The Tristan Chord

A little heavy culture and a heavy chord. It's the notes F-B-D#-G# played together. It appears in Tristan and Isolde. It is much discussed.

If you take the hype seriously, the thing about the chord is that it leaves you utterly confused as to what key you are in. Here is the thing, though, it was used in music before Wagner did it without raising any hype at all. So why did this particular use of the chord cause such excitement?

The short answer is because of the duration and emphasis it receives.

A little more theory. There are a lot of pieces of music that are not at all bewildering to the ear that have some truly wonky chords hiding in them. These chords generally occur in between other familiar and solid sounding chords. The music is going from one chord that is as solid and familiar as an old barn to another one as comfy and cozy as afternoon tea. But barns and teas, however comfortable they may be by themselves, rarely appear side by side. So to get you from one to another, the author of the piece has inserted some harmonic moves that all by themselves would be a little disturbing.

And the music comes down with emphasis on the comfortable barn and tea chords and not on the wonky transition harmony so you barely notice it. The emphasis is on what is solid and the more jarring chords are not accented or prolonged.

But what if you did it the other way around and emphasized the wonky transitions? Well, then you'd have something like what Wagner did. And your audience would be left uncertain as to where exactly the music was coming from or where it was going.

It seems to me that there is a lesson here about living a virtuous life. There are parts of your persona that are like solid, comfortable chords. They send clear and easy to understand messages to everyone about who you are and where you are going. And then there are the things you do to smooth out the connections, to get through the night and so forth, especially the and so forth.

It seems to me that the proper thing is not to emphasize these things. Let them do their business of making connections but don't emphasize them so the whole world knows.

Moralists will immediately object that this is just the usual hypocrites papering over of things. And, yes it is. Furthermore, if you think you can get through life without any odd harmonic moves to back you up, then you should just go right ahead and never be a hypocrites. I'll be the first to take my hat off to you.

More election followup

I think this commentary at National Review Online is very perceptive:

Yet here is something that’s pretty clear, even as the dust settles. Men would have elected Gov. Romney President by a wide margin. Women, who cast about 53 percent of the votes, gave President Obama about a ten-point margin and another four years in the White House.

This should be a wakeup call for everyone on the Right. I count myself among those who assumed — clearly wrongly in hindsight — that the “War on Women” rhetoric wouldn’t work. From my perspective, the Democrats’ campaign for women was flatly insulting, treating women as sex objects (appealing to them to vote with their “lady parts”) and helpless wards of the state (Julia). The charge that Republicans want to restricted access to contraception — that is, beyond returning to the pre-ObamaCare status quo when religious organizations were not forced to pay for others’ contraception — is so far-fetched that it’s almost hard to know how to counter, since just engaging in the discussion grants the question a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.

That is written by Carrie Lukas and I will cheerfully admit that Ms. Lukas's name and this comment is the sum total of what I know about her. There is a lot that should be said here.

But first let me say something a little impertinent. Lukas says the Democrat campaign treated women as sex objects and that is true. But do you know who else treats women as sex objects? Women do. A woman who puts on skin-tight leggings, a push up bra and a cleavage revealing shirt thinks of herself as a sex object. And that is only the extreme example. The woman who dresses in an elegant and sophisticated manner is also flaunting herself as a sex object. That's not all she thinks of herself as but it is part of it.

And, as I I keep repeating here, the more freedoms and rights a nation gives to women, the more they dress as sex objects. Both on the right and the left there are a lot of people who have a hard time dealing with this. They keep trying to convince themselves that women are being pressured into this, and us, that they shouldn't trust their own lyin' eyes but the truth is plain for anyone who walks out the door and looks around.

Again, as I have said here before, women tend to value sexual status at least as much as sex itself but they do like sex and most of them like it a lot. Sex is not a risk free activity for them, and they typically pay a higher emotional price for it than men do. And then there is this central fact:

Women get pregnant.

Go make like Bart Simpson and write that 100 times on the blackboard before you go home from school today. Men and women are different from one another and that fact goes a long, long way to explain the differences.

Lukas says that the notion that Republicans want to restrict access to contraception is "far-fetched". Well, it depends how you understand the language you are hearing. As I said in last night's post, a lot of women hear the words of those who would deny abortion even in case of rape a desire to take away from them the right to have sex and not to have babies. That may seem far fetched but if any woman who takes a close look at Catholic moral teaching regard sex will find language about every sex act being open to conception that will justify her paranoia. An awful lot of women heard that talk and they skipped right past the legal distinctions and they heard an intent. They heard an intent to force them to be open to pregnancies they don't want.

And see this as a right. They understand perfectly that the Catholic church has a right to teach that the use of contraception is wrong but they also think that any woman, ANY woman, working for ANY employer should have the same access to contraception as every other woman. If any employers are to pay for contraception, they reason, then the Catholic hospital should as well.

I'm just describing here. I'm not saying that is the way it should be but it is the way it is and if last night proved anything, it proved that the culture war is over. I don't know what the losers do at this point. There are a lot of them, far too many to expect them to load up their wagons and slink away to exile in the wilderness.

Sorta political: Election analysis

I write this at 11:12 local time. None of the swing states have been called yet but I think it's over and Romney loses and I'm going to bed now..

What's it mean? I think it means the culture war is over and conservatives lost it. The biggest losing point for the right now is sex and the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is like an anti-sex albatross around the neck of the Republican party. No matter how many votes these people pull in, they will always alienate more.

I know, I know, cultural conservatives don't think they are anti-sex but that is because their understanding of sexual issues is so far from what the rest of the world means that they aren't talking the same language anymore. No matter what cultural conservatives say, most others hear a plan to deny them their sexual freedoms.

ADDED: To put it in one sentence: Women don't want to have babies that they don't want to have. You can parse the question as much as you like but the basic fact of Catholic sexual ethics is that Catholics want to take away the ability to decide these things from women. Look, I'm anti-abortion myself but when Akin and Mourdock and then others said what they said, almost all the women I know started hoping for a Romney defeat.

And I live in Canada!!!

And let's not even get into birth control.

The cultural conservatives also hamper any sort of libertarian case. I don't know that a libertarian argument could succeed in any case but it definitely can't succeed so long as the conservative Catholic-Evangelical alliance is stirring up the pot. For starters, Catholics just don't understand economics and they don't understand economics because they won't abandon their paternalistic notions.

Last question for tonight: Is this a good thing? I don't know. There are some upsides and there some downsides. I suspect the downside is probably a lot steeper than anyone guesses but even if it is, things probably aren't as bad as they might be. They usually aren't. Usually.

How do I feel? I'd like to see greater individual liberty and more freemarket policies along with a scaling back of entitlements. The chances of those things happening just got to be even more remote than they already were. That said, they already were a very, very long shot.

This is the theme song for the day:

Proust: More love

Here is a passage to ponder:

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms and the people and places she knows ... the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and that what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes.

There is a sense that all that makes sense. We could read it in certain moods and think, I recognize that sentiment.

It also seems to me that much of it is slightly unhinged. Notice how he starts with expressions such as "enter her life" and "link it to our own" but ends with a desire to penetrate the "impenetrable" and "possess" her. Again, we might think ordinary male attitudes towards love. But how much can these be justified? Especially the second?

And note that there is something here that simply isn't true. We can tell what other people are thinking and feeling from looking at them. No, we can't do it perfectly and we can't actually read minds. But much of the time, we can read people's intentions and feelings towards us from their facial expressions. Well, most of us. There are people who cannot.

The sense in which all the above is most credible is if we imagine these as the thoughts of an adolescent boy.

It is well, well, into the volume entitled A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that the five girls whom young Marcel finds himself in the shade of make their appearance*. In some ways they are more boy-like than girl-like but I think any heterosexual male can identify with this thought of young Marcel's when he tells us the various things he thought about the girls:

Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste.

Not because it is impossible to imagine women as chaste but you tend not to when you are sexually attracted to them.  

Which leads to odd tensions. You sit down and have a pleasant conversation about Proust with the woman you just a few hours ago were imagining what it would be like to dribble chocolate sauce on her nipples, which you have never seen, and watch it form little dark  streams down over her white, white breasts. And you wonder, "Does she know what sort of things I think of her?" and "Would she be pleased or horrified?" All the while you keep up the pretense.

Now, the normal course of events is that you meet a woman and the two of you get closer and slower and get a better and better understanding of your thoughts about one another. She doesn't know about the chocolate precisely but she knows you and gets a good notion of how you are likely to have thought about her and you get a better understanding of her and how she is likely to respond to being told that you have thought such things. And away you go.

But in adolescence such things seem impossible. Girls are older and more knowing than you and, at the same time, your thoughts of them seem so over the top that you cannot imagine connecting.

What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one could tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their review of us has inspired any reflections in them.

Naturally, you are attracted to girls but, equally naturally, girls whose outward behaviour is a little more vulgar and openly sexual, and who perhaps belong to a new and rising class not so beholden to all the manners and mires that make direct expression between boys and girls more difficult. And thus the five girls who come down the beach at Balbec.





* Why does this second volume take so long to get to the point? Why make your reader beat his way hundreds of pages in, more than 60 percent of the text, before justifying your title? The answer to that, I think, is that the first volume was self-published and Proust was limited in the number of pages he could print. As a consequence, he cut the third section of volume 1 way down. When he found an actual publisher to print volume 2, he revisited at the beginning the stuff he would have liked to have put in Volume1.

I know this is heresy, but I rather wish he hadn't. I think Proust needed an editor and there isn't a single volume of the novel that couldn't have been cut quite a bit and thereby have been made even better.

Another image: What are they selling

Proust tomorrow, I'm feeling a little burnt out this morning.

Not just an image but a bunch of images by Władysław Czachórski. Czachórski's name is spelled in a number of different ways depending on who you ask. He was a Polish artist from the little discussed but fascinating period between Romanticism and Modernism sometimes called "late romanticism".

Czachórski painted all sorts of stuff but his work divides into two categories:

1. the stuff that the critics loved.
2. the stuff that paid his bills.

Today we are talking about the second category. The good folks at Wikipedia quote an organization devoted to promoting Polish history and culture called The Kosciuszko Foundation in describing the work Czachórski had such great success selling to paying customers:

The hallmark of Czachorski's style, however, and the basis of his fame, are his images of beautiful young women in rich interiors, painted with great realism. He has long been regarded a master of rendering fabrics, jewelry and other details to create the atmosphere of luxury and elegance.

Every word of that is true but there is also a rather important aspect of his art that is being left out. I think you can do your own image analysis on this one. Just scan the following and I think you'll be able to figure it out pretty easily.

He is helped more than a little by women's fashion. Czachórski didn't invent that V-shaped panel on the front of women's dresses. It was a popular style at the time. And it is easy to see why. Depending on what the dressmaker chose to emphasize, it could make the neck seem to open wider (image 1), it could could make it seem like the dress was opening up from the bottom (image 2) or it could point rather bluntly at a woman's "rose" (Image 3).

To see what Czachórski's contribution was, put yourself in the position of a connoisseur  admiring his art and technique. Take, for example, his masterful "rendering of fabrics". Look at image 3 for example and allow your gaze to float over the fabric of her dress and then let it rest at the spot the V-shaped panel points at. Take the time to deeply appreciate the pattern the folds make in the fabric. Remember, you're a man. So here is the question, "Are you getting any payoff for your efforts?" To put it more bluntly, are you getting the sense that the rendering of the fabric is encouraging you to imagine what is underneath?

This third example is called "The Rose" by the way. Roses, like a lot of flowers, smell and are shaped the way they are because their smell and shape fools insects into trying to have sex with the flower thereby accomplishing the plants sexual purposes for it. Okay, but here is an interesting question: Who is trying to entice us in the above picture? Meaning, do you credit the artist or the woman with the seduction. Look at the way she meets your gaze?

Speaking of "gazes", check these ones out.

The classic feminist analysis, and in this case the feminists are absolutely right, is that the woman looks at us inviting our gaze and the other woman, whose sexuality is, at first glance, ambiguous, validates our gaze by also looking at the first woman in a frankly sexual manner. (The classic feminist mistake is to imagine that this is all the male artist's fault; to forget that women don't do all these tricks in real life too.)

Again, follow the V-shaped panel down and take a moment to appreciate the rendering of the fabric. There is a rather lot of texture right at the spot where there would be pubic hair underneath isn't there. Anyone think that is an accident?

(Oh, by the way, the composition of that painting. Does it look familiar?  It should.)

Let's carry on with this homoerotic theme shall we?

I'll grant you that pearls are wonderful things and even that that is a rather long string of pearls but you cannot explain the facial expressions of the women in this picture in terms of their enjoyment of fine jewellery. And, go head, follow these Jewels of the Nile back to their source. How interesting that she would dangle them just there? And notice how the arm of the chair blocks the actual magic spot so we have to connect the pearls in our imagination.

And what exactly is happening here? It's hard not to suspect that this woman is taking advantage of the absence of men to tell her friends about a rather neat trick that a girl can do with pearls and they are staring at the pearls agape because they never guessed pearls had such powers before.

Then again, pearls could be used as distraction. Imagine they aren't there or, more suggestively that they are standing on for something else. Now ask yourself what is happening. Look at the facial expressions. The woman handling the pearls definitively has power over the other two.

Continuing with pearls, do watch a woman put her pearls on if you ever get the chance. She'll lean forward to do it, just as she does when she puts her bra on. And for the same reason: to take advantage of gravity to make sure everything falls into the most advantageous place.

I mention all that just to make it clear that no woman leans back to put her pearls on and she certainly won't do it like this.

You could easily forget that there even is a string of pearls in that painting. Well, it's easy to do because that is what you are supposed to do. And, once you get them out of the picture, well, what do you think is going on here? What do you think she is thinking?

I like particularly the way Czachórski has exploited the opening of the overskirt here. To get at what he has done, here is a thought experiment: close your eyes for a moment and imagine the image. Do it and then come back and look at the image again and continue reading.

When you opened them and looked at the image again, were her legs as wide apart as you imagined them? The trick is accomplished with the strips of embroidery. Look at the two strips edging the V-shaped panel and then two more edging the opening of the overskirt. Then look how the table is placed so as to break up the pattern made by her actual legs (it's difficult to figure out exactly how she has them placed). Between these two effects we tend to be made unaware of her actual legs and to replace them in our imagination with two that run parallel to the two strips of embroidery that open up along with her overskirt.

Don't sneer at this stuff. Don't think this legs-spread illusion or other effects are easy to achieve because they weren't. Very few of the artists of Czachórski's era and virtually none of the artists of our era could do what he did. And remember that you could not paint a picture of a girl with her legs actually apart in that era or culture. Women didn't ride horses side saddle for exactly that reason. That is, people didn't worry about a woman getting sexually stimulated by pushing herself up against the saddle. No, women rode with their legs together because the image of a woman with her legs apart was so sexually powerful it couldn't be allowed in polite company.

This wasn't because women didn't know what it felt like to spread their legs for someone or that men (and other women) didn't know what it was like to watch a woman spread her legs. No, it should be obvious to us that they cherished such moments much more than we do because they treated them as something special. Compared to them, we are like someone who claims to value dark chocolate while shoveling it into our mouths by the pound. (I've created something of an artificial effect by putting all these Czachórski paintings in one group. At the time, you would have to be lucky enough to visit a different house to see each one.)

And one huge advantage of the implied sexuality was that you didn't have to notice it if you didn't want to or you just weren't in the mood that day. And you can see, looking at the collection above, that some of Czachórski's customers liked the effect to be more obscure while others liked it to be more easily discovered. But no matter which one it was, there would be some days when a young woman or man visiting the house where one of paintings hung would look at it for a while and then decide they might go back to their room and "rest" or "write some letters" or some such thing.

A little light culture: Meaning nonsense

People who do philosophy of language worry about the fact that it is possible to construct a sentence that follows all the grammatical rules and yet makes no sense. Consider, for example,

 The cat flew the window.

I've used that example before. It's not original. A professor of mine used it during a graduate seminar in linguistics.

In linguistics this sort of stuff is sometimes trotted out in relation to what is called the deep grammar debate, that is the debate about whether there is some deep grammar embedded in our brains that makes all languages possible*. But what about right-on-the-surface grammar? The odd thing about sentences like the above is that you see them and you go looking for a way it could make sense. Right-on-the-surface grammar tells us that this is a sentence and we assume that the failure to see what it means lies with us and not the sentence. And it pretty much has to make some kind of sense; as Wittgenstein noted, even nonsense has to make a certain kind of sense.

I've abused John Lennon in the past, largely because he deserves abuse, but one thing he was really good at, perhaps the only thing he was really good at, was nonsense.

Semolina Pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.

Those phrases from "The Walrus" have great mouth feel. And they also seem packed with meaning. You can argue that the whole point is that they don't have meaning and that Lennon was making fun of people who insist on finding meaning but that is a kind of deeper meaning of it's own isn't it? To trot out Wittgenstein again, we might say that it's the "deeper meaning" that is hidden right on the surface; you just have to look at it the right way.

When I was a little boy and my older cousins would play that song I imagined that Semolina Pilchard was a girl. I wanted to know her. She seemed like the heroine of a child's story. But there is no reason at all to assume Semolina is a girl except that "Semolina" felt like a girl's name to me because I didn't know what the word meant. It's a kind of flour, in case you don't know.

Of course, if you were listening to someone read this text, you might well hear "It's a kind of flower," instead and think, "That's why he thought Semolina was a girl".

There is an old anecdote that racists used to tell about a young woman who wanted to name her child a beautiful word she had heard during labour. The beautiful word? "Placenta". But you can see her point can't you?"Chlamydia" would also make a beautiful name for a girl if it didn't mean what it means. I get it entirely, "Placenta" is a beautiful word and if you don't know the thing that it means, the associations you get from hearing it are beautiful. Far from proving something racists wanted to believe about black people, the anecdote only seemed to make sense to the people who told the story because were already racists to begin with.

"Semolina" felt like a girl's name to me because it felt soft and pretty but "semolina" is actually from durum wheat. "Durum" from the same root as "durable" meaning "hard"!

"Pilchard", by the way, was the last name of a police officer who arrested a number of rock musicians on drug charges back in the 1960s. That may be where Lennon got it, in which case he was thinking of a man. When I was 20, a boy named Matthew Pritchard, which sounds almost like "Pilchard", stuck an automatic pistol in my face and robbed me. All he got for his trouble was a canvas bag with a Frank Sinatra pin on the outside and several books by Karl Marx inside. I eventually got everything back except the pin and I've always missed that pin. It wouldn't have bothered me at all to have lost the bag or the books.

Later, when I went to court intending to give the testimony that would send Matthew Pritchard to jail, I found myself singing "The Walrus" and wondered how the song got in my head. When I got to court, I learned that although Pritchard had robbed a number of people the same night he'd robbed me, I was the only one who wasn't too scared to testify. The police officer who met me at the court told me that right before the case was to begin. It hadn't occurred to me to be frightened until then. As it happened, I didn't have to because as soon as Matthew Pritchard's lawyer told him that I had, in fact, showed up, he changed his plea to guilty.

Years later, I saw Pritchard again in a bar and I told him who I was largely to prove to myself that I really wasn't scared, that I would have passed the test if I had had to. But when I told him who I was and how I knew him he started to shake. In his world people tell you stuff like that just before they hurt you really bad. He was tiny little guy without a gun. That hadn't been my intention and I was shocked to see his reaction. He was really, really scared.

It never occurred to me he might be scared because it never occurred to me to wonder what it would feel like to be him. It did occur to him what it would feel like to be me when he pushed the gun in my face. I know that because he talked a lot when he robbed me and everything he said was about how scared I should be.

The other thing that never occurred to me was how it was that I was absolutely certain it was him. I'd only seen him twice before in my life and that several years previous. And yet I recognized his face instantly. I'd walked over and said, "are you Matthew Pritchard?" but I'd never doubted for a second that he was.

Thinking about it afterwards, I laughed because I remembered singing "The Walrus" that morning and I realized that the song had popped into my head because "Pritchard" rhymes with "Pilchard".



Now consider this sentence from one of the Psalms** in this morning's Divine Office:

I go mourning all the day long.

It's not just that if you heard it you might think "morning all the day long" and think of how that might makes sense. And it might make sense in a certain context—"all day breakfast" makes sense even though "breakfast" means a meal we eat in the morning. When you read the Psalm aloud, and it's always read aloud during the Office, you feel that other meaning at some level. Particularly as this is a morning prayer. And it's Friday morning which, for Catholics like me, is a special morning of mourning; mourning both for Christ, who died on a Friday, but also for me who dies by my sins.

Yeah, we're odd that way. The rest of the world wakes up Friday morning and thinks, "Yay, Friday!" while we Catholics mourn Christ's death and our sin.

Here is a last sentence for your consideration:

The vast majority of our dogs have been lemon. 

Sounds like a nonsense example someone made up just like "The cat flew the window" or "Elementary Penguin singing Hare Krishna" doesn't it?  It isn't. It's meaningful sentence that made perfect sense to the readers for whom it was intended.


It was written by a woman who breeds Clumber Spaniels. Clumbers are mostly white with markings that can be dark or light. The darker markings are called "orange" and the lighter ones are called "lemon" and she is saying that most of the dogs they have bred have had lighter markings. Now you know. But even before you knew, that sentence seemed to have meaning didn't it.

Sort of like the way the world can be full of God's wisdom because he created it even though we can't understand that wisdom. Some people will read that and hate it and maybe even hate me.



* My best guess, for what it is worth, is "probably not".
** Psalm 38

Manly Thor's Day special: Katie Moss got married

Here is the set up quote:

Even on her wedding day to rock musician Jamie Hince, in 2011, Moss looked to her old friend John Galliano to tell her who to be. As Moss recalls, “On my wedding day, I’m like freaking out, obviously. ‘You’ve got to give me a character.’ And [Galliano] said, ‘You have a secret—you are the last of the English roses. Hide under that veil. When he lifts it, he’s going to see your wanton past!’”

Can I confess that that all makes perfect sense to me. I get her reaction and I get her needing a role to play. And it is a sexual role to be a bride, to be a model and, some days, just to be a woman. Role playing is not only a sane and healthy thing to do, it's an important part of learning how to be human, learning how to be a man or woman and learning how to be sexual.

None of those things can be done any other way and anyone who tells you different is an immoral liar. (Which is another reason to deplore those who condemn sexual fantasies.)

 What I don't get is revealing this to the whole world. What the blankety blank is she doing telling this story about her wedding day!!! to Vanity Fair?

Think of this, she is still married to Jamie Hince so why is she saying the following to anyone at all, never mind the whole bleepin' world:

There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said ...

Your married to a woman and you read her quoted talking that way about another man in Vanity Fair. How does it make you feel?

I was thinking about this yesterday when an article that Lena Dunham wrote for The New Yorker came up in the comments. I haven't read it yet but it was apparently inspired by her ex-boyfriend's parents blocking her on Facebook. This led her to spill her guts about the whole relationship in print. Think about that, you're offended because someone blocked you on Facebook so you tell the whole world about it? The being-offended part makes perfect sense. It's the complete lack of any sense of privacy and intimacy that is utterly insane.

People who, like Kate Moss and Lena Dunham, aren't good at deciding when to keep, reveal or discard roles—who don't see that there are some very intimate roles that should stay intimate–are high risk to be found having choked to death on their own vomit.

Roles are comforting and safe. They operate a lot like clothes. You should be as careful about discarding the former as the latter.

Although, come to think of it, neither Moss nor Dunham are exactly prudent in their choice of clothing or lack of it either.

Relevant disclosure, I find Kate Moss hauntingly beautiful and always have. I'm glad not to know her though.