Tourists and pilgrims.

I am always impressed by Matthew Milliner. Here's something he had to say about tourists and pilgrims:

“The tourist seeks interesting places. The pilgrim seeks to realize the way that a particular place freshly articulates the truths of faith. Hence the pilgrim, like the tourist, can be deeply impressed by the scale of the Parthenon, but equally overwhelmed by Mars Hill just below, where Paul's message, then mocked, would soon make of the that Parthenon a church. The pilgrim, like the tourist, will be awestruck by the Roman forum, but struck all the more - looking out at the mushrooming church domes over the Eternal City skyline - that the forbidden religion overcame imperial might. Pilgrims, like tourists, can’t help but be affected by the pyramids, only to then sense the shattering contrast of the Sinai wilderness, where the man-made pyramids are dwarfed by far larger natural ones, and where Pharonic splendor is both tempered and judged.”

If I kept quoting the good stuff I'd just steal the entire post.

Self-indulgence.

I am thinking about using the League to post some of my late-night Garageband covers of North Carolina bands. Is this a good idea or a bad one?

Bad ideas.

I wrote something for the League on Friday and Saturday, realized it was sort of dumb on Sunday, and posted it anyway on Monday. The first comment is right: I do make mountains out of molehills. I spend lots of time on conceptual points with no direct application to anything at all. Sorry! But I'm not going to change.

Miscellany.

Just a few short notes:

• My favorite thing about driving through Virginia would have to be the “SPEED LIMIT ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT” signs. Surely aircraft alone are insufficient to enforce speed limits; presumably what happens is that observation aircraft relay information to patrol cars, and the patrol cars pull the car over and write the tickets. I can only think of two ways that the aircraft alone could enforce speed limits, both of which are awesome to think about whenever some wild driver blows past at twenty-five miles over the speed limit. The first is strafing, and the second is using some sort of giant magnet to physically remove the car from the roadway.
• I am about three-quarters of the way through Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It's a tough book to get through, and I probably don't have the background to get as much out of it as I could, but it's rewarding in an interesting way. I've been surprised to find that my way of thinking is really congenial to historicism of many stripes. Another way of saying this is that Rorty's way of thinking doesn't seem as weird or scary as I thought it would.
• Brahmagupta once said that anyone who could solve x²-92y²=1 in less than a year is a mathematician. The other day I wrote a program that can do this in milliseconds, but I used a method from Wolfram's MathWorld so I am not sure it counts.
• I picked up the new Spoon album and I really like it. Every song is interesting, and it all fits together in a really nice way. I haven't read any reviews aside from Peter Suderman's small endorsement on The American Scene. I have noticed that the Internet encourages people to quickly and reflexively compare their reactions to art or music with the internet median instead of taking time to meditate or struggle with the experience. While this is part of the process of enjoying a show like Lost, it's the wrong way to go about appreciating anything that may turn out to have deeper meaning.
• Dickens: “I don't know where she was going, but we saw her run, such a little, little creature, in her womanly bonnet and apron, though a covered way at the bottom of the court; and melt into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in the ocean.” Maybe it's a little sentimental, but there are lines in Bleak House that stay with me for days.
• I probably could have tightened some of this stuff up for Twitter, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I am not nearly clever enough to be tweeting.
  

A human-centric internet.

“The architecture of the internet must support a global, universal micropayments capability. In this way, anyone could charge for information made available online, whether it is music or a program for a future robot. A silly YouTube-like prank might generate a windfall for a silly teenager, while a scholar’s writing might be only occasionally accessed, but over a long period might still generate enough income to be of use. People could then re-create the best social formula that has been achieved thus far in human experience. Middle class people could own something- the information they produce- that would give them sustenance as they have children and age.

“In order for this scheme to work, there would have to be some structural changes introduced gradually, as I explain in the book. This direction is the only way to create a human-centric internet, instead of one that serves the cultists who believe in information more than people. It would not attempt to make information free, but instead make it affordable. It is worth noting that this is exactly how the web would have developed if the initial design proposal for it, dating back to the 1960s, had been carried out. (This was Ted Nelson’s vision.) It is the obvious way to design the network if people are your top priority.”

-Jaron Lanier

I read Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget last night. It has me thinking pretty hard about what I want to use internet tools for. Lanier imagines a different web ethic than the one we have now, with a primary difference being that creators are compensated for their work instead of expected to give it away and make money on knicknacks. Though I’m not sure I buy everything Lanier has to say about the need to get away from the command line or the sorry state of music (though he’s certainly right about the sorry situation of musicians), it’s a book that demands critical thinking about the technologies we have so often uncritically adopted.

The NYT visits the Levine Museum.

There’s a piece in today’s New York Times on Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South. I spent an afternoon at the museum last month and I think the article is spot-on. I should also take this opportunity to recommend Tom Hanchett’s book Sorting Out the New South City, which is a wonderful supplement to a museum visit. (Link via Lew Powell.)

McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy.

Eugene McCarraher has given a three part interview to the Other Journal. McCarraher’s a Christian socialist who is one of the most visible and ferocious critics of the First Things crowd. I find him to be consistently interesting, even if I have trouble understanding his confidence. Here's what he had to say about the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) movement in the third part of the interview:

“Before I go on further about McCabe, let me offer a critique of RO, because if RO led me to McCabe, McCabe led me away from RO. Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing ‘modernity’ and ‘liberalism’ treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, ‘the Enlightenment project’—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.”

I am a little curious as to how McCarraher would relate this to MacIntyre, for whom he has kind words in another section of the interview. But more generally, I think this paragraph describes pretty well an excess to which I was especially prone for several years. I don’t think I’ve adopted another point of view on the matter; I’ve just gotten much less confident in my ability to know what the boundaries of “modernity” and “liberalism” really are.

Solving the harder problem.

I've not been writing much for the Internet recently. One of the things I've been doing instead is trying to improve my rather meager programming abilities. Since I have a giant Java reference book in my possession and all the necessary stuff already on my computer, Java has so far been my language of choice. If anyone has any suggestions on what might be a better language to learn, I'm open to them.

I've been using Project Euler as practice. Project Euler is a list of math/programming problems. Most of them would be either extremely difficult or exceedingly time-consuming to solve by hand, whereas an efficient algorithm can solve each problem rather quickly. At least for the early problems, the good solutions take less than a second to finish.

When you solve a problem, the website gives you access to a forum where you can see how other people solved problems. Some of the top solvers use a language called J which looks really, really cryptic, even for simple operations. For example: “c=:%:@:(+/)@:*:” creates a formula for the Pythagorean Theorem. Many of the statements just look like someone going to town on the top row of the keyboard. But it's a really powerful little language, and I've been trying to get the hang of it for the past three or four days.

Well, Project Euler's Problem 29 gave me some trouble because I misread it. The question is “How many distinct terms are in the sequence generated by a^b for 2 a 100 and 2 b 100?” See where it bounds a and b at 100? Well, I accidentally did the problem for 2 ≤ a , b ≤ 1000. Doing the problem for 1000 created a whole bunch of rounding errors, because, say 999^1000 is a pretty gigantic number. So I got around this by taking logarithms on one axis, which at the time seemed like a mildly creative way of getting around the problem, though in hindsight it’s the obvious thing to do. I found a second way of checking the answer which also worked nicely. And then I return to the webpage to enter the solution, and find that my bounds were way too high. The real problem was smaller, and when I ran my first line of J code it turns out that I didn't hit any rounding errors after all.

Oh well. The nice thing about math is that when you solve the harder problem, you usually learn enough that it doesn't even feel like a waste of time.

Heroes.

Of the people I would like to take as heroes at this time in my life, it’s a bit disturbing how many have committed suicide. I’m trying to figure out what the significance of this is.

Thermal belts.

Back in high school, I spent a lot of time listening to WNCW, an NPR station that was rebroadcast in Charlotte. WNCW’s studio was up in the mountains, in Spindale, North Carolina, on the campus of a college with a curious name: Isothermal Community College. I always wondered how a college would get such a science-y sounding name. Well, North Carolina Miscellany points to a page on Isothermal’s website that explains what thermal belts are. Farmers found that in certain regions they’d get phenomenal crop yields despite regional cold weather. Though scholars had trouble pinning down the exact boundaries of these locations, it was hard to deny that they existed. Thermal belts may have something to do with temperature inversions, which happen when a slope is warmer than the valley floor below it. Apparently, it’s one of those things that’s better understood in folk wisdom than in formal study. Anyways, read the whole thing.

How conservative is this?

A germ of a thought: Insofar as I have one, my basic political principle is something along the lines of “The government’s level of access to resources should significantly, though not directly, constrain government action.” More colloquially: “If you can’t afford to do something, you generally shouldn’t do it, no matter how badly you want to.”

This sets me at odds with both parties in practice, though I could reconcile myself with segments of either in theory.

In a utilitarian scheme, what’s the proper way to compare not doing something about present suffering against putting those who come after you in an impossible position?

I should be less vague and centrist-cowardly before trying to adapt this for the big blog.

2009’s music.

Here’s the tracklist for my annual end-of-the-year mix CD. It’s songs that I listened to this year, not songs that were released this year.

1. Arvo Pärt - Ludus (from Tabula Rasa)
2. The Wu-Tang Clan - Protect Ya Neck
3. Crooked Fingers - New Drink for the Old Drunk
4. The Mountain Goats - Hebrews 11:40
5. Megafaun - The Process
6. Radiohead - Black Star
7. The Avett Brothers - Pretty Girl at the Airport
8. Superchunk - Misfits and Mistakes
9. Tor/Sufjan Stevens - Star of Wonder/None Shall Pass (feat. Aesop Rock)
10. Hi Ho Silver Oh - Perjury
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Missing One
12. Mount Eerie - Between Two Mysteries
13. The Busy World - Idaho

I'm driving from Charlotte to Orlando in a few days, and then back to Charlotte a few days after that, so I've got some good music-listening days ahead of me.

Breaking some of my rules.

The rules in question: “don't use a blog to vent” and “don't metablog.”

Briefly, though, I take it as pretty basic that hostile argument in comment boxes never works. If you actually want someone to change her mind, friendly questions might do it. Long posts on your own blog might do it. Chances aren't good, but I've seen people adjust position after such exchanges. The shadowy facsimiles of friendship that comprise most of our online “relationships” aren't good for much, but you need at least that much if you want even a ghost of a chance of changing someone's mind. Why should I even bother with terse, aggressive comments from total strangers?

So I think my new rule should be never to respond to someone who hasn't already demonstrated good faith.

Or maybe I should implement Zeke's rule: “Remember to pre-emptively disavow every conceivable inference that you don’t intend next time!”

Funny.

From Dr. Boli: “Eternal Damnation by Chocolate.”

Reverence.

I really have no clue whether the David Foster Wallace short story in the New Yorker was intended as a stand-alone piece or if it's part of that novel he was working on, but I was glad I got to read it anyway. It includes this line, which satisfies my yen for Rudolph-Otto-style typographies of the numinous:

“This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of ‘reverence,’ which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena, the same way that ‘respect’ and ‘obedience’ describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money.”

-from “All That” by David Foster Wallace, at The New Yorker

Two quick thoughts.

1.) Two of my favorite songwriters are John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie. Neither of them are Christians. Yet Darnielle is surely the most Christian non-Christian songwriter on the planet. Obviously, he just released an album about the Bible, but his entire catalog is suffused with a yearning for redemption and an eschatological hope that comports very well with my understanding of the Gospel. I don't know whether Darnielle believes in souls that can be redeemed, but his art (giving eloquent expression to the emotions of characters who would lack such words in real life) seems to presuppose such a notion. With Elverum, on the other hand, it's like Christianity doesn't exist. I don't recall a single instance of him borrowing a Christian term or theological concept to use in his rich mappings of his quest for insight.

2.) Regarding those Bud Light “The Difference is Drinkability” ads, I'm not sure that “drinkable” even admits of degree. No beer is any less drinkable than Bud Light unless it's frozen or something. However, I do have to admit that “drinkability” is a difference between Bud Light and, say, hamburgers.

Semi-anti-Dylan, but still mostly pro-.

Fellow Ordinary Gentleman Will posted a link to the Weekly Standard's anti-Dylanism piece. The argument goes that Dylan fans get so into Dylan that they throw songwriting standards out the window, or something like that. Anyway, I was a little late to the party and nobody responded to my comment. So, I'll repost it here.

I am surprised to say that I agree with the Weekly Standard on this one. I’m surprised because I don’t think of myself as anti-Dylan, and I had a lengthy Dylan phase in high school, and I remember having some kind of wildly intense aesthetic experience when I saw Dylan live during that phase. But I think the reason I agree with the Weekly Standard is that I’ve definitely seen this thing happen where dedicated Dylan fans let Bob’s music determine their scale of judgment. Things like melodic complexity, rise and fall, and the craft of arranging just drop off the list of things that the greatest songwriter ever would have to have a grasp on.

There’s something to be said for trusting an artist to the point where you suspend your judgment. This is what I will do with anything by The Mountain Goats or Lambchop. But then I have to keep myself aware that when other people hear recent stuff by TMG, they might just hear a guy with a nasal voice and an affinity for adult contemporary production, and Lambchop might just sound like lazy lounge music. That is to say: it can be a worthwhile trade to ignore an artist’s shortcomings in order to appreciate what they do well, but outsiders are going to find it incomprehensible when you start insisting that the shortcomings are in fact strengths. And this shortcomings-to-strengths thing is what the Weekly Standard guy is complaining about.

Sometimes I try to imagine what kind of music Bob Dylan would have written if he’d never had to wrestle with fame.

George H. White's final speech.

I've been reading up on local history: one book on politics in North Carolina and another on residential patterns in Charlotte. The decade that really grabs me is the 1890s, when a Republican-Populist coalition, representing small farmers, mill workers, and African-Americans actually managed to beat the Democrats, who represented the state's large farmers and businessmen. By broadening voting laws, the coalition made it possible for a good number of African-Americans to be elected as officials. At the high tide of this movement — 1896 — George H. White won a congressional election and became the only African-American in the House of Representatives. He won reelection in 1898.

But 1898 was also the year that the Democrats orchestrated a massive white supremacy campaign and recaptured the machinery of North Carolina politics. Determined to hamstring the opposing party, they followed the rest of the south in deliberately disenfranchising black voters by means of a the poll tax and the literacy test. Representative White realized he couldn't win after this law passed and declined to run for reelection in 1900.

I found his final speech to Congress in UNC's Documenting the American South online collection. It's a remarkable and moving speech. The most quoted section is the closing:

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress; but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised, and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people--rising people, full of potential force.

Mr. Chairman, in the trial of Lord Bacon, when the court disturbed the counsel for the defendant, Sir Walter Raleigh raised himself up to his full height and, addressing the court, said:

“Sir, I am pleading for the life of a human being.”

The only apology that I have to make for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.

Dear FLG

From your open letter:

“I agree that taste is relative, but was wondering what you want out of music? And further what you think I want out of music?”

I can answer with some authority on what I want out of music. I've got a couple of priorities. Speaking really roughly, you could put the albums I really like into three groups: albums by songwriters I like, albums by composers/performers that I like, and albums by rock bands that I like.

I like songwriters who develop conceptual worlds across their albums and careers. (Not that they'd describe their own work this way.) Phil Elverum from The Microphones and Mount Eerie basically has a whole personal mythology set up at this point, and I dig that. Jason Molina from Magnolia Electric Company writes album after album about lonely wanderers guided by the north star and seeking the blues, and I always love it. I can let albums from guys like this really get into my head; I'll pore over the lyrics or just lie back and do nothing but listen to the album.

I'm pretty into mathematics, and I think that has something to do with why I like counterpoint so much. If I want pure music, I will often go for English Renaissance or for Bach. Sometimes Handel, but I don't feel Handel's music as deeply as I do Bach's. And I'm no jazz-head, but I get something good out of the interplay in Miles Davis's modal stuff. I know enough about music theory to get the barest intuition of what goes on in really great music, and sometimes it's really frustrating when I can tell that I'm missing something important. At some point, I want to study up and get better at interpreting art music. Basically, I like art music that pushes the interplay of melodic and/or harmonic lines.

While I'm rather comfortable with my taste in lyricists and in art music, I'm a little bit at odds with myself on what I want out of a rock band. It's a bit Dionysian, I guess, but I like bands that I can really get caught up in: Springsteen (oh, Springsteen!), punk-rock bands like Superchunk, a whole bunch of local bands in Chapel Hill or Durham… For a time, I was really into local music, and I've come to get a big kick out of seeing a good band in a small room — like, 400 people or less. But a big draw here is catharsis and community, even more than aesthetic merit.

I could go on and on here, talking about exceptions and outliers, but it would probably just be for me. As for what I think you (that is, FLG) want out of music, all I have to go on is your “currently listening” postings and your comment that you'd take Journey over Radiohead. I am guessing — and I could be totally wrong in this — that you go for strong melody and solid rhythm. Do you usually listen to music while doing other things? Do you tend to like songs that have some presence in pop culture, or is it more that those are the videos that are easy to find on YouTube? My hypothesis is that strong melody (or “hook”) and competent-to-exceptional performance are key to your taste in music. Don't be mad at me if I'm wrong, please.

By the way, I'd pick Radiohead over Journey ninety-nine times out of a hundred because the only Journey song I know is “Don't Stop Believing,” whereas I've really come to like a bunch of Radiohead songs.

Yours,

-wrb

PS Here are some videos.

The story of Charlotte, and the Charlotte Museum of History.

I need to start out by saying that the Charlotte Museum of History is a local treasure. It's a wonderful place to spend a few hours: exploring the museum, seeing the preserved colonial house, or just wandering the small network of wooded paths. But I out there looking for the story of the city of Charlotte, and, for the most part, I had to tease it out of smaller details.

Driving up the museum feels like finding an oasis. The beautiful flowers and fountain welcome you to the grounds, and the grounds are wooded enough that the parking lot seems to be way out in a forest, even though you can still see Shamrock Drive. It's a peaceful place. You walk into the atrium and pay your six dollars for an adult ticket, and you're off to the exhibits.

Off to the right, there are two rooms, one dedicated to the founding of Charlotte and another to its growth. The Eighteenth Century room has a model of what the Trade and Tryon intersection looked like in the late 1700s — two dirt roads and a small group of houses and cabins. You'll find the story of how Thomas Polk got Charlotte to be named the seat of Mecklenburg County, and where our local emphasis on hornets came from. The other room is for the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with a nice display for the gold rush of the 1830s and cases full of artifacts from America's wars.

Between these two rooms, you've covered the broad outline of American History. Colonial times, American revolution, agriculture, gold rush, slavery, Civil War, reconstruction and industry, World War I, World War II. And I can see how this is probably the best way to draw people into Charlotte's history. But it doesn't seem like Charlotte's own story. If you want to figure out how Charlotte became the most populous city in North Carolina, you have to read between the lines.

For example, one placard showed that before the Civil War, almost a third of Mecklenburg County's population was enslaved. It also says that about 6,000 African-Americans were emancipated after the war. If I'm thinking about this correctly, that puts the population of Mecklenburg County at about 18,000 people. Which is to say: not that many, compared to now. In fact, Charlotte's population boom didn't start until the early 1900s, when a streetcar network and a “Watch Charlotte Grow” campaign created a ring of suburbs and an industry boom. There is basically one panel on this growth in the downstairs rooms, although elsewhere there is a map that shows the sequence of Charlotte's annexations over time. What's rather startling is that in 1899, the city limits were roughly where the inner beltway is now. It was in the decade that followed that Charlotte's population eclipsed that of Wilmington, which was to that point North Carolina's largest city. All of which reinforces my hunch that Charlotte wasn't very important prior to the last few decades of the 1800s, and makes me wonder what advantages Charlotte had over other cities. One of the clues to Charlotte's rise can be found in the railroad maps, which shows Charlotte at the intersection of the line running from Wilmington to the mountains and the line running from Raleigh down to Columbia, South Carolina.

While I felt the two permanent rooms were trying to tell America's story through Charlotte's eyes, one of the upstairs exhibits told a particular Charlotte story more along the lines of what I was looking for. North Charlotte was a company town that was built in Charlotte's crucial decades of early growth, and for a time functioned as a self-contained mill community. The neighborhood weathered the Great Depression only to decline when the mills closed after the second World War. North Charlotte languished under high crime rates until a group of new artists and old locals restyled the area as NoDa, or North Davidson. It was an excellent display, evoking the lost world of Piedmont mill towns, despite a somewhat goofy use of the same photograph of one mill in full color to illustrate good times and menacingly grayed out to represent bad times.

Another room downstairs was devoted to the photographs of Margaret Morley, a writer and biologist who moved to the North Carolina mountains and distilled a decade of observation into her 1913 book The Carolina Mountains. The photographs and captions are beautiful, and it's worth six dollars just for that if you love the Blue Ridge as much as I do.

Out behind the museum, you find the Hezekiah Alexander house. This carefully restored building dates to colonial times. I didn't have time to take the tour, so I won't say much about it except that it's really nice to walk around to the herb garden, and to see the old trees in the yard. The woods are tranquil and verdant, and worth stopping in. Wander too far, and you'll end up on the grounds of a Methodist retirement community called Aldersgate.

I realize that it's a bit unreasonable for me to walk into a museum demanding a particular narrative, especially when there's a whole other museum dedicated to the rise of Charlotte as a New South City. And the Charlotte Museum of History recommends some interesting books in its display and has a great website. But I was surprised that the question “Why did Charlotte grow?” wasn't addressed more explicitly, as it's perhaps the crucial question for rooting our aspirations to world-class status in our own history.

Still, don't let any of this stop you from visiting. They're doing good work over there.