If I happened to be in Kirkland on July 8, I’d definitely go see Mike Marshall and Hamilton de Holanda.
Incidentally, here’s one for the grammarians in the crowd: If I wanted to wish to be in Seattle at that time, but I know (more or less) that I won’t be, how would I say it? The future subjunctive, I wish I were to be in Seattle,
sounds close, but it seems like there’s a better way. Oh well, it’s late.
OK, I’m sure this isn’t the first time that headline has been written, but I’ve never written it before. I went to see Blast this afternoon, courtesy of a friend of mine. I would never have managed to get tickets to it myself, because I’m horribly lazy about actually doing things like that, but I’m really glad I wound up with the opportunity to go. I had a great time – lots of brass, lots of percussion, and lots of volume. 
If it ever goes on tour again, you might enjoy it. More musical than Stomp, and more percussive than Riverdance.
Another one I saw recently was Bowfire. I’m a particular fan of stringed instruments, and I’ve never seen anything quite like this show. Lara St. John was worth seeing, and Ray Legere had a surprisingly good mandolin number as well as playing a great bluegrass violin. All in all, the show was a little weird, but very worthwhile if you’re into strings.
We buy books in part because we believe we’re buying the time to read them. -Unknown (by me)
I have a nasty book-buying habit. Always have. My wife is looking for a 12-step program, which is fine by me, as long as they have a nicely printed and bound guidebook.
Books bought this weekend:
Interestingly enough, 2 came from Borders, 2 from Costco, and 2 from Barnes & Noble, all from local stores (as opposed to websites). This amazon.com thing will never catch on.
If you’re around the Kansas City metro area and are looking for a good way to pass an evening on April 29, come out to Lawrence, KS and check out the debut performance of the Downtown Mandolin Orchestra.
I’ll be playing mandolin in the orchestra, which also includes mandolas, mandocellos, guitars, a base, and percussion. All told, there are about 18 of us – a little smaller than the Mandofest orchestra I’ve played in the last couple of year. But, the small size means a tighter sound.
We’re playing quite a bit of music – my guess is we’ll have over an hour of playing time. Styles range from a classical suite to a number of Brazilian tunes, a couple of Spanish tunes, a couple of Irish numbers by Turlogh O’Carolan (always fun), and more. We have a very special finale prepared as well.
Scott Tichenor, the man behind Mandolin Cafe, will be the featured artist of the night. He’s a really fantastic player and plays an equally fantastic mandolin.
More information is available at the Cafe. Tickets are $5 at the door. I hope to see you there!
This is completely nontechnical, but it’s been on my mind all morning. Feel free to fast-forward.
So, one of my favorite plays of Shakespeare is Macbeth, and one of my favorite scenes is Act IV, Scene 1, in which the three witches make some very equivocal prophesies to Macbeth. These lines pop into my head pretty regularly:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
The witches generally speak in a four-foot trochaic meter. They’re pretty unusual in that regard; Shakespeare’s characters typically speak in iambic pentameter or in prose. But it’s effective: I have a terrible memory for verse, lyrics, prose, etc., and this has been stuck in my head for years. It sets an other-worldly mood when taken against the rest of the play’s dialogue.
This week I’ve been picking apart the Dies Irae as I’ve been attempting to learn Latin. Dies Irae (“Day of wrath”) is a part of the traditional Requiem mass for the dead used by the Roman Catholic Church. Something about it sounded amazingly resonant to me:
Dies iræ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla!
The trochaic meter is identical; it’s also a little unusual compared to other Latin verse with which I’m familiar, which handles meter and rhyming differently. This is part of the connection I was trying to make this morning.
But there’s more to it than just the meter. A 19th century French composer, Hector Berlioz, wrote a symphony called Symphonie Fantastique, the final movement of which is “Songe d’une nuit de sabbat”, which usually rendered in English as “Song of a Witches’ Sabbath”. This movement is one of my favorite works in all of music.
For me, there are two striking features of this final movement. One is the most amazingly perfect, major-mood melody that arises from the depth of the cellos and basses two-thrids of the way through the 15-minute piece. But right before that, the horns have a loud, evil-sounding version of the traditional Gregorian Dies Irae melody. You get the feeling that it is designed to rattle your teeth out of your head. The juxtaposition of these melodies makes for a pretty amazing effect.
OK, so this is why it has been stuck in my head all morning: I always envision the witches on the heath during the final movement of Symphonie Fantastique, and I wonder if Berlioz had that scene in mind himself. And, I wonder if Shakespeare had the Dies Irae in mind as he was composing the witches’ dialogue – he would have been acquainted with it, as far as I can tell, particularly if you believe Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion in Will of the World that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic.
OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Now playing, predictably enough: Mozart’s Requiem Mass
I’m listening to Jorge Luis Borges’s excellent Harvard lecture series This Craft of Verse this week. It’s really fantastic; his was a great intelligence, and he was extremely well read.
One thing he said really struck me. About midway through his first lecture, he commented on the title of Cervantes’s Don Quixote de La Manca, saying that the title was intended to be a little bit silly. He said that it would be similar to a modern American writer saying something like Don Quixote of Kansas City
.
Now, I live in Kansas City, so I can relate to what Borges is saying here. I just didn’t think anyone really cared about Kansas City enough to make fun of it. It’s good to know that my hometown provides amusement for even the most elite intellectuals. And, this helps to settle a long-running debate between my wife and me.
On a related note, I read Don Quixote recently, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s brilliant. The amazing part is remembering that it was first published in 1605; Shakespeare was still active then and it’s over two centuries before Jane Austen’s first novel.
Anyway, thanks, Jorge!
The 80-20 rule is amazingly useful. As someone who occasionally tries to learn new languages (human languages, in this case), I had always wondered how good language textbooks really are at guessing which words and concepts to introduce in what order. So tonight, I got tired of wondering and wrote a little program to analyze word frequencies.
My latest language learning project is Latin; I’ve tried a few times and haven’t really gotten there. Seems like it’s time to try again. Which words should I learn first, though?
To find out, I downloaded the entire New Testament of the Vulgate (the Latin version of the Bible) from Wikisource. The Vulgate is relatively straightforward, as Latin goes, and has been in active use by the Church for over 1500 years. Plus, it’s in a consistent style (for the most part), which helps the analysis.
If I restrict the program to the top 10 words, by frequency, in the book of John, I get this:
Most common 10 words These 10 distinct words (3085 instances) account for: 0.390472471690746% of 2561 distinct words 21.9323190672544% of 14066 total words et (898) in (377) non (307) quia (258) est (235) me (213) qui (207) autem (201) Iesus (199) eum (190)
Those stats are pretty impressive at a glance: 1/3 of a percent of the distinct words make up over 20% of the total words in the work. So I started wondering where the 80-20 rule cutoff is; what does it take to get 80% of the total words represented? After some playing around, I came up with this:
Most common 561 words These 561 distinct words (11254 instances) account for: 21.9055056618508% of 2561 distinct words 80.0085312100099% of 14066 total words et (898) in (377) non (307) quia (258) est (235) me (213) ...
So, the 80-20 rule is amazingly close here: 20% of the distinct words make up 80% of the word instances. But this is a pretty small sample size; what does the whole New Testament look like?
Most common 10 words These 10 distinct words (26230 instances) account for: 0.0579777365491651% of 17248 distinct words 19.6052051333797% of 133791 total words et (9404) in (4449) est (2195) autem (2128) non (1976) qui (1897) cum (1125) ut (1095) ad (1066) enim (895)
In this case the top 10 words still account for about 20% of the total word instances. The 80% cutoff for instances is even more dramatic, though:
Most common 2641 words These 2641 distinct words (107032 instances) account for: 15.3119202226345% of 17248 distinct words 79.999402052455% of 133791 total words et (9404) in (4449) est (2195) autem (2128) non (1976) qui (1897) ...
In this case, you only have to know 15% of the distinct words to get to 80% of the instances, but that does represent a lot more words. But any way you slice it, my Latin textbook (Wheelock’s, which I understand is quite popular at the University level) is only in partial alignment with this word list at best. I wonder how much this would change if I threw Caesar or Cicero at it.
Don’t take this too seriously (Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
), because this is bound to be wrong for a number of reasons. One excellent reason is the highly inflected nature of Latin, meaning that words change by just a few letters very often. There are something like 15 different endings for the adjective magnus, for example, depending on the word’s function in a sentence.
I’m curious to try this on French and maybe English, which are progressively less inflected than Latin. I’d expect the results to be even more dramatic, although I’ll have contractions to contend with.
Anyway, if you’re curious, my little perl script is posted here.
I remember watching the Challenger explode on live television. I was in third grade and had just returned from the cafeteria to go pick up my lunch. We were eating in our classrooms so that we could see the live shuttle launch. There was a lot of discussion about Christa McAuliffe getting to go into space. We were all stunned when it blew up – I had a hard time believing it wasn’t just a stunt of some sort.
After the accident, Richard Feynman wrote an appendix to the government report discussing the reasons for the crash. It is recommended reading for anyone who works in an engineering field, including software engineering. It’s short and to the point, and as is usually the case with Feynman’s stuff, it’s a great read.
Today is the 250th birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. So I’m curious: does that strike you as “wow, he’s old”, or as “Wow, he’s not very old”? I’m in the latter camp, myself. It’s amazing to me that he was writing during the American Revolution, which seems relatively recent to me from a world history perspective. It’s also amazing to me that he only pre-dated Jane Austen by a few decades.
I just got the urge to go rent Amadeus.
Another reason why the Internet is Just Cool. I’ve been on a bit of a self-reeducation rampage over the past few years, focusing in particular on humanities. I’ve read a few of Harold Bloom’s books lately – The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and most recently, his Barnes & Noble audio course, What a Piece of Work Is Man, covering the seven major tragedies.
I liked the audio course so much that I decided to e-mail him and ask if/when he’s planning to do the Histories and the Comedies. He replied (which I wasn’t really expecting) and said that he was going to wait and see how the tragedies course was received.
So, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, treat yourself to the lecture course (about $35 if you’re a B&N member), and then leave them positive feedback so I can get my Histories and Comedies. TIA.