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Recent Highlights
Claire
Fox, Charles Murray, and I spoke las year at a Sydney
event sponsored by the Centre for Independent Studies.
The topic was elitism, and in different ways the three
of us defended it. My piece has just been published
in The Australian. You can read it here.
A longer review of John Carey’s book, mentioned
in the essay, can be found here.
Philip Matthews of the
Press talked to Doug Campbell and me for a lovely
article on Climate
Debate Daily. You can read the Press
article here.
Many
thanks to the editors of the New York Times for
naming my Joyce Hatto essay, “Shoot
the Piano Player,”
as one of the paper’s
“Notable
Op-Eds of the Year.”
It was only op-ed given that honor for January or February,
and so heads the Times’s chronological list.
Thanks to Robert Fulford for this
appreciative piece on Arts & Letters Daily
in Canada’s
National Post.
Mark Singer has written
a very fine article on the Joyce Hatto scandal for The
New Yorker. I have an advance PDF version of it
here.
It is absurd to imagine
that Joyce Hatto did not know about her faked recordings....
How has Joyce Hatto’s
husband, William Barrington-Coupe, been able to get
away with his farrago of nonsense about this fraud?
Barrington-Coupe’s
account has been accepted by the press and the public
at large. As numerous headlines put it, he has “come
clean.”
He “did
it out of love.”
“Coming
clean”
in his fanciful account means that (1) he only started
to mix in other pianists’
tracks to cover the grunting of his diseased and suffering
wife. (2) All recordings of her mix her work with other
pianists. (3) He did it all for her, to make things
more bearable. (4) She didn’t
know a thing about it. He wins, you see: he is a hero,
and she was a mere victim of his kindness. He lied to
her, and to everyone else, but don’t
be too harsh, since he did it out of love.
This is pluperfect rubbish.
No one has detected any mixing of two pianists on the
same track in any of her fakes. All known tracks so
far are 100% other pianists, with time time compression
in some cases (not all), with the effect of making the
recordning even faster and more brilliant than the originals.
So much for (1) and (2).
As for (3) and (4), Joyce Hatto was a lively, bubbly,
intelligent person who promoted these recordings to
people, and was familiar with them. She was not at the
end of her life anywhere near doddery senility, and
seemed to have no intellectual impairment. (Listen to
her last radio interview here:
no sign of being out of touch.)
Think through the possibilities.
It is not implausible to imagine a recording engineer
who is also a loving husband slipping a false performance
of one track or other into a CD where her performance
had fallen short. But we are not talking about a track
or two, we are faced here with the biggest single
body of pianistic output in recording history (Rubinstein’s
lifetime production was less that 100 CDs, but included
many, many repetitions of the same pieces). So far,
not a single post-1970 recording by Joyce Hatto has
turned out not to be a fake.
Her catalogue includes
around 30 or so concertos. This is probably more recorded
concerto repertoire than Rubinstein and Horowitz combined.
All of these CDs have the same non-existent conductor
and orchestra. Joyce Hatto was aware of these CDs. This
is incompatible with Barrington-Coupe’s
claim that she did not know what was going on. In fact,
it is a palpable absurdity to imagine she did not know.
She signed CDs, she boasted
of her exploits! Listen to the radio interviews.
Joyce Hatto knew her catalogue,
she knew the claims made about her, she knew the reviews
and the critics, and she knew how to charm anyone who
talked to her.
As for whether Barrington-Coupe
loved his wife, it is doubtless true, but it is entirely
beside the point. I’m
sure Clyde loved Bonnie too.
The media coverage of
the Hatto episode is a lesson
in how the news cycle turns over with a story. Barrington-Coupe
got in with this last bit of nonsense just at the point
when editors were likely getting tired of the story.
They don’t
care; they have other things to worry about. Oh, journalism!
In sum, based on her letters
to critics and her radio interviews, it is my considered
opinion that Joyce Hatto, in addition of being a lively,
chirpy, witty, bright, and positive person, was also
a systematic, methodical liar. The only thing she needed
was to be married to a convicted fraudster who was also
a recording engineer. And guess what?
Because she was so extremely
pleasant and because she was an artist, it has been
very difficult for people to accept the notion of her
guilt. Con artists are often very engaging people with
high IQs. Her positive attitude derived, I imagine,
in part from thinking she was going to get away with
it. She was very likely having the time of her life,
at last the star she’d
always longed to be. And, perhaps luckily for her, she
died before she was caught out.
Anyway, my New
York Times op-ed goes through the issues. Four
interesting letters to the editor are included. There
is an excellent page by Andrys Basten bringing together
information about the Hatto scandal. You can find it
here.
Joyce
Hatto
After a long period of overcast weather,
the Christchurch sky at last cleared on January 22,
2007, and we were able to observe Comet McNaught in
its true celestial glory. It is the most impressive
comet I have ever seen (and I’ve
seen a few, since my first, Comet
Arend-Roland and then Comet
Mrkos, both in 1957). The photo above was made by
holding my Fuji digital camera steady on the top of
the old Saab for a 15 second exposure. The location
was near Darfield and a 70 km/hr Nor’wester
was blowing across the Canterbury Plains. Both with
naked eye and with 11x80 binoculars the comet was spectacular:
a brilliant head and coma with a wonderfully streaky
tail. The Fuji shot below hardly does justice to it.
(To be sure, there are better
photos than this available on the net, but like
my snaps of the Acropolis or the Taj Mahal, this one’s
a personal memento.)
I attended the White House Press Correspondents’
Association Annual Dinner last year at the Hinckley
Hilton. My account, angled toward a New Zealand audience,
can be read here.
In 2003, John Brockman’s annual
Edge
Question asked for a memo to the President on the
premise that he had just appointed you as his Science
Advisor. I recently came across my contribution; I had
lost track of it. You can read it here.
I stand by it still.
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Courses for 2008
Philosophy 110 Science: Good, Bad, and
Bogus
Here is the topic
for the essay for Phil 110. It is due June 6,
2008.
More general information
aboput the course is available here.
Specific course requirements for Phil 110 this year
are here.
We shall continue with
the remainder of the book through May and June.
The reading assignment
by Sir Karl Popper is here.
Karl Popper says in the assigned essay that he was “thrilled
with the result of Eddington’s eclipse observations
which in 1919 brought the first important confirmation
of Einstein’s theory of gravitation. American
Scientist has just published an interesting account
of the Eddington expedition and what it meant for Einsteinian
physics. You can read it here.
As further background,
check out this wonderful BBC discussion programme connecting
the history of astronomy with the history of European
exploration. There is an MP3 version of it here.
Philosophy/Classics
141: Classical Concepts of Beauty.
Here is the topic
for the essay for Phil 141. If you are enrolled
in Phil 140, you may do this essay from this topic (also
due June 6), or you may wait till the second semester
and write on a different topic. That decision is over
to you, but you are only required to write one essay.
Remember too: students enrolled in Phil 140 do not take
the exam for Phil 141. Your exam is at the end of the
year.
We shall finish Plato’s
Republic next week. We shall then move on, after
Patrick O’Sullivan’s lectures, with Aristotle’s
Poetics. You can get started with your reading
now.
That lovely BBC discussion
of Greek myths I mentioned in lecture is available
here. Other programmes worth hearing are produced
for Philosophy Bites: Angie Hobbs discussing “Plato
on War” and Melissa Lane on the totalitarian
nature of the Republic.
Phil 141 is but part
of the year-long course, Phil
140: Arts and Ideas. For information on that
course, click here.
Dates and so forth
for Phil 141 is available here.
You may have seen this photograph. It used to appear
in blow-up form in the Margaret Mead Hall at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. It was also reproduced
in an abysmal book called Gone Primitive: Savage
Intellects, Modern Lives, by Marianna Torgovnick
(panned by me here).
Thanks to help from friends at the Museum of Natural
History and across Central Park at the Metropolitan
Museum, I am able to present the original color version
of the photo. For an updated account of the controversy
surrounding this image, click here.
This pan of the absurdly overrated Lord of the Rings
films has been published in the Press, the
New
Zealand Herald, the Sunday Los
Angeles Times, and the Australian.
Here is the complete
version from which these different edits derive.
If you travel into the Sepik River area of northern
New Guinea, you may encounter firewalking as practiced
by the natives. It is an old jungle tradition. Well,
maybe
not that old.
Back-up files for Phil 140 and Phil 142 readings include
Aristotle’s Poetics,
David Hume’s Of
the Standard of Taste, excerpts from Immanuel
Kant’s Third
Critique, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters
on Aesthetic Education, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
The
Birth of Tragedy, Leo Tolstoy’s What
is Art?, and Clive Bell’s Art.
When the Shroud of Turin was at last
carbon dated in 1988 many observers thought that would
put an end to whacky speculation that it was the actual
burial cloth of Jesus. Those of us who had spent much
time studying the psychology of Shroud belief knew otherwise.
A signed confession from the Shroud’s
creator would not do make any difference to believers
at this point.
A few years before the carbon test,
I reviewed two recent books on the subject. The review
can be found here.
Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray, was
the subject of a
long review in the New Criterion. Murray’s
book is a splendid achievement, so full of facts and
hypotheses that critics have had a field day poking
holes in it. While I poke a few, there is much to admire
in this provocative work.
Charles Murray
Time magazine in its issue of
14 June 2004 (U.S. edition) has an article
on weblogs that includes a flattering remark or
two. I have never viewed Arts
& Letters Daily as a weblog, in that it
does not present a running commentary. The progenitor
of the modern weblog, by the way, is not the personal
diary, but the nineteeth-century commonplace book, a
scrapbook of newspaper cuttings, favorite poems, and
creative prose. ALD is just a daily reading list
with attitude.
I’ve
been searching for a decent link to Aristotle’s
Poetics on the web. All I could find were fairly
messy text and zipped versions that lacked the the editorial
niceties to guide the eye and the mind through this
work. The Perseus Project (W.H. Fyfe’s
1932 version) offers perhaps the best, but it’s
broken into many separate pages and is very hard to
navigate. So I’ve
cobbled together a couple of versions of the 1902 Butcher
rendering and applied a modern editorial eye to the
result. Here’s
what I’ve come up with. Corrections are most
welcome (email me here).
I know for starters that I’ve
missed a few italics in this text.
The April issue of Philosophy and
Literature is out with lots of fresh argument and
analysis. Click on the image for the current table of
contents. The infamous Philosophy and Literature
style sheet can be consulted here.
Ansel Adams’s great
photograph of Hernandez, New Mexico can be seen here.
Background on the where and how the photograph was taken
can be read here
(this page opens erratically; sometimes you have to
scroll down a bit).
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