Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. Actually I can’t stand Blossom Dearie. Anyway this is the view from the kitchen last night. Note the mist hovering over the lake.
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A Bad Guide 
What, even singing Gershwin?
That’s all right. But why can’t she ever sing anything straight? It’s always too bloody clever by half.
Don’t I remember, Crown, that you Hold Views on red trousers?
http://uncouthreflections.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/what-to-make-of-all-the-colorful-pants/
I am woefully ignorant of so many things (though not of the equine history of Native Americans, I’m happy to say), including Blossom Dearie. My first negative impression, hearing her now, was of an affected little-girl voice. But that impression quickly faded and gave way to respectful admiration. The only part I didn’t like (maybe this is what Crown thought was too clever) was how she slowed the bridge (or what my uncle likes to call the “release”) way down, all the way into what I almost experienced as an absence of rhythm. But maybe this a Pierre Menand thing: when you’re singing for those who know a song inside-out, it’s not a bad thing to take liberties.
I do like hearing the optional introductory parts of songs that I thought I already knew.
Blossom Dearie was on British TV a lot on the weekends in the 1960s. That’s when I first heard her singing. She did a popular song about Georgie Fame, another 1960s artiste.
I did a post about the equine history of the Plains Indians a couple of years ago. It’s not that I don’t know anything, the point is that I didn’t learn it at school in a subject called History (and from a historiographical point of view that was quite right: even at the age of 14 you don’t study history in order to be able to answer general knowledge questions any more than you study maths for that reason). I don’t know Pierre Menand, and I barely know Pierre Menard, that must be who you mean, but I usually much prefer a well-known song to be sung straight. I don’t like Jimmi Hendrix’s version of the American national anthem, for example. And of course I like classical variations and fugues, but that Blossom Dearie stuff reminds me of Bill Murray’s lounge singer imitation.
I like the usually-skipped introductions too.
I may hold views about red trousers, I just can’t remember what they are right now, but it’s interesting that it’s a transatlantic thing. Someone should nudge them in the direction of that ‘Fucking Red Trousers’ website.
Menard, yes. That was hasty and pretentious of me. Less hastily: I meant that when the singer and most of the audience already knows a song, especially when it’s a “jazz standard”, then singing it straight is not necessarily the best thing. Also that people will necessarily receive it filtered by lots of previous experience, so that any performance is going to be on some level a commentary on other performances.
I have three renditions of “All of Me” in my iPad: one by Ella Fitzgerald, one by Louis Armstrong, and one by Billie Holiday. Maybe the last is the straightest, but they all mess with it some. Fitzgerald often messes around with songs in ways that could come across as self-indulgent or “too clever by half”, but I rarely mind because (a) she does it so well and (b) she’s clearly having such a great time doing it.
even at the age of 14 you don’t study history in order to be able to answer general knowledge questions
Yes. Although I take more pleasure than most people in stuffing my head with facts, that has very little to do with how I think about mathematics. Fact-collecting versus understanding.
When I was trying to decide where I wanted to do my undergraduate studies, I seriously considering Brown (where I coincidentally ended up teaching later), mainly because it had recently done away with “distribution requirements” or “general education requirements”. Most US colleges/universities make a point of requiring their undergrads to study a little of this and a little of that. I remember at age 17 being extraordinarily irritated by the notion that it’s worthwhile to force-feed our youth with knowledge in that way, even in the service of fine phrases like “well-rounded” or “informed citizenry”. I could not and cannot believe that one who has been made to study a bit of history against his or her will can be said to be better for it, and the same goes for pretty much any other subject. I remember arguing vociferously with a friend of my parents about this: sarcastically describing what you learn under those circumstances as just enough to make small talk at a party.
In the end I chose Harvard over Brown for various reasons. There was a pretty wide range of options there for making myself well-rounded. I got a bit of History of China and a bit of History of Science, and it didn’t do me any harm.
Hold on, chaps – the Plains Indians and the Spanish horses aren’t just random facts, they are an illustration that backs up the point that the Conquistadores had horses and the Aztecs didn’t. That, in turn, is part of the discussion of how handfuls of Spaniards (plus Indian allies) could beat the huge army of a well organised empire and take over that empire entirely. (The discussion is, as far as I know, still inconclusive: so few were the Spaniards that I doubt whether horses, or steel, or gunpowder, or all three, can explain it.)
I could not and cannot believe that one who has been made to study a bit of history against his or her will can be said to be better for it, and the same goes for pretty much any other subject.
Yes, of course, and I’ve got a school friend, now a pretty well-known historian & writer, whose school days were cursed by having to retake Maths O-level (i.e. through algebra, trigonometry & calculus) three or four times in order to get a place at university to study History.
Though it wouldn’t suit everybody I admire the US universities’ liberal-arts undergraduate course. They could do with something similar in Britain and Norway. In general, I don’t approve of 18 year-olds studying for professions in medicine or law or business or engineering without ANY background in the stuff you aren’t ready to learn in high school (Western philosophy, art history etc.) I’ve no evidence that British doctors have laxer morals than their US counterparts, but I still find it a little scary that they wouldn’t necessarily know who Kant, say, was.
I think it’s a shame for some of us that the history of mathematics isn’t taught at secondary-school level together with the maths itself. I found that if you read a little bit – say about Descartes and Newton – it seems less arbitrary the way the information you’re learning in the Maths course is introduced.
By the way, your Pierre Menard reference wasn’t at all pretentious. It was useful to know.
Ella Fitzgerald, one by Louis Armstrong, and one by Billie Holiday
Yes. I may have to rethink this. They are a powerful argument. Part of my Blossom Dearie problem is that she sounds so white. Why listen to her when you could be hearing something by Nina Simone?
Dearie, I don’t know how we got ourselves into this position of having to post the same comment in two places, but as I said at Hat’s: if you’d got as far as reading a little historiography before you sacrificed the arts for the greater good you would have found that no matter how well they hang together it’s STILL not very important whether you learnt this bit or that bit in History. What matters is learning how to process the information, much as if you were studying Maths or Physics.
“What matters is learning how to process the information”: what does that mean?
Learning how to analyse information.
But then is there any case for studying history as opposed to some other discipline?
Anyway, I think you’re wrong: the notion that only one activity “matters” is surely implausible.
You must have misunderstood me, I don’t think we disagree at all. I simply mean historians acquire lots of facts and then make them into a story, that’s what historians do. As you know I’m not a historian, but I think you study history – or maths or science or whatever – if you find it interesting. You might have other motives, like going into politics or making money, but they’ll only come to anything if you first enjoy studying the subject.
“I think you study history – or maths or science or whatever – if you find it interesting.” True: but my problem at school was that I found almost everything interesting (bar Latin: I must resist blaming the teacher). So the culling of subjects was irksome. I probably started from the proposition that nobody in his right mind would drop English or Maths. Thereafter I think I must have been influenced by the notion that it was better to drop subjects that I could fairly easily read up for myself. It was therefore imperative not to drop Physics or Chemistry since I couldn’t supply my own lab teaching. Obviously I would want to keep at least one foreign language going. As such arguments with myself continued, and timetabling constrained my choices, poor old history eventually got squeezed out. It was a pity: I was top of the class. Hey ho.
Physics was an interesting case: some of the material was dull, but it equipped me to read more interesting stuff on my own. So when, after Chernobyl, I was pressed into emergency service to do some rapid assessment work for HMG (unpaid, the bastards), the knowledge of nuclear power stations that I used was based on what I had learned on my tod when I was sixteen. It is remarkable how good some popular science writing was back then. I’d still recommend Banesh Hoffmann’s Strange Story of the Quantum to any teenager (or architect) with scientific interests.
Thanks, dearie. I’ll take a look at that Banesh Hoffmann book, I love stuff like that (well-written science and maths I can understand). Someone else, another very clever person, has been telling me today how boring he found experimental physics at school (he ended up as a historian, funnily enough), so I wonder how many people science loses because of its secondary-school teaching methods.
The teacher who taught me physics was really poor at it (he was a chemist) but it was still clearly a fascinating subject. Happily my maths teacher was superb, as was my English teacher.
As for boring labs: I found that university physics lectures covered interesting stuff (though often taught badly, of course, not least because physicists back then were incredibly arrogant) but the labs were largely dull. Chemistry was arsey-versy – lecture material largely dull but many of the labs super. There’s a great joy in mastering qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and organic synthesis. It’s real stuff and you learn to do it all by yourself. (Unlike present day students many of whom, apparently, do chem lab in pairs so they will many of them never really learn to do it properly on their own. By God there’s a generation or two who have been short-changed in their education.)
I didn’t ever go to the lab of Physics during my secondary school. I went to the lab of Chemistry once (voluntarily; on Saturday) and also once to the lab of French. Besides we listened to two songs another year.
But still worst, a friend who is a German teacher didn’t ever listen to speak in German when she was at university (the famous Salamanca!) to study that language. Fortunately she had been in Germany for 11 or 12 years.
What are you complaining about? :- )