An Echo That's Reversing – Page 7 – more discussions on the Fine Arts, current events, programming, and what-not

Word of perception

I’ve been using Celsius for the past few years and have partially imprinted it in my perceptions with a natural understanding. I generally don’t need to convert back to Fahrenheit to get a sense of the outside temperature. Celsius has a more compact range than Fahrenheit: 1 degree C. is around 1.8 degrees F. Slight changes in Fahrenheit are scientifically relevant but subjectively less so–do you really know the difference between 68 degrees and 69 or 70?–but are more noticeable in Celsius. To put it more simply: the language used to express these measurements (both Celsius and Fahrenheit) is more precise that what we can perceive.

In the book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on page 97, one of his characters ponders on the relative precision between languages:

Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural [sic, these are number and not case, English e.g. has three cases]. The North American Indian languages even fail to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?
—Babel 17, Bantam Books

Contrasting the last sentence, the converse is negated by temperature systems having a more precise expression than we can think/experience. Taking an example from the Babel-17 quote, even the imprecision of the words hot and cold can be made more precise by elaborating poetically (albeit cliched) “it was hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement” (ex-treme-ly hot) or “it was a cold that chilled your bones” (ex-treme-ly cold). Those two words don’t engender a semantic deficiency. A greater nuance in the system we use to communicate doesn’t necessarily give us a meaningful understanding of that nuance, and a lack of expressiveness of a single unit within the system doesn’t hobble your ability to be limited to the representation contained in the unit.

Delany is likely a student of Whorf-Sapir/linguistic relativity school of thought, something I’ve never been a fan of but is still popular in linguistics and philosophy. The theory is that people’s understanding of the structure of reality is based on the syntactic structures that are available in the language they speak. It’s a compelling idea.

The availability of a vintage pulp magazine

Updated 12 Mar 2024

On Mastodon (as I had done on Twitter), I follow various pulp accounts that post old books and magazines (and less frequently, albums) that have covers of some interest, often grouped together in a theme. Vintage computer ads, Harlequin romance, ridiculous robots from 50s sci-fi, pin-ups, magazine illustration from mid-century, etc. Site’s like Pulp Covers and Pulp Artists are also good sources for such wonderful nonsense and from those I found the cover artists for many of the pulp sci-fi books I’ve read. The Mastodon accounts are a good way to break up your feed with something visually interesting, kindof like a pop culture museum exhibit.

The magazines on display during a scene from the 1970 action movie Airport

Watching old movies, I often latch onto a scene that pulls me back to the year that the film was made with both a realization that the artifacts contained within the scene were of-the-time, and an amazement that they are easily find-able now with the Internet. I’d had almost-success finding a dive bar called The Moonfire Inn from MST3K’s riff on The Hellcats (1968), and even if the abandoned old building I found on Google Street View wasn’t it, I learned a lot about the the place’s cultural proximity to both a Paul Newman movie and the Manson Family. Since movies aren’t real, this fascination with old movie artifacts as historical documents can be a bit of a degraded version of the (more understandable) fascination with long-distant history as we walk through ancient ruins. Here though, as with the Hellcats biker bar, the artifacts are real and are not, say, the prop of a Maltese falcon.

A scene from the movie *Airport* (1970) @23:00

Pages: 12

Printed public domain sheet music

Twice recently I’ve ordered sheet music for scores that are in the public domain. One for Bach’s Musical Offering and one (well, two) for the Sibelius Symphony No. 5, the full orchestral score and the piano reduction.

The Bach work is one I often listen to, passively but with inevitable moments of actively, and it’s also a notable work of creative notation. I wanted to look at the structure of the Ricercar a 6 which is a six-voice fugue performed (most of the time?) on keyboard–ouch!–but each piece in the set has its own interesting characteristics. I listened to the Kuijken/Kohnen/Leonhardt recording from 1975 growing up and so is the “official” one to my ear.

I’ve wanted to study the Sibelius symphony–considered one of the greatest symphonies ever written, ymmv–ever since I started working with orchestral composition. Public domain rules are byzantine and generally I think a score needs to be around 70 years old before it becomes available. Older scores I’ve looked at are notoriously badly edited (with questionable phrase markings or capricious choices of accidentals or just misprints, though not seeing more curated versions I may be wrong), so to mitigate any weirdness in the orchestral score I also got the piano reduction.

Suite for Orchestra, “Figures in a Landscape”–Working with limited resources

I’ve just started the 5th movement, Fire, in which our heroes are trapped in a conflagration in the field of local villagers. (In my research notes, I have it covering pages 94-115 of the 2020 Penguin/Vintage edition I use as reference.) At this point I am struggling with the idea of program music in contrast with soundtracks. A few months back I had an abbreviated, stumbling Twitter conversation with an individual Much Better Informed but we ended up having the same opinions of soundtracks-as-pure-music. That is: a low one. In these days of a renaissance of quality composers, it’s admittedly a bit unpopular to get all academically scoffy about music written for movies.