celestialmonochord

Philosophy of Science, Part 1 of 2

I studied a lot of philosophy of science in grad school, and I’m very glad I did — it deepened the way I understand a lot of things that are very important to me personally. Still, looking back, most of the big questions I thought I was grappling with then no longer seem important to me, and ring a bit hollow. But two details do seem to keep coming back to me … and if they keep following me around, they must matter somehow.

We spent a lot of time talking about how much the stuff scientists talk about are "social constructs" — stories scientists tell each other as a group of folk that make up a culture — and how much they’re something else having more to do with the universe they study.

Always, during these discussions, some guy or other would get rather aggressive and try to prove that "things exist" by banging his fists on desks, kicking chairs, thumping his chest like an ape, etc.

Eventually, it became clear to me that whether or not desks are, in fact, hard is rarely a question that real scientists debate for very long. More typically, they debate things like, say, how to reconcile two experiments that give different answers for the precise magnitude of dark energy, or whether a certain experiment in a particle accelator really did create a certain particle for a miniscule moment, thereby implying some new form of energy field, and so on. There’s no need for philosophers of science to go around slapping themselves. The real questions are much more subtle.

You can draw whatever Moral of the Story you please. I suppose one lesson is that the most vivid, dramatic, immediately impressive arguments are very often not correct.

Thanks go to "The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations" by Ashmore, Edwards and Potter, in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology.

Shaking the Hell Out of Folks

Shaking
image adapted from poster at the Library of Congress

I think more deeply about pre-War folk and blues than I do most other music, so maybe it's me … but it seems striking how many of these old recordings have lines that ring in your head, multiplying and deepening and getting sweeter the more you think about them.

Probably, that's one thing Bob Dylan learned from the old music … but that's another story.

Uncle Dave Macon rewrote an old minstrel song into a song satirizing the automobile. His "Jordan Is a Hard Road To Travel" was a "topical" song when it was recorded in 1927, even though its sentiments were already old-fashioned. You can hear it at Hongking Duck, and the New Lost City Ramblers have a great cover of it on "40 Years of Concert Recordings."

For now, never mind the fascinating chorus with its reference to the River Jordan. Let's look at one of the verses:

You can talk about your evangelists
You can talk about Mr. Ford, too
But Henry's a-shaking more Hell out of folks
Than all the evangelists do

There are multiple jokes packed into these few lines.

The most literal is about the suspension system, tires, rough idle of those 1920's Ford flivvers, not to mention the terrible roads they had to travel. A ride in the country in a Model-T Ford was so rattling and convulsive that Uncle Dave considered it even more violent than the jostling you suffered in the Holiness and Pentecostal church services sweeping the USA in the 1920's. So, that's one layer of the joke, and a pretty funny one.

Uncle Dave disliked the automobile, in part because it put him out of business as a mule teamster. He also disliked the disruption the automobile caused in society, in the way people lived. Ford's production methods and the cars they produced brought wrenching changes in the economy, social hierarchies, family structures, and geography of the USA, and fast. These shocks were widely discussed and debated.

So maybe we have the convulsive services of the Evangelists trying to shake people until all the hellishness comes out of them, while Ford's disruptions are bringing out the hell in people in quite another sense. And in this battle, Dave thinks Ford is winning.

But there's still one more joke in this little verse. Uncle Dave would have known very well that the Ford Motor Company had long campaigned to instill "moral purity" and "family values" in its autoworkers. They sent company reps to the workers' homes for surprise inspections, looking for booze, tobacco, loose women, soiled linens, etc. Henry Ford, like the evangelists, was trying to save souls.

As part of this effort, Ford also sponsored old-time fiddle contests with enormous cash prizes, believing that white, down-home fiddling was more wholesome than the hot African American-influenced jazz and blues so popular in the era. Every mention of these contest I've seen treats them as a strategy by Henry Ford to instill his beloved conservative values in his workers and customers.

I haven't made a thorough study of it, but I suspect Ford also, or instead, wanted to improve the reputation of his product. He wanted to associate his newfangled contraption with old-time values, thereby dispelling the stench of sex, jazz, and chaos that seemed to hover around the automobile in the minds and noses of many potential customers.

I doubt Uncle Dave's sharp wit could have missed the irony that Henry Ford was pushing nostalgia and wholesomeness at the same time he was creating a sinful new American culture.

You can talk about your evangelists
You can talk about Mr. Ford, too
But Henry's a-shaking more Hell out of folks
Than all the evangelists do

Lisa Simpson Goes to Banjo Camp

My wife Jenny reports that the episode of The Simpsons that aired on Sunday, April 17 briefly showed Lisa Simpson wearing a t-shirt that said “Banjo Camp.” I missed it because I glanced down to peel a shrimp. I would love a screenshot of it, if anybody out there can make that happen for me.

Also, if anyone would kindly explain to me just what’s so funny, exactly, about wearing a t-shirt that says “Banjo Camp” …

UPDATE (April 26, 2005)

It turns out that Lisa’s shirt actually said “Band Camp”:

Bandcamp

“Banjo Camp” was merely wishful thinking on Jenny’s part. Ah well, it could happen to anyone. Actually, it does explain a lot — of course, band camp is for dweebs, and so, is funny. But banjo camp? That would’ve needlessly alienated a key demographic, don’t you think?

Art and Science on “Morning Edition”

NPR’s Morning Edition has been airing a series exploring the intersections between art and science. It’s had some fine moments, and it’s definitely worth listening to on the web. Probably my favorite segment was on Louis and Bebe Barron, pioneers of electronic music in the 1950’s.

An apparently eccentric husband and wife team, the Barrons found ingenious ways to get crude 1950’s-era electronics to make strange noises. Frequently, they would deliberately push circuits beyond their limits, creating various whirrs, whistles, and pops as the circuitry fried — that is, they made instruments that made music through self-destruction.

The home page of the series reads like a kind of Dream-Jobs-Only classifieds section.

Orphan Songs, Part 4:
Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

The Carter Family, via The Country Music Hall of Fame

“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” is one of the best-loved, most-recorded songs ever. I’ve always loved it, but never quite understood it — it’s rather oblique. What circle are we talking about, exactly?

I was standing by the window
On one cold and cloudy day
And I saw the hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Chorus:
Can the circle be unbroken
Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky

Lord, I told the undertaker
Undertaker, please drive slow
For this body you are hauling
How I hate to see her go

I followed close beside her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in the grave

Went back home Lord my home was lonesome
Missd my mother she was gone
All my brothers sisters crying
What a home so sad and lone

It’s no wonder I’ve been puzzled. It turns out that this version was based on an earlier song that gave a full explanation, but the story given in the earlier version has now been mostly forgotten, thanks to the new, familiar one.

A. P. Carter, of the great Original Carter Family, pieced together the more familiar version a couple of days before it was first recorded, during a session on May 5, 1935. He completely re-wrote the original song’s verses — the storyline of the song — but left the chorus essentially unchanged. So, today, we all know the original refrain, but not the narrative that gives the refrain a literal meaning. (This was probably an improvement, songwriting-wise.)

The original song seems to have been first published in a hymnal in 1907. The idea of the verses was that, back in the good old days when our family was all together and happy and harmonious, we all literally sat in a circle — maybe around the hearth — warmly enjoying each other’s loving presence. (You remember that, don’t you?)

But now, years later, many of us have died and gone to heaven, breaking that circle. The chairs are emptying, one by one. But don’t despair! In Heaven, that circle is slowly being re-assembled — member by member, as we all pass on — and some day, the circle will be unbroken once again.

But there’s a catch … well, beyond the fact that you’ll have to die to complete the story, there’s an even more serious catch. It’s not a sure thing that everybody in the family will wind up in heaven to help complete the circle. Some of us may wind up ELSEWHERE.

So the song was written to ask, in essence: Will you go to Heaven when you die? Or will your loved-ones sit in Heaven, in their broken circle, looking mournfully at that empty chair where [ your name here ] should have sat, but was instead led astray? Will the circle be unbroken? It’s up to you! It will be unbroken, but only if you quit your sinful ways and are saved!

Both versions of the song are “alter call” songs, used to invite you to come forward to the alter to be saved. Here’s the lyrics to the original:

There are loved ones in the glory,
Whose dear forms you often miss.
When you close your earthly story,
Will you join them in their bliss?

Chorus
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?
In a better home awaiting
In the sky, in the sky?

In the joyous days of childhood,
Oft they told of wondrous love,
Pointed to the dying Savior
Now they dwell with Him above.

You remember songs of heaven
Which you sang with childish voice,
Do you love the hymns they taught you,
Or are songs of earth your choice?

You can picture happy gatherings
Round the fireside long ago,
And you think of tearful partings,
When they left you here below.

One by one their seats were emptied,
One by one they went away;
Here the circle has been broken—
Will it be complete one day?

Note that both versions have nearly the same melody as the old Negro spiritual, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah, Since I Lay my Burden Down,” which you’ll find on your copy of the Harry Smith anthology.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Acony Bell

Aconybell
Time the Revelator (CD cover detail)

Gillian Welch wrote a song about a flower she calls the Acony Bell. Like most of Welch’s songs, it’s great — beautifully performed and written. The lyrics describe the flower in terms so detailed and specific, they remind me of the kind of formal botanical descriptions you find in guidebooks and taxonomic encyclopedias.

The flower itself has always been elusive. Early attempts by botanists to study it were frustrated by the fact that the flower is rare, hard to grow, and is found naturally only in a small geographical range way up in the mountains running through Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The plant was so elusive that it was eventually “discovered by a man who didn’t name it, named for a man who didn’t see it, by someone who didn’t know where it was,” according to an article in Harvard Magazine.

In a way, Gillian Welch has added another chapter to this long history of confusion. My first attempt at Googling the flower was frustrated because its name is usually spelled Oconee Bell, not Acony Bell as Welch had it on her CD. To help you along in your own research, here’s some information about the Oconee Bell, also known as Shortia galacifolia.

Well it makes its home amid the rocks and the rills
Where the snow lies deep on the windy hills
And it tells the world “Why should I wait?
This ice and snow’s gonna melt away.”

J. Dan Pittillo @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

Banjos and Culdesacs

Flying into Raleigh-Durham Airport for the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, I looked through the window, soaking up my first glimpses of North Carolina and dreaming of banjos. Then I noticed how much culdesacs look like banjos from the air:

Banjo culdesac

And then I thought … “I’ve got to stop thinking about banjos before I go mad!”

“Culdesac” is also a term sometimes used to describe a website that has links only to other pages within the same site, and has no links to anywhere else on the web. So if you’re just pointing and clicking at such a site, there’s NO WAY OUT.

And so, maybe banjos really are sort of like culdesacs. Hmmm, yes … food for thought …

Orphan Songs, Part 3
They All Pretend They’re Orphans

They all pretend they’re orphans
And their memory is like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away

— Tom Waits, “Time”

She made up someone to be
She made up somewhere to be from

— Tom Waits, “Dead and Lovely”

In Orphan Songs, Part 2, I speculated about why I’ve found so many songs about orphans and being parentless. Here’s one last possibility.

When we’re young, parents are sometimes an embarrassment — a reminder of who we used to be, or that we’re not yet who we hope to become. You often see this embarrassment in memoirs of the experiences of immigrants. Here you are in your American clothes with your American attitude, accompanied by your father in his black suit and yarmulka, or your mother with her sari and her bindi on her forehead.

To fantasize about being an orphan, of sorts, is to play with the idea of escaping your class, your status, and your cultural (sometimes even fanancial) inheritance.

Memory is an act of imagining, and to be an orphan is to “remember” (i.e., imagine) your parents, which is also to idealize yourself as someone able to advance your artistic, political, financial and other goals. It’s the old story of leaving home, going to the big anonymous city, and becoming somebody else.

In a post — which is no longer online — to the unofficial Martin Guitar forum, journalist Don Hurley once wrote about an encounter with Bob Dylan in England, during the filming of Don’t Look Back:

“I took a photographer to his suite to do a profile for the next day’s paper. I questioned him on his background and about supposedly running away from home at the age of eleven. He confirmed it all and said he could not remember when he last saw his parents, that he was “just an orphan of the road.” We finished the interview and made for the elevator which my photographer and I shared with an older couple and their son, who turned out to be Dylan’s parents and his brother David. They were literally in the suite next to his!”

I’ll write more about such “orphans” — in the context of the Folk Revival — in a future installment of this Orphan Song series.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Dark Was The Night: Candles

Candle flame

Night used to be dark — really dark. When the sun went down, you pretty much couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face, unless there was a moon in the sky, a display of aurora, or lightning. Or you could get light from some kind of open flame. To accept this as fact is easy enough, but to imagine it as a reality is hard for people living in the 21st century.

Consider the problem of trying to imagine living by candlelight. Candles used to be made of tallow (essentially animal fat) and bee’s wax. Both cast a dim, yellow, flickering light. Sometimes a tallow candle would spatter hot fat on someone nearby.

The first major challenge to deep darkness at night was from gaslight in major cities, made possible by late-19th century coal and oil refining. To respond to the challenge presented by the great steadiness and brightness of gaslight, the candle industry developed the paraffin candle, which produced much brighter, whiter, and steadier light than wax or tallow candles ever did.

But paraffin is a byproduct of the same refining technology that produces gaslight. So the candle itself has been modernized to respond to the challenges of technology.

If you want to imagine life before Night was banished, it won’t work to simply light some candles and turn off all your lights (don’t forget the VCR display and the clock radio and the light from your neighbor’s porchlight leaking into your windows!). The candles you’re likely to be usings are already modern lighting techology.

The Revolution Will Not Be Heavenly

Today, I bought a copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’ book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in an edition edited by Stephen Hawking. The original 1543 book helped inspire people to give up the idea that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that the Earth circles the Sun, not visa versa.

As I understand it, the change was such a shock and so deeply altered the way people saw the hierarchy of things, in both the heavens and on Earth, that for centuries, whenever people talked about similar upheavals, they would call them another Revolutions, meaning Copernicus’ book. After a while, the association of the term with the book got forgotten — hence the word “revolution”.

Trouble is, in the original title, De revolutionibus orbium colestium, the word means “spinning around and around in circles,” as in, “the going around of the celestial orbs.” So the root word of “revolution” is not “revolt,” it’s “revolve” — to wind up exactly where you started and have to do it all over again.

And all too often, that’s how revolutions have gone, at least outside of science. You wind up with the same cast of characters, at best, and you have to stage another revolution, over and over and over.

I swear, the fact that this is Tax Day is PURE COINCIDENCE!