Imperfectionism and more

Imperfectionism

This extract from my first book has been widely quoted over the years. And it helped launch a new approach to art—known today as imperfectionist aesthetics.

Imagine T.S. Eliot giving nightly poetry readings at which, rather than reciting set pieces, he was expected to create impromptu poems—different ones each night, sometimes recited at a fast clip; imagine giving Hitchcock or Fellini a handheld camera and asking them to film something—anything—at that very moment, without the benefits of script, crew, editing, or scoring; imagine Matisse or Dali giving nightly exhibitions of their skills—exhibitions at which paying audiences would watch them fill up canvas after canvas with paint, often with only two or three minutes devoted to each ‘masterpiece.’

These examples strike us as odd, perhaps even ridiculous, yet conditions such as these are precisely those under which the jazz musician operates night after night, years after year.

…

Imagine a computer that has been programmed to compose musical works in any style. Even if the computer produced works stylistically and qualitatively indistinguishable from Mozart’s, we would still be unwilling to consider them as comparable to the Austrian composer’s pieces. The two are incommensurable. Mozart’s works are artistic masterpieces, and the computer’s output, however admirable, is something else entirely. The latter’s perfection no more reflects on the composer’s art than the existence of motor boats affects our judgment of how difficult it is to swim across the English Channel.

Thus, not only is our interest in the human element in art a justifiable concern, it is in fact a necessary concern….Art, in the words of the great modern aesthetician Benedetto Croce, is “expressive activity,” and lives and dies by the success of that expression.

Ted Gioia, whose capacity to surprise me on a very wide range of issues makes his Substack one of my favorites. The title and topic of this one is My Warning About AI Music from 1988.

Ted’s brother is poet Dana Gioia. It would have been ever so interesting to be a fly on the wall of their childhood home.

What parties do

I know many Democrats consider it frustrating and fundamentally unfair that they struggle so badly in Senate contests—something that is likely to get worse over the coming years. But to treat this as a structural impediment to power is badly mistaken. It is only a structural impediment to power if Democrats assume the party’s current policy commitments and moral stances are set in stone, non-negotiable, incapable of adjustment for the sake of doing better in senatorial and presidential elections. But such adjustments are part of what parties do. The GOP, for example, is now competitive in ways that it wasn’t when Mitt Romney was the presidential nominee—because Donald Trump changed its policy commitments and moral stances and thereby began appealing to different groups of voters than those that had been voting for Republicans in recent, Reaganite decades.

Damon Linker

This was inevitable

When ideologues have medical licenses, or doctors get the impression that they could be the leading edge of the Next Big Thing, it’s a formula for trouble.

I saw this first development coming and probably wrote about it here. The second is important in helping establish the Standard of Care to which doctors will be held in malpractice cases:

The last week has seen two big developments in the debate over transing children. The first was a lawsuit that won $2 million in damages from a gender doctor for a rushed double mastectomy on a 16 year old. The second was the response to it: both the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and the American Medical Association came out formally against “gender-affirming” surgery for minors.

That removes yet another argument made repeatedly by the queer groups: that every American medical association supports what is “settled science.” They don’t. And the science is obviously not settled. The lawsuit deals with one of the less concerning procedures: a mastectomy for a 16 year old. That’s nowhere near as irreversible as puberty blockers and cross sex hormones that alter your endocrine system for good, and after puberty, where most “gender affirming care” is focused on those about to enter puberty. But it’s a start.

The silence from the [LGB]TQ+ groups this past week — HRC, GLAAD, et al. — is also revealing. They hounded journalists who sought to pursue the story, and bullied countless others away from it. They called us bigots and transphobes for simple legitimate concerns about kids. And of course, they will never apologize or explain. Why should they? The one thing we know about the woke is they are never held accountable for the human wreckage they so blithely leave in their wake.

Andrew Sullivan, who of course is gay but has been rock solid on crazy transing of children and teens.

RD and JD are pretty much dead to me

[Vance is] relishing the opportunity to seem cold-blooded [over Pretti’s death], and from someone who pretends to be a pious Catholic toward a man whose death was mourned by the Catholic Church. … [He’s] a hollow shell of a man who defends the murderers of American citizens more vigorously than he has ever defended his own family from the bigots he’s trying to court for 2028. There has never been such a pathetic figure in public life.

Pedro L Gonzalez via Andrew Sullivan.

Were it not for a puff piece by Rod Dreher, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, his introduction to public life, would probably have continued its poor sales and Vance wouldn’t be Vice President today. Dreher and Vance became personal friends before Vance’s political career sort “took off,” if that’s what you call being Vice President under this dementing toxic narcissist.

Now one of the reasons I’ve stopped reading Dreher is his continued pretense that everything about Vance is perfectly normal. I understand not stabbing your friend in the back, but maybe you could just, like, shut up about him, y’know?

There was a time when Dreher knew better:

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

Shorts

Chicago is where American stopped being Europe. (David Mamet)
[Y]ou can’t fully understand Trump’s approach to Ukraine without understanding his view of Canada (or Mexico or Greenland or Panama) — and vice versa. David French

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.