English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2019-04-16 (page 1 of 2)

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12:00 AM

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12:17 AM

@Cerberus That's good news!

I was just thinking how we might not enjoy a reconstruction as much, but then I started thinking about the Greek sculptures that we know only through Roman copies, and I wondered if we even miss the originals, or contrarily what we might feel seeing the originals in comparison.

@Robusto Indeed!

@Robusto Yes, that is an intellectual dilemma.

Cf. all the reconstructed buildings in Germany.

Well, yeah.

At least they look a thousand times nicer than what they would have built there otherwise.

But they still look new.

And you know they're fake.

Some cities in Germany were pretty much bombed flat, so ...

A century from now, though, they will look older already.

@Robusto And they have rebuilt large parts.

12:22 AM

Everything perishes eventually.

But, with luck, it can be reconstructed to look much like it once did!

Humanity has always restored or reconstructed damaged buildings of value.

I wonder about the rose windows.

What do you call those?

I think call such a window a roset(te?) in Dutch.

@Cerberus Rose windows are called rose windows.

A rose window is often used as a generic term applied to a circular window, but is especially used for those found in churches of the Gothic architectural style that are divided into segments by stone mullions and tracery. The name "rose window" was not used before the 17th century and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, among other authorities, comes from the English flower name rose.The term "wheel window" is often applied to a window divided by simple spokes radiating from a central boss or opening, while the term "rose window" is reserved for those windows, sometimes of a highly complex...

What is that museum in Berlin where you can see a very nice model of the Parthenon in all its glory? Or was it somewhere else I saw that?

@Robusto Noted.

@Robusto There are musaea in Berlin that have some antique temples.

The Parthenon, I'm not sure.

This is the problem with trying to see everything in one weekend.

They have an Egyptian temple, and they have a fake Ishtar Gate, I think?

Yeah.

12:30 AM

@Cerberus Yes. Really interesting.

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This original temple is in Leiden.

It had to be removed when the Egyptians built a dam that would flood the region.

I have always had a passion for dioramas of ancient civilizations.

Ever since I was a little kid.

Which I was at one time, believe it or not.

Yay.

I have this lovely book about Roman monuments with overlays.

The overlay is a partly transparent page which you can flip.

On the page behind it is a modern photograph; the overlay covers destroyed or absent parts of monuments with an impression of how they must have looked.

That is awesome. What book?

12:46 AM

@Robusto By Staccioli.

ebay.com/itm/…

I have this but a different edition.

And it's in French.

user image

It's a bit hard to see in a photo.

1:06 AM

Nice.

Looks nicer in reality.

2 hours later…

2:51 AM

@Cerberus What are you referring to? I am lost.

3:04 AM

Notre Dame: Blaze engulfs medieval icon - BBC News

8 hours later…

11:02 AM

@Robusto Amerikaner merken an. Die Amerikaner sind am Erkennen.

I often write unbelievably brilliant counterpoint in the couple seconds right before waking up. Then I wake up and all of it is gone. Every last note.

Just imagine how many new words were actually invented by Shakespeare, but are now lost forever because he woke up to write them down.

@Robusto A rose by any other name is still a window.

5 hours later…

4:17 PM

@Cerberus this whole situation really goes to show how absolutely nobody in the world entire has read Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. Certainly not anybody working in journalism or TV.

And that in a day and age where the whole text is accessible online for free in every language of the world.

For shame.

@MattE.Эллен to edit my code, I use an editor. None of those fucking things are editors. They are fucking atrocities. Which as I may well remind you was very much an integral part of the point you were making.

4:47 PM

@RegDwigнt You just explained to yourself that Matt explained you to yourself.

WTH where is @MetaEd?

Well then, I'll finish my point on the Notre-Dame instead.

You tune in into any channel, or grab any paper, or read statements by the leaders of the world, whatever. And all of them are in an arms race struggling for metaphors how important the building is. The heart, the soul, the symbol, the icon.
All the usual tired crap. The exact same carp they'd write if the Tower Bridge were on fire. Or the LEGO headquarters.

@RegDwigнt So a rose is a window. QED.

Had they read the book, or at the very least about the book, they'd know exactly what to say. They'd know what the building actually stands for, and why. Just how much more it actually means than all their made-up metaphors combined.

The book wasn't about the hunchback, and certainly not about Esmeralda. It was about the sad and sorry state of the cathedral at the time.

When Hugo wrote the book, Notre-Dame was in a state of total decay and disrepair. Had been for many decades. It was a crumbling old building nobody gave two shits about. People were using it as a stone quarry. They'd literally walk up and break out stones out of it to use them as construction material for their own stuff.

That was not specific to this one cathedral. It was very much a global thing. The culture of the time. Nobody gave a fuck about preserving old buildings. They were old. Architecture was not seen as art. It was a basic commodity. To be used and then discarded. Especially if it was no longer in the style of the time.

Like dude, look outside, it's baroque now, why would you care for ancient gothic shit. Good riddance.

Hugo's book changed that. It changed our view on things. We slowly but steadily started caring for preserving old architectural styles. For treating them as styles of art.

The French government passed like the first law ever that declared old buildings to be worthy of protection. You couldn't just break down any old house as you saw fit. Overnight it became a federal crime to crowbar stones out Notre-Dame to build your fence or garden shed.

Then other countries saw that and started copying the French. As was the custom of the time.

And over time that seed grew into our culture of architectural preservation and restoration that we have today.

Where it gets people teared up watching the Taliban break down an old statue somewhere on the other side of the planet.

In Hugo's time nobody would have shrugged at that. Good, they'd say. Now people can build cattle sheds out of it.

We literally wouldn't be the people we are today without Notre-Dame.

This one building, Our Lady of Paris, has single-handedly made us who we are now.

That is its true importance and meaning. And not a single fucking journalist in the entire world is aware of that.

5:32 PM

@Cerberus certainly you must have heard of what happened to the most major of all them churches, in the very heart of Moscow.

Christ the Savior Cathedral: the destruction and restoration

Imagine Italians blowing up St. Paul's to make room for a 400-meter statue of Berlusconi.

And now imagine the Russians actually did just that.

And now stop imagining, because that is an actual thing that has actually happened.

5:46 PM

@RegDwigнt I only ever saw fleeting glimpses of the Disney animation in advertisements. With some weird old building n the background.

I have a really good tasteless joke about that but... people would disapprove. It's hard to control where your mind goes, but you can control what you share of it.

@RegDwigнt Wait... singlehandedly?

Ooh...another tasteless joke possibility.

@RegDwigнt Then what do you use?

@RegDwigнt How do you mean?

@RegDwigнt Yesterday, I read about how he fought against the demolition of old buildings, yes. Wikipaedia said he influenced a change.

Way too many votive candles in that place (and every gothic church).

@RegDwigнt Horible! I didn't know.

At least it wasn't very old.

Did they also destroy Mediaeval churches?

The culture of protecting monuments was still not up to strength even in the forties.

And when did the Soviets destroy that cathedral? Twenties?

@Mitch But the candles are generally not below wooden structures.

At least they shouldn't be!

Imagine if an altar caught fire: that could be extinguished fairly quickly, and the flames would just rise up a bit under the huge dome or vault.

But roofs are made of wood and attics not so tall...

That's why great monumental fires often begin on or just under the roof.

Usually caused by construction workers.

6:03 PM

@Cerberus That's certainly what was done during the French Revolution, beheading religious statues (probably priests too).

Maybe Hugo was some kind of crypto-ancienregimiste?

@Cerberus It's a huge place but who knows what one out of thousands of tourists might do accidentally.

@Cerberus yeah it was probably something like that.

but hundreds of open flame candles inside just seems like it'd be easy to say no to.

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 22 hours ago, by John Dvorak

Imagine being the worker who set Notre Dame on fire...

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ slowly backs into bushes meme

Also the building suddenly collapsing would have probably been more tragic

18

Q: Is pollution the main cause of Notre Dame Cathedral's deterioration?

A 2017 Time article discussing the crumbling, wearing out, and water damage of France's Notre Dame Cathedral prior to the 2019 fire writes (emphasis added): Notre Dame, which looms over the capital from an island in the center of the city, is a constant reminder of Paris’ history. It has seen...

france pollution architecture environmental-damage

OMG Lexilogos continuously gets better.

All the languages. All the dictionaries.

But also, so many dictionaries with lots of work behind each one.

Nice. My 16289432nd bookmark.

6:10 PM

haha

and tab

Nah I keep different windows now. Only like 40 on this one

For example, I have this tab open:

-12

Q: What is wrong with this question... not?

I am revisiting a much-disputed question: what is wrong with this post. The crazy thing is this: I'm completely changing the question. What is good about this question? Every time I read this question, which happens to be my own, I keep wondering why it was upvoted. Most of the questions I have ...

Gosh that title

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Multiple windows. Multiple tabs. Each in a useful forward.backward sequence of pages.

@Mitch by 2021, I'm expanding to Windows versions.

I'd have a computer running on Win 95 so I can use those Flash player sites

By next week I'm going to have multiple browsers open.

Chemists are ancient. Chemists that do chemical visualizations are basically cavemen.

6:14 PM

accelerating, by the following day, I'm going to be doing all that on multiple machines.

"Please use IE9 or earlier versions."

and in the following hour, I will clone myself

and in one more second, the multiverse.

In (the many years of) grad school, in my backpack I'd have really important seminal papers that I just had to read to really understand it all, only to discover a year later that I hadn't even realized it was in my backpack under layers of other seminal works. I'd pull them out, shuffle them around going 'wow, this one is really important', put them back in, and repeat again the next year.

6:45 PM

@Mitch There is a difference between statues and buildings, but yeah.

@Mitch Candles are just less of a risk in a huge, high-vaulted, stone room.

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Quite!

I just set all the fonts in my browser to Consolas. Now everything I see on the web is Consolas!

7:01 PM

@Cerberus I'm sure it did. As well it should.

And that is very much my point. In the last 24 hours we've witnessed all the journalists in the world collectively not even so much as read Wikipedia for a minute.

It's not that we care for Notre-Dame just because we like old buildings. It's that we like old buildings just because of Notre-Dame.

We get this beautiful, um, chiasmus, metaphor, dramatic irony, whatever, all of it actually, all served to us on a golden platter by actual history.

But we're unaware of it and instead are trying to make up our own similes and antimetaboles. Each worse than the next, and none on par with the real thing.

Remember how I used to say people on the Internet don't read, they only write. Apparently this has left the virtual realm and now also holds true for journalists.

I saw the news and immediately thought of Hugo's introduction to Hunchback. So sad.

@Cerberus Well, if the powers that be blow up St. Paul's, just what do you think they will do to some tiny church in Catanzaro nobody's even heard of.

Moscow used to be called the city of forty times forty churches. Now that's obviously using "forty" in the Biblical sense of "many", so many times many. But surprisingly enough the actual figures documented are not far behind, ranging between 800 and 1500.

Going to Google Earth and counting the ones remaining is left as an exercise to the reader.

@RegDwigнt I haven't heard of Catanzaro either so...

It's in Calabria.

Does it have a church?

7:06 PM

Its claim to fame is that in the radius of some 100 miles it's the only city with two-storey buildings, one of which actually houses an escalator.

But yes there's actually quite an important church nearby. In Serra St Bruno.

So just trying to clear this all up...are you pro-Hugo or pro-down-with-religious-icons?

Now that place absolutely nobody has ever heard of, mind.

@Mitch stop trolling on the Internet. The Internet is not for trolling, it's for porn.

haha. that's all I do.

the trolling thing.

The Internet Is For Porn - Avenue Q - Original Broadway Cast

But really, any rationalist, stoic, or taoist would say dust to dust, it's all ephemeral you never step into the same river twice, history never repeats but it sure does rhyme a lot. And religious artifacts and monuments are totems to childish superstition.

7:12 PM

Dust to dust, yes. But a monument is not dust. It's the opposite of dust really. And it takes an awful lot of work to turn it into dust. If you have that much energy in you, you might as well turn it into something useful.

Like, surfing the Internet for porn.

Which brings me nicely right back to what @Cerberus was asking about. Yes they did turn a whole bunch of churches into mundane things. Like for cabbage storage.

Why destroy a church if you can instead turn it into an engineering office that designs the torch for your 1980 Olympics.

In fact as you might or might not remember, that's a story I actually wrote down on Wikipedia, and pretty much the only thing I ever wrote there.

Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Moscow)

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary is a neo-Gothic Catholic Church at Moscow's center, that serves as the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Moscow. Located in the Central Administrative Okrug, it is one of three Catholic churches in Moscow and the largest in Russia.The construction of the cathedral was approved in 1894 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs under Tsarist Russia. Groundbreaking was in 1899; construction work began in 1901 and was completed ten years later. Three-aisled and built from red brick, the cathedral is based on a design by architect Tomasz...

> members of the Mosspetspromproyekt (Russian: Мосспецпромпроект) research institute took possession of the former church. The research institute dealt primarily with project drawings for industrial facilities,[4] but also designed the Olympic cauldron used at Lenin Stadium for the 1980 Summer Games.[7]

But yeah before that they just stored cabbage there.

7:31 PM

@Cerberus the Christ the Saviour Cathedral was demolished in 1937. Shortly before the war. They couldn't build that 400-meter-high palace with Lenin on top because of the war. They had already dug out the giant excavation pit. Which after the war was turned into Moscow's biggest open-air public swimming pool.

So that's another irony of history to add to all the others we have listed today.

I guess things get sacreder the farther lost in history they are.

It is thanks to Hugo that Hitler didn't destroy Paris. And it is thanks to Hitler that Russians were able to rebuild their most important cathedral.

Really this shit writes itself. I should be a journalist.

What a mensch.

ikr

An übermensch, even.

In spite of the fact that you are not even high.

7:34 PM

So how's things. How's your little finger.

Little finger is much better, but it gets fatigued too easily still.

And some chords still stretch it in awkward directions. And by awkward I mean painful. But all in all much better than before.

How's your fluting coming along?

Well that's good news in my book.

I've not fluted for like ten days. Even though I spent every single one writing for flute and other winds.

Trying to balance five woodwinds vs five strings as an orchestration exercise.

Because why start easy if you can start hard.

Well, throw in a horn. That makes things easier.

Not for strings it doesn't.

Woodwind quintets generally include a horn for balance.

7:41 PM

A single oboe will cut through everything, and I that's just one of them five fuckers messing with my violin line.

@Robusto that I obviously know. As I said, I'm not looking for the easy way out. I'm specifically looking for a challenge.

You can weenie out and let the strings carry the weight while the woodwinds add the touches.

There's literally like only one other decet for five strings and five winds on IMSLP.

@RegDwigнt IMSLP?

Have I spelled it wrong or is this a genuine question.

That's like the wiki for all the public-domain sheet music.

ORLY?

7:43 PM

Has been around for ten years now, like. That's where every musician I know gets their sheet music from.

You are throwing me off, man.

I haven't bought sheet music in years. Not since I could just walk into Carl Fischer and browse the bins.

Well yeah. It's still browsing the bins, but we call it the Internet now.

makes notes

It's got like everything right up to Ravel and Stravinsky.

Besides, I have so much music I haven't even learned yet that I oughtn't to tempt myself with new stuff.

7:45 PM

Yeah, but it's very useful when, you know, you just want to quickly look up a line from Beethoven's 7th 2nd movement or whatever.

Then you just clickety-click on your tablet for two seconds and hey presto it's in front of you.

Sure.

And as a composer, you must surely have found it makes plagiarism much easier.

Mar 18 '11 at 17:56, by Robusto

@jgbelacqua — "The young poet mimics; the mature poet plagiarizes." — T. S. Eliot

Dunno about that. The more music you are familiar with, the harder it becomes to plagiarize from any one place. You know too much.

Hey, Bach stole stuff right and left. Although, to be fair, he did improve it quite a bit.

@Robusto yeah and that would've been the next thing I'd've said. I don't plagiarize. I openly steal.

Because then at least I know for a fact where I got it from. Instead of discovering 20 years from now that Sibelius wrote it verbatim 100 years ago.

And then having to look up who the fuck Sibelius was.

I do look things up in scores when my ears don't parse a harmonic progression in a particular passage that I like. And then I usually find it's really way simpler than I thought.

7:52 PM

Well that or when you have to play a line that makes no sense unless you see what everyone else is supposed to be doing.

Which is the flip side of the same coin really.

Speaking of music left unlearned, I still have eight months of Tchaikovsky's The Seasons to get through. I started with December back in 2008 just so I wouldn't feel compelled to do them in order, a month at a time. Ha. I opened the door to procrastination and he walked right in and made himself at home.

@Robusto so anyway, yes, that. I basically started off by treating it as a quintet for flute with a string quartet. Then adding oboe and clarinet touches. Basically hilariously dancing around as much as possible around anything I don't know how to write for.

But that had to stop after a point, because that's the whole point of the exercise.

So for the B section I cold-turkey flipped it to the opposite, a duet for oboe and clarinet, and then gradually everyone else comes in.

Are you involved with a group that could play the piece eventually?

Not yet. And of course if I were it would make things so much easier I probably wouldn't even mention it now.

Tru dat.

7:56 PM

I couldn't even name the months in Tchaikovsky's The Seasons.

I'm going through the Beethoven symphonies right now.

Listened to the sixth for the last couple days. Which was quite pertinent to what I'm doing because I have a very simple motif to work off of, so there's a ton of repetition.

There are worse things to go through.

And Beethoven's 6th is like all repetition all the time. But he makes it work.

And, like, not even through variation. Sometimes he literally repeats the same three notes for 16 bars.

It's kind of amazing how simple he can be, and repetitious, and yet everything is always new.

He makes I-V-I and all its variations so very profound.

Well the 2nd movement of the 7th that I mentioned above wasn't an accident. It's the one where you have everyone just play the note E for twenty minutes.

Yeah. The 7th is my favorite.

8:01 PM

I actually used that as a violin exercise for bow control.

Or still am. It's not easy.

Beethoven: Symphony No.7: Second Movement (Israel Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta)

Those two upbows in a row fuck with my brain.,

But yeah, here he actually makes a gorgeous melody emerge out of it. Not so much in the 6th. There it's just repeat repeat repeat with no melody in sight.

Here's some more repetition. But sublimely so:

Beethoven Symphony No. 7 – 4th Movement

Yeah he knows when to repeat and when not to. When to delete. And let the listener's mind just fill it in.

I've watched a ton of Bernstein discussing these two symphonies in that regard. Repetition and deletion. Like literally for hours on end. Every bit I could find. Very illuminating.

Yep.

But actually applying it is a different thing entirely.

Btw, the slow movement of the 9th just kills me every time.

8:05 PM

So like with dynamics I just don't really bother at all at the moment.

Just making the notes themselves work first.

Well, dynamics are important. How else do you make the music breathe?

Ah that's not quite what I mean. There's dynamics all the time in this thingie I'm doing. That is indeed the breath of the piece. It ebbs and flows constantly.

So what do you mean then?

What I mean is that if you have ten boring notes that don't work in their own right, you can't make them work just by playing half of them louder.

Well, no.

8:09 PM

Is all I mean.

That reminds me. Don't write boring notes that don't work in their own right.

Music is something that can only be apprehended over time but must be comprehended in its entirety, as a whole, before it gets written down.

That's why I sucked at composition.

That and lack of talent.

That's actually Beethoven's skill through much of the 6th. He actually does have stuff in there that goes against just that. "Arriving in the countryside". 16 repetitions of the same three notes. Those are boring if you input them in some software. People will hate you. But he manages to fix even that. And much of that is dynamics. So what you get in the end is a mental image of a coach actually rolling through the countryside.

But that is rocket science for now.

Right now I'm just making sure not to have 16 repetitions in a row.

Which is hard if all you have is a three-note motif.

Here's some more Beethoven repeating notes:

Barenboim on Beethoven "Waldstein" 1st Movement

Yeah.

It just ... fucking works, doesn't it?

8:19 PM

The one that you absolutely must watch is this:

Leonard Bernstein Discussing Beethoven's 6th and 7th Symphony

I don't remember if I linked it before.

My memory of the past two weeks is muddy.

All repeated notes all the time.

If you did I don't recall seeing it.

BTW, you must hear this version of the 3rd movement from the 9th:

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 - Mvt. 3 - Barenboim/West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Is that Barenboim

Oh yeah it says so.

Yes.

Somehow I didn't think anyone could take it that slow, but of course Barenboim can.

Well yeah that one I know then. Not that I've listened recently. I will get to the 9th in due time.

Like, it's the one most people start with, obviously. But I ordered myself patience.

Oh yeah 17:35. That's like the duration of an entire Mozart symphony.

When I first started playing in orchestras, you know what really surprised me? That the magical sounds that I had been hearing were actually written down and divided into repeating sections that were demarcated with letters. It seemed so clinical to look inside them like that.

Like looking at the intestines of a beautiful woman.

8:23 PM

That's why so many people shy away from music study. They are afraid to lose the magic.

Which never happens. You only discover always additional layers of magic still.

But you have to make the leap of faith.

Well, I've never lost the magic. Something about playing in an orchestra is beyond all that technical, clinical shit. It's like you're inside this big musical engine, and you're helping it go.

It's because you're making music. Simple as that. You are making music. It wouldn't exist without you. Unlike a painting or a book. It's only there while you're there. And then it is gone.

Well put.

8:37 PM

@Robusto well you know that favorite diatribe of mine, there is no such thing as talent, it's mastery, not a thing on a golden platter, but hard work, yada yada. I won't bore you with all of it all over again. But it's really only now and really only slowly that I begin to understand how true it is and in how many different ways.

Like the very word composer. Suddenly I've been thinking about that one a lot.

Because you really don't write. You really do compose.

You can write a piece in a minute. Indeed, you'll probably write every piece in under a minute. But then you have to compose it.

And the worst part is, you can be constantly finding the most elegant solutions to the most intricate problems, indeed that's pretty much all you have to do all the time, but you still can't be sure of what it all adds up to in the end.

Like, imagine you're a painter, and are really proud of the most masterful brush stroke you have ever placed on any canvas, in just the right place in just the right direction with just the right pressure and swing and structure and pigment. And every neighboring stroke is just like that. But then the camera zooms out and we are reminded that your painting as a whole is a still life of a dog turd.

@RegDwigнt Well, I find elegant solutions to the most intricate problems in software, but while that is an edifying experience it's not edifying in the same way music is. And whenever I've finished composing a piece of music, even if I've found many elegant solutions to certain problems, the result just leaves me flat. That is what I mean by lack of talent.

The best I ever achieve is, like, student-of-Haydn level, journeyman stuff, but definitely missing that infusion of Mozart that gets my soul to singing.

Well yeah. But then again, look at Mozart's early stuff. Again, discipline and persistence. You bang your head against the wall for ten years writing basic counterpoint. And then for another twenty trying to quit sounding like basic counterpoint. But then you just might wake up one day and hold the Jupiter symphony in your hands.

And then you die.

Well, it's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age he'd been dead for 33 years.

He cheated by visiting the Sistine chapel at the age of three.

That is when you have to start counting.

I've not even seen the chapel yet. So it's all fair game for me right now, every bassoon note I write without even knowing who bassoon is.

I don't mind writing my Jupiter symphony at the age of 100, after wasting the first 70 years on YouTube. The best of both worlds really.

8:54 PM

Well, good luck.

Thank you.

I'd prefer having written my Zauberflöte by that time.

If you knew you'd be dead two months after writing The Magic Flute would you feel compensated for your demise?

I guess that depends on whether anyone but myself would actually know of its existence. I'm a vain person. I don't want to be the only one who ever gets to hear my music.

That said, I probably wouldn't care either way. When I'm dead I'm dead. If I cared one bit about what happens after, I would be cleaning my room right now.

That's the last thing I'd do, clean my room.

There's sheet music everywhere. To say nothing of LEGO.

It's a paradise if you're like five. But it's a mess if you're pretending to be an adult.

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