Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

All from The Observer Review, 2 October 2005:

"Robyn Hitchcock and Roy Harper gave individualistic tugs of the forelock to master Bob"
-Praise be to Bob almighty, Neil Spencer

"I have noticed over the years that even guys who own no other 'female wailing rubbish' happily tug the forelock to the majesty that is La Bush."
-Comeback Kate, Barbara Ellen

"I tug my forelock with genuine respect as I back out of her presence."
-I'd rather be with my kids than a man, Lynn Barber

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death;

Ginsberg's publishers, City Lights Books of San Francisco, are organizing celebratory events for the next year, starting on October 6, the date of the poem's first public performance.

I am happy but somewhat perplexed to note that "Howl" boasts an entry in an Astronomy Encyclopedia (perhaps it's those lines about the "starry dynamo"?).

And, since Ginsberg was, like me, nothing if not a good (bad) Jewish boy from New Jersey, and it's Rosh Hashanah this week: Happy New Year!

Don't worry, I'm not getting all personal on you. Rather, this month marks the sad anniversary of the death of John Peel. In his honor, a scary all-star cavalcade has recorded a version of one of his favorite songs: the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love?" -- Robert Plant (ok), Roger Daltrey (hmmm), Elton John (!!!!), a lineup apparently OK'ed by Peel's son, which at least also includes the Buzzcocks' own Pete Shelley, who wrote the song, and a smattering of younger artists like the Datsuns. The single will be played simultaneously across the BBC radio stations on October 10; October 13 will be heretofore known as John Peel Day; and the single will actually be released on November 21 (proceeds go to Amnesty International, so donate directly if the geriatric lineup makes you gag).

Update: OK, the single's not too bad; at least it's loud, and it's fast. Not as good as the original, nor the Fine Young Cannibal's pop-candy version, nor the buzzsaw guitars of unknown mid-80s Connecticut rockers Bleached Black's version. But it's still a great song, hard to ruin. You can listen to it on the BBC's web site for the next week or so (almost exactly 1 hour and 12 minutes in).

Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I'm earning my keep doing what most people think a "University Lecturer" (a.k.a. "College Professor" in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement is based upon research, but that's another story).

So far I've taught a few sessions of our first-year ("freshman") Seminars in Communication and Teamwork -- it's a joy to see these exciting and excited students thinking, speaking and working together. Next week I dive into one of the unique -- and somewhat daunting! -- aspects of the UK University system: tutorials, just me with three or four students.

So, if any of the students I'm teaching see this, I'd love to hear from you -- leave a comment if you're willing to do it in public, otherwise send an email.

p.s. I haven't been able to bring myself to watch Supernova, the BBC's new sitcom revolving around the life of (wait for it) an astronomer... Has anyone out there seen it?

In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms -- from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's description of the changes wrought by such new ideas as Darwin's Theory of Evolution or Quantum Theory.

Despite Sokal's avowedly old-fashioned-leftist politics (New Deal Democrat, as far as I can tell), this stance was especially taken up by the right in the so-called Culture Wars who used it to decry universities as bastions of cultural relativsm and loony leftist politics (not entirely unfairly with respect to the “leftist” bit at least -- I say this as a lefty -- if not the “loony” description). The present-day irony is, of course, that the only argument for promulgating crackpot falsehoods like Intelligent Design is cultural relativism -- They think it might be true so we should all be forced to learn it; it's “just another theory.”

The Sokal incident certainly skewered its target, but this really was just a small, albeit vocal, segment of the academy, standing in contrast to many of their better-informed comrades, such as Penn State's wonderful Michael Bérubé, a humanities prof, insightful blogger and great writer who seems to know his science, in this wonderful discussion of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions from a footnote in his forthcoming book:

Because of his emphasis on the importance of “normal science” and the protocols under which it operates, Kuhn is not a relativist; on the contrary, he argues that there is such a thing as scientific “progress,” though he insists that it can only be gauged retrospectively, for it is not proceeding toward any preordained goal. For Kuhn, science is therefore evolutionary in precisely the same sense that evolution itself was evolutionary for Darwin: in an anti-teleological sense....

In a recent complaint about humanists’ appropriation of Kuhn’s work, Thomas Nagel writes: “Much of what Kuhn says about great theoretical shifts... is also entirely compatible with the conception of science as seeking, and sometimes finding, objective truth about the world” ... I agree with this if, and only if, “objective” is understood as “mind-independent,” and I decline to believe that this standard of “objectivity,” as it pertains to objects like quarks and quasars, can be usefully applied to mind-dependent matters such as justice or anxiety.

If only we scientists could write so clearly (OK, “anti-teleogical” is mild jargon, but it's a lot easier to decode that with a dictionary than, say “quark-hadron phase transition”). And all this in a footnote! But go read the original post for the back-story.

(Thanks to Penn State astrophysicist-blogger Steinn S. over at Dynamics of Cats for noticing this.)

Here in the UK, the Government has been criticised for "climbing down" in its presentation of a new bill to curb smoking in pubs: instead of an outright ban, it will allow smoking in private clubs and in pubs where "food" is not served (where the definition of "food" isn't quite settled). Whether you think such a ban is Nanny-statism or sound health policy, it seems weird to complain when the government has just followed Bismarck's dictum: "politics is the art of the possible". Are we meant to be shocked that the government has... compromised? Isn't that what governments are meant to do in the face of disagreement?

Back in the US, yesterday we heard about Harriet Miers' withdrawal of her nomination for the US Supreme Court. It has always seemed to me, although it does require an amount of cleverness on the part of the President that seems hard to imagine, that this has always been the plan. Nominate the loyal, semi-competent Miers, someone without a lengthy conservative paper trail. The right, Bush's base, doesn't like her because she's not obviously a raving conservative lunatic (replace with a positive description if you want a non-partisan version of the story). And the left doesn't like her because, well, Bush nominated her. So she pulls out. But now Bush gets to nominate a right-wing ideologue and look as though he's only doing it because he has to, not because he wants to. So Bush looks more moderate, the court gets more conservative, the right is happy, and the USA's takeover by a cabal of neocons and fundamentalist crackpots goes on and on.

Today, though, Miers' dropping out has been overshadowed. And as happy as I am to see any pain in the Bush White House, it's hard to take the indictment of someone named "Scooter" seriously.

The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible.

--Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the birth of the atomic bomb, from director and librettist Sellars and composer John Adams.

The article isn’t available online, but Ross writes more about the opera here, here and here, and posts some pictures here (and if you tire of Ross’s take on the subject there are plenty of links to other articles therein).

On a sort of related note, I’ve been listening to The Jam’s “‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street” and its companion, “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”. Although the right-wing thugs have been replaced by tracksuited chavs, it’s remarkable how similar a picture these songs paint to the Kaiser Chiefs’ “I Predict A Riot”, nearly 20 years on.