Disecting song lyrics is rather enjoyable. But one should not do it out of context. The actual music, the notes per se, are vitally important to the words.
Consider the following lyrics sung by Some Girly:
And I miss you
Like the desert missed the rain
And I miss you
Like the desert missed the rain
And I miss you
Like the desert missed the rain
And....etc.
If you analyze what the sentence "the desert missed the rain" means, you might come to the conclusion that she's saying total gibberish. Naturally, the desert is a desert, and doesn't miss the rain. The desert is a place, the practicalist would say, where there is hardly any rain, if it rains at all. So how can the desert miss something it doesn't have, or in fact, doesn't need? Cactus and other such plants and creatures that live in the desert don't need rain. If there was rain in the desert it would cease to be a desert, it would drive these creatures into extinction, and the desert wouldn't miss the rain anymore, if it ever did!
However, the poetical and musical side of me hears a sort of stormy wind in the music, a yearning note. The desert can miss the rain! How? Well, consider this. The desert is a place that is deserted, no joke, by rational people, animals, and only spikey things and kangaroo rats live there. The desert is also deserted by the rain. Because it is a desert it does miss the rain! The poetical side of me likes this explanation. Some Girly was trying to get the impression across that she's been abandoned, nay, deserted (no pun intended) and is likening herself to some place that has long needed to quench its thirst.
To me it works. But I think I can hear Mr. Jones protesting. :-) I disagreed with some of his beefs with the poetry that he presented at disputatio. I'm still trying to figure out why he thought certain styles were bad, and others that took a straightforward, practical approach, were better. More on that later.
Another song, by an Unknown Golden Oldies Singer goes something like this:
I'm a-walking in the rain
Tears are falling and I feel a pain
A-wishing you were here by me
To end this misery
And I wonder
I wo-wo-wo-wo-woooonder
Why
Why-why-why-why-why she ran away
And I wonder where she will stay-ee-yay
My little runaway
A run-run-run-run-runaway
I know it looks pathetic on paper, but try to imagine chipper music playing along, with an upbeat, and something that sounds like a piccolo solo. It's rather amusing, but despite the dumb lyrics I find it enjoyable and useful to sing along in the car while one drives to work. I am tempted to say, that despite the appearence of amateurism in this particular song, it has way better lyrics than Daniel Powter's Bad Day. Don't get me wrong, I like that song a lot, but the chorus to Bad Day gives me the impression that he's trying too hard to rhyme things.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Gaslight
Ha! Joseph Cotten is an amazing actor. And I knew it, even before I saw Gaslight last night.
Brief Outline: Ingrid Bergman plays a timid, pretty young girl whose life is blighted by the unsolved murder of her aunt, who was a famous singer. The movie opens with Bergman moving to Italy where she is tutored under the maestro who taught her aunt, and we find her 10 years after the strangling of her aunt, still singing, but distracted. She loves a piantist (Charles Boyer), who is a tall dark, square-jawed fellow with a killer accent and a deep voice. Naturally, they get married and he convinces her to return to the home where she grew up, the home she inherited from her aunt, and the place where her aunt was strangled. But although she would love to have parties and people over, she is too ill to do this or to go anywhere, and on top of it all strange things happen. Such as, she puts things in odd places but doesn't remember doing it, she forgets where things are, she loses things. Or, so her husband tells her. Boyer tells her she is forgetful, that she does strange things, and indeed she seems to be going crazy. Her husband works across town every night to be in a quiet place while he composes. When he is gone, Bergman sees the gaslights go lower, and hears all sorts of footsteps, some shuffling and bumping. She begins to believe she is going mad, especially when her husband tells her her mother (who died when she was born) was crazy and died "alone in an asylum without a brain".
Enter Cotten, who chances to see Bergman and realizes that she is the niece of the famous soprano he met when he was a boy. Bergman seems strange, though, and her husband is even weirder. Cotten happens to work for Scotland Yard and gets going, privately reopening the long forgotten case of the strangled soprano.
Cotten's movies are all good. He's with Orson Welles in The Third Man, and is in a wartime movie Since You Went Away, he's a strange uncle in Shadow of a Doubt, a strange husband in Under Capricorn, a political guy who falls in love with a Swede in The Farmer's Daughter. My favorite is I'll Be Seeing You. I need to see Citizen Kane next, because he's in it, and everyone and their dog has seen it.
Brief Outline: Ingrid Bergman plays a timid, pretty young girl whose life is blighted by the unsolved murder of her aunt, who was a famous singer. The movie opens with Bergman moving to Italy where she is tutored under the maestro who taught her aunt, and we find her 10 years after the strangling of her aunt, still singing, but distracted. She loves a piantist (Charles Boyer), who is a tall dark, square-jawed fellow with a killer accent and a deep voice. Naturally, they get married and he convinces her to return to the home where she grew up, the home she inherited from her aunt, and the place where her aunt was strangled. But although she would love to have parties and people over, she is too ill to do this or to go anywhere, and on top of it all strange things happen. Such as, she puts things in odd places but doesn't remember doing it, she forgets where things are, she loses things. Or, so her husband tells her. Boyer tells her she is forgetful, that she does strange things, and indeed she seems to be going crazy. Her husband works across town every night to be in a quiet place while he composes. When he is gone, Bergman sees the gaslights go lower, and hears all sorts of footsteps, some shuffling and bumping. She begins to believe she is going mad, especially when her husband tells her her mother (who died when she was born) was crazy and died "alone in an asylum without a brain".
Enter Cotten, who chances to see Bergman and realizes that she is the niece of the famous soprano he met when he was a boy. Bergman seems strange, though, and her husband is even weirder. Cotten happens to work for Scotland Yard and gets going, privately reopening the long forgotten case of the strangled soprano.
Cotten's movies are all good. He's with Orson Welles in The Third Man, and is in a wartime movie Since You Went Away, he's a strange uncle in Shadow of a Doubt, a strange husband in Under Capricorn, a political guy who falls in love with a Swede in The Farmer's Daughter. My favorite is I'll Be Seeing You. I need to see Citizen Kane next, because he's in it, and everyone and their dog has seen it.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
The Problems of Medicine
Atul Gawande wrote Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. It is a riveting book, and a blurb on the back cover says "Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around...He's prescient and thoughtful...the heir to Lewis Thomas' humble, insightful, and brilliantly crafted oeuvre." (from Salon.com)
Well, I like Lewis Thomas. And I really like Atul Gawande. His style is simple, but not dull. He doesn't assume the readers to have complete medicine knowledge or to be up to date on the lingo, so he helpfully provides that.
The problem of medicine, Gawande begins to argue in the chapter Education of a Knife, is that "We want perfection without practice." This is ridiculous, because we cannot attain perfection without practice. World-renowned doctors are, well, world-renowned because they are good at what they do. They have been at their job for so long, they have instincts about what to do in dire situations. But people often forget that doctors are human too. They are still fallible and make mistakes.
"We call such doctors "incompetent", "unethical", and "negligent". We want to see them punished. And so we've wound up with the public system we have for dealing with error: malpractice lawsuits, media scandal, suspensions, firings. There is, however a central truth in medicine that complicates this tidy vision of misdeeds and misdoers: all doctors make terrible mistakes."( pg. 55-56)
I also find it interesting, and partly true, how Gawande realized that half the deaths of patients under a doctor are not the doctor's fault. Circumstances (or fate, he might say) led to the point that no matter what the doctor did, because of previous events, the patient would die.
"The British psychologist James Reason argues, in his book Human Error, that our propensity for certain types of error is the price we pay for the brain's remarkable ability to think and act intuitively - to sift quickly through the sensory information that constantly bombards us without wasting time trying to work through every situation anew. Thus systems that rely on human perfection present what Reason calls "latent errors" - errors waiting to happen. Medicine teems with examples. Take writing out a prescription, a rote procedure that relies on memory and attention, which we know are unreliable. Inevitably, a physician will sometimes specify the wrong dose or the wrong drug. Even when the prescription is written correctly, there's a risk that it will be misread. (Computerized ordering systems can almost eliminate errors of this kind, but only a small minority of hospitals have adopted them.) Medical equipment, which manufacturers often build without human operators in mind, is another area rife with latent errors: one reason physicians are bound to have problems when they use cardiac defibrillators is that the devices have no standard design. You can also make the case that onerous workloads, chaotic environments, and inadequate team communication all represent latent errors in the system. ...The one attending trauma surgeon available gets stuck in the operating room. When things go wrong, it is usually because a series of failures conspires to produce disaster." (pg. 63-64)
Here's one last quote about practice. It's impressive for surgeons specifically to keep at what they do, even when they are not absolutely sure that what they are doing is the best thing. Their many years of practice give them ability to be mostly sure, but not completely. The will to keep doing surgery is impressive, and is what sets them apart.
"Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist [apparently, Gawande likes psychologists] and expert on performance, notes that the most important way in which innate factors play a role may be in one's willingness to engage in sustained training. He's found, for example, that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That's why, for example, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway." (pg. 20)
Well, I like Lewis Thomas. And I really like Atul Gawande. His style is simple, but not dull. He doesn't assume the readers to have complete medicine knowledge or to be up to date on the lingo, so he helpfully provides that.
The problem of medicine, Gawande begins to argue in the chapter Education of a Knife, is that "We want perfection without practice." This is ridiculous, because we cannot attain perfection without practice. World-renowned doctors are, well, world-renowned because they are good at what they do. They have been at their job for so long, they have instincts about what to do in dire situations. But people often forget that doctors are human too. They are still fallible and make mistakes.
"We call such doctors "incompetent", "unethical", and "negligent". We want to see them punished. And so we've wound up with the public system we have for dealing with error: malpractice lawsuits, media scandal, suspensions, firings. There is, however a central truth in medicine that complicates this tidy vision of misdeeds and misdoers: all doctors make terrible mistakes."( pg. 55-56)
I also find it interesting, and partly true, how Gawande realized that half the deaths of patients under a doctor are not the doctor's fault. Circumstances (or fate, he might say) led to the point that no matter what the doctor did, because of previous events, the patient would die.
"The British psychologist James Reason argues, in his book Human Error, that our propensity for certain types of error is the price we pay for the brain's remarkable ability to think and act intuitively - to sift quickly through the sensory information that constantly bombards us without wasting time trying to work through every situation anew. Thus systems that rely on human perfection present what Reason calls "latent errors" - errors waiting to happen. Medicine teems with examples. Take writing out a prescription, a rote procedure that relies on memory and attention, which we know are unreliable. Inevitably, a physician will sometimes specify the wrong dose or the wrong drug. Even when the prescription is written correctly, there's a risk that it will be misread. (Computerized ordering systems can almost eliminate errors of this kind, but only a small minority of hospitals have adopted them.) Medical equipment, which manufacturers often build without human operators in mind, is another area rife with latent errors: one reason physicians are bound to have problems when they use cardiac defibrillators is that the devices have no standard design. You can also make the case that onerous workloads, chaotic environments, and inadequate team communication all represent latent errors in the system. ...The one attending trauma surgeon available gets stuck in the operating room. When things go wrong, it is usually because a series of failures conspires to produce disaster." (pg. 63-64)
Here's one last quote about practice. It's impressive for surgeons specifically to keep at what they do, even when they are not absolutely sure that what they are doing is the best thing. Their many years of practice give them ability to be mostly sure, but not completely. The will to keep doing surgery is impressive, and is what sets them apart.
"Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist [apparently, Gawande likes psychologists] and expert on performance, notes that the most important way in which innate factors play a role may be in one's willingness to engage in sustained training. He's found, for example, that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That's why, for example, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway." (pg. 20)
Thursday, May 11, 2006
See You In September
This is the time when half the world is gone, for a college student. It's weird to think about how often we don't want dramatic change. But think how boring life would be without change. God knows us so much better than we know ourselves. He knows how dull and practically pointless life would seem without sudden twists, surprise parties, death, birth, joy, tears, pain, love, late nights which turn to early mornings, car accidents, anguish, sorrow, felicity, goofiness, serious and teasing conversation, dancing, singing, running, falling, thinking, struggling, reaching, success.
Our lives begin each day, all over again, with the blessing to strive once more to live like Christ.
Our lives begin each day, all over again, with the blessing to strive once more to live like Christ.
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