Social distancing and covid-19 (link)

Well-done aimation showing why social distancing matters:
https://youtu.be/dSQztKXR6k0

Five by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick. The Variable Man (1957) What’s there to say? Dick had probably the wildest and most accurate imagination of the golden age SF writers. He wanted to know the social and psychological effects of technology, and there are still too few writers (and others) who take that question seriously. Each tale in this anthology deals with issues that still trouble us. His technical imagination was limited, but his social and psychological imagination was not.
     The Variable Man: social control by algorithm, warfare between empires, the urge towards dictatorship, rivalries between government agencies.
     Second Variety: total war, autonomous weapons, artificial intelligence.
     The Minority Report: preventing crime by identifying criminal before they do the deed.
     Autofac: automated and autonomous production.
     A World of Talents: social competition and class struggle, symbolised by conflict between humans with psi talents and humans without.
     Dick’s vision is often bleak, but even in the bleakest stories the spark of resistance to tyranny glows, however dimly. ****

ETs want Earth!

    Groff Conklin. Invaders of Earth (1952) A nicely done collection of invader stories, with enough twists to satisfy even the reader of current speculative fiction. About the only thing none of the  authors attempt is a truly alien alien. Not surprising, since every example is pulp or popular magazine fiction, whose authors couldn’t afford to speculate too far outside of their putative readers’ boxes.
     I won’t summarise any of the stories. The Wikipedia article lists all 22 stories published in the original hard-cover edition. This Tempo Books edition, contains only 17. All first rate examples of their genre. A keeper, despite its age. Or maybe because of it. ***

Alan Bullock: Hitler

     Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962) A re-read. See my first review  About the only things to add are, first, that Hitler suffered from Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
     In his Epilogue, Bullock points out that Hitler was a European, and that the malaise that he embodied was not unique to Germany. He writes Hitler’s idiom was German, but the thoughts and emotions to which he gave expression have a more universal currency. Quite so, and the rise of the far right, of ethnic nationalisms, of the paranoia triggered by the globalisation of our world, show that these thoughts and emotions are never far below the surface.
     Bullock ends his Epilogue with  [Hitler] was in revolt against ‘the System’ not just in Germany but in Europe, against the liberal-bourgeois order, symbolised for him in the Vienna which had once rejected him. To destroy this was his mission, the mission in which he never ceased to believe, and in this, the most deeply felt of his purposes, he did not fail. Europe may rise again, but the old Europe between the 1789, the year of the French Revolution, an 1939, the year of Hitler’s War, has gone forever – and the last figure in its history is Adolf Hitler, the architect of its ruin. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – If you seek a monument, look around.
     The European Union is an attempt to refashion that liberal bourgeois polity. Brexit is an attempt to repudiate it. It’s ironic that the liberal democracy that refused to surrender to Hitler in 1942 is now the carrier of the same infection, and the one that came to England’s aid is sick with it.
     800 and some pages, and oddly enough a page-turner. Recommended. ***

Two Movies

I like movies, and sometimes watch one twice or even three times. Here's two we watched in March of this year.

    High Noon (1952) [D: Fred Zinneman. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly] This is one of the classics that holds up. If anything, it gets better every time I see it. Simple story of a sheriff who decides on his wedding day that he has to finish a job he started when he arrested a killer, who has been released, and is coming back for revenge. The one man who is willing to help pulls out when he finds out he’s the only one. The townsfolk back off from risking their lives, unwilling to accept that the killer and his cronies will destroy the town if they win. Cooper wins of course, and rides off with his bride, no doubt happy to leave the town to stew in its cowardice.
   The movie’s a fable, but it’s an unobtrusive one. The pace, the beautifully composed shots, the wonderful tonality of the black and white film, the use of natural sound, the haunting theme music, the conceit of making the movie exactly as long as the sheriff’s job, the desolation surrounding the town, the well-realised characters, all these combine to tell an astonishingly believable story. I’ve seen this movie at least three times that I can recall; I do not tire of it. ****

The movie is adapted from a short story The Tin Star. See my disussion of it at https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2014/08/john-cunningham-tin-star-colliers.html

   The American President (1995) [D: Rob Reiner. Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Michael J. Fox, Martin Sheen.] A love fantasy set in the White House, where widowed president Andrew Shepherd woos lobbyist Sidney Ellen Wade, while dealing with a reelection campaign. The plot is convoluted enough that a short summary is impossible, but the main line is clear enough: Boy meets girl, boy and girl have an affair, boy almost loses girl, boy and girl wed and live happily ever after. Well acted, competently paced and photographed, with just enough cliches bent off-kilter to provide freshness: we enjoyed this movie. Romantic love always gets me. I want to believe that everybody can be happy. The political games are well handled, too, and while they avoid getting too deep into the dirt and stay well away from the dark side, they feel true enough to make us believe the threats to Andrew and Sidney’s happiness, and how they resolve the ethical questions surrounding their relationship. **-½

Murder in the Napa Valley: Bitter Finish by Linda Barnes

Linda Barnes. Bitter Finish (1983) Michael Spragge, scion of a rich Boston clan, actor, sometime P.I., partner in a California winery, answers a summons for help from his business partner and sometime lover. The winemaker has gone missing. A nearly headless corpse found in a derelict car on the winery estate isn’t him. Etc and so on and so forth.
     The book’s an almost page-turner, a mildly amusing entertainment, one of Barnes’ first attempts at a crime series, reissued when her value as a crime writer rose high enough. She followed up the Spraggue series with ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle, a better imagined character. *½

Homo musicis: Why humans make music

Daniel Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music (2006) Levitin was in the music business in LA for many years, but discovered a yen for understanding what it was all about. So he became a neurologist, believing that understanding how the brain works when we make or respond to music would explain it all. It doesn’t, but it comes close.
     Music is species-specific behaviour: only humans make music.We could label oursleves homo musicis. Other animals use sounds for communication and for courtship displays, but none, as far as we can tell, play around with sound-sequences like we do. Not even whales.
     Every known culture and society has music. The three features of music are rhythm, melody, and harmony. What’s interesting is how we perceive them. Rhythm is built on sequences of strong and weak beats. We recognise the same rhythm whether played fast or slow. Melody is a sequence of intervals, not notes: we recognise the same melody whether played with higher or lower notes. Harmony in the sense of timbre is omni-present: human voices and all musical instruments generate different combinations of overtones in addition to the main tone. Think of chords as deliberately created and controlled overtone groups. Then a melody becomes a sequence of chords combined with a rhythm. By the way, a melody can be played with different rhythms. And in every culture, music and dance are connected. You can’t have one without the other. (The Western habit of suppressing movement while listening to a performance is a relatively short-lived aberration.)
     Levitin sees two puzzles: First, how do we perceive and produce music? Second, how come music is such an apparently necessary part of human experience? Even people who are tone-deaf experience music as more or less pleasurable. Neurology provides some of the answers. Every part of the brain is involved when we make or listen to music. The cerebellum controls repetitive movements. The cortex plans them, and generates expectations. The limbic system supplies both the memory and the emotions. (It’s unclear just how many melodies we can recognise, for most of us it’s in the hundreds.) The auditory system decodes the complex wave-forms of the sounds of music, and delivers the results to other areas of the brain that recognise melody, rhythm, harmony, and the words of a song. Music is intimately connected with movement and language.
     We use music to build community. Although we can make it a solitary pursuit, it is first and foremost a collective one. We sing together, we dance together, we make music in groups. We prefer the music of our ingroup. Music is part of our courtship behaviour. It persists in our memories after dementia has destroyed almost every other part of our selves. A fragment of a song will trigger memories, and the emotions that accompany them. Music is such a pervasive part of our individual and collective experience that we take it for granted, and hardly realise how much it shapes our lives.
     As you can see, it’s complicated. Levitin has become a premier researcher in the neurology of music. Every result raises new questions. This book is now 14 years old, and recent work on questions of consciousness, mental health, the role of emotions, dementia, etc, have superseded some of his insights, but on the whole I think it’s an excellent introduction to music as a human endeavour. Levitin is an academic, so he tends to pile on the details, but that’s the only flaw in a very good book. Recommended. ***