Top Music for 2007

My top artists for 2007, according to last.fm. Not the most representative collection, because the long tail of my listening habits is, well, really long. But aside from a few surprises, it's pretty fair. One thing that's not a surprise: I am decidedly out-of-date. I think only a few of these folks came out with an album this year. And a lot of them are dead. I almost never know what's going on in the music world, but I'm okay with that. On with the list...

Jeff Buckley - No surprise here. Pretty sure I've got more of his music than any other person in my collection. King Crimson - Big surge in the second half of the year. In the Court of the Crimson King quickly became one of my favorite albums, ever. And Beat is a lot of fun. Pink Floyd - Old standby. DJ Ti?´sto - This was a bit of a surprise, but In Search of Sunrise has gotten a lot of play. Like today, for example. Claude Debussy - Heavy play of the Nocturnes and Children's Corner. Dave Brubeck - Didn't expect him so high, but he got featured in a couple of playlists. Radiohead - No surprise. Jean Sibelius - Huge surge this winter, after reading The Rest Is Noise. Philip Glass - I went on a Glass-collecting spree this fall. Still have something of love/hate relationship with his music. Feist - We had a good year together, except for when she released an album when I was out hiking for a couple months. Sergei Rachmaninoff - Pretty balanced play from an old favorite, across the spectrum of symphonies, concertos, choral works and chamber stuff. Madonna - Never really listened to her until this year. Big fan. Bela Fleck & the Flecktones - Another surprise here. Didn't think I was listening to them so much, but I got addicted to "Big Country" for a while. Pat Metheny - Probably would have ranked higher if last.fm kept track of all the play on road trips. Henry Purcell - I sat through Dido & Aeneas a bunch of times so I could hear the final aria and chorus in context. Johnny Cash - A good bit of the older stuff, but especially American IV. Duran Duran - Rio, mostly. Especially "New Religion". Daft Punk - Eh. Need to play this less, I think. Al Jarreau - Mostly the live album, Look to the Rainbow. Carly Simon - Almost all from Anticipation. Erik Satie - Almost exclusively due to the Gymnopedies. April March - For some reason, the fact that she's over 40 really boggles me. Will Scruggs - A good friend and brilliant jazz saxophonist. Joanna Newsom - Surprised she wasn't higher on my list. Probably would be if her songs weren't so epic and awesome. Still feel like an idiot for not going to her Atlanta show this past November. Machito - The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite got into a couple playlists.

The Road (review: 5/5)

Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can't survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, and what they hope to find are never made completely clear, just as the cause of society's downfall is unexplained. But the beauty of the story is in everyday purpose they find in each other despite the struggle. There are a few tense moments avoiding bands of thieves and cannibals or other desperate nomads, but most of the book is a catalog of daily trials and conversations, simply and lovingly told. McCarthy's language is surprisingly simple and repetitive. It often called to mind a bit of the last stanza of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow.

Like Wallace Stevens' poetry, McCarthy's book has something of music in it. At times, since the book has no chapters or divisions larger than a few paragraphs, it reads like a very long unbroken poem or chant or something you might read aloud. McCarthy occasionally disrupts this flow with some whiz-bang vocabulary (e.g. gryke, chary, kerf), but for the most part it's just really wonderful.

Cloze, reading, learning, life

While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads it and fills in the blanks. It's kind of like mad libs, but the goal is to choose the correct words instead of just having fun with it. What's cool about cloze tests is what they can tell you about learning. By comparing how well readers complete the passage vs. how well they answer questions given a complete text, you can find where the optimal difficulty is. It turns out that there is an optimal difficulty level if you're looking to maximize information gain. Right around a 35-40% cloze success rate is best if you've got an instructor available when needed, and around 50-60% if you're learning independently.

You tend to acquire the most information with texts at those particular difficulty levels. You bring enough context and prior knowledge, but just enough to get a handle on the new stuff. What's crazy, if I can stretch it a bit, is that the most efficient learning takes place when you're stumbling roughly 40-60% of the time.

So it kind of woke me up to thinking, if the goal is to learn and grow, how can I pick and choose the best experiences? I don't mean it in a snobby sense---"that is below me"---but in the sense of growth and challenge---"this is difficult and worth it." If you've got perfectionism issues (like I do sometimes), sometimes you get stuck doing things you're great at, because you're great and being great feels good. But there's no growth there. So the cloze thing comes into play. Try something where you know you'll only be partially successful. See what happens.

Fun with Flickr stats

Spent some time playing with Flickr stats the other day. I'm not really looking to be known for my photographs, but I am a sucker for data. As expected, my stats don't demonstrate that internet users worldwide have come to appreciate my uncanny eye for composition and form, but rather that one can leverage Flickr's hard-won Google ranking and search relevance to own some obscure keywords.

From the Rope Swing Manifesto

From the Rope Swing Manifesto:

The absolutely best rope swing is one currently in use by your friends. If you approach a rope swing in use by persons not known to you, realize that you may get a cool reception or worse. As we’ve seen, rope swings usually occur on private land. The swings themselves, however, are private in a way more profound than matters of real estate, surveying, probate, and taxes. Prior use conveys ownership. While the other rope swing users are no doubt trespassers just like you, they may feel that they are the true keepers of the swing, and you are an interloper. They are right. As holders of local knowledge, and as people who have used the swing without getting caught in the past, they have every right to resent you, who by your very presence may call just enough attention to the swing to get it cut down.

policies to encourage professors to help students complete the dissertation

PhD trivia: "Only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10." That sounds completely insane to me. Granted, I've never been in a PhD program, but... wow. Just wow. Some schools are implementing policies to encourage professors to help students complete the dissertation, on pain of the department losing admissions slots.

Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories (review: 3.5/5)

Flash Fiction Forward collects a bunch of stories that only take a couple of page turns to finish. One thing I thought was odd is how none of the stories take on a particular genre, and how many of them seem to have a contemporary setting. Why not a tight little detective story, or a scene from a Civil War battle field, or a nice little 13th century abbey? I'm all for penetrating meditations on modern relationships and culture and stuff, but it's a shame to see such talent spent in a narrow range. In any case, many of these stories are quite good, and the low cost of reading means you should take a glance. Some of the stories I particularly liked are:

"Before the Bath" by Ismail Kadare "The Great Open Mouth Anti-Sadness" by Ron Carlson "Rose" by John Biguenet "The Old Truth in Costa Rica" by Lon Otto "I Never Looked" by Donald Hall "Fab 4" by Jenny Hall "Words" by John A. McCaffrey "21" by Jim Crace "The Orange" by Benjamin Rosenbaum "Geometry Can Fail Us" by Barbara Jacksha "Bill" by Dan Kaplan "00:02:36:58" by Bayard Godsave "Traveling Alone" by Rob Carney "The Death of the Short Story" by J. David Stevens

One final note: it's incredibly disappointing how many of these stories are not (easily) available online.

The Twitter Curve

The Twitter Curve. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It's one of the best things distractions going, but I have to be really careful to keep my signal/noise ratio in balance.