Lady and Carol

Carol and I began dating at the end of summer in 2009.  It was not long before I was introduced to her thirteen year old beagle, Lady, who lived behind Carol's family's house.  The decision had been made early on in Lady's puppyhood that it was not worth the effort to attempt to housetrain her - Carol's parents had their hands full with their business, Carol had her hands full with her junior year of high school, and the house's only other resident at the time was Carol's younger brother Johnson, who has Down Syndrome.  So an outdoors life for the beagle it was.  It may seem odd, then, that a decision would be made to acquire a pet at such a time, but Carol was battling depression, and her parents hoped that a faithful companion would be of some comfort.

They moved several times over the years, as the family business grew and prospered.  Despite an uncontrollable itching which Carol would experience whenever she spent time with her new pet, she walked her faithfully two or three times a week, quite willing to accept the inconvenience of needing a shower after every walk.  Allen, Carol's father, was responsible for feeding the dog every morning, and he would regularly take her for walks as well, although after he broke his leg in 2001, he scaled back his walking a duties a bit, out of concerns that the energetic animal's pulling on the leash might possibly trip him up and cause some recurrence of his injury.  Still, he walked her about once a week.  The rest of the household displayed little interest in the canine addition to the family, so Carol and Allen were the principal objects of Lady's affection.

As for Carol, she graduated from high school and briefly attended UNC Chapel Hill, but returned home and finished her studies at PCC and UCLA.  She hung around the house, depressed, playing video games as a distraction, not knowing how to find a feeling that her life was worth something, until she gradually became more and more absorbed in the family business.  She became quite good at it, eventually becoming accepted as an integral part of it, and offered an equal share of ownership.  She lost sixty pounds, delighting in her new figure.  The weight loss revealed the clear lines of a delicate jaw and elegant cheekbones.  Boyfriends came and went, one hanging around for six years.  Lady was with her for it all, their regular walks being the only constant of Carol's own choosing in her life.  Never one to connect much with her peers, or retain close friends, Carol instead confided in her digging, sniffing, leash-tugging companion, retelling her struggles, hopes and fears in Taiwanese to her British dog as they walked the local roads of the San Gabriel Valley together.

Carol and I met after the family had finally settled in Arcadia, where Lady's domain - oddly - was an unused, fenced-in tennis court in the backyard; I suppose the hard court prevented the wholesale uprooting of the lawn. (I recently inquired about this digging compulsion - "Did she ever find anything?"  But apparently her habit was merely to dig a deep enough hole to create a little shade for her to lie in.) A doghouse was set up inside, to protect her from the elements when necessary.  Clearly, the mild southern California climate made such an arrangement workable.

Early on I realized that Lady was not what I normally expected from a dog.  While not hostile or standoffish, neither was she particularly keen on being petted or played with.  She loved for her favorite people to take her for a walk - if you so much as picked up her leash, kept next to the house, she would immediately wake from dozing in her doghouse a hundred feet away, and come bounding across the court to pant eagerly by the gate.  But like an autistic child (I would know), she didn't feel a strong urge to interact directly with the people she loved, preferring simply to have them nearby while she was doing her favorite things: the aforementioned running, digging, and sniffing.  And she displayed interest in neither the friendly overtures nor the aggressive provocation from other dogs she'd meet at the dog parks or in yards she passed on her walks.  The running did get her in trouble a few times, once breaking loose from the median on Huntington Drive - running through traffic, fortunately unharmed, until a passerby rounded her up - and at other times, getting separated from Carol completely, but finding her way back home on her own, or wandering the neighborhood until being rescued by an impromptu search party.  For this reason, Carol would choose among a very short list of paths for their walks, knowing that the monotony might bore the dog a little, but reasoning that it gave her the best chance of finding her way home after one of these inevitable escapes.

This introverted beagle, more than just loving her walks, also experienced an indescribable anguish at the prospect of being deprived of them, as well.  I learned, after a couple harrowing experiences, that upon returning her from a walk, I could never walk back out through the gate; somehow this signified to the dog that I was going for a walk, but without her, and she would howl disconsolately for what seemed like an eternity.  If I re-entered the house through the back door, as Carol pointed out, the crisis could be averted.

Part 2: Lady and me
Part 3: Carol and me

How Bethany Church helped me become an atheist

I have, on many occasions, been asked questions that carry a pile of false assumptions, and it is much more interesting to try to address the underlying misconceptions than to attempt to answer.  For example, "Why did you stop being a Christian?"  An important error there is the assumption that the rationale I gave when I decided I was no longer a believer is the same as the reasons I would give today.  "Why are you not a Christian?" is a better question, but I think there is an important issue that still needs to be addressed before launching into a discussion of this topic - and a discussion it must be.  There can be no short answer, because the question "Why are you a Christian?" rarely admits of a concise response, either.   I think religious people in general do have a wide variety of reasons they believe.  To stop believing requires much more than just one of these foundations of belief being challenged or even overturned.

As a side note, this is partly why I disagree with those atheists who say that arguments with the religious can never bear fruit, just because no one changes their mind just as a result of one conversation.  No, it takes many conversations, with many other thinking beings than yourself.  The general reluctance of nonbelievers to respond to proud, public affirmation of belief in absurdities surely must help to prop up the faith culture.

So, because I, like most Christians, was a believer for many reasons, not just one, it was also not for only one reason that I one day found I was no longer able to believe.  It can be a difficult process for the apostate to deconstruct after the fact.  The thinking person's loss of faith, by necessity, is not a conscious process.  It is no secret that religious belief, the more detailed and counterintuitive it is (American Christians may read that as "the more fundamental and evangelical it is"), requires active maintenance.  Because worship and prayer and church groups are all part of this act of rationalization and reinforcement via groupthink, a critical mind can find its path away from belief through immersion in the very culture that is designed to prop it up.  I am lucky in that my wariness of self-deception and desire for rationality served me well in this regard.  I do not claim credit, for I did not choose these traits - perhaps I am merely fortunate that there were books in my home and my preference for solitude and lack of access to video games led to enough reading to cultivate my mind.  (Ironically, C.S. Lewis and other apologetics featured prominently in this reading.)

I hardly intend to enumerate here my objections to faith, as more eloquent writers than I have tackled the subject at length in recent years, and they succeed in filling such tomes as "God: The Failed Hypothesis" and "God Is Not Great", which for all their concise language and clarity of expression, fail to be nearly as short as a blog post.  While my most mature and most central complaint, I think, would be over the lack of a valid epistemology for generating any beliefs about the supernatural, it recently occurred to me that part of my gradual process of rejecting Christianity was a most generous and unintentional gift from a speaker at a youth group meeting.

"God answers prayers," the speaker said with conviction.  Slowly and deliberately, ostensibly to denote profundity, he continued: "Either 'yes', 'no', or 'not yet'."  (I mean no offense to any particular youth pastor or guest, as I have forgotten who delivered this platitude.)  In retrospect, I am struck with horror at how such appalling stupidity was so frequently and solemnly inflicted on me at such meetings.  My reaction at the time was not nearly so severe.  I was simply made very uncomfortable by this pronouncement, as it did not take any great mental acuity to note that if this man's claim were true, then the world we live in would be, in that regard, indistinguishable from one ruled by a god completely indifferent to prayer.  I decided the speaker was wrong, but I was as of yet unaware that my faith was diminished.  The wall did not, and never did, fall at the sound of a trumpet - it took the work of many to tear it down.

a little gig

In my piano studies, both independent and formal, I have struggled a great deal with choosing repertoire. There are so many factors to consider - It is important to play to your own strengths as well as to your weaknesses. It is good to play music in a style that you do not excel in, as well as playing music in a style you know and love. It must not be too easy, and it must not all be too hard. And, as a relatively mature musician who performs from time to time, I consider it important that the the pieces can cohere as a program. This consideration, how a program, both in its individual selections and as a whole, appeals to an audience, how it must take them on a journey through different moods and styles, is the one I give the greatest weight, and the other considerations, while essential, have to fit into a scheme of programming a recital. Other factors such as preparing auditions, working on an etude, having a "party" piece as my teacher calls it, I think all fall under this heading of programming.

I played a gig today for the Pasadena Women's Club, with my excellent violist friend Camille. (Unclear? No worries, she is both an excellent violist and an excellent friend.) In choosing what to play, and the order in which to play it, I was inspired by the French composer Alkan's opus 76 - three etudes, the first for the left hand alone, the second for the right hand alone, and a grand finale for the hands united. We each would play a solo piece before delivering the coup de grace together. I got more inspiration from attending an LA Phil concert conducted by Salonen - a program of Hindemith and Wagner. The second to last piece on the program was the Magic Fire Music, which is grandiose and deeply moving to the point of leaving the listener feeling quite spent. By the time singer Bryn Terfel returned to the stage for the third round of applause and the audience began to stand in appreciation, Salonen realized he had to reign us in, and launched into his clever preparation of an entr'acte from Lohengrin, which was delightfully light, but being Wagner, not a complete non sequitur. It was a very pleasant way to come down from the emotional heights of the Fire Music.

So that experience helped me develop the form of today's thirty minutes of music: Camille opened with the first two movements of Bach's G major cello suite (transposed up an octave for the viola, of course), I then played the Impressionistic "Jeux d'Eau" by Ravel, then we joined forces in the centerpiece of our performance, Telemann's viola concerto in four movements. After the rousing, joyful Presto finale, we closed the concert by bringing them down with Saint-Saen's The Swan. Then we were treated to one of those pleasant moments when the applause continues longer than you, as an performer, were expecting, and the realization dawns that your listeners feel they've been treated to something special, and we bowed a second time. It was a brief moment, lasting less than the time I took to write this paragraph, but it felt good.

Now what remains will surely be a fulfilling weekend - Pasadena Symphony tomorrow afternoon, LACO tomorrow night, and chamber music at Caltech on Sunday!  I'm starting to think Los Angeles might be an acceptable place to live after all.

It finally happened

It was bound to happen eventually, as I've already tried, and been foiled by the locked door. Saturday night I got into the wrong Prius, belonging to a stranger. "Hey, the seat is farther forward than I left it... Huh! Did I leave the car unlocked? Let me check and see if my stuff is missing. Oh cool, not only is my stuff not missing, I have extra stuff! Oh."

Psychosis and the problem of metaphorical violence

This weekend, a young man opened fire at a public event hosted by Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords at a Safeway in Tuscon. Giffords was shot and is in intensive care. Six are confirmed dead, including a federal judge who just happened to be stopping by, and a nine year old girl who had just been elected to her student council and wanted to meet Giffords.

The shooter, Jared Loughner, is clearly mentally deranged, as evidenced by the weak grasp of basic reasoning he displayed in five text-only youtube videos, mostly consisting of syllogisms with weird axioms. Many on the right wish to insist that this disturbing ad has nothing to do with Saturday's events. Same for this.

I think that there is evidence supporting a connection between them. It is at least clear that he wanted to target Giffords, as it was a "Congress on Your Corner" event she was running, and he was aware of the number of his Congressional district, unlike most Americans, so he probably knew who his representative was, unlike most Americans.

I think it is also clear he identified more with the American political right than with the left. He clearly picked up several words from the media, using them frequently without displaying any understanding of their actual meanings, in particular I note "currency" and "unconstitutional". He complained that people in his district did not know "English grammar". He declared that he would not use a currency that was "not backed by gold and silver". These are conservative positions on the gold standard and apparently on immigration.

Objectively, it appears that he was unsuccessful in life and did not know who to blame. He made a cryptic remark about being "unable to find the subject" - in light of his disdain for his non-English speaking neighbors, it seems he was bitter about his own inability to understand grammar at the technical level; he quickly followed it up with an observation that "most students can't find the subject". He was upset about paying fees at a community college, and insisted that charging fees to students at a public college was unconstitutional. Perhaps he thought that by changing money, he could somehow fix his money problems. He seemed to have a cognitive error which many if not most people fall prey to - seeing agency in self-organized, bottom-up systems. It's an error magnified by the conspiracy theorist, and running rampant in a schizophrenic.

How his station in life, which he perceived to be imposed on him from outside, rather than due to his mental illness and how it hampered his ability to benefit from his education, led him to the attempted assassination of his representative in Congress, I doubt can ever be fully explained. But the behavior of psychotic people doesn't admit of consistent rational explanation. Reportedly he is being "uncooperative" in custody, i.e., he is not talking. Perhaps he was satisfied that his act would draw attention to his videos, which are barely comprehensible, but which are, in his mind, revolutionary.

I do not claim that his political views and SarahPAC's ad constitute a smoking gun that should legally implicate Sarah Palin in Saturday's shootings. But I do claim that the rhetoric of violence as metaphor is a problem. People like Jared Loughner do have access to guns, as libertarians and political right want to ensure that they do. The ability to read violence as metaphor is something that a sane person with a grasp of cultural and social norms brings to the advertisement; it is not found in the advertisement itself. For this reason, different metaphors must be used, and I am concerned that we accept the imagery and language of violence as a norm, and that lobbyists and lawmakers as of yet see no need for a legislative solution.

If Sarah Palin and her PAC see no connection between their actions and Loughner's, why was it necessary to quickly remove the ad from their site after the shootings? Why do they suddenly feel the need to expedite the disappearance of violence-inciting tweets into the memory hole?

top ten?

Camerata Pacifica's Facebook page recently drew to its followers attention an - ostensibly incomplete - article by New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, concerning how one might tabulate a list of the top ten greatest composers of classical music. While I do see the point of such an endeavor, it is one which I would be neither qualified for, nor particularly interested in attempting. Surely Bach and Beethoven would be near the top of the list. But to make such a list I'd have to set aside personal taste, and approach the matter from a purely academic perspective. And the primary reason I listen to music is for emotional stimulation. Certainly, greater understanding of style, form, and theory has informed and enhanced that enjoyment, but I would be terribly bored to spend much time trying to use that angle to share my love of music with a fellow human. (And if the goal of such a process, undertaken by a connoiseur, isn't to share, what would be the point at all?)

But I could make a list of roughly ten composers I most enjoy listening to, which is quite another thing than a scholarly perspective. I love music from the Romantic period, and I mostly like solo piano, chamber, and orchestral music. So, something like Chopin, Schumann, Sibelius, Brahms, Dvorak, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky. That's nine. Bach and Beethoven can fight it out for the tenth spot, but the places of the other nine are secure.

I note that I love art song in English and I like a lot of 20th century music that I've heard, but I'm not well-versed enough in these areas to include an important composer of either among my favorites, besides Ravel. This must be remedied.

concern trolls

There is a peculiar thing about atheists as a group. When I dare to publicly point out the obvious - that religion is cruel, barbaric, harmful to society, and most importantly, false - I am told that I should not say such things, because some believers might get upset, and I am told this by other atheists. What a curiosity! When certain feminists speak out against gender inequality, pointing out how harmful sexism is to society, and opining that there is no rational basis for these dehumanizing attitudes, I wonder whether there are other feminists who try to hush them up, warning: "Careful! You might offend some misogynists."