. So far, classical music doesn’t get me high.

Classical music was a lot more popular in its day, but I’m not sure if it the common folk often hummed its tunes. Few people got to hear Mozart’s compositions in his day, unless it was in church. Folk music was probably more popular, or music from taverns and dances.

I’m mostly a self-educated person, even though I have a college degree. I’ve read books about other places and times where the main characters were cultured, very well educated and spoke beautifully of the emotional depth of classical music pieces they loved. That has often inspired me to buy classical music, but it just never worked. I never felt what the characters described. I’ve bought two separate recordings of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, decades apart, because of the powerful written descriptions I’ve read about his performances. Each time I was painfully disappointed. I could sense their intellectual achievement but they were cold and passionless to me. Simone Dinnerstein warmed up the Goldberg Variations quite a bit, but not enough to make them hit songs with me. Maybe Roy Bittan should give them a go.

I know classical music offers greatness, I just can’t perceive it. Over the decades I keep trying. I’ve bought a couple dozen classical CD sets over the years trying to perceptually break on through to the other side. Haven’t made it yet. Last night performance encourages me to keep trying.

I went with three women to the performance last night, Ann and Anne, and Robyn, a woman who teaches and performs classical music. I grilled her for information, and I asked her about her tastes in pop music. I got the feeling she doesn’t share my passion for rock and pop that I do. Were we each conditioned to like only what we grew up listening to? Is it genetic? I wished I could have telepathically tuned into the heads of my three companions to see how they each perceived the performances. Just how different are our inner worlds? Are classical and pop music such distant lands that they are each alien landscapes to the other? Are classical music lovers mentally different from me?

Of course, we all have our own unique collection of passions. I am never moved to yell or high-five a friend over a football play on television. I absolute love Breaking Bad, a television show my wife feels only psychopaths could embrace. My friend Peggy thinks about dancing the bop or shag all the time, but I’m never moved to get up and boogie. My wife and her family are mesmerized by golf games on TV, while I sit around wonder where’s the Kool-Aid I should have drank to feel such happiness.

Maybe I’ll never love classical music, but I’ll keep trying.

I do worry that learning to love classical might change the way I love rock. Does it work that way?

JWH – 9/2/12

Living To Do Everything–And Getting Nothing Done

We want it all. To do more, see more, go more, feel more, taste more…

We rush to fill every hour with more activities. We hate to miss anything our heart desires. Yet, how much do we really get done?

Patricia Hampl said in Blue Arabesque:

Isn’t that why I’d majored in English to begin with, without knowing it? Not to teach, not to be a librarian, not for a job. To be left alone to read an endless novel, looking up from time to time for whole minutes out of the window, letting the story impress itself not only on my mind, but on the world out there, letting the words and world get all mixed up together. To gaze at the world and make sentences from its passing images. That was eternity, it was time as it should be, moving like clouds, the forms changing into story.

By doing too much, we do too little. Hampl blames modernity on our failure to see the sublime in life.

Is it more enriching to hear 1,000 different songs than to get to know 100 songs by playing them 10 times? Is it a richer experience to study 10 songs by living with each a 100 times? Or should we devote ourselves to 1 song until we can sing and play it note for note, either in perfect imitation or in wild improvising?

The time spent is the same, but how deeply do we experience time when listening to 1,000 songs versus listening to a song 1,000 times? How productive is contemplation?

I woke up this morning, lingering between sleep and wakefulness, entertaining myself with thoughts about what I would do today. I’d like to pick just one goal and accomplish it each day, but no matter how hard I try, the whirlwind of life diverts me from the ambition I pick. I can never focus because my environment pulls me in endless directions.

For example, between all forms of books, hardbacks, trade editions, paperbacks, ebooks, and audiobooks, I have about 1,000 books waiting for me to read. What would life be like if I only had one? Ditto for friendships, movies, television shows, photos, albums, hobbies, household responsibilities – all vying for my attention. Not that I have a 1,000 of each – some much less, but others much more.

I can’t honestly say I have 1,000 essays and stories waiting to be written, but the number is large. If I had no other distractions and only one idea I wanted to write about, how much more could I accomplish in one day?

I think we all want too much. Wouldn’t we all benefit from a stay at Walden’s Pond and being Thoreau for a year?

While laying in my dreamy state of mind this morning, my subconscious told me I could get more done if I did less.

Why don’t I listen?

JWH – 8/26/12

Studying Science in My Retirement Years–Breaking the Science Barrier

I am listening to From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll and although I can understand his words I doubt I understand what he’s trying to tell me. The book is about time and entropy, and how they are seen from classical physics, relativity, and quantum physics. I read and listen to a lot of science books, but I believe there’s a science barrier that I can’t break through. I’ve also been reading Brian Greene and Lawrence M. Krauss, whose books often overlap what Carroll is covering. These books are fantastic, both in the quality of writing and research, and in scope of topic. They take the reader to the edge of space and time and describe the cutting edge of scientific knowledge.

The fruits of my study show a murky comprehension at best. I can understand science at the level Galileo and Newton understood it, but 21st Century science is magical and closer to science fiction, lots of razzle-dazzle. I’d like to truly see where science is pointing. I’d like to grasp the experimental logic of how scientists got there.

I’m sixty years old and I never stopped trying to understand reality. The older I get the more sure I am that religion has nothing to say about the nature of reality. In recent years I’ve come doubt the validity of philosophy. Logic and rhetoric can be very seductive, but also deceptive. I am quite confident that science is the only system that explains reality.

But I’m not sure I can understand science’s explanation!

What’s hilariously ironic, is we believers in science must take so much of what we’re taught about science on faith.

I struggle to make sense of quantum physics. I wish they’d stop talking about cats and talk about actual experiments. When science writers try to convey quantum physics they end up talking in metaphors that just don’t make a lot of sense. Black holes and cosmology have a conceptual reality that makes sense, even though I can’t understand why information won’t be destroyed if it fell into a singularity. I was very lucky to read The Information by James Gleick before reading these books, because information theory does make sense to me, just not at the quantum mechanics level yet.

When little kids ask their mommies where everything comes from and their moms answer “God created everything” – that’s a big convenient cheat. Moms really don’t know or don’t want to take the time to explain what science has learned about the nature of reality. The truth is out there, at least part of it, and it’s not what Fox Mulder and Dana Scully discovered with the help of Chris Carter, or anything you can learn from prophets and their religions, or even from Plato and Aristotle, and their philosophical descendants.

If you want to know the truth you have to study science. It’s the only game in town. Trust me. I’ve read hundreds of books searching for the truth, and it all distills down to that. Religion and philosophy can take you down years of blind alleys.

How badly do you want to know the truth? Bad enough to study math? Yeah, I thought so. At 60, I don’t think I can go back and pick up where I left off after my B in Calculus I. Without being a math whiz, how close can we come to really understanding science? Without math, how close can anyone get to understanding what science has to teach? I don’t want to accept science on faith. Nor should anyone else.

In school and college I studied physics, chemistry and biology. I know a fair history of science and great experiments, and how we gained the scientific knowledge we have up until around Einstein. This is classical science. It’s the science at the world’s eye view of things, where most experiments can be repeated in the classroom. I’ve explored the larger world of astronomy with telescopes and books, and the mechanical universe makes sense too. It’s when cosmology melds with particle physics and the quantum reality that my mind fails to grasp what’s going on.

Since I never had my own personal atom smasher, I’ve never really understood how scientists know what they know about the zoo of sub-atomic particles, much less quantum physics. Because this world is invisible, and exploring it is so mathematical, science writers often resort to analogies, metaphors, similes, and thought experiments to explain this frontier of reality. These stories sound wonderful, but they don’t help me see what’s really happening. Classical experiments in gravity, optics and electricity have a immediate truth to them that doesn’t work when studying particle physics. Chemistry is abstract, but models of molecular bonds help picture it. The microscope gives biology a direct view. Animations of the sub-atomic world help me picture things, but I’ve been told my whole life these animations are wrong.

What I need to do is go back to the 1600 and retrace all the experiments that were done to set the stage for particle physics. That might help me conceptualize quantum mechanics.

I did find Following the Path of Discovery – Repeat Famous Experiments and Inventions – Hands on Activities for High School and College Students.

I once bought a CD-ROM copy of Scientific American’s “The Amateur Scientist” but I can’t find it now. Too bad, it’s out of print and selling for $852 used. But it contains the complete run of the “The Amateur Scientist” from Scientific American. That would be a great way to spend my retirement years, doing those experiments myself. But DIY science has gone out of fashion. SciAm dropped “The Amateur Scientist” in 2001. Heathkit and Edmund Scientific gave up on budding scientists years ago. Make Magazine has rekindled the old DIY craze, but it’s not quite the same.

The big movement in Education now-a-days is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Maybe it will reignite a rediscovery of science learning through teaching classic experiments.

PBS should create a television series on historical science experiments. There’s lots of stuff on the net about fun science experiments, like what Steve Spangler does, but that’s not what I’m talking about. PBS NOVA comes close sometimes, but they don’t follow an experiment step-by-step, but instead create a historical summary of it.

And I might not need to see historical experiments performed to understand particle physics. Studying the history of quantum mechanics from the beginning, starting with Michael Faraday, might do the trick. I’m reading 21st century books when I might need to read 19th century books first, or good histories of that period.

I’ve often wondered if I should start a reading program that covered the history of science. My problem might be I’m reading about modern science without enough historical foundation in science.

If I was an ambitious blogger I’d create a timeline of science history, and then link the best science books I could find to the timeline. Maybe someone has already done that? So far I haven’t found such a timeline, so I might get to work on it. It would be a great retirement project that could take years.

Here’s an example. In 1838, Michael Faraday noticed a strange light arc between the cathode and anode in a glass tube. It took science until 1897 to discover this light was electrons. At the time science thought atoms were the smallest bits of matter. What are the best science books that cover those years and experiments? How would I arrange such books on a timeline? What other science experiments were going on between 1838-1897 that should go on the timeline too. What books cover their history?

I’m rearranging my books right now, so this gives me an idea. I want to start a reading project that starts with 1600 and moves forward in time.

JWH – 8/22/12

So Many Books, Too Little Time

My motto should be: “ Quot Libros, Quam Breve Tempus” or so many books, so little time.

My patron saint is Henry Bemis.

In case you don’t know Henry Bemis, he was played by Burgess Meredith in a very famous episode of Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last” about a super-bookworm, Henry Bemis. Henry was a bank clerk who never could find enough time to read, until the world came to an end.

I never can find enough time to read either. It’s a life of quiet desperation for words. I have more unread books on my shelves than I will be able to read if I lived to be 100. I also have a book buying addiction – I buy 7-10 books for every one I read. I’ve always rationalized I will read them someday, but at 60, I know that’s not true.

I had an epiphany the other day. I was flipping through some free books I had picked up and it dawned on me that I will never run out of something to read, even if I didn’t own a single book. I have access to so many free or cheap books, that owning books doesn’t matter anymore. I even pictured myself finishing a book and just leaving it where someone else could find it, and then stumbling onto my next read. There’s a service for leaving books for other people to find called Book Crossing.

There’s also a movement called Little Free Libraries, where people build tiny waterproof libraries to give away books. They put them in public places, or in front of their homes, with a sign “Take a book, leave a book.” I wonder if I built a little free library box for my yard, would there always be a book in it I’d want to read when I finished my current book?

Where I work we’ve had a free book table for years. I always find something to read there. Today I snagged The Victorians by A. N. Wilson, and Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind by David Berreby. Yesterday my friend Ted handed me Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Before that I brought home The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman. Don’t be too impressed, I doubt I’ll actually read them, but like Henry Bemis I dream of the day when I could. Ted is giving away hundreds of books. Over the years so have I.

I’ve also rediscovered libraries, and my main library now has a used bookstore as part of the library. So there’s a library book sale every day except Sunday. It’s classic section always has at least one book I’ve always wanted to read. Last Saturday I came home with five such books, for about $9.

And even if I couldn’t find a free book, there’s never been a time I’ve walked into a bookstore and not found a book I wanted to read.

This makes me wonder why I hoard books. Generally I don’t read books off my bookshelves because I’m always hearing about a new book I want to read. Serendipity always selects my next read, so why should I bother gathering books to somehow plan my future reading?

Well, it’s an addiction. Not a bad one. I don’t have to steal to keep up my habit. The worse aspect about it is my house fills up with books and I have to decide which ones to give away. That’s what I’m doing this week. So far I’ve brought five cloth bags of books to the free book table at work. The fall classes start this week and they will disappear quickly.

Another source of books is friends. I know enough bookworms telling me about great books that I could mooch off of them for the rest of my life.

There’s also an Internet service called BookMooch. You list books you want to give away by mail and people contact you. You earn points towards mooching books off of other members. I have access to so many free books that this service wouldn’t help me, but people living where books were hard to find should love it.

And just remember the new world of ebooks. Feedbooks and Manybooks fills my Kindle and iPad with classics and public domain books. And Books on the Knob daily reports all the great free ebooks that are available. My library provides me with free ebooks to check out, and Amazon Prime lends me free books too.

I could reduce my bookshelves down to one volume, a Kindle, and never have to worry about finding something to read again.

I don’t think I’ll give away all my books. I have too many I keep for sentimental reasons, but I do think I might try overcoming my book buying addition. There’s no reason to hoard books. Well, I can think of one reason. If the world came to an end like in the Twilight Zone show, it would be great to have a stockpile of books to read if I was a sole survivor.

JWH – 8/21/12