There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.
by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Follow @telescoperLooking at the news feeds during my last evening in rainy Copenhagen, I see that the Leader of the Opposition, Ed Milliband, has weighed in with an armful of brand new platitudes he obviously acquired during the riots, including a dig at so-called “academic” studies into the causes of violent disorder.
I think this is a big mistake. A serious academic study would undoubtedly reveal a deep sociological connection between mob violence of the type recently experienced in England and the soccer hooliganism of the 70s and 80s. The pioneering research discussed in the following news clip offers a radical suggestion for solving the problem of youth violence.
Follow @telescoperI’m struck by the similarity between cosmologist Alessandro Melchiorri and former Happy Days actor Tom Bosley. I wonder if by any chance they might be related?
Bosley
Melchiorri
Just a quick blogette to mention that yesterday the workshop participants here in Copenhagen went on an excursion to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which is just north of Copenhagen.
This is an extremely interesting museum to visit at any time, not just for the temporary exhibitions which at present include the architecturally-themed Living and some wonderful drawings made by David Hockney using his iPad; the latter almost made me want to go out and buy one.
There’s also a fine permanent collection, including many wonderful sculptures by Alberto Giacometti :
and several by Henry Moore standing (or rather reclining) in the grounds:
What’s really great about Louisiana though is its relaxed informal atmosphere; kids are encouraged to play around (and sometimes in) the scupltures, there is lots of green space to relax in, and you are welcome even to swim in the sea, although I didn’t because I didn’t have my bathing costume with me. Many consider modern art and its galleries to be a bit pretentious, but that couldn’t be further than the truth for this place. I’ll also add that it was very busy indeed so is obviously extremely popular.
For those of you not so interested in Modern Art (which actually seemed to the case for many of my dining companions last night), there is a strong astronomical connection with this place because it offers a view of the Island of Hven on which Tycho Brahe established a famous observatory Uraniborg.
I’ve been to Louisiana many times but have never taken the short boat trip out to Hven, largely because there’s nothing much of the observatory left. Apparently the locals were squeezed mercilessly for taxes to pay for the running costs of Tycho’s observatory, with the result that by the time Brahe left in 1597 the residents of Hven were thoroughly fed up with him and tore the whole thing down.
The moral is clear of that little story is clear: astronomers need to keep the public on their side!
Now it’s time to start the workshop for today so I’d best be off…
Follow @telescoperI’m in Copenhagen, yet again, for the third time in as many months, this time for a workshop arranged by the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute. It’s my talk this morning, in fact, so although I’m up early I haven’t got much time to post. I have to work on my talk to see if there’s a way I can make it all fit in 30 minutes!
Copenhagen is a pretty familiar place to me, but this has to be the most unsettling trip I’ve ever made here. I’m not talking about the long delay at Heathrow airport before we took off; I’ve come to expect that. The airport clearly can’t cope with the level of traffic it is supposed to handle during the summer months, so you have to reckon on at least an hour delay inbound and outbound. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour while being told over and over again that it will be “just a few minutes” really does bring out the grumpy old man in me. Still, at least I didn’t lose any luggage.
No, the reason this is such an unsettling trip is that back home in Blighty all hell seems to have broken lose, with riots in the streets of, first, London and now apparently Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. I was also on the march in 1990 that turned into the Poll Tax riot. I was appalled by the violence that day and got myself and my friends away from trouble as soon as it flared, but it has to be said that it did lead to a change in the law, something Parliament had failed to achieve.
Back to the present, I note that the Tesco at Bethnal Green, where I used to live, has apparently been looted. I hope all my friends in London are keeping themselves safe.
I don’t think there’s anything I can say about these riots that wouldn’t be ill-informed, unhelpful, or even downright stupid. I am however old enough to remember that such things have happened before, in deprived inner-city areas, including Liverpool and Bristol. The circumstances were similar too. Given the public spending cuts that have hit community programmes extremely hard, it doesn’t surprise me that some have decided to lash out, especially at the Police, whose criminal collusion with the media over phone-tapping and draconian tactics in dealing with lawful protests has turned many others against them .
I find it hard to separate these signs of social disintegration from the large-scale economic landscape. The huge level of debt accumulated by banks during the Credit Crunch of 2008 has now been absorbed by governments across the globe, who are attempting to deal with it by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes. Meanwhile the bankers have accepted their bailouts with glee, paying themselves bonuses by the bucketful and no doubt squirreling away the dosh in the Cayman Islands. If the state sanctions greed on that scale, is it surprising that people at the bottom of the heap decide to join in by looting the local supermarket?
The young have the right to feel particularly disillusioned. The current generation has lived beyond its means for too long and, realising it too late, is trying to pay for it by mortgaging the future. The opportunities our young people, especially those from less affluent backgrounds, can look forward to, in terms of education and jobs, will be much poorer than my generation.
I’m not usually one to endorse the view of the Daily Telegraph, but I think this piece hits the nail pretty much on the head. As Karl Marx would have said, it’s all about alienation, and I can tell you it’s not just the “underclass” that’s feeling it at the moment.
None of which is to condone the violence: you can be angry with the looters and the arsonists and those engaged in wanton destruction, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to understand why it’s happening.
But I’m very afraid that there’s going to be a lot more of this. The sovereign debt crisis is far from over. In many ways it has only just begun. There will be deeper cuts in public spending, greater inequality, greater social divisions and more upheavals like this. I think we’re in for a rough ride. I’m just glad I’m no longer young.
Follow @telescoperI’m off travelling for a few days to a conference, of which more anon (assuming I succeed in connecting to the interwebs while I’m away). It will do me some good to change location after the terrible week I’ve just had. Anyway, I thought I’d leave you with a whimsical poem while I’m travelling. It’s a bit silly, I know, but I like it. It’s called Love and Tensor Algebra and it was written by Stanislaw Lem.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product of four scalars it defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
As regular readers of this blog will know, I have a – sometimes excessive – interest in the origin and meaning of words. It’s not something that many people share, but I think language is a fascinating thing, in the way that it evolves so that words and phrases take on different nuances.
It’s not just in English that this happens, of course. The other day I received in a brochure about Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming production of Don Giovanni (for which I’ve already got first-night tickets). I’ll no doubt post a review in due course, but probably the most famous scene of what is arguably Mozart’s greatest opera is near the end of Act II when the statue of the murdered Comendatore arrives to claim Don Giovanni’s soul, with the words
Don Giovanni a cenar teco
m’invitasti e son venuto!
(Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you and I have come!) It’s a stunning scene from the point of view of both music and drama, and can also be genuinely frightening when done well.
Here’s an example from Youtube, with the doom-laden basso profundo of Kurt Moll as the Comendatore
Some years ago in Nottingham I went to see Don Giovanni performed by the Lithuanian National Opera. It was a nice but unremarkable production until it reached the Comendatore scene. The arrival of the ghostly figure is preceded by an ominous knocking sound which, in this production, emanated from offstage, to the right, as the audience watched. The cast all looked in this direction, as did all the audience. But it was a classic piece of stage misdirection. Suddenly, the music announced the arrival of the statue, a spotlight flashed on and there was the Comendatore already in centre stage. It took me completely by surprise and I gasped audibly, to the obvious disapproval of the team of old ladies sitting in the row in front of me, who shook their heads and tutted. I had seen Don Giovanni before, and knew exactly what was coming, but was still scared..
Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post. At a conference some years ago I was talking to an Italian colleague of mine and he told me something I found fascinating, which is that the Comendatore scene had led to an idiomatic expression in Italian Il Convitato di Pietra (“The Stone Guest”) which is in quite common usage.
In fact there are other works that allude to this phrase including an earlier opera called Don Giovanni o Il Convitato di Pietra and a later play by Pushkin called The Stone Guest.
So what does it mean? It’s not quite the same as the Comendatore scene would suggest. In Italian it is given as
(una) presenza incombente ma invisibile, muta, e perciò inquietante e imprevedibile, che tutti conoscono ma che nessuno nomina
which I’ll translate with my feeble Italian as
an impending but invisible presence, dumb and therefore disturbing and unexpected, which everyone knows but no-one names
In other (English) words, “The Stone Guest” is someone who’s not actually present – at least not physically – but who nevertheless manages to cast some sort of a shadow over the proceedings. I’m sure we can all think of occasions when this would have been a very apt phrase but there seems to be no English equivalent. It’s not quite the same as the Elephant in the Room, but has some similarity.
Now that I’ve had a chance to think, though, perhaps there is an English equivalent. A person who is perpetually absent but despite that exerts baleful influence on those present? A name connected with stone?
It’s got to be Keith Mason….
Follow @telescoperI seem to be in an unaccountably nostalgic mood this Saturday morning so as a consequence I’m going to post a musical blast from the past that I hope at least some of you will enjoy.
I first heard the following track on Humphrey Lyttelton’s Radio 2 show The Best of Jazz, which I used to listen to every Monday night when I was at School. I must have heard this sometime around 1981, i.e. about thirty years ago. From the moment I heard the first achingly beautiful phrases of theme of this tune, called Ophelia, I was entranced and it did more than any other single record to fill me with a love of modern jazz. Although I’d always loved jazz, I had tended to think of it as music “of the past” – even the “modern” jazz of e.g. Charlie Parker fell into that category – and usually made in a recording studio. This sounded so new, so exciting, and indeed so beautiful, that it filled me with the urge to hear live jazz whenever and wherever I could. It cost me a lot of money and a lot of late nights, but I think it was worth it.
The performance was recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London in June 1980 and released on the small British record label Mole Jazz, an offshoot of the famous (and sadly now defunct) record shop of the same name that used to be on Gray’s Inn Road. I loved the track Humph played so much I got the album Blues for the Fisherman straight away (by mail order) and, although I still have it, I have almost worn it away by playing it so much. It’s a brilliant, brilliant album, with the intense atmosphere of a live performance adding to the superb playing of the musicians.
The band is listed as the “Milcho Leviev Quartet featuring Art Pepper”, although that was probably for contractual reasons, as this was the same band that toured extensively as “The Art Pepper Quartet”: Art Pepper on alto saxophone, Milcho Leviev on piano, Tony Dumas on bass and Carl Burnett on drums. I was lucky enough to see this band play live at the Newcastle Jazz festival not long after I got the record and they were great then too. Art Pepper sadly passed away in 1982.
As far as I’m aware this record wasn’t released on CD until very recently and, fortunately, a public-spirited person has put the tracks from the original album and some previous unreleased material on Youtube, so I’ve seized the opportunity to post the track which did so much to inspire me about jazz when I was 18 years old. There’s so much to enjoy in this piece, including the superb drumming of Carl Burnett and virtuosic piano of Milcho Leviev, but the star of the performance for me is Art Pepper (who also wrote the tune). His playing is at times lyrical and at times agonized, but always compelling and this band was especially good at spontaneous transitions of mood and dynamic. I love this performance, and I hope some of you will too.
Follow @telescoperA nice blog on the evidence (such as it is) for water on Mars, which is good because it means I don’t have to try writing about it!
I’m not sure it is water. That dark colour suggests to me it might be Guinness…
In the Dark 