Weaponized Baroque: Ted Gioia writes about the use of classical music in San Francisco to repel the homeless from public spaces. Where did the idea come from? “Experts trace the practice’s origins back to a drowsy 7-Eleven in British Columbia in 1985, where some clever Canadian manager played Mozart outside the store to repel parking-lot loiterers. Mozart-in-the-Parking-Lot was so successful at discouraging teenage reprobates that 7-Eleven implemented the program at over 150 stores, becoming the first company to battle vandalism with the viola. Then the idea spread to West Palm Beach, Florida, where in 2001 the police confronted a drug-ridden street corner by installing a loudspeaker booming Beethoven and Mozart. ‘The officers were amazed when at 10 o’clock at night there was not a soul on the corner,’ remarked Detective Dena Kimberlin. Soon other police departments ‘started calling.’ From that point, the tactic — now codified as an official maneuver in the Polite Policeman’s Handbook — exploded in popularity for both private companies and public institutions. Over the last decade, symphonic security has swept across the globe as a standard procedure from Australia to Alaska. Today, deterrence through classical music is de rigueur for American transit systems… Baroque music seems to make the most potent repellant. ‘[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,’ notes critic Scott Timberg.”
What is Poet Voice, other than the worst thing you’ll ever hear besides Billy Crystal singing? This is how Marit J. MacArthur puts it: “‘The pitch range tends to be narrower, but that by itself is not enough…It’s also what you’re doing with your voice within a given pitch range.’ Devotees of Poet Voice tend to exhibit slow pitch speed and pitch acceleration: in other words, though the pitch may go up and down over the course of the reading, it’s more rolling hills than rollercoaster. ‘You could think about it almost as the same melody over and over,’ says MacArthur…This is also, perhaps, why it can seem grating or detached: ‘In a more natural conversational intonation pattern, you vary your pitch for emphasis depending on how you feel about something,’ says MacArthur. ‘In this style of poetry reading, those idiosyncrasies … get subordinated to this repetitive cadence. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just say it in the same way.’”
A history of the Bank of England: “The Bank of England is one of Britain’s distinct contributions to history. It was chartered in 1694 to lend money to King William for war on France, when a company of London merchants received from Parliament the right to take deposits in coin from the public and to issue receipts or ‘Bank notes.’ The bank financed a summer’s fighting in the Low Countries, gave the business district of London, known as the City, a currency for trade, and lowered the rate of interest for private citizens. In the next century, the Bank of England developed for Crown and Parliament sources of credit that permitted Britain, during 115 years of intermittent warfare, to contain and then defeat France and to amass, in Bengal and Canada, the makings of an overseas empire. Through ‘discounts,’ or unsecured lending to merchants and bankers, the bank provided the City with cash and influenced rates of lending and profit, and thus the course of trade.”
Apple comes to Raleigh: “The company announced in January that it planned to establish a second headquarters, away from its Cupertino, California, base, employing up to an additional 10,000 people wherever it chose to plant roots. Unlike Amazon, which last year launched a very public competition among cities to win its HQ2, Apple has conducted its business in private, as it tends to do. ‘We’re not doing a beauty-contest kind of thing,’ CEO Tim Cook recently told Recode’s Kara Swisher.”
Did Google fake or edit part of an artificial intelligence demonstration? “Google Duplex, as the technology is called, represents a major leap forward in Silicon Valley’s efforts to produce robots that sound like people. It can make phone calls to schedule appointments, say, or to reserve a table at a restaurant, using familiar human verbal tics and filler words…that make it eerily hard to tell that the voice on the other line is an artificial intelligence. To show the tech in action, Pichai played a recording of the Google Assistant device—Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa—calling and interacting with someone who was purportedly an employee at a hair salon to make an appointment.” But something was a little off about the conversation.
Father Reggie tries to save Latin: “Fr. Reginald Foster, O.C.D.—‘Reggie,’ as he was known to generations of students—[is] a one-man Panzer battalion fighting for the resuscitation of the Latin language and against the pedagogical flummery that (he is convinced) has kept it in its grave. His enormously popular classes at Rome’s Gregorian University attracted disciples from the entire English-speaking world, making him famous well beyond Italy and a somewhat nervously cherished celebrity within the walls of the Vatican. Foster presented to the public a studied cantankerousness that ensured his dealings with pupils and employers alike took place on his own terms, as he had the luxury of dispensing with any business that wasn’t. This reviewer knows a dozen or so of Foster’s students, all of whom are profuse in their praise, all of whom attest that, in the classroom, he delivered what he promised. One of these likened Foster to that freak at corporate headquarters who is allowed to show up wearing Frank Zappa T-shirts and play Cream LPs at full volume in his office inasmuch as he’s the only one who really knows how the IT system works. In cultivating his status as enfant terrible and Latinist without peer, Foster was able to keep joshing his fans through the tough patches of grammar while confounding most of his critics. Ossa Latinitatis Sola ad Mentem Reginaldi Rationemque is as much a portrait of the artist as a specimen of his art. This 830-page cinderblock is a peculiar hybrid: part instructor’s manual, part chrestomathy, and part near-verbatim transcription of Foster’s classroom discourses, themselves a characteristic mixture of folksy grammar and polemics.”
Essay of the Day:
Lord Byron was both an outsider and an insider, famous and notorious. In the latest issue of the magazine, Algis Valiunas revisits his life and work:
“Although they may be herded together to mark a period or even a movement, each of the Romantics was a singular figure. In the first generation, whose principals outlived those of the second, William Blake, almost unknown in his day, couched shattering curses and blessings in language of disarming simplicity, and conceived theogonies and prophecies intended to rival or even supplant the Bible. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth joined forces in the collection Lyrical Ballads (1798) ‘with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.’ Coleridge took opium as more conventional gentlemen took snuff and gave birth to fantastic visions, while Wordsworth made heroes of leech gatherers and idiot boys and mourned the loss of ‘the visionary gleam’ in a world hellbent on ‘getting and spending.’ In the second generation, Percy Bysshe Shelley took the lash to a political, social, and religious order that bred human depravity and abjection, and he proclaimed the glorious coming day when freedom and true worship will make a heaven on earth. John Keats, bound for a consumptive’s early grave, kept house with rapturous melancholy and ‘beauty that must die.’
“And then there was Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most famous poet of his time and the most notorious hellion, whose life and work together created the superb desperado known as the Byronic hero, dubious exemplar for numerous impressionable young souls bent on artistic glory, sensual feasting, and political high daring, overlaid with world-weariness that made all such aspirations seem ultimately and deliciously pointless. Byron set himself at a haughty remove from the other Romantics. An aristocrat’s vanity informed and undercut Byron’s sense of literary vocation, so that he deprecated his own poetry as inferior to heroic action and simply dismissed that of his most estimable contemporaries.
“In the long satire English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, published when he was 21, Byron laid waste to his most distinguished elder, whose studied plainness of diction and commonness of subject he found noisome: ‘Yet let them not to vulgar Wordsworth stoop, / The meanest object of the lowly group, / Whose verse, of all but childish prattle void, / Seems blessed harmony to Lamb and Lloyd.’ In an 1814 letter to his friend James Hogg, he declared that Wordsworth missed his true calling as ‘a man-midwife’.”
Photos: NASA’s wind tunnels
Poem: David Yezzi, “Aubade”
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