by Michael Liss

This past Sunday, November 11, marked the Centennial of Armistice Day, the European commemoration of the agreement to end World War I. Representatives from more than 60 countries attended carefully choreographed ceremonies to honor the sacrifice of those who fought.

The Europeans take the Great War seriously. Americans really don’t. It just doesn’t feel like our war. To us, it’s an old chest filled with musty, tattered maps and the remains of broken monarchies and shattered ambitions. Even the early film footage, jerky and grainy in black and white, looks more like a silent movie than something real. We know we participated, and naturally we were heroic. Our boys saved the Allied powers from the Huns, all the while singing “Over There” and wooing the local pulchritude. It’s what we broad-shouldered, brave, optimistic, can-do Americans do.

But, if you want to contextualize our actual contribution, consider the following:

The United States committed 2.8 million servicemen to the war, and suffered 53,402 killed in action, 63,114 deaths from disease and other causes, and about 205,000 wounded. On an absolute level, that’s a lot of lives. But, by contrast, in just one extended, insane battle, the Europeans fought the Somme Offensive, with more than 3 million men engaged and 1 million casualties. Then there was Gallipoli, the infamous, disastrous push by then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill in the Dardanelles, which provided the Ottoman Empire with its last meaningful military victory, and included a horrific sacrifice by ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand combined forces) and half a million casualties. And Verdun (between the French and the Germans), which lasted close to 11 months in 1916, and yielded nearly 700,000 casualties and more than 300,000 dead. And Passchendaele (3rd Battle of Ypres, Flanders Fields), between Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, in July to November 1917, in which the dead and wounded may have been as high as 700,000. And Operation Michael, the last major German offensive in the West (Germany, the UK, France, and, finally, the United States), which had almost 500,000 casualties. That, of course, skips every battle between the Germans and the Russians. Read more »

by Robert Fay

I get sad whenever I think of Robert Lowell. He is the poet of a lost America, an America that likely never was, but one that is gone nonetheless. I get sad when I think of Robert Lowell because of my own inadequacy to love poetry the way he did, the way I once did, when I was more vulnerable, when I was more courageous. I get sad for Robert Lowell because he is unfashionable and his legacy may soon disappear, if not from our university curriculums, than certainly from our hearts.

The optics, as they now say, don’t look good.

Lowell was the patrician poet with a trust fund; the privileged, white-male literary figure who wore a corduroy sport jacket and sloppily-knotted tie—the casual wear of the “bummy rich,” as they were once known on Boston’s North Shore. He was the old Brahmin from Yankee Beacon Hill, whose full name was Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, and whose ancestors were a “who’s who,” of American history, including William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, and Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is a foundational American literary text.

And then there was his relationships with women. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Books have always mattered to me. When I was single in my 20s, I mentioned to my then boss that whenever I first visited a date’s apartment I would look at his bookshelves. He didn’t get it. Why did it matter what books a person read? I tried to explain that for starters, it mattered to me that someone actually read at all. Soon after this, I met my now ex-husband. The circumstances of our meeting had a tangential connection to his love of the Thomas Pynchon novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (long story short, we connected over the Internet in its early days and his persona was Tyrone Slothrop). I’d never read it. For our second date, he brought me a copy of the book. To this day, that was the single most romantic gift a man has ever given me. When we moved into together a mere 6 weeks later, the merging of our books was a major undertaking – interestingly, while there were a lot of authors we didn’t share a love of, like Pynchon, we had a lot of books which completed each other’s sets of various authors. We gave away a fair number of duplicates. When we divorced 18 years later, the process of remembering whose books were whose was challenging. I actually left some behind by accident. He kindly returned them to me, or let me take them off his bookcase, when one, or both us realized. Books have always mattered to me. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

In a recent study, data scientists based in Japan found that classical music over the past several centuries has followed laws of evolution. How can non-living cultural expression adhere to these rules?

Evolution is an “algorithmic process applied to populations of individuals.” [1] Individuals vary, and certain individuals’ traits are passed on while others are culled. These steps are repeated many times. In biology, scientists can study the gene as a “unit of inheritance,” but an analogous unit of inheritance has to be selected in a study of a cultural practice. Eita Nakamura at Kyoto University and Kunihiko Kaneko at the University of Tokyo decided to look at unique musical features such as the tritone–a dissonant interval of three whole notes–and measure the number of occurrences in Western musical compositions over the centuries.

According to Nakamura and Kaneko, “The mean and standard deviation of the frequency (probability) of tritones steadily increased during the years 1500-1900.” Because this might have been just a function of individual composers’ preferences or “social communities” and not necessarily governed by statistical evolutionary laws, they developed a mathematical model of evolution to tell the difference. The tritone is a relatively rare musical event, but its use has spread over the centuries in a way that the study’s authors say follow precise statistical rules. [2] Read more »

by Bill Murray

The crocodiles know. They form pincers on either side of the crossing point. Richard says they feel the vibration of all those hooves along the riverbank above them.

Waves of animals surge toward the river then fall away. If they all go we’ll witness a frightful, deadly crush of beasts in motion, mad energy, herd hysteria, dust and confusion, the cries of mortally wounded beasts rising to the heavens, birds of prey gaggling and swooping and squawking, kinetic intensity unbound.

We have come to see the sprawling, real life spectacle of wildebeests crossing the Mara River. It is the largest overland migration in the world. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

“We’re in one of those great historic periods…when people don’t understand the world anymore…when the past is not sufficient to explain the future.”
–Peter Drucker

Fasten your seatbelts, we’re going for a ride. We start over 300 million years ago and arrive at the present in a mere six paragraphs. We remain here for the rest of the tour, looking at pictures and talking about a strange urban paradise situated in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas on the planet.

From Pangea to Hurricane Sandy

Roughly 335 million years ago, during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, the Earth’s existing continental masses formed themselves into the supercontinent Pangea. Pangea began to breakup roughly 175 million years ago giving rise to the Palisades Sill, most visible as a series of cliffs running 50 miles along the west bank of the Hudson River in New York and New Jersey. The Palisades tapers down to sea level in what is now Jersey City.

Roughly 14,000 years ago the first humans settled in North America, spreading quickly across the continent and south through Central to South America. In 1609 the Lenape greeted Henry Hudson when he set foot in that area on his search for a Northwest Passage to China. Two centuries later railroads began emerging in North America. In the second quarter of the 19th Century and Camden and Amboy Railroad became the first in New Jersey, completing its first line in 1834. In the middle of the century the Erie and the Delaware-Lackawanna railroads completed the Long Dock Tunnel in 1861. It conveyed freight trains from the Meadowlands through the Palisades Sill to freight terminals on the Hudson River. By the early 20th century Jersey City had become a bustling port.

In 1906 the Erie Railroad began blasting a cut through the Palisades less than a football field’s width south of the Long Dock Tunnel. The Erie Cut was completed in 1910. It is between, say, 50 and 80 feet deep and 70 to 100 feet wide at the bottom. In four places the cut becomes short tunnels so that roads and buildings could go atop it; short bridges cross the cut at three other points. Collectively these are the Bergen Arches, the name by which this feature is known today. Read more »

by Dave Maier

No, it’s not that time of year just yet! However, since my yearly lists aren’t always exactly best-of-year lists anyway, I thought I might get the jump on everyone else, before we’re all best-of-year’ed out. (I should do sets more often anyway …) About half of these tracks are from 2018, and the rest are recent-ish, so that’s something.

Ethernet – Birds of Paradise (From Here to Tranquility Vol. 7 [Silent])

I don’t know a whole lot about Ethernet (I didn’t bother googling, because I bet you get a bazillion hits for, you know, Ethernet), but this track is a gloriously bubbly spacy ambient number of the sort Silent does very well (although there are all kinds of things on their samplers, of which they are up to Vol. 10 now, I see).

Fastus – Dream Within a Dream (Terra Incognito)

Fastus is a guy named Ian from Jersey City, NJ in the USA. He does great demos for particular synth modules, which is how I know about him. Most if not all of this track was done on a Eurorack modular system, perhaps the very one pictured in blue above. It can be difficult to make modular synths sound musical, so hats off to Ian for this compelling track. Check out the Bandcamp link for a sweet deal on all three of Ian’s records.

Erik Wollo – Traverse (Threshold Point [Projekt])

This is Erik’s 23rd album, some of which, he tells us, was composed “under special and tragic circumstances,” which he says make it “more ethereal and humble” than some of his other music. I haven’t heard all 22 of his other records, so I can’t really say, but this one sounds to me pretty much like the ones I know from his early days (classics like Traces and Images of Light). This particular track may also be an homage to fellow Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, as the chord progression sounds a whole lot like that from the track “Avskjed” from Rypdal’s 1980 album Descendre. If I ever meet Erik again, I will ask him. Read more »