My friend Christine Kenneally has written a piece for the Boston Globe Ideas section, explaining that we don’t like music for its mathematical beauties alone, but because it caters to us with the pitches and rhythms of human speech. “A cat’s idea of a good tune,” she writes, “would derive from yowls and meows.” There’s a business opportunity here. How hard would it be to sample many meows, identify the pitches most emphasized, construct a scale (nine tones?), and write music for cats? Owners enjoy giving catnip; surely they would be willing to pay for their cat to sit entranced beside the stereo, like the RCA dog.
Approaching Infinity
My interview with David Foster Wallace, about his new book, Everything and More: A Compact History of Inifinity, was published in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe today (10/26/03).
Rhodes’s Timoleon Vieta Come Home
My review of Dan Rhodes’s novel Timoleon Vieta Come Home is in The Nation for 3 November 2003.
Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown
My review of David A. Price’s Love and Hate in Jamestown is in the New York Times Book Review of Sunday, October 19, 2003.
Ordinary business cycles
While reading Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, I inadvertently noticed that bank president Nicholas Biddle preferred speculative capitalism—per Schlesinger, “Biddle and men like him were willing to take the chance of depression in exchange for the thrills and opportunities of boom”—for more or less the same reason that Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch) advised Conrad (Timothy Hutton) to cure his anhedonia by yielding to the dark throes of survivor guilt in Ordinary People (1980). (Perhaps the movie’s real subject was the overcoming of stagflation?)