What You See Is Not Always What You Get: Georgia and Verdana

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[This is mostly inspired by an article by Daniel Will-Harris from 2005.]

The virtual reality in which most of us swim has some interesting effects.  The process of becoming comfortable with dots on a screen as both text and image sometimes makes us ascribe greater continuity to it than we should.  A few years ago, the depiction of text on screen looked jagged to most of us, but as screens improved enormously, the text seemed --to eyes at first frustrated with pixellation, but later inured to it -- to become actually perfectly smooth.

To many people, the computer screen is just a means to an end.  As Whatsisname says in the article, to them the screen is just a preview of the real thing.  But for many others, the screen is the end of the process; a blog, for instance, seldom or never makes its way into print.

Meanwhile, with computers everywhere, and everyone getting interested in fonts and publishing (including college professors, who could now get their handouts and quizzes looking just the way they wanted, for instance), the number of talented artists working to create new fonts increased dramatically.  On the other hand, and probably quite appropriately, they viewed a font as something that had to look good (literally) on paper in the sense of being physically printed..  But one pioneer: Matthew Carter, took up the challenge (by Microsoft Corporation, as it happens), to create a font face that looked good on a computer screen.

How are computer graphic images designed to look good?

The earliest computer fonts and printers had just a few pixels to work with.  A dot-matrix printer, for instance, could not pretend to be really depicting a font such as, say, Times Roman, that Model T Ford of fonts.  They could only supply the users of 1980 with a (say) 8x10 matrix of dots, and some printers did a better job than others.  If you were a font designer whose job was to create the shapes that the little needles would ink onto your paper, you would obviously  start with a 8x10 matrix, and come up with something like you see here, and that would be "A". (Actually you wouldn't, because your A would have to stop a little higher on the matrix, since A doesn't go below the baseline!  Heavens, that is the ugliest thing I ever created.)

However, getting the great non-technical public computerized was the first challenge of the computer powers of the early 80s.  The Apple folks were the most successful, and probably to this day, it is "Apple folks" who most resent having to confront the fact that the images on their screens are not really as smooth as they have convinced themselves they are.

The new generation of artists, too, bought into this conceit, and designed fonts as if they would be eventually seen at infinite resolution.  A font designer would now create a font using mathematical curves--the same kinds of things you can do in Powerpoint, when you're building a curve.  This sort of curve is called a spline, because the formulas go from one dot to the next, but the angles are sort of "splinted" together to join smoothly.  The fewer the dots, the more elegant, mathematically.  And, with the technology of scalable graphics, the printers could print these at any size you wished.

Coming back to the screen, though, you were back again to roughly 6x8 matrices, but of course now we could use shades of grey.  Recognizing this, Carter and Microsoft decided to make fonts that would look good at 12 point size on the screen.  And Georgia, the very font we use for this blog, is one of the results.  So as long as you use 12 point on your screen, Georgia is going to look fabulous.  I always thought that Georgia sort of snapped into focus at 12 pitch, and now I know why.  Honestly, I would like to own a non-scalable version of Georgia, because it is just so elegant.

[Added later: as I look at Georgia on my browser, I'm amazed to see that Georgia is represented without dithering at lots of different resolutions; 12 point is just one of them.  Now that is a remarkable achievement.  And all of them, at least to some degree, have that stylishness that I associate with Georgia.  Georgia reminds me of a font commonly used in textbooks of about fifty years ago called American Typewriter, and similar related fonts: Bookman, for instance.  Georgia is far more graceful and refined, but it has that cheeky smoothness that American Typewriter had.  I seem to have misplaced American Typewriter somewhere; I loved to use that, especially for quick reports, as well as for URLs, where it was important to be absolutely clear in spelling.]

Verdana was created for the screen with different goals in mind, and you can read all about it in Mr Will-Harris's article from 2005.  One hopes that more designers have, even temporarily, decided to pursue the goal of fonts that will look good at common resolutions.

Here is an image of a block of text at 12 pitch, blown up roughly 400%, and a block of text at 24 pitch on my monitor, blown up 200%.  You can see how at the smaller resolution (for which the font was designed), it settles on the bitmapped design, while at other resolutions it relies on a sort of aliasing (using grey to smooth out the outlines), with limited success.  I think the bitmapped font is amazingly elegant, and Georgia actually looks gorgeous on paper, too, at any resolution.

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Seeing Harmony!

[This was written in a hurry; I'm making some corrections.]

For years, I've wanted to devise a method to "see" chords, and harmony. Now, it seems, the effort is no longer necessary, because finally --actually several years ago, as early as 1983-- a fellow called Stephen Malinowski has invented a method that enables us to visualize harmonic relationships. His idea slowly evolved, as he interacted with various friends and other like-minded people in the computer and animation world (the history of the project is available if you click on the title of this piece) until it is now a really fabulous piece of invention.  [Added later: Mr Malinowski points out that the ideas actually came from fellow musicians, and not computer or animation people.]

Malinowski's remarkable piece of software, named Music Animation Machine "plays" MIDI files. So you enter a piece into a computer notation program like I do, for example Sibelius or Finale or Capella, or Noteworthy Composer, and the program is usually able to convert your piece into an electronic format called MIDI (which was invented about 20 years ago, and is the modern version of the paper tape that Pleyel Pianos generated. MIDI can actually do a lot more than paper tape, but it does it at the cost of some things that the piano rolls did really well) which the MAM then plays.  MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

The Music Animation Machine reads your piece (in MIDI form), and while playing it, interprets the harmonic relationships in beautiful graphical form. This video of a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti (a major composer whom I have sadly neglected here) illustrates the basic visualization mode of the machine.

It has several different visualization modes, the simplest being the "Piano Roll" style, in which the music is presented as little bars for each note. The longer the note, the longer the bar; the higher the note, the higher the bar. So, instead of the music notes on the staff, you see these bars creeping across the screen from right to left. As you can imagine, this setup is more conducive to representing melody than harmony.

Another of the visualizations is based on note intervals. (Everyone knows "octave" (8^ve), the musical distance between, say, Middle C, and the next C above or below it. Similarly, every pair of notes define an interval, ranging from Unison (two coincident notes), which is zero, to however much you like. The important intervals are: the Fifth (5^th), between C and G above it, the Fourth (4^th), between C and G below it; and the Major Third (Maj 3^rd), between C and E above. Finally, there is the Minor Third (Min 3^rd), from E up to G. Or D up to F, for that matter.)

Malinowski decided to depict the notes that were being sounded at any moment with some shape, and then connect these notes with lines; blue for 5^ths, green for 3^rds, and some other cool color for 4^ths. The other intervals, which all sound more harsh, such as 7^ths and 2^nds, were depicted with red and yellow lines.

The illustration at above right is a composite of several screen shots.

At the top is a blended picture of two piano-roll views; the left part shows the bars colored according to the instrument (the entire melody is the same color for a given instrument or part, so that you can trace intercrossing lines of melody more easily), and the right half has the bar colored according to the note; Blue for C, or whatever.

Next below that is a fascinating view of one single chord, with all its notes lit up. This setup represents each note as one of a honeycomb pattern of note labels, surrounded by six of its harmonically closest neighbors, with the silent ones simply left dark and the sounding ones lit up. This piece of mine has five parts, so you see five of the discs lit up: 1, 2, 4, and 6, with some doubling, obviously. (In case you want to know, this is the minor seventh on the "supertonic", the note next up from the base note-- "Ray, a drop of golden sun." Or rather, the chord Re, Fa, La, Do.) A chord with closely related notes in it will be clustered tightly together; a wild and crazy chord will have tentacles all over. Well, at least out in the second concentric circle. For example, the chord B, D, F-Sharp, A-Flat will look pretty wild, I'd bet. [7, 2, 4#, 5# in this diagram.]

Objectively, I suppose, this would be the most illuminating view of the music, once you got used to it.

But Malinowski has yet another fascinating representation. He indicates notes on a rotating 12-tone scale of the circle of fifths --just the circle C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, etc opened up and copied over and over-- with longer notes represented by large diamonds, which get thinner as the note fades away, and each note is connected to every other note by lines, whose colors represent the intervals! So we have both pitch and intervals here.  The Circle of Fifths is shown at right; click to enlarge.   (This has a mathematical analogy that is fascinating. For various reasons, it is convenient to open up a circle into a line. Trigonometry students are familiar with the correspondence between 1/2 Pi and 90 degrees, for instance. Similarly, folding the entire piano keyboard into a circle, or opening out the circle of fifths into a line, or a cylinder of fifths into a plane are all familiar procedures for at least some mathematicians.  The diagram was created using Geometer's Sketchpad, currently owned and operated by Key Curriculum Press.)  [Please feel free to uses my Circle of Fifths ad libitum, except that you may not sell it to anyone, and must tell anyone to whom you give it that he or she should not sell it either, and so on until the end of time.  I do not insist on being identified as its creator, since better minds than mine were involved in its invention, even if the idea is obvious.]

Look at the last two images in the composite. The upper one is the opening chord, and let's pretend the piece is in C major. That opening chord has 3 C's, a G and an E. The 3 C's are all on the same horizontal line, the G is right above, on the very next line. (Why? Because G is [one of the] closest note[s] to C harmonically, though not interval-wise.) And some four notes away is our friend E, connected to the C's with green lines. The E makes two kinds of thirds; the major third is represented with a bluey-green line, it seems to me, and the major third with a yellowy-green line, but I could be wrong. They're both green, anyway. The octaves and the fifths and fourths are represented by blue lines.

The very next image, the lowest in the composite, shows the chord C, C, C, F#, A. As before, the lines between the 3 C's are blue. A to C, and F# to A are both thirds, both minor thirds, incidentally, and they're shown in green. But the flaming red lines indicate the C to F# interval, which is not far on the keyboard, but harmonically the notes are antipodal. So we see three sets of red lines, between each of the C's and the F#. (To modern ears, the C to F# interval is not so horribly dissonant, but at one time it was called the Wolf, or the Devil in Music: Diabolus in Musica.)

Harmony, though, is a tiny bit more than just the sum of the intervals involved, and to do it justice probably needs a representation that's more complex. But complexity has to start somewhere, and it looks as though we're never going to have to turn back from what Stephen Malinowski has achieved with his Music Animation Machine.

Initially, there was a very primitive video embedded here.  I have replaced it with a sharper (HD 720) video made in 2013, with the video captured using updated software.  This also uses far better sound samples.  I hope you like it!  Many thanks to Stephen Malinowski, as always.

Glenn Beck: "Progressivism is the Cancer in America"

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This was said recently by Glenn Beck--whoever he is, and progressivism--whatever it is--is getting to be a major problem to many Americans.

The fact of the matter is that more and more of our incomes is being eaten away by taxes; so everyone focuses on the taxes.  The Government, meanwhile, has bigger and bigger problems, as America passes into middle age, gets filled with immigrants, we begin to realize that though most of us would like to be classified as middle-class, our educational backgrounds have not kept pace with the demands of the available employment.

It is technology that enables people with very little education to carry on like experts; Excel enables a mathematically inept person keep track of mathematical things; Word enables someone with terrible grammar and spelling skills write moderately well; Google enables someone who is essentially ignorant of world affairs to scrape together a fair amount of information for very little effort.  So the essential ignorance of the vast majority of citizens is masked by technology.

But this same technology makes greater demands on productivity and on workers.  You need to be a lot more hip than our ancestors and our predecessors to handle the requirements of the kinds of jobs there are, out there.  Being able to Google makes us look a little smarter than people of twenty years ago, but we need to be a lot smarter than they, because of the kinds of jobs out there.  So there are some very middle-class people (with middle class expectations), but with less than middle-class jobs, feeling poor and deprived and hostile to the government, which seems to be bent on helping freeloaders.

Life is harder for everybody, and more complicated for everybody.  The problems are more complicated: a few years ago, we did not have to worry that much of the commercial real estate in some of our large cities were owned by foreign banks, for instance, or that such a large proportion of the population of California spoke Spanish, or that security at Airports would be so restrictive.  We didn't know that the Internet would be a major source of information and disinformation, affecting elections and party affiliations, plagiarism and education.  In addition to the general falling-off of how well people do in school, now employers want you to be able to do all sorts of things that were never required before.  And we expect the Government (local government and State government) to provide a better education for our children so that they are employable, but also to do a better job with educating people who have fewer educational resources than ever before: people in low-income neighborhoods living in crowded conditions, in violent home environments.

A responsible administration has to respond to the fact that millions have lost jobs with employers whose revenues reacted to the bad economic conditions of the past year or two.  Millions have lost their homes.  And now, millions have lost their health insurance also.  Some sectors of the population would like the Government to ensure that basic health care is available to everyone.  Others do not like this, since it looks like it will take tax dollars from them.

Well, how progressive is it, really, to want to take care of the health needs of the population at any cost?  That's what I want.  I don't see it as progressive at all.  I see it as an essential way of looking after the weakest members of society.

In the last analysis, when future generations judge us, they will judge us not on how much of our earned income we got to keep, but on how well we looked after the weakest among us.

[P.S.  Just a remark about the weakest members of society.
It might seem reasonable to blame the poor and unemployed for their own problems, but this is by no means an obvious thing to assume.  Poverty has many sources; poverty begets poverty, and so a child born to parents of limited means will often remain poor throughout his or her life.  On the other hand, there are many people in poverty today who were born to middle-class parents.  Their economic conditions could have had their roots in a number of different circumstances: an employer going bankrupt, a sudden illness, the loss of a home to fire or accident, loss of limb, cancer, war, robbery, a traffic accident.  It's amazing how little imagination the wealthy have, when dismissing the poor as the cause of their own poverty.]

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"Culture Pirates", copyright, and all that

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The invention of Kindle and Sony Reader (and similar devices at other places, e.g. IPad and Borders) has brought up the whole issue of what "copyright" does for us.

In "Misinterpreting Copyright, Richard Stallman describes a convincing point of view.  He sees copyright as a piece of social contract: someone gets to market something that he or she "creates" for a limited period, in order that more authors will be encouraged to creative enterprise.  This is supported by language in the US Constitution, which says  that Congress should "promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."  In other words, he says, the point of copyright is not so much to support some "natural right" that an author has, by virtue of being a creator, to enjoy the material benefits of controlling his creation, but rather that the people grant the author this privilege for a limited period of time in order to encourage creative endeavors.  Otherwise, he argues, why would we limit the period of time?  We don't limit the period of time one gets to live in one's home, he says, drawing a sharp contrast between owning one's residence, and owning the copyright to a work.

I'm obviously not an expert, but this view seems reasonable to me.  Most modern creativity takes place in a social context in which the individual receives benefits in living in society far in excess of the taxes he or she pays.  Thus the society at large partakes in the authorship of all creative works.  (Particular authors can be expected to dispute this, since they could easily fall into the illusion of being individuals who are so autonomous and so independent that they owe little or nothing to society.  They do expect society to defend their claims to authorship, though.)

For those of us whose creativity is limited, perhaps it is difficult to see how much particular authors cherish this illusion of being sole creators of their works.  Nor would I like to be in their shoes, since it is always better to share credit for any endeavor.  For instance, I write my music in a program whose name I am afraid of mentioning for fear that they will claim authorship of my music.  While I do not mind sharing the credit, I do resent the possibility that these co-creators with me of any works I might create will be able to exploit them commercially.

Stallman, and numerous other individuals have invented and sharpened the concept of "Free Software", saying that it is "free as in Free Speech, not as in Free Beer."  This means that you have it as an absence of significant restrictions, rather than as not being asked to pay for it.  A book, for instance, if it is still under copyright, is not Free as in speech, because you can't alter it, add to it, even write a sequel to it without permission.  (I could be wrong, but this is my understanding.)  Shakespeare, in contrast, can be obtained as a photocopy from someone (so, Free as in Beer), and you can modify it, and sell it, if anyone is willing to pay for your Improved Shakespeare, so Free as in Speech, too.

For Stallman, who naturally focuses on Free Software, the unrestricted nature of the software is more important than that you might have to pay for it.  He points out that since it isn't restricted, there will invariably be multiple ways of obtaining it --getting it from a friend, for instance, which is legal, since there is no restriction on redistribution.  So the Free as in Speech aspect of free software makes the not Free as in Beer aspect less painful.  It took me a while to get my mind around the distinction, but I think I finally have.  A software distributor could charge for software to cover costs, or raise money for whatever purpose, but the premium is charged essentially for the convenience.  Once you buy it, there is no restriction on what you do with it, except for the simple one imposed by a movement called CopyLeft: a freedom clause equivalent to the one accompanying the original free software has to be imposed on any improvements you make and distribute.  In other words, anyone who improves free software with a CopyLeft restriction on it must distribute it as CopyLeft software.  The CopyLeft agreement has to be inherited by any successors to CopyLeft software.

In contrast, DVDs, Kindle books, etc etc are even more restricted than conventional books and magazines.  Conventional books and magazines can be recirculated at will.  Not so a Kindle book.  You have to get it off the satellite every time you read it, but you cannot give it to a friend.

The article referred to in the title is about a professor who is studying the present concept of Copyright, he believes, in the Industrial Revolution (though Stallman goes a little further back to the 18th century), and seems to be in favor of a revision of the concept of copyright, though he may not be as radical in his ideas as is Stallman.  Stallman's view is that the privilege of exclusive marketing is a brief and limited concession, and not an inalienable right.

But the ideas are subtle, and I encourage everyone to read both articles.

Great Art, Great Music, and Great Literature

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I recently read a story by an unpublished author that got me thinking.

The story was about a very intelligent woman, Janet, who had attended one of the best colleges in the country, and early in life met an incredibly brilliant woman and fallen in love with her.  They had inspired each other to become more and more immersed in the best of early and Baroque music, which was going through a burst of increased interest in the sixties.  They had separated soon afterwards, when others had entered their circle, but twenty years later they still kept in touch, but now there were siblings and nephews and nieces, all brilliant, all musical, all talented.

Into this circle enters an outsider, a wealthy middle-class girl, a freshman in college, who meets Janet and falls in love with her despite the difference in their ages.  But immediately there is a clash of cultures.  The young girl is more into Harlequin Romances, while the girls of her generation in Janet's immediate circle are incapable of considering anything less highly endorsed by the establishment than Pride and Prejudice.

Personally, I'm on both sides of this divide: the lovers of Great Art, Great Music, and Great Literature, on one side, and the lovers of a wider variety of art on the other.

Musically, of course, I have been largely on the conservative side; my tastes are still centered on the (musical) Baroque, the period from around the time of Purcell in England and Schutz in Germany, to around that of the sons of J. S. Bach: W.F. Bach, C.P.E Bach, and J.C. Bach.  However, since I also like a certain part of the Pop/Rock output of the last half-century, as well as a tiny sliver of the opus of the musical theater, my tastes are not as narrow as they might have been.

In literature, my tastes are a little wider, ranging from Jane Austen to P.G. Wodehouse and even Ronald Searle, and Terry Pratchett.  I have written a couple of stories, but their style hearkens back to that of Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  (I would have hated to admit that a couple of years ago, but now that I'm older, I realize I only have about 40 years of embarrassment left before I pass on that duty to my descendants.)

On the one hand, let's face it: there's an awful lot of stuff out there, begging for adoption into our hearts, our bookshelves, our walls, and our CD and DVD libraries.  Some people have the energy to keep going round looking at books, art and music that they might like, confident that there is something out there with which to fall in love.  Me: I figure that I know there is still stuff out there by composers and authors that I know I like, but haven't got to, yet.  Why would I go looking for new authors?  (When I have, it has usually been rewarding.  But that's beside the point.)

On the other hand, since I have written a couple of pieces of music myself (actually, just two pieces, totaling less than 10 minutes in duration, end to end) I find myself on the other side of the divide: the goal of every composer is to have his or her music performed and heard.  So if everybody else, like myself, was only at all interested in Great Music, I can forget about anyone listening to my stuff at all!

What are the issues?  Living in an age of plenty of everything (and not a drop to drink) as we are, the big intellectual battle, as I see it, is clutter.  Some things come in waves, like movies, for instance.  Every year--especially every winter--we have to decide which movies to see, and so we sift through them, and decide to like particular ones.  With movies, I guess we are lucky.  Few of us are such conservatives that we watch only the Great Movies, such as Casablanca, say. (Though even there, I come close.)  With books, the New York Times mostly decides what we ought to be reading, or we can wait for the movie.  Or we can go to the library, and browse.

With music, browsing at libraries is out, but the radio serves as a sort of musical library.  You listen, and if you like, you send out for it from Amazon, or order it at your local bookstore, or record store.  (I urge the latter; there are plenty of others out there to keep Amazon in the style to which it is accustomed.)

These days, there is also YouTube, which is actually more to do with sound than video, it seems to me.  There are a few teenagers who upload clips of themselves talking to the camera, but by and large, it seems mostly about music.

But, to get back to Janet and her young friend: Literature was initially a barrier between the younger woman and Janet's extended family.  Still, because of the fascinating characters involved, they managed to transcend their prejudices to the point where they were able to go past the superficial superficiality, to the interesting person beneath.  Superficiality is often superficial (though not always, unfortunately).  It's generally a good idea to give half an hour, say, to trying to understand the tastes of a new acquaintance, especially if they are strongly contrasted with your own.  Persisting longer is likely to be to the frustration of both of you.  For myself, I stick to the narrowest of cores of Great Art, Great Music and Great Literature just as a convenience, and not as a matter of principle.  Critical acclaim has little to do with why I like certain things.  I like them now, and I really don't base my preferences on the endorsement of the authorities.  To refer your preferences to some authority stinks of Philistinism.  And they say that's bad, don't they?

[Once again, I must acknowledge Susan Haley, from whom I have borrowed some of these ideas, especially the phrase Great Art.]

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Lessons from History, my opinion

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One thing that is different between current events and historical events is public opinion.

Like it or not, most people are influenced to some degree by the reactions of people (neighbors, friends, talking heads on TV, bloggers) to various happenings.  In the time of Pharoah, say, the only insight he would have had into what the people thought would be hearsay, and whatever was channeled to his ears by his so-called advisors.  Today, Obama only has to turn on his TV or power up his laptop to know all about what people are saying.  Of course there are still idiots who only listen to their friends.  A lot of people do tend to only talk with those who agree with them.  (I must admit that I do tend to hang out with mostly die-hard liberals, except for my buddy Gene, who listens to conservative talk shows almost exclusively, and jumps all over me if I happen to mention anything like health care reform.)

There were genocides all through history; for instance, the eradication of the Phoenicians by ancient Rome, and the harrowing of Carthage.  But over the years, the understanding of major historical events among the common people has gradually increased, with its cumulative effect on what we consider morally objectionable and morally justified.  The near-eradication of the Native Peoples of North America was clearly wrong, in hindsight.  But part of that very "hindsight" is World War 2, and the worldwide attitude towards genocide, in general.  Indeed, the word genocide had not been coined, if I'm not mistaken, prior to the 20th Century.  A similar eradication of a people (or a score of peoples, as was the case in the American expansion) is wronger now than it was then.

Despite all this, in the US, as in many other nations of course, there are those whose opinions seem to have only the most twisted relationship to world opinion.  Nevertheless, certain types of atrocities, at least, are less forgivable today than they might have been in the distant past.  For instance, it would be unforgivable if a head of state were to have his spouse beheaded for not providing him or her with a male heir.  (I'm not sure of the exact circumstances, but Henry Tudor has a lot to answer for, IMO.)

Notwithstanding all the above, there appear to be many regimes currently in power who have calculated precisely how much of world opinion they can ignore.  One reason for this is that the US tends to orchestrate world opinion very aggressively, and it becomes a convenient excuse for ignoring any opinion: "The US is behind it."  On one hand, orchestrating world opinion using diplomacy is a step forward as far as the US is concerned; in the past, we suspect that the CIA influenced thinking in many parts of the world using methods that were far more extreme than we can imagine.  Anything the US does without sending out the bombs and the tanks (and the CIA) is worthy of some degree of approval.

Also in the US, there are those who have studied the fine art of just how far we can go before we screw up the little sympathy we have abroad.  These experts are back in business now after an eight year sabbatical; there was no demand for subtlety in the first eight years of this century.

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Playful Mathematics, Karaoke, and other matters

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In a recent NY Times website piece (click on the title above), the author commented about the more playful aspects of arithmetic.  This is a wonderful piece, the sort that would inspire adults to revisit some of the basic mathematics that intimidated them in their youth.

As with everything, your ability to think in particular ways changes with age.  As a kid, I hated literature, history, and geography.  And little wonder; the interesting aspects of each of these subjects has to do with experience and wisdom, and ones accumulated knowledge of people and their behavior, and how it is colored and affected by their circumstances (including climate and economics).

I recently (yesterday, actually) saw a post on the Karaoke culture of urban Philippines, specifically how the Frank Sinatra song "My Way" has, unbelievably, been the last thing some poor Filipinos sang before they were stabbed to death.  I know it's a terrible song, but this seems to be extreme.

I would have been quite uninterested in Filipinos, stabbed or unstabbed, thirty years ago.  But since then I have met and got to know many fascinating Filipinos, and my attitude now is completely different.  This is why it is so important to meet people of all sorts, and keep an open mind while doing it.

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"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." Robert Louis Stevenson

Mockingbird: A study of grace

I was oddly delighted when I stumbled across this page, an interview with Mary Badham, who was Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird". It is easy to guess--and has been verified, I believe--that Scout was the voice of Harper Lee herself.

I can't remember actually reading the entire book; I'm sure I did, and I should read it again. The history of pre-integration American South is just a vague thing to me; I have my own racism to deal with, and don't need to take on gratuitous feelings of guilt. But this doesn't mean that I can't get into the minds and see through the eyes of Southern characters. The South has been incredibly fortunate in having a great list of white authors who have eloquently presented personal accounts of their interactions across race lines, or stories handed down by their families, possibly embellished in ways that make the protagonists sympathetic, but I doubt that this has been done to the extent of obscuring the essential facts to the discerning eye.

Mary Badham's photograph, which showed her with a smile that seems characteristic somehow, seems to bear witness to the fact that she who so ably created the central character of Scout (you simply must read the excerpts from the interview; she seems to have been every bit as interesting as the character she played) has managed to age so gracefully! Oh if only we were all so fortunate!

To my mind, Mockingbird is all about grace: the grace of the blacks, and their continued love of the white children, and the grace of the lawyer, when he finally listened to his conscience. Both the fact that some whites stood with black slaves against their racist neighbors, and that we find it necessary to glorify this minority, all are reasons to ponder those times with a mix of sorrow, and gratitude that conditions are a little better. Still, it seems to me that a novel that celebrates all that was best in those times should be cherished. Some may complain that it may be more informative to read a novel that presented the raw viciousness that was the order of the day.

This is always the problem with the politics of inequity: whether to educate with fiction depicting noble ideals, or humiliate and inform with fiction that depicts raw confrontation, and the exertion of military might, whether to feed our imaginations of how things could be, or remind ourselves of how things are.

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