Miscellany
A couple of miscellaneous items. A scientist goes off-topic to talk about women composers, thus revealing (and not for the first time) that scientists tend to know more about the arts than artists and humanist scholars know about science.
And then there’s a very interesting long post by John Holbo on Bad Writing. He’s just read Just Being Difficult?, the new book that re-ignited the subject of bad writing, and he has some excellent acerbic comments on it. There’s also a discussion of Holbo’s discussion at Crooked Timber. One reader there makes this classic comment:
I’ve always wanted to ask Steven Weinberg why he became a scientist. The answer would be most likely because of a certain kind of desire for a certain kind of truth. But truth is a metaphysical construct with a whole lot of poetical baggage. In court they don’t talk about ‘truth’ but about ‘facts’ which are much more mundane. No one spouts of about The Eternal Search for FACTS! do they?
Ah. Truth is a metaphysical construct with a whole lot of poetical baggage, is it. And is that all it is? Does that exhaust the subject? Does no one ever use the word ‘truth’ without attaching words like ‘eternal’ or rather ‘Eternal’ to it? Whose poetical baggage and metaphysical construction is whose, here? Interesting.
I am almost tempted to say that it isn’t just women composers, or perhaps that it’s going to take more than just a gender-balance thing to bring their stuff [back] into the daylight. Every time I walk into Tower, their classical section has gotten smaller. Same thing with Silver Platters, despite my complaints. Seattle once had 2 classical stations; now there is just 1–it seems to be doing well, but sometimes I worry a bit. KING FM introduced me to Fanny Mendelssohn’s Overture, it is on a Koch International disc.
So someone with more money than me faces a 2-fold struggle–not just to get proper recognition for women composers of the past, but to keep ALL classical music from fading away in the present.
My library hasn’t gotten that Just Being Difficult book yet…
No, neither has mine, no doubt because it’s the same library. Same radio stations, too. There are more classical music stations on the tiny Monterey Peninsula than there are in Seattle. Very odd.