Brahms is known as the  most serious and intellectual of the 19th Century romantic composers.  Schoenberg has a reputation for being cerebral.  (Some would say that his music works better for analysis than listening.)  But this Gypsy dance is pure fun.  It was composed by Brahms in 1861 as part of a piano quartet, orchestrated by Schoenberg in 1937.

About his motivation for transcribing the piece, Schoenberg wrote:  ‘I like the piece.  It is seldom played.  It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings.  I wanted for once to hear everything, and this I achieved.’

Listen to the Brahms/Schoenberg Rondo alla Zingarese

Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values.

— Helen Merrell Lynd

How is the war going really?  I want your honest opinion.

Charles A Dana, born this day in 1819, was a fiercely independent journalist during the Civil War, who followed General Grant and reported his monstrous errors of judgment along with his brilliant successes. 

It is a striking contrast to modern political practice that Dana had direct access to President Lincoln.  His telegraphed dispatches from the front lines were eagerly received in the White House, and Lincoln valued his unvarnished observations.  Very late in the war, Dana was appointed to an official capacity as Under-secretary of War, as he continued the same reportage with a new title.

A close confidant of Ulysses Grant, Dana supported his Presidential campaign, but later revealed his problems with alcohol to the public, and ruthlessly criticized Grant’s failings as President.

Today, the American tradition of independent journalism has not abandoned us, but it has been pushed out of the established press onto the Internet, where it is partially drowned amid unreliable and amateurish rantings.  Some of my favorites:   Bradblog   OpEdNews  TalkingPoints    CommonWonders     NewsFromUnderground      VDare   GregPalast    ThomHartmann    CounterPunch    InformationClearingHouse

‘Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth.’
— Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897)

Democracy in China

HONG KONG - While China’s crackdown on Tibet and heavy-handed approach to dissidents in general have reinforced its international image as a ruthless, totalitarian state ahead of next month’s Summer Olympic Games, the reality on the ground is that the Middle Kingdom has never been more democratic and is, step by small step, becoming even more so.

That reality was bolstered with the recent announcement by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as reported by the official Xinhua News Agency, that it has adopted a ‘tenure system’ that will give real power to traditionally rubber-stamp delegates to party congresses. In the past, party elites made all the decisions. The future could be quite different — but that all depends on implementation of the new system...

The great difference between the dictator Mao and those currently wielding power, however, is that today’s leadership understands that, without democratic reform, the country risks widespread social unrest that could ultimately bring down the party.

— Kent Ewing, writing in the Chinatown Report

The uses of paranoia

Alan Wall speaks of paranoia as the psychic force animating the mythology of our time.  ‘Is there a fundamental link, in the era of modernity at any rate, between the paranoid and the poetic?’ We transform horror and the unbearable sadness of loss — visions that threaten to isolate and destroy us — into myths that pull us together.

‘The Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination might be taken as one of the founding texts of American paranoid fiction. It opened a gap between information and credibility into which the fiction and the irony have never ceased rushing ever since. The present status of the commissions and reports into 9/11 doesn’t give much hope that they will do more than fill a parallel slot in the psyche.’

Marina Warner nominates candidates for myths to embody our fears for the future of our planet. 

It seems to me that Erichsychthon makes a strong candidate in the world of eco-disaster: he’s the tycoon in Ovid who cuts down a whole forest even after he has been warned of the consequences, and is then cursed by the outraged goddess of nature with unappeasable hunger; he ends up selling his daughter for food, and when that no longer works, consuming himself bite by bite.

Other myths of our time could be the wanderers and fugitives – Io chased from country to country; Leto forbidden from resting anywhere to give birth to her children; Aeneas leaving Troy in burning ruins with his father on his back, like Dido leaving Tyre, both of them fleeing westwards.

Last year, the most recently discovered planet, ‘2003-UB313’, was renamed Eris after the Goddess of Strife, whose actions catalyse the Trojan War....However, it turns out that astronomers weren’t inspired to this choice by the state of the world, but by the state of their profession. In a spirit of resistance to Eris’s planetary hold, I hope another body is orbiting into view, dreamed up by a fabulist’s reasoned imagination and bringing with it new creatures out of the mirror of myth.

The blame-China syndrome

It’s open season on China, newly installed as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Last week the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said China’ s economy was responsible for two-thirds of the global increase in CO₂ emissions last year. The week before, the environment group WWF calculated that China uses 15 per cent of the world’s resources. It builds two coal-fired power stations a week, manufactures half the world’s cement and is the world’s largest importer of tropical timber.

The charge sheet is long, and mostly true. But remember that 1 in every 5 of the planet’s citizens is Chinese. Looked at in this light, the stats do not look half as bad. On average, the CO₂ emissions of a Chinese person are half those of a European and a quarter those of an American or Australian. Per capita, China’s ecological footprint is below the world average.

Yes, China burns a lot of coal. But last year it also deployed more wind turbines than any other country. Its recycling businesses are among the world’s largest. It leads the world in aquaculture, helping to protect surviving ocean fisheries.

Should we at least blame China for its huge population? Go carefully. Its population would be much higher but for its sometimes coercive efforts to cut birth rates. Ah yes, China’s dodgy human rights record. We don’t like that either. Rightly so, perhaps. But we can’t have it all ways.

— New Scientist editorial

The wages of fear

Grasshoppers can be so afraid of wolf spiders that they will starve to death rather than come out of hiding and feed in the presence of the spider.  

In a June research paper, ecologists Evan Preisser and Daniel Bolnick found that the presence of a predator reduces activity rates of the prey by 45 percent in aquatic ecosystems and by 34 percent among those in terrestrial ecosystems.  Paralysis from fear seems to be common in nature.       Press release

Are animals programmed by natural selection to be excessively risk-averse, so that they actually pay a bigger price for avoiding danger than they would probably pay if they just faced t the danger?

…Of course, humans are much smarter and more rational than grasshoppers, and their measured response to danger would never cost them more than the actual risk justifies.  Our much larger brains consistently support us to avoid panic and remain calm in the face of danger.

I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
When the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
~ from Dune by Frank Herbert

School Prayer

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

— Diane Ackerman, from I Praise My Destroyer

Shays Rebellion

On this day in 1786, a New England farmer, former war hero of Bunker Hill, led a band of protestors who had become disillusioned with the American Revolution.  They had fought bravely against the British, only to find themselves treated disdainfully by the new American Confederation.  Their salary for the years of conscription was never paid, and the foreign debt accumulated in the war was passed down to small farmers.  Homes, furnishings, and livestock were confiscated by debtor’s courts, while the wealthier landowners and merchants thrived.

‘I’ve labored hard all my days and fared hard.  I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war; been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates, and all rates. . . been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth.  I have been obliged to pay and nobody will pay me.’
— Plough Jogger, quoted by Howard Zinn, in The People Speak

‘Rebellion against a king may be pardoned, or lightly punished, but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.’
— George Washington

‘A little rebellion now and then is a good thing . . . . God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . . and what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned, from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.’
— Thomas Jefferson

Washington won this one.  The protest was treated as an insurrection, and put down brutally.
Calliope article.     Wikipedia article.