tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972120889629675714.post1960367109203155976..comments2024-02-25T05:24:24.948-05:00Comments on Beyond Easy: Straight White MenPatrick Rhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02410016566636603639noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972120889629675714.post-46259629166986424392016-06-20T04:45:26.110-04:002016-06-20T04:45:26.110-04:00Start with something you might remember from scien...Start with something you might remember from science class: if an atom were the size of a football stadium, each electron would be about the size of a football, and the nucleus, containing 99.99% of the mass, would be about the size of a marble.<br /><br />When a massive star can no longer sustain fusion, there is no longer any force opposing its gravitational attraction to itself. The core collapses inward, squeezing protons and electrons together so tightly that they become neutrons. This liberates a colossal amount of energy, and the outer layers of the star are blown away in a supernova.<br /><br />What's left is a ball of neutrons, essentially a giant atomic nucleus, about ten miles across and weighing between five and eight solar masses. A neutron star.<br /><br />Neutron stars are preposterous objects, but you have to love them. If you drop a marble on one from a height of one meter, it will be going fast enough when it hits the surface to ignite fusion. The resulting explosion will be comparable to a hydrogen bomb. Some of them spin -- all five-to-eight solar masses' worth -- between two and ten times a second.<br /><br />This is how art forms die. I say die, anyway. You could also say that they go into hibernation, waiting to be rediscovered. But that assumes a continuity that just isn't there in many cases. What we think is poetry, what the Grand Siècle thought was poetry, and what the ancient Greeks thought was poetry are all very different things.<br /><br />Either way, the death of an art form is very much like the birth of a neutron star. There is the initial failure to sustain the creative spark, the ejection and scattering of the audience to the four winds, the hard core's turn inwards, and a remnant that is by turns fascinating and preposterous in comparison to its former mass appeal. I think this happens a lot: Jazz, opera, "classical" music, painting and sculpture have all responded to declining popularity by becoming recondite. Poetry is no longer read by people who don't write it.<br /><br />I don't think any of this is bad. In a world where you can shoot up threatening virtual brown people twenty-four hours a day if you want, and many people do, it's healthy to have a lot of other options, and some, you'd hope, that you have to work for. There is a price for that: audiences who are willing to tolerate less accessible works are more willing to indulge creators' more way-out ideas, under the theory that they are good for you. But it's a price worth paying for entry into the high country of the mind.Jedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12482605979122678782noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972120889629675714.post-42487354154575039292016-06-18T02:23:38.074-04:002016-06-18T02:23:38.074-04:00I would still appreciate the neutron star analogy ...I would still appreciate the neutron star analogy if it's still at the tips of your fingers.Patrick Rhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02410016566636603639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972120889629675714.post-63571833572054904782016-06-18T02:22:07.248-04:002016-06-18T02:22:07.248-04:00Re: Ed—I was paraphrasing. It's not that Ed...Re: Ed—I was paraphrasing. It's not that Ed's education and career were necessarily a cakewalk. He just had the good fortune to be able to progress without obstruction, or really without thinking too hard about what to do with his life. If, say, a black woman had demonstrated potential in math and science during her high school years circa 1960-something, she likely wouldn't have received the same encouragement that Ed did, would have had a very different university experience (Google tells me that in the late 1960s, 80 percent of black undergraduates in Purdue's engineering program dropped out during their freshman year), and would have had a VERY hard time getting the same job that Ed wound up with. The point wasn't that science and engineering are EASY, but that Ed didn't have to fight tooth and nail to gain a place in the industry.<br /><br />Your identifying a lot of the bad noise as part of an ideological land grab is pretty spot-on, though. But I do have to take a lot of it seriously because I see it helping to fuel a lot of the even worse noise coming from, say, the Trump campaign and its supporters.Patrick Rhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02410016566636603639noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8972120889629675714.post-28055705372983935912016-06-17T23:01:51.079-04:002016-06-17T23:01:51.079-04:00I just spent 15 minutes cooking up a metaphor like...I just spent 15 minutes cooking up a metaphor likening the moribund state of certain art forms to the evolution of neutron stars. It was pretty cool and I thought you'd like the subject matter, but something's just occurred to me and now I can't think about anything else.<br /><br />The father in this play is an engineer who says he walked through an open door and into a successful career. If the author of those words could walk her way through engineering school in ten years I will bite off my left pinky.<br /><br />I think you let the safe-space cadets worry you unduly. They're a syphilis epidemic. Maybe you know the story: syphilis was... discovered in the New World and brought back to the old, where it did terrible things because nobody had any resistance to it. Over the next few centuries it became progressively less virulent until antibiotics reduced it to an embarrassing inconvenience. Today hardly anyone has it long enough to start getting holes in their brain.<br /><br />So it is with politically correct zeal. In time it will evolve into a system of inter-communal etiquette that will be necessary in a globalized world in which the person sitting next to you is as likely to come from Karachi as from ten miles away. But for now the ideology is still virulent. It will have all it can take. The one-upsmanship of sensitivity this play nods to is just what we might expect from an idea in its land-grab phase. But sooner or later it will keep someone from fucking or making money and the pushback will begin. There will be debate, which all sides will complain about in the entitled way Westerners adopt when potentially explosive social tensions are defused without loss of life. (In more repressive places there <em>will</em> be loss of life, and it won't make them any less repressive.)<br /><br />In the end, we'll have a new system of social understandings that won't be too onerous to any of the parties to the big debate. They will come to seem so perfectly normal that many people will never really understand that things ever were otherwise. And there matters will rest until the whole thing happens again.<br /><br />So, like I said, I think you're too concerned about this. It's like you're on a sinking ship and trying to decide what to wear for dinner. It doesn't matter. Pretty soon it'll be swimwear for everybody.<br /><br />Good review, though.Jedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12482605979122678782noreply@blogger.com