Guitar learning diary: As I learn to play the guitar, I realised that I might be able to make musical associations without mental awareness. It’s probably because I am not familiar enough with the language of music to surface musical feelings to a conscious level. For example, yesterday, I tried to play some dominant 9 chords in a book. I was learning the fingering so I wasn’t attending to the sounds of the chords. It’s all mechanical at this stage. If you ask me to imagine a C9 chord, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I don’t know how to use a 9 chord in a musical context.

However, today, when I listened to the My Buffalo Girl track on Bill Frisell’s Good Dog, Happy Man album, I noticed that he played an interesting chord that sounded dissonant but musical at the same time. I looked it up in the Bill Frisell: An Anthology songbook, and what do you know? It’s a dominant 9 chord!

This happened to me before. I was interested in Miles Davis’ So What, so I tried to play a couple of bars of Miles’ solo. It was mostly an exercise to learn the Dorian mode. Then, for no apparent reason, I thought about Bill Frisell’s Monroe (again, from the Good Dog, Happy Man album) and tried to play it. It took me a while to discover that Monroe is in Dorian mode!

I am not sure if these are all coincidental, but I suspect that an interesting psychological phenomenon is in the play.

One of the zanier moments in Penn & Teller Fool Us: While Penn used a magic trick to comment on the New Testament (in which Teller was both the camel and the rich man at the same time), he said that heaven to him was listening to Sun Ra playing Bob Dylan tunes, while eating vegan fudge and watching the Tree Stooges chasing a honey badger on TV.

I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone phreaking into the awareness of the public, Rosenbaum said that his vision of the phone phreaks of the 60’s and the 70’s was influenced by the underground communication networks described in the novel.

When I started to read the book, I didn’t associate phone phreaking with Pynchon. But of course, Pynchon loves secret communication. The second chapter of Lapsley’s book on the birth of Bell System and AT&T, he cited optical telegraphs of the 18th century as an early form of long-distance communication network. Incidentally, optical telegraphy is one of the main themes of Pynchon’s novel Mason & Dixon.

The second book I am reading is the The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. It’s a classic non-fictional account of Stoll’s experience of tracing the footsteps of German hackers through the mazes of Internet and government agencies in the 80’s. Although he didn’t explicitly mention Pynchon, in Chapter 29, he gave a technology company the name Yoyodyne - the name of a giant defense contractor in The Crying of Lot 49.

It’s very interesting to me that Thomas Pynchon (rather than, say, William Gibson) is the author that people turn to when they talk about hackers and phone phreaks.

PS: I am now reading The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. Guess what? It also makes a reference to Thomas Pynchon!

I had a surreal experience reading Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, published in 1993 (I found a copy for free). Stross argued convincingly that NeXT was hopeless. Had I read it in 1993, I would have thought that the analysis was spot on. Who would have thought that in 2023, people would be still using essentially NEXTSTEP? Also, the entire workstation market has been wiped out, but IBM is still selling mainframes!

My family has been watching the Penn & Teller: Fool Us TV series. I was reminded of a 2008 paper published in Nature Review Neuroscience about the psychological aspects of magic. Teller was listed as a co-author (among several well-known magicians). There is a very remarkable sentence in the paper: “One of the authors of this Perspective (referring to Apollo Robbins) is a professional thief.”

Some friends and I ran into a trivia question about an ice cream named after Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. A friend said that it must be a pun, so I suggested “Grapeful Dead”. The answer, of course, was “Cherry Garcia”.

During the lockdown, I finally found the time to read the first volume of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. In general, I can’t say I like them as detective stories, because what I am looking for in this genre is brilliant deduction, and Father Brown doesn’t do that kind of thing. However, I was very impressed by a story titled The Sign of the Broken Sword. It’s a very unusual detective story, in which Father Brown analyzed the accepted narrative of a (fictional) historical event, and concluded that the overlooked inconsistencies could only mean one thing: the narrative was manufactured to cover up a deeper, tragic truth.

Since I started to read Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones, I realized how much Borges was influenced by Chesterton. In fact, his short story Theme of the Traitor and Hero seems to be modeled on the Father Brown story. In the first paragraph, Borges even acknowledged that this story was inspired by Chesterton and Leibniz. Again, the main character uncovered the hidden truth behind a historical account, except that Borges took the idea to a weirder place. In his story, a historical event involving thousands of people was staged like a large-scale play, to advance the agenda of certain forces.

Thomas Pynchon likes to talk about Godzilla in his novels. In Inherent Vice, there is a funny scene where the main character Doc told his girlfriend Penny that the 1964 Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was a remake of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Later that night, Doc caught Penny sobbing at the TV, because she watched the Japanese monster movie as a romance. Pynchon is good at writing this type of plot that is ridiculous but oddly touching. I watched the Ghidora movie after reading Inherent Vice. It is obviously nowhere near a remake of Roman Holiday (we are talking about a movie that is mostly about actors in rubber suits fighting other actors in rubber suits), but the writers must have lifted some plot elements from Roman Holiday.

I recently watched a Godzilla spin-off movie Rebirth of Mothra with my 4.5yo daughter, and I had a Pynchon moment. It’s a tragic scene where a comically giant moth caterpillar watched her mother, a giant moth, died and sunk into the ocean. It’s an unbelievably ridiculous scene featuring hilariously looking monsters. But it was genuinely touching. The filmmakers managed to tug a heart string with a giant moth and a caterpillar.

In the 70’s, it was fashionable for intellectuals to abuse the term “grammar” to refer to any underlying principles. In one of his essays, Italo Calvino used the term “the grammar of tree” to refer to…. essentially developmental plant biology. I thought that was pretentious. But heh, in R programming, people are talking about the grammar of graphics and grammar of data manipulation again. It’s fashionable to call functions “verbs” again. Hello, structuralism! (PS: A philosopher friend informed me that this abuse of the word grammar started with Wittgenstein)

One music album that I used to play a lot of was called Night of Short Lives. It was published in the 90’s under the artist name Frame Cut Frame. It’s very hard to describe what kind of music it was. The publisher called it “unclassical music”, because the music had the classical texture, but not the classical form.

The CD was just one of those random things that I had. I don’t remember why I had it. I had no idea who made it or why it was made. It was published by an independent Belgian label called SubRosa so I had assumed that it’s European. But I just discovered it’s Australian! The music is by Brett Dean, with sampled sounds by Simon Hunt. Brett Dean turns out to be not just a random Aussie who made this obscure album. Wikipedia shows that he is one of the most celebrated Australian musicians!

I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. about a month ago. I was thinking about writing a review, but what’s the point? Given its classic status, it has been analyzed to death. So just a couple of thoughts. This was Pynchon’s first novel, so we have to ask if it compares well to his later masterpieces. I think a novel worthy of Pynchon’s name must do two things: 1. It must induce a mindfuck. At some point, you must feel that this novel is 10x denser than what your brain can process. 2. There must be a couple of magic moments of sublime beauty. You must pause and say “Oh wow. That’s just beautiful. I have no words for it.” V. does both. Pynchon did it the first time. However, the novel does feel different. V. reads like it’s made up of several short stories. They are connected stories but you can detect the boundaries. No other Pynchon novel gave me that impression. The other thing is that V. is very cinematic. Many chapters end with dramatic scenes that I can visualize as climactic moments in epic movies. Later Pynchon novels are more organic, subtle, and abstract. This makes V. more accessible, but not lighter. I found reading V. a thoroughly satisfying experience. Many parts of it will stay with me for a very long time.

I was reading about the Emacs org-roam mode, and came across the Zettelkasten method of notetaking. I hadn’t seen this term before, but the idea of taking notes with cross-referenced index cards sounded familiar. Where did I read about it? Ah yes… in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, the main character Casaubon (an ex-academic who makes a living as a “detective of knowledge”) uses boxes of index cards to keep track of ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised that Eco himself did this religiously. He apparently recommended it to PhD students.

Finished William Gibson’s Count Zero. I like William Gibson. There are things that he did extremely well in this novel. But it doesn’t work. The three main threads of narrative are all interesting ideas by themselves, but they don’t add up to a meaningful big picture. In the end, I don’t understand why anything happened. I was planning to read Mona Lisa Overdrive after this one, but maybe not. The second half of Count Zero seems too clumsily written for me.

Europe was a dead museum

from William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel. Clearly an homage to William S. Burroughs.

So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass

Count Zero by William Gibson.