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What are your favourite pieces by Dimitri Shostakovich and why?
Impressed by Jeremy Shatan’s answer, to have included the Fourth Symphony! So Mahler, so anxious, so my favourite, and not often heard. The Cello Concerto #1 speaks well to Jeremy’s taste as well, but that piece is better known.
So, skipping those two:
- Ninth Symphony. Jolly, quirky, Haydn on steroids, alternating with genuine lamentation in the 2nd and 4th movements. (Bernstein thought the 4th movement was a parody of Beethoven’s 9th; I’m not seeng it.)
- 24 Preludes and Fugues. It may not be more formally perfect than Bach’s, but it has a much more prodigious emotional range, from the sunshine arpeggios of #7 to the tears of #24 to the insanity of #15.
- String Quartet #8. A lot of extramusical lore has built up around this “suicide note”, and not unreasonably, with Shostakovich quoting himself repeatedly; but the music supports it. Harrowing.
- Seventh Symphony. Not so much for the famous first movement, as for the solemn mass of the third, grieving and angry and soulful.
- The Anti-Formalist Rayok is not a favourite piece, not even a particularly great piece, but its passive-agressive sniping at Stalin and Zhdanov is certainly instructive about where Shostakovich was at in 1948. Bonus for the YouTube performance featuring Stalin sung by a guy with a Stalin moustache and a Stalin pipe.
Is it true that Americans don’t learn Old Greek, Latin, or German?
Ugh to many of these answers.
The traditional European language curriculum was oriented to an elite, and had to do with instilling the cultural values of the West, which privileged Latin and Greek. Latin was still the lingua franca for European intellectuals up until the 18th century, but that does not explain Greek. I’ve written on that more extensively at Nick Nicholas’ answer to In the traditional British public school system, why is (or was) it believed that knowledge of “the classics” was necessary?
German was added in the 19th century because German at the time was what English is now: the language of science and technology and scholarship. In the Anglosphere, French was always more prominent than German.
The curriculum worldwide has turned away from prioritising culture and character development, to prioritising utilitarian skills and citizenship. That shift has been most prominent in the Anglosphere, and slowest in Germany—the last refuge of Bildung in the West. Accordingly, the choice of language in the Anglosphere is now most oriented to what will be most useful to students: Chinese in Australia rather than French, Spanish in America.
That’s not something to boast about or decry; it just is. Learning Spanish is still better than learning no language at all. And learning a putatively useless language is not stupid or the cause of the collapse of the British Empire (Good Lord!):
- It was definitely not seen as useless by those who promoted it, and it had a clear ideological intent (see my linked answer).
- Not everything in school has to be about utility.
- It’s not like people retain from school the utilitarian skills that they don’t end up using.
If the place of Latin in the curriculum is shaky because it isn’t “useful”, I’d argue the place of trigonometry is even shakier. In fact, prioritising trigonometry over statistics is downright irresponsible to the citizenry…
What are the good and bad neighborhoods of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia?
Kim Daniels’ answer sounds the most accurate to me, as does Sherï Hussain’s answer to Are there really rough neighborhoods to avoid in Melbourne Australia?
The question is clearly vexed, and if you’re paying close attention, there’s several things going on (which Stacey Johnston’s answer alludes to). The social dynamic in Melbourne is in flux; people’s old prejudices about suburbs die hard, even if they are overtaken by events (and that will be reflected in my answer too); and there’s a lot of class prejudice in both directions, for a people who are in denial about having class prejudice.
Tribes at disdain with each other or overlapping with each other include:
- The old Melbourne establishment
- The old working class (or its remnants)
- Yuppies, creatives and suchlike cosmopolitans
- Enterpreneurs of varying types, including both tycoons and tradespeople
- Several different kinds of underprivileged groups
- Several waves of migration: Southern European, Vietnamese, Indian, East African, and several iterations of Chinese migration
- Hipsters
- Bogans
- The complexity of the tribalisms is illustrated by the complexity of the appellation bogans. It looks like it’s tied to class, and there is a correlation, but it’s not a good correlation. Much more of it is tied to culture; one can readily be a “cashed up bogan”, and plenty of people are rather proud to call themselves bogans.
So, with that in mind:
There are three divides in Melbourne. The least relevant is North Of The River and South Of The River. It is true that there are lots of Melburnians who will never cross the river; but that’s merely a divide of transport laziness. South Yarra is fashionistas and Brunswick is hipsters; they’re not as different from each other as they like to think.
The old class divide was Western Suburbs vs Eastern Suburbs. The money was in the East; the working class was disproportionately in the West, as were the underprivileged. Broadmeadows was a project in social engineering gone horribly wrong—dump a bunch of social housing in the Western outskirts with no amenities and nothing for kids to do but beat each other up. Footscray was notorious in the 80s for its Vietnamese gangs and its all-round seediness.
Half the suburbs in Kim Daniels’ answer are Western: Sunshine, St Albans, Broadmeadows. That class divide is pretty much gone now. Williamstown and Yarraville are a stone’s throw from Footscray, and they’ve transmogrified from Southern European industrial dormitories into Yuppieville West. Footscray has gone from Vietnamese turf to Vietnamese vs Somali turf, but gentrification is well underway. It’ll eventually hit Sunshine too.
The divide was never that sound anyway, as you can see from the other suburbs Kim Daniels names. The real class divide is now Inner vs Outer suburbs, with better vs worse access to amenities. There’s an inner affluent zone; a middle suburbia that’s getting increasingly expensive, and an outer zone mixed between the disaffected and young families that can’t afford suburbia. It’s why Footscray simply has to gentrify—it’s too close to the CBD not to. And it’s why Broadmeadows will not.
Dandenong and Frankston were the outer eastern limits 30 years ago, and I guess they’re still outer, though there’s 20 km of exurbia past Dandy now. Dandenong has had an increase in crime, and people looking askance at its newly arrived immigrants. Frankston is often derided as Bogan Central, although it has nowhere near the criminality of Dandenong. It’s laughed at rather than feared, I’m afraid. (And it knows it has an image problem: Faces of Frankston are all over my train carriage.)
Springvale, which is geographically middle now, historically was the Other Vietnamese centre, and had some criminality in the 80s. I suspect this is more reputation than fact.
The last two suburbs on Kim’s list are inner, which may seem odd. Fitzroy is a strange mix of ghetto and hipsterville. (Well, maybe not that strange: it’s gritty, and that’s what hipsters like.) It has a junkie problem (the McDonalds has blue lights in its toilets—Why are there blue lights in public toilets?), and it has Melbourne’s best known Aboriginal enclave. It also has an overrepresentation of vegetarian restaurants, and the loathsome hipster smugness of Offspring (TV series), set in Fitzroy.
God damn it, I hate those arrogant, Ooh Look At Me I’m So Unconventional neurotic hipster turds on Offspring. I don’t care that it’s fictional, I just want them DEAD.
Screw you, impeccably accessorised hipster bastards, and your fricking hipster inner city parks.
Ahem.
There’s a very insalubrious patch of Heidelberg West overrun by drugs too, as you can tell by the abrupt dip in house prices. Far cry from when it was Melbourne exurbia 100 years ago, where the Heidelberg School did their thing.
As for St Kilda, it was rough maybe 20 years ago, in patches; Grey Street really was Streetwalker Alley, and there really were bits it was not wise to venture into at night. Again, I think this is people’s memories at work: it’s now overrun with British backpackers and British migrants reliving their backpacker past, and I find it pretty damn pleasant.
Oh, the good suburbs?
- For Old Melbourne Establishment, Toorak and adjoining suburbs, and (I think) Camberwell.
- For hipsters, fricking Fitzroy, and adjoining Brunswick, moving northwards now to Northcote. South Yarra for more money and glitz. Hawthorn for grit South Of The River.
- As suburbia goes, it gets bland quickly. For nicest and pleasantest—Glen Waverley? Ivanhoe? Glen Iris?
Did Da Vinci say something like, “If you ever tried flying, you will look at the sky when walking and think that is your home”?
Googling finds:
Refuted in Wikiquote Talk:
So to summarize what we know, based largely on the research of KHirsch above, the quote was first used in print (and misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci) in a science fiction story published in 1975, The Storms of Windhaven. One of the authors, Lisa Tuttle, remembers that the quote was suggested by science fiction writer Ben Bova, who says he believes he got the quote from a TV documentary narrated by Fredric March, presumably I, Leonardo da Vinci, written by John H. Secondari for the series Saga of Western Man, which aired on 23 February 1965. If this is correct, then the quote may have been written by Secondari for the TV documentary, and Ben Bova incorrectly assumed that he was quoting da Vinci. Accordingly, the probable author is John Hermes Secondari (1919-1975), American author and television producer.
Followup:
However, I should mention that a 1976 edition of Contact Quarterly, a biannual journal of contemporary dance, improvisation and performance, cites Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds as the source of the quotation. I don’t know where to get a translation of that Codex, but I imagine one must be available somewhere, so it can be checked. – Embram 16:15, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
- Having searched the ‘Codex on the Flight of Birds’ for the quote, nothing can be found that even closely resembles it. 2:22, 9 October 2013
As a teacher, what is the weirdest thing you have seen in your school or classroom?
Back when I was lecturing, I made a consistent effort to be the weirdest thing in the room. If I was running late, I would boom the opening words of my lecture while walking down the corridor into the theatre. I would walk into lecture drinking a Slurpee, and remind students that no eating or drinking was allowed in the theatre. I would reuse my Introduction To Linguistics slides from the previous year, and point out that the essential nature of human language had not altered significantly in the past 12 months. I would intersperse my lecture with random dated pop culture references from the 90s and dad jokes. I opened my first lecture on historical linguistics in Old English. I paced the room, gesticulating and expostulating.
Of course you are not surprised to read this.
I was something of an acquired taste, but I had a mature age student point out to me that during my lectures, you could hear a pin drop.
As a result, and being transfixed by my own antics, I didn’t notice any weird happenings among the students. I had colleagues that did. One colleague noted the incongruity between the couple taking notes above the desk, and what their hands were doing to each other below the desk.
Alas, I was absent the day my peers brought a stripper to scare off the curmudgeonly lecturer during his final Fortran lecture. (It didn’t work. “You are not a student enrolled in this course! Please leave!”) I was there, however, when a group of students performed the Dutch national anthem for our Dutch computer architecture lecture, and the Danish national anthem for our Danish operating systems lecturer.
I was in fact the soloist.
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe ben ik, van Duitsen bloed….
What movie, or movie scene, scared you the most as a kid?
This is kind of lame (and TV rather than movie), but I guess I had a sheltered upbringing, and I was just six.
1977 was the heyday of Alice Cooper. As a sophisticated adult, I can now appreciate the antics of Alice for what they were, and even stifle a yawn at them. But as an impressionable six-year-old, not so much.
The scene that scared me was nothing about Satan worship, or fans dismembering chickens. It was, of all things, an award show, at the end of which Alice saw fit to pull a gun. The host (was it Dionne Warwick?) shrieked, the credits rolled, and I was terrified that Mayhem had seemingly intruded on the propriety of Hollywood.
Yes, Michaelis Maus, I was already inhabiting The Matrix.
For a couple of years after, Alice Cooper was at the lead of my personal pantheon of hobgoblins. I was scared that he would break into my home and subject me to some unspeakable horror. (I don’t know what that horror would have been; singing School’s out for summer, I expect.) I went so far as to bow my head while in the toilet, convinced that that would prevent Alice from identifying me, and whisking me away to some sort of un-education camp.
I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pull that kind of stunt these days. It truly was a more innocent time.
What do you think about “Naked Attraction”?
I caught a glimpse of it while channel-surfing.
My thoughts:
- Most of these reality shows are better in the original American: Dating Naked.
- I find something very trashy and mean about UK Reality TV in general, and this did not appear to be an exception. Once again, the contrast between the American and the UK take on the concept was illuminating.
- There was little in the way of prurient joy to be had from the show. The UK had destroyed any notion of naked bodies being sexy anyway, through Embarrassing Bodies. (More meanness disguised as a community service.)
- Useful experiment? Through Reality TV? Useful experiment in what can they possibly come up with next for a ratings hit, I guess.
Did anyone from your high school become famous?
Nicole Livingstone: Nicole Dawn Livingstone, OAM (born 24 June 1971) is an Australian former competitive swimmer, Olympic silver medallist, and a television sports commentator and radio presenter. Livingstone competed for Australia in three summer Olympics – 1988, 1992, and 1996 – winning both individual and team medals.
Nicole Livingstone, or, as we imaginatively call her at the time, “Dead Rock”, was in my class for a year when I was 13. Outside of the rarefied circles of Quora and Klingon linguistics, she is more famous than me.
Booooo…
Oh, what was my impression of her? Let’s just say, the onset of puberty is not a time that brings out the best in anyone. And in the unlikely event she remembers me, she’d say the same about me.
6 am
Give to her joy, you callused world, give peace,
this lady who should never, ever cry.
Let it have air to bloom, roots to release,
this beauty which should never, ever die.
This smile, which neither coin nor bonds can buy,
let it be sheltered from the bondsman’s blame.
This heart so generous, this glance so wry,
let their reward be more than they can name.
Sleep now, my sweet, sleep while the world’s aflame.
There will be time to mourn it yet. Your hair
smoulders in auburn whorls, which none can tame.
Tomorrow, you’ll catch fire again and flare,
to stand your ground, and take what you deserve.
The stars fall at your feet, eager to serve.
What would be your choice for a Love song? See details.
Oh, shut up, QCR.
Others applaud them. I panic for them. I want it to work out, they are both good souls who have earned respite, and find it in each other; I worry that they may not work out, because the world is a cruel place.
Yes, nothing ventured nothing gained. And at least, they are both old and wise enough to know.
I worry so much, that the first song to pop into my head was this. Lyrics Kostas Tripolitis, Music Mikis Theodorakis, 1981: late Mikis. Lyrics disillusioned and fearful; music soaring and yearning. Αγάπη: Love. stixoi.info: Αγάπη
Love of bread and fire,
Love of brackishness.
Billboards will choke us
and empty beer cans.
Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.
Love of bread and rain,
Love out on the balconies.
You’ll see blood on the asphalt
and plastic containers.
Where can I take you away?
Glass and sheet metal
have filled the years
with expired months.
I worry, too, that you’ll talk each other mad. Too wise to woo, bickering constantly, exasperatingly, charmingly, like Beatrice and her Benedick. But they got to have their day in the sun, in the end. And so do you: