Hardcore for Nerds

First blog post of 2024, on a rabbit hole of translations and etymologies I was sent down on finding a word in a Psalm variously translated as "dung hill" or "ash heap".

Wiktionary is a great resource!

I see a lot of people complaining that Google search doesn't work any more, which is probably the case for anything that is vaguely commercial and/or SEO+GPT adjacent, but for obscure and esoteric queries it works pretty well for me

Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @PP_Rubens Saint Anthony, being tempted. Because the possibility of dining on barbecued ear was really enticing to hermit saints! By Jan Mandijn, whose day was today. 12:56 AM · Oct 23, 2023

"On the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Priestley's house was looted and burned down by a mob (inspired by the King and the Church) that was enraged by Priestley's view of revolution." Priestley Riots - Wikipedia

An interesting piece of late 18th-century English social history I don't think I'd heard about before: in 1791, in Birmingham, the homes of many notable Dissenters - that, is Protestants who did not subscribe to or take oaths in the Established Church of England - were attacked, seemingly with the tacit support of local authorities.

I came across this as a passing mention in an episode of Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, where he explains the location of a preserved workshop of J.B. Priestley - the 'discoverer' of oxygen - in the US rather than England due to him fleeing to Pennsylvania. Noting that Priestley was not the friendliest of characters, but not explaining the reason behind his house being burned down in an illustrated engraving; though Wikipedia says "Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community", it was for eminently political rather than scientific reasons that the popular mob turned on him and his coreligionists.

Although Journeys of the Mind is a vivid and droll guide to Brown’s role in advancing the historiography of late antiquity, it is also a sustained and moving meditation on how historians of any faith cope with the strangeness of its past. Brown’s upbringing among a shabby genteel tribe of Anglican servants of the British Empire in Éamon de Valera’s clerical republic acquainted him not just with the plight of vanishing aristocracies but also with the “hard edges” of religion. The boundary between Protestant minority and Catholic majority in his native Dublin was invisible but always palpable. Yet the “tweedy philistinism” of Oxford seemed to ignore the fierce grip that beliefs exercise over persons, or else read it as an expression of other identities, such as ethnicity or social class.

Hegel against the machine - New Statesman

On the nature of intelligence in relation to embodied, situated reason and intentionality.

Also worth reading, a couple of recent Substack pieces:

Render Unto the Machine by L.M. Sacasas

On the relationship between institutions and human competencies, and how the idea of replacing humans through automation speaks largely to the robot-ification of our interactions already.

Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button by Ethan Mollick

On the ouroboros nature of AI text generation and parsing potentially replacing much of the communication in the corporate world, and the 'crisis of meaning' that produces.

I've always been a bit sceptical of - or never properly understood - the argument that intelligence is fundamentally an "embodied" thing that can't simply be abstracted away from sensory experience and feelings, which probably says a lot about me. By contrast, I find quite seductive the idea that we do largely think in some sense like LLMs, by exploring the 'phase space' of our thoughts, and that we are just predicting the next word, phrase or token.

According to The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, what we consider to be reason can also be understood as post-facto rationalisation of our (unconscious decisions), which likely evolved as a means to facilitate communication and persuasion through the mechanism of being able to explain our thoughts.

Missa Pro Defunctis: I: Requiem Aeternam - Orazzio Vecchi, Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer (2017)

For his latest Glossa CD with Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer takes his lead from the funeral rites for the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens in 1640 – which might well have encompassed the Requiem Mass by Orazio Vecchi as recorded here – to demonstrate the coexistence in Baroque Antwerp of two apparently contradictory, but interconnected facets.

One of these facets was the continuing presence of prima prattica polyphony; the city was a major centre for music printing and Vecchi’s Requiem was brought out there – as were works by other composers represented on this disc: George de La Hèle, Duarte Lobo and Pedro Ruimonte (the recording ends with three successive Agnus Deis!). The other facet is that of the image of Rubens’s art: full of energy, seductive, optimistic and scintillating. The Northern Baroque par excellence.

Backhuysen, Ludolf, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1695)

JS Bach, Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? (Jesus sleeps, what should be my hope?),  BWV81: No. 1 Aria

Pierre de Manchichourt [1510-1564], Messe de requiem: Introït, performed by La Tempête and Simon-Pierre Bestion - Hypnos (Alpha Classics, 2022)

Heard on Radio: La Baroque from France Musique

If there is a concept of the ‘aural sublime’*, I think this is it - layers of sound sliding over each other, voices and (I think?) horns (their site lists ‘Instrumentalists: 1 cornet, 1 bass clarinet’) but always with the sense that what you’re hearing right now is exactly what you should be hearing...

JS Bach, Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe (I stand with one foot in the grace), BWV153: No. 1 Sinfonia

Continuing my series of listening to Bach cantatas on the liturgical date they were originally composed for, with the third Sunday after Epiphany. Lots of emphasis on submission to God’s will via the Gospel reading of Matthew 8:9 (KJV: “And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”)

Somewhat unusually, this particular cantata opens with a purely instrumental Sinfonia, which (in this rendition anyway) has a melody that puts me in mind of something wistful you might hear from a Northern brass band in England.

Previous weeks: 

2nd Sunday after Epiphany, BWV13, Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen (My sighs, my tears)

Urban fractals