Posts by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
(DIR) Post #9tni2XFIWFPE98YBpg by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T12:52:23.589052Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@sampo >using a vcs that doesn't even take exponential time to mergesmh
(DIR) Post #9tnjdFZ5Jpd9yksPLM by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T13:10:11.866707Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@lain (aside: how on earth did he manage to apppear so smug in all his photos?
(DIR) Post #9tnwwGyXb61RGBBV3o by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T15:39:18.884431Z
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>girl in doujin speaks in an incomprehensible Japanese dialect??? Why does she start every sentence with "そげん"? Why does she end every other sentence with "ばい"? What on earth does "よかとこげん" mean???
(DIR) Post #9tnzW7ao9wysUdIzYm by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T16:08:12.380651Z
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>He stands forlorn and silent, neglected or insulted, in the midst of multitudes, animated with hopes which he cannot share, and employed in business which he is no longer able to forward or retard; nor can he find any to whom his life or his death are of importance, unless he has secured some domestick gratifications, some tender employments, and endeared himself to some whose interest and gratitude may unite them to him.Please, Dr Johnson, no more.
(DIR) Post #9to2fVu9RANeMdWUYS by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T16:43:29.871924Z
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>For it is very easy to the solitary reasoner, to prove that the same arguments by which the mind is fortified against one crime are of equal force against all, and the consequence very naturally follows, that he whom they fail to move on any occasion, has either never considered them, or has by some fallacy taught himself to evade their validity; and that, therefore, when a man is known to be guilty of one crime, no farther evidence is needful of his depravity and corruption.>To imagine that every one who is not completely good is irrecoverably abandoned, is to suppose that all are capable of the same degree of excellence; it is indeed to exact from all that perfection which none ever can attain.Dr Johnson clears up a point here that has always been a mystery to me. I never really understood how the left can condemn certain persons with such vehemence on one hand while believing equal goodness in all. This single sentence "To imagine that every one who is not completely good is irrecoverably abandoned, is to suppose that all are capable of the same degree of excellence" really is a wonderful summary of such a mindset.
(DIR) Post #9to4dwpgY4FPD0obzM by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T17:05:39.840837Z
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Delitiae Musicae's slow tempi has really grown on me. Now La Venexiana's relatively brisk tempo feels kind of perfunctory to me.
(DIR) Post #9toB9xZTw9xoUWsruC by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T18:18:38.834911Z
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>Princeton University Press makes 6000 books free on project MUSE>but not Einstein's Italian Madrigal (3 Vols)What's the bleeding point then.
(DIR) Post #9toC3mLIs85VsnruoS by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T18:28:44.733553Z
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@thor The tragedy is that although the union of those sets comprises the majority of fedi users, the complement of those sets is also so large that even if you meet another person the overwhelming probability is that you share nothing in common.
(DIR) Post #9toHbrErfrdIgVvV2W by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T19:30:56.236769Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@augustus Brainlets like to dismiss Chopin because he only wrote for piano despite the fact that he was demonstrably one of the greatest masters of counterpoint on par with both Bach and Mozart.>In this respect, Chopin, although among the most radical musicians of his time, was deeply conservative and even reactionary. For him, counterpoint was the basis of all composition, and in conversation with friends like the painter eugène delacroix, he illustrated this point by citing Mozart rather than Bach. It was not just the learned and ostentatious display of fugues and canons that he thought important, but the hidden contrapuntal mastery— the voice-leading, as it is called— of the different inner and outer lines in all music.
(DIR) Post #9toJvXDo0TlOIpwR84 by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T19:56:53.755376Z
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@augustus Add this to Tolstoy's comments on Shakespeare one can conclude that slavs have a deficience sense of aesthetics, it's a pity he couldn't hear the continuity. Like Mozart, Chopin owed a lot to the style of Italian operas. In fact, Chopin have been writing nothing but bel canto opera arias all his life, and like Mozart, he enriched the lightness of Italian music with a solid grasp of counterpoint.
(DIR) Post #9toKkr0iBxyiRgHuUa by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T20:06:09.402915Z
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@augustus If you have the time, this 60 page article by Wegman (What Is Counterpoint?) explains the issue right from the beginning. TL;DR "counterpoint" was an invention the musicians used in response to a 13th century papal bull to justify their musical practices at the time.https://linx.prolatio.xyz/selif/wegman.pdf
(DIR) Post #9toL8AXHlNczf9dpNg by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T20:10:23.838264Z
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@augustus Wegman only posts part of the Bull, and I couldn't find a full translation anywhere. However, after some very painful searches through books of canon law, I managed to locate a full latin version, so I might as well post it.https://linx.prolatio.xyz/docta-sanctorum-patrum.txt
(DIR) Post #9toLIVZwNhcfp0oV0q by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T20:12:15.369616Z
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@augustus Sorry, the image to text was done awfully, the original pages are here.
(DIR) Post #9toLdXjbYqAQabMd7I by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-07T20:16:03.492930Z
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@augustus Get this, the Papal Bull actually only allowed "octavae, quintae, quartae", so only octaves, 5ths and 4th, all other interval (2nds, 6ths etc) are all haram.
(DIR) Post #9tp43eDOU92CCUYV96 by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T04:33:48.830735Z
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@tija Much of Tolstoy's essay is devoted to ridiculing King Lear, a sad irony since Tolstoy, when he came to the last station of his cross, had involuntarily turned into King Lear . A sophisticated Resenter will not bring forth Bertolt Brecht as true Marxist drama, or Paul Claudel as true Christian drama, in order to prefer either of them to Shakespeare. Yet Tolstoy's outcry has the poignance of his authentic moral outrage and all the authority of his own aesthetic splendor.Palpably, Tolstoy's essay-like his What Is Art? -is a disaster, prompting the serious question of how so great a writer could have been so mistaken. Disapprovingly, Tolstoy quotes as idolaters of Shakespeare a distinguished company that includes Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Turgenev. He could have added Hegel, Stendhal, Pushkin, Manzoni, Heine, and scores of others, indeed virtually every major writer capable of reading, with a few unsavory exceptions like Voltaire. The less interesting aspect of Tolstoy's rebellion against the aesthetic is creative envy. There is a particular fury in Tolstoy's denial of an eminence shared by Shakespeare with Homer, a sharing that Tolstoy reserved for his own War and Peace. Much more interesting is Tolstoy's spiritual revulsion against the immoral and irreligious tragedy of King Lear. I prefer such a revulsion to any attempts to Christianize Shakespeare's deliberately pre-Christian drama, and Tolstoy is quite accurate in seeing that Shakespeare, as a dramatist, is neither a Christian nor a moralist.I remember standing in front of Titian's painting of the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo when it was shown in Washington, D.C. Appalled and overwhelmed, I could only nod agreement to the comment of my companion, the American painter Larry Day, that the picture had something like the power and effect of the final act of King Lear. The Titian was there in St. Petersburg for Tolstoy to see; I can recall no specific comment by him, but presumably he would have conceived Titian's image of that horror, the promised end, as well. What Is Art? discards not only Shakespeare but Dante, Beethoven, and Raphael. If one is Tolstoy, perhaps one can dispense with Shakespeare, but we owe something to Tolstoy for locating the true grounds of Shakespearean power and offense: freedom from moral and religious overdeterminations. Evidently Tolstoy did not mean this in any commonplace sense, since Greek tragedy, Milton, and Bach also failed the Tolstoyan test of popular simplicity that was passed by some works of Victor Hugo and of Dickens, by Harriet Beecher Stowe and some minor Dostoevsky, and by George Eliot's Adam Bede. These were examples of Christian and moral art, though "good universal art" was also acceptable in a curious secondary grouping that included Cervantes and Moliere. Tolstoy demands "the truth," and the trouble with Shakespeare, in Tolstoy's perspective, is that he was not interested in the truth.That certainly joins the issue: How relevant is Tolstoy's complaint? Is the center of the Western Canon a pragmatic exaltation of lies? George Bernard Shaw greatly admired What Is Art? and presumably preferred Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to Shakespeare in somewhat the same way that Tolstoy ranked Uncle Tom's Cabin above King Lear. But this kind of thinking is now drearily familiar to us; one of my younger colleagues told me she valued Alice Walker's Meridian over Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow because Pynchon lied and Walker incarnated the truth. With political correctness replacing religious rightness, we are back in Tolstoy's polemic against difficult art. And yet Shakespeare, as Tolstoy refused to see, is virtually unique in simultaneously manifesting both difficult and popular art. There, I suspect, was the true Shakespearean offense and the ultimate explanation of why and how Shakespeare centers the Canon. To this day, multiculturally, Shakespeare will hold almost any audience, upper or lower class. What burned its way into the canonical center was a mode of representation universally available as far as I can tell, give or take a few French naysayers.
(DIR) Post #9tp7lAzcnEpcAqYwwS by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T05:15:16.644212Z
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@augustus It's why most of 14th century music have that "hollow" sound, yes.
(DIR) Post #9tp7xXRn8OVRI1dGC0 by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T05:17:30.927961Z
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@lain The Da Ponte Operas, the mature piano concerti and the mature string quintets should be more than enough. Just make sure you read Rosen so you actually understand him.
(DIR) Post #9tpGpflzC92KNlP02y by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T06:56:53.764094Z
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@tija Fair enough since I'm not sure if Bloom spoke Russian at all. But the issue of aesthetics has not been resolved. As Lichtenberg said, when the book his the head and makes a hollow sound, it's not always the fault of the book.
(DIR) Post #9tpHmglT9RjkXkIkjo by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T07:07:35.400064Z
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@tija This loss of meaning via translation is one of the primary reason why I haven't read a word of Tolstoy until I'm fluent in Russian tbh. Not proud of it, but prefer it to the alternative.
(DIR) Post #9tpOwMvAU2GdZgOuvI by deorsum@pleroma.prolatio.xyz
2020-04-08T08:27:45.543401Z
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@tija You get it now. Tolstoy mounted an (Christian) attack on the scandalous morals of pre-Christian Britain depicted in Shakespeare. Unfortunately this has no connection with the aesthetics power of the play, which cannot be denied. So Tolstoy's aesthetics sensibility is still up in the air, unfortunately.