Quoted by Doron Swade in his book, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, this seems pretty much universally relevant:
Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
Bob on Bob, Louis Menand’s review of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, in the September 4, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. A great review of a book that sounds less than great, due to Dylan’s mumbling indifference to most interviewers, at least during the early days of his career. Menand zeroes in on Dylan’s interest in the sound of music, more than lyrics, and how artists, either out of creative exploration or commercial necessity, often explore a greater range of interests than their fans, who want to put their prey into boxes:
…[Dave] Van Ronk was a big spirit, and in his posthumously published memoir, written with Elijah Wald, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”—a wise and very funny book; in some ways a great book—he had this to say:
I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.
…You can’t find the road that gets you from “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “This Land Is Your Land” through “Pirate Jenny” to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.”
…Van Ronk thought that Dylan was sloppy, that he wrote his songs too fast. Even in Dylan’s best songs (I know that my life will not be worth much after these words appear in print), there are lines that are truly lame. “And the words that are used/For to get the ship confused/Will not be understood as they’re spoken” is not even lyrical, forget about the sense. “Ballad of a Thin Man” does not profit from the verse about the one-eyed midget shouting the word “NOW.” (“And you say, ‘For what reason?’/And he says, ‘How?’/And you say, ‘What does this mean?’/And he screams back, ‘You’re a cow/Give me some milk/Or else go home.’ ” Maybe it makes some kind of sense as a proto-hip-hop rant.) Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”
K.C. Cole has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Why editors must dare to be dumb, about how science editors tend to be uncomfortable with advanced science topics they do not understand. What it boils down to, in Cole’s opinion, is a fundamental discomfort with uncertainty and senselessness:
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
…
So what is it about science that makes them [editors] uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
…
Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
Embrace uncertainty, in science, in art and in life. As the Talking Heads sang, stop making sense.
Here is an interesting analysis of sound and silence in Finnegans Wake, featuring my favorite little static interruptor, “zinzin.”
Great Dave Hickey interview in zingmagazine #14. Here’s a snippet:
The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the ’50s and the ’60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made — from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late ’60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy — you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the ’60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society — the society of contemporaries.
And more a little later:
The main thing is Americans don’t like art, they won’t pay for art, they don’t deserve art. That’s just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That’s fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it’s not very educational.
I keep challenging people, “Tell me one thing that you’ve learned from art.” It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don’t need to know anything to understand good art.
OK, one last quote before I go / one last cup of words ‘fore I go / to the valley below:
I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that’s very difficult. Works of art don’t have messages. They don’t have determinate meanings. They’re not just formal objects.
Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don’t mean anything, but they have meaning. And that’s how art works. A Pollock doesn’t mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It’s totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don’t know what it meant, I know that the story doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. Artists don’t know what they’re doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.
I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That’s not meant to discount the artist. It’s meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don’t know anyway.
