Duke Ellington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Ellington
http://www.dukeellington.com/
When Duke Flirted With The Queen
by KEVIN WHITEHEAD
September 09, 2013 12:20 PM NPR
Duke Ellington, looking dapper in 1958.
Evening Standard/Getty Images
In 1958, at an arts festival in Yorkshire, Duke Ellington was presented to Queen Elizabeth II. They tied up the reception line for a few minutes, exchanging royal pleasantries; our Duke politely flirted with Her Majesty. Soon afterward, maybe that very night, Ellington outlined the movements of The Queen's Suite. He recorded it with his orchestra the following year, sent it to Her Majesty, and declined to release it to the public in his lifetime. It's not clear whether Queen Elizabeth has listened to it.
Ellington devoted special attention to The Queen's Suite, which in the end hewed closely to his original sketch. Its six episodes were inspired by natural phenomena encountered in his travels: bird calls of two continents ("Sunset and the Mocking Bird," featuring clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton, was based on a bird call Ellington overheard in Florida), the Northern Lights seen from a Canadian roadside, and a ballet of hundreds of lightning bugs, accompanied by a chorus of bullfrogs, along the Ohio River. Ellington's alter ego Billy Strayhorn wasn't there that night, but composed "Lightning Bugs and Frogs" from Ellington's description.
The suites Duke Ellington wrote with Billy Strayhorn were sometimes loosely tied together. The Queen's Suite is unified by prominent use of clarinets, their woodiness reinforcing the nature theme. Ellington ties that back to his royal subject via the movement "Apes and Peacocks." Those were among the annual tributes bestowed on the Bible's King Solomon — natural wonders presented for a monarch's delight. It's on a new edition of The Ellington Suites, which has three of them.
The Goutelas Suite was recorded in 1971, after Strayhorn's passing. It commemorated a ceremony Ellington had participated in years earlier, in which the restored wing of a medieval chateau was unveiled in the French hills. In a journal, Ellington wrote warmly of how the countryside's aristocrats and commoners — its intellectuals, artisans and laborers, its Catholics and communists — had all banded together on the project. Ellington's orchestral concept was based on a similar idea, which he'd learned hanging around a D.C. pool hall as a kid: "All levels could and should mix."
The album The Ellington Suites also contains the Uwis Suite of 1972, composed for a University of Wisconsin festival. It's best remembered for Ellington's novelty polka, "Klop." But it also includes "Loco Madi," the last of the many train songs Ellington recorded, in a tradition that began with his inaugural session in 1924. A new edit gives us three more minutes before the fadeout. There's also a previously unreleased tune from the Uwis session, although not part of the suite; "The Kiss," like "Loco Madi," adds electric bass to the rhythm section. Neither of those performances is a model of ensemble polish. But all posthumous Ellington is of interest — even if it can't all be The Queen's Suite.
Syrian Refugees
Syrian refugees make a new home in Germany
Video from DW: https://www.youtube.com/
The two-and-a-half-year Syrian conflict has caused savage bloodshed, with more than 110,000 people killed in the fighting since March 2011, according to the latest estimate from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
But the civil war has also forced vast swathes of the population - two million by last count - to flee Syria and seek safety abroad.
Many have flocked to Syria’s neighbours such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Others have headed further afield as part of a UN programme to relocate Syrian refugees in Western countries.
For 107 Syrian refugees arriving on a flight from Beirut to Hanover on Wednesday, their new home, at least for now, will be Germany.
Once settled, the new arrivals will be given cultural and language courses, access to social services and authorisation to work in the country, opportunities that are welcomed with opened arms.
“It is, of course, a feeling beyond words,” said Khalil Mostafa, one of the newly arrived refugees. “It is the first time ever that we're feeling something like this. Our only wish is that our child can have a safe future, in particular with regards to education.”
Germany has already welcomed 200 Syrian refugees and has committed to housing a total of 5,000 over the coming weeks. Other European countries have also agreed to provide temporary homes for displaced Syrians.
“I think that as everything takes place, the international community - in particular Europe as it is happening on its doorstep - must worry about how to cope with the entire set of problems,” said Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich.
But with Syria’s neighbours struggling to cope with the vast influx of refugees, Western countries are being urged to do more to help.
The UN hopes to resettle 12,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year but has so far only found places for 7,000 in 12 western countries.
“There are two million people in the region who have left Syria right now, and Lebanon alone, which only has a population of 4.4 million people, has some 700,000 Syrian refugees,” said Amnesty International’s Franziska Vilmar.
“So if you look just at that, I think Europe could do much more.”
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The Beauty of Science
What We Can Never, Ever Know: Does Science Have Limits?
by ROBERT KRULWICH
September 06, 201311:52 AM
I got two books in the mail that, if they could have, would've poked, scratched and ripped each others' pages out. I don't know if Martin Gardner and Patricia Churchland ever met, but their books show that there are radically, even ferociously, different ways to think about science. Gardner died last year. He was a science writer whose monthly "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American was wildly popular. Patricia Churchland is a philosopher who teaches at U.C. San Diego.
The issue between them is: How much can we know about the universe?
"I am a mysterian," says Gardner, in his new (posthumously published) autobiography. Mysterians, he writes, believe that some things — how life began, the nature of time, what consciousness is, whether there is free will — are so inherently complex that they will forever elude human understanding. Not only does "no philosopher or scientist living today [have] the foggiest notion" of how mind or time or consciousness work, "we believe" he wrote, "it is the height of hubris" to suppose those things will ever be understood completely.
Forever Unintelligible
Gardner allows that humans have wonderful brains, that we can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but he says there are still limits, hard limits.
Just as "there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even make it understand the square root of 2," he writes, "surely there are truths as far beyond our grasp as our grasp is beyond that of a cow." He concedes that once upon a time humans were chimp-like and over time developed brains that cracked the "square root of 2" problem — but that doesn't faze him. There are properties of our universe so profoundly complex that no sentient mind, no matter how enhanced, will ever understand them fully.
It's not clear from his book whether this is a scaling problem (that our brains are too small and the universe too, too big) or if the universe has been deeply designed to stay mysterious to its inhabitants. Either way, in his book he insists that some mysteries are permanent.
Gardner was a fine science writer, fearless, imaginative, daring. But he pushes his argument very far. Because some scientific questions are unanswerable, he says, maybe we shouldn't investigate them, that "[t]hese questions are so far above our natural human prowess that to fret about them seems as ridiculous as insisting that a dog understand general relativity."
Ignorance Is Just Ignorance
Patricia Churchland hates this notion. "Ignorance is just ignorance," she says. If you don't know something that doesn't mean you will never know it. In her new book, she writes, "There is something smugly arrogant about thinking, 'If I, with my great and wondrous brain, cannot imagine a solution to explain a phenomenon, then obviously the phenomenon cannot be explained at all. ... What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe.' "
For centuries, she says, authority figures have argued that we will never understand germs or earthquakes or atoms or volcanoes — that even to try was to trespass on divine territory. But we trespassed. We asked. We probed. And we learned. People who say we will never fathom the nature of consciousness are just doing what previous authorities did — they are choosing to hide from knowledge; they're cowards.
Yay, Brain
When a friend of hers, another philosophy professor, jumped out of his seat at a conference and yelled, "I hate the brain, I hate the brain!" because all this attention to brain science was taking attention away from philosophical pursuits, she smelled his fear. "Does he worry that neuro-knowledge is forbidden fruit, a Promethean fire, a Pandora's box, ... an evil genie released from a rightly sealed bottle?"
Patricia Churchland calls people like Martin Gardner "anti-enlightenment." She's proud of the human brain, its reasoning ability, its resourcefulness, and given enough time, she suspects, no question is unanswerable, there are no permanent mysteries. In the end (and the end is a long, long time away), we will know it all.
Asking, Asking, Asking
And, then, a third book fell into my lap, not from a scientist, but from a poet, Stanley Kunitz. His views on this subject, casually mentioned at the end of a chapter, are my own. He wrote that he finds his life, his being here, deeply mystifying. He loses friends to diseases and doesn't know why. He loves deeply, but doesn't know how. "Can there be any possibility of completely understanding who we are and why we're here and where we're going? These are questions that can never be answered completely," Kunitz says, contradicting Patricia. But then, contradicting Martin, he takes the crucial next step, "But you have to keep on asking ..."
To me, that's the beauty of science: to know that you will never know everything, but you never stop wanting to, that when you learn something, for a second you feel crazy smart, and then stupid all over again as new questions come tumbling in. It's an urge that never dies, a game that never ends. Science is a rough trade, played, I hope, forever — and, sorry Patricia, sorry Martin, that's how I think of it, not limited, not unlimited, just an itch that always needs scratching.
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Patricia Churchland's new book is called Touching a Nerve: The Self As Brain. Martin Gardner's upcoming autobiography, to be released next month is Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, The Autobiography of Martin Gardner. I found Stanley Kunitz's thoughts in Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.
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Physicists Take a New Approach to Unify Quantum Theory and Theory of Relativity
Physicists from the Max Planck Institute and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have developed a new approach to the unification of the general theory of relativity and quantum theory.
For almost a century, the two major theories of physics have coexisted but have been irreconcilable: while Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity describes gravity and thus the world at large, quantum physics describes the world of atoms and elementary particles. Both theories work extremely well within their own boundaries; however, they break down, as currently formulated, in certain extreme regions, at extremely tiny distances, the so-called Planck scale, for example. Space and time thus have no meaning in black holes or, most notably, during the Big Bang.
Daniele Oriti from the Albert Einstein Institute uses a fluid to illustrate this situation: “We can describe the behavior of flowing water with the long-known classical theory of hydrodynamics. But if we advance to smaller and smaller scales and eventually come across individual atoms, it no longer applies. Then we need quantum physics.” Just as a liquid consists of atoms, Oriti imagines space to be made up of tiny cells or “atoms of space”, and a new theory is required to describe them: quantum gravity.
Continuous space is broken down into elementary cell
In Einstein’s relativity theory, space is a continuum. Oriti now breaks down this space into tiny elementary cells and applies the principles of quantum physics to them, thus to space itself and to the theory of relativity describing it. This is the unification idea.
A fundamental problem of all approaches to quantum gravity consists in bridging the huge dimensional scales from the space atoms to the dimensions of the universe. This is where Oriti, his colleague Lorenzo Sindoni and Steffen Gielen, a former postdoc at the AEI who is now a researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, have succeeded. Their approach is based on so-called group field theory. This is closely related to loop quantum gravity, which the AEI has been developing for some time.
The task now consisted in describing how the space of the universe evolves from the elementary cells. Staying with the idea of fluids: How can the hydrodynamics for the flowing water be derived from a theory for the atoms?
This extremely demanding mathematical task recently led to a surprising success. “Under special assumptions, space is created from these building blocks, and evolves like an expanding universe,” explains Oriti. “For the first time, we were thus able to derive the Friedmann equation directly as part of our complete theory of the structure of space,” he adds. This fundamental equation, which describes the expanding universe, was derived by the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman in the 1920s on the basis of the General Theory of Relativity. The scientists have therefore succeeded in bridging the gap from the microworld to the macroworld, and thus from quantum mechanics to the General Theory of Relativity: they show that space emerges as the condensate of these elementary cells and evolves into a universe which resembles our own.
Quantum gravity could now answer questions regarding the Big Bang
Oriti and his colleagues thus see themselves at the start of a difficult but promising journey. Their current solution is valid only for a homogeneous universe – but our real world is much more complex. It contains inhomogeneities, such as planets, stars and galaxies. The physicists are currently working on including them in their theory.
And they have planned something really big as their ultimate goal. On the one hand, they want to investigate whether it is possible to describe space even during the Big Bang. A few years ago, former AEI researcher Martin Bojowald found clues, as part of a simplified version of loop quantum gravity, that time and space can possibly be traced back through the Big Bang. With their theory, Oriti and his colleagues are hoping to confirm or improve this result.
If it continues to prove successful, the researchers could perhaps use it to explain also the assumed inflationary expansion of the universe shortly after the Big Bang as well, and the nature of the mysterious dark energy. This energy field causes the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate.
Oriti’s colleague Lorenzo Sindoni therefore adds: “We will only be able to really understand the evolution of the universe when we have a theory of quantum gravity.” The AEI researchers are in good company here: Einstein and his successors, who have been searching for this for almost one hundred years.
Salman Rushdie
“And by that destiny to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.”
Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.”
~William Shakespeare
Read an excerpt from, or buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/
A Fictional Character
‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir,’ by Salman Rushdie
By DONNA RIFKIND
Published: October 12, 2012
Salman Rushdie’s memoir is many books in one book. It’s a personal story that takes place at the center of an international crisis: the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 denunciation of the author’s fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” as a work of blasphemy against Islam, and his call for Rushdie’s death. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young man that describes his influences, obsessions and ambitions as well as his rise in the publishing world. It’s a record of his relocation from Bombay to London to New York, where he settled in 2000. It’s an intimate tale of fathers and sons, of the beginnings and ends of marriages, of friendships and betrayals.
At the same time, “Joseph Anton” is a large-scale spectacle of political and cultural conflicts during an era in which, Rushdie writes, “incompatible realities frequently collided with one another.” The death decree, or fatwa, would come to be seen by some as an early signal of a clash of absolutes that would lead up to 9/11 and into our tinderbox present — of the continuing struggle between religious belief in the immutable word of God on one hand and secular faith in the unconditional right of free speech on the other.
One unifying theme that emerges from this multilayered account is the concept of flight — though here that word assumes a double identity. Flight from the fatwa meant a “fretful, scuttling existence” in which the author, a 41-year-old British citizen, abandoned his home in the London neighborhood of Islington and dashed from one safe house to another around the United Kingdom. While Rushdie located and paid for these dozens of hide-outs himself, the British government provided him with nine years of round-the-clock protection by the “A” Squad of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, who in turn answered to Britain’s intelligence services.
If flight meant forced departure, for Rushdie it also meant an insistence on certain freedoms. Most critically, he would not give up his literary life, his flights of fancy. Battling depression and writer’s block, he managed during this time to write a major novel, “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” along with a charming children’s book called “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” at his young son’s insistence. He collected a volume of short fiction (“East, West”) and another of essays (“Imaginary Homelands”). He wrote book reviews, poems and op-ed essays. Whether large or small, every completed piece of writing felt, to him, like “victory over the forces of darkness.”
“Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?” Rushdie is right to pose the conflict over “The Satanic Verses” as a question not of ideology but of power and control. And he is right to claim his own story after many humiliating years of surrendering that story to other people, most of whom transformed it for their own purposes.
But the question of control is also a tricky issue in Rushdie’s own writing. His novels are giant winged contraptions, packed to capacity, hurtling across time and space, “pitting levity against gravity,” as he describes one of his airborne protagonists at the beginning of “The Satanic Verses.” At their best, Rushdie’s imaginative machines attain lift and remain thrillingly aloft. At their worst, their centers cannot hold, and they spin into pieces. In “Joseph Anton,” which Rushdie has composed very much like a novel, both these scenarios come to pass. There are sections where the narrative soars, and more than a few in which it plummets.
One of the memoir’s novelistic approaches is its perspective, which shifts from the autobiographical “I” to “he.” It’s not as mannered a choice as it sounds in a narrative consumed, as much of Rushdie’s writing is, with the multiplicity of identity. “He was a new self now,” he realized after news of the fatwa reached him. In fact he split into several selves: not just the Salman his friends and family knew but also a “Rushdie” reviled by screaming demonstrators in England and abroad, “an effigy, an absence, something less than human”; and reproached, too, by many unsympathetic compatriots in the Western press. The sense of fracture was heightened when the police insisted he invent an alias so he could write checks without being identified. He came up with “Joseph Anton,” the first names of two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. Not lost on him was the peculiarity that a man who invented characters for a living had now “turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well.”
In early sections — among the best in the book — the author reveals that his actual surname was itself an invention. His father, a nonpracticing Muslim, changed his “fine old Delhi” name to Rushdie in homage to Ibn Rushd, the 12th-century Spanish-Arab polymath who wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle and made a forceful case, 800 years before the uproar over “The Satanic Verses,” for rationalism over Islamic literalism. Yet if his father’s “fearless skepticism” was his gift to young Salman and his three sisters, a dire home environment was his curse, for Anis Rushdie was so wrathful an alcoholic that Salman’s mother admitted she survived the marriage by developing a “forgettery” instead of a memory. In 1961, 13-year-old Salman was only too willing to leave his hometown, Bombay, for boarding school in England, where he was lonely and unpopular, and on to Cambridge, where, as a history student, he first learned about the “satanic verses,” a set of lines expunged from the Koran.
These absorbing coming-of-age passages are followed by equally engaging recollections of Rushdie’s London jobs as an advertising copywriter, where he developed his distinctive verbal bounciness. Those jingly effects and aphorisms pop up in the memoir as well (“Life was lived forward but was judged in reverse”). And he vividly conveys the exhilaration he felt in the mid-1970s while dreaming up his first big success, “Midnight’s Children,” scene by scene, finding the tools and tone to tell his story: “India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language.” Rushdie also comes across as tenderly devoted to his two sons, Zafar and Milan, and grateful to many of the individual police officers who guaranteed his and his family’s safety for nearly a decade.
If “Joseph Anton” builds up a lot of reader-friendly capital in these sections, it exhausts that capital rather too freely as the story continues. While the first days of the fatwa unfold grippingly, there’s a steep drop in momentum as the years drag on. Not even as talented a writer as Rushdie can avoid writing about tedium without becoming tedious himself. Clichés abound: “The house was beautiful but it felt like a gilded cage”; “What was he,” he wonders while contemplating moving to America after his ordeal is over, “but a huddled mass yearning to breathe free?”
As that last quotation suggests, Rushdie shows a cheerful willingness throughout the memoir to show off his less than dignified side. These scenes can be bleakly funny: when the police persuade him to wear a wig to avoid recognition in public, he tries it out on Sloane Street in London and is immediately the center of amused attention. “Look,” he hears a man say, “there’s that bastard Rushdie in a wig.” But there are occasions in which his goofiness grates and creates an uncomfortable dissonance in what is, after all, a sobering chronicle of state-sponsored terrorism that resulted in the murder of Rushdie’s Japanese translator and near-fatal attacks on his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher.
It’s of course lots of fun to read of the author’s unflagging bedazzlement at mingling with all kinds of celebrities, from Playboy bunnies to heads of state, and in his access, post-fatwa, to every sort of party. (“Willie Nelson was there! And Matthew Modine!”) It’s fun also to render cheap sideline judgments during the many instances of score-settling here (particularly unflattering are Rushdie’s portrayals of his ex-wives Marianne Wiggins and Padma Lakshmi; his publishers at Penguin and Random House; and the former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb).
Are readers likely to remember mostly these juicy bits, and if so, how will that affect Rushdie’s literary legacy? “It was as a writer that he wanted to be defended, as a writer that he wanted to defend himself,” he eloquently states. But with “Joseph Anton,” is he risking becoming the kind of writer whose books are not so much read as skimmed for their potential provocations — a barbarism he’s fought against for nearly a quarter-century? Read all of “Joseph Anton,” then, for its lessons in how books are used, and whether they matter.
Donna Rifkind is writing a book about the screenwriter Salka Viertel and her Hollywood émigré salon.