self-fulfilling prophecies of mutual contempt, courtesy of an interview at Slate from March 2018

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/is-liberal-smugness-to-blame-for-our-political-climate.html?via=homepage_taps_top

 

Isaac Chotiner: You write in your piece that, “The problem isn’t just filter bubbles, echo chambers or alternative facts. It’s tone: When the loudest voices on the left talk about people on the right as either beyond the pale or dupes of their betters, it is with an air of barely concealed smugness. Right-wingers, for their part, increasingly respond with a churlish ‘Oh, yeah? Hold my beer,’ and then double down on whatever politically incorrect sentiment brought on the disdain in the first place.” The way that’s written implies that the right-wing attitude that we see online and from the president is a response to a smug leftism. Is that how you see this—that essentially the right is merely reacting to something?

Katherine Mangu-Ward: The sentence that’s at the very top of the piece is, “It’s hard to tell who started it.” I actually do believe that. I think it is not a case of a single original sin that sent us cascading down into the rhetorical swamps where we now live. But I do find that, although I am demographically and in many ways even ideologically sympathetic to people on the left, in this story, in the story of smug versus trolls, I find myself sympathetic to the right, sympathetic to this response of, “Fine, if you’re going to see me that way, I’ll double down on it. I’ll be as bad as you think I am.”

The idea, then, is that people are accused of being racist, or see other people being called racist, and as a response to that say, “You know what? I’m going to vote for a racist, or I’m going to be part of a political movement that looks the other way about racism.” If that is actually going on, and let’s grant for the sake of argument that it is, it’s a very strange way of operating in the world.

I guess I would challenge the way that you set that up. I think that when people feel that they’ve been accused of something horrible, like racism, or that their peers or friends have, that they respond negatively, and that they respond by maybe overstating their own case, or mocking the other side. I don’t think that it’s an accurate mental picture to say they responded by voting for a racist. I think they say, “You on the left are either overstating or overvaluing that particular aspect of Donald Trump. However, he has a lot of other attributes that you don’t value at all, and you’re wrong to not value those things.”

You say that smug people on the coasts, to speak broadly, look at people who vote for Republicans, white working-class people, and say, “You guys don’t understand your own economic interests.” That comes across as smug, and that makes people respond in a certain way. But if that’s your objective analysis of what’s going on, how do you think we should have that conversation? The sincere belief of many people on the left is that working-class people on the right are being taken advantage of, in this case by a con man

The definitive piece on this, which I didn’t explicitly reference, but consulted, is Emmett Rensin’s Vox piece on the “smug style” in American liberalism. I find that piece to be a very compelling account of the demographic reasons why liberals believe that thing that you just described, [which is] that essentially the liberal coalition has been hollowed out. While it used to be a coalition that spread more evenly across different socioeconomic classes and a broader geographical area, it’s now rich, white people and then people of color, to oversimplify it dramatically. He says, and I think it’s true, that there’s a certain amount of baffled resentment at the class of people that abandoned the left. It was a coalition that made sense to the rest of the left before, when it was intact, and so the natural inclination then is to say, “Something’s gone wrong that those people left us, and it must be that they’re confused and were right before.”

 

I think that that explanation explains the weirdly emotional approach to this. It explains why people aren’t just like, “Oh, that’s a bummer,” or like, “You seem to be under a misapprehension,” but are like, “Screw you, you idiots,” because they were abandoned. [emphasis added]

I think the flip side of that is that if you talk to conservative intellectuals, they don’t know what happened in their party. They are very confused about what happened. The sort of Never Trumpism among National Review types and others shows that they too are confused about what happened with that demographic.

OK, but I’m a writer. You’re a writer. I want to say what I think. I still haven’t quite figured out how to not smugly say that I think Donald Trump is a con man taking advantage of his voters. I don’t think every Republican, or the entire Republican Party’s platform, or libertarianism, or social conservatism, is just about conning voters. I do think Donald Trump is a con man, and he is essentially conning his voters to enrich his family. I don’t know how to say that without sounding smug and without immediately telling essentially everyone who voted for him, “You got conned.” I just don’t quite understand how to get out of that pickle when you have someone like Donald Trump as president.
 

Your response is very similar to a significant portion of the response to this piece. That is to say, of the people who replied to me on Twitter and elsewhere, the vast majority of people who were “team smug” offered some variant of what you just said, like, “But we’re right, and they’re wrong, and so what do we do?” All due respect to you and all those people, that’s precisely the problem. You are the problem. That is to say, just because you have an analysis of why someone voted the way they did and you think that it’s wrong, you don’t have to say it out loud. Having said it out loud lots of times, and it having not been effective as a rhetorical move to shift the political landscape in the direction that you want, why not try another tack?

 

I think this is the argument for [saying], “OK, maybe these people who we are talking about here, these Trump voters, it is not that they are confused about their own interests, but simply that I am not looking at the world the way they look at the world. How can I do better at that?” It’s an Oprah thing to say, but it is nonetheless the answer.
 

It seems like what you’re saying is a version of political correctness. It’s as if saying this, even if it’s the truth, doesn’t work, so you should stop saying it, which is itself almost condescending. It’s essentially, “You people can’t hear this.”

Yeah, I think that’s right. It is a version of political correctness, but the origins of political correctness are nonpernicious. The very, very beginning of the political correctness movement was basically just people saying, “Hey, why not temper your speech slightly to avoid giving offense to those in a position of less power than yourself?” That’s a good idea. I think obviously you don’t want to pull every punch, but at the same time, to say over and over, both formally as the Democratic Party and also rhetorically as the pundit class, “You all are wrong about what you need and want,” is not doing it.

It just feels to me that as writers we have some responsibility to argue for what we think the truth is. You write in the piece, for example, about the DACA debate, “The left labeled the right racist. The right accused the left of hating America.” There’s just more truth to one of those things than the other. We should have some responsibility to say what’s true rather than just saying, “This is how people feel.”

Again, all due respect, but you’re wrong about that asymmetry. Just to be clear, I think that every single DACA beneficiary and every Dreamer, because those are, I guess, slightly different categories, should be given immediate full citizenship forever, and ever, and ever, and their family forever and ever, amen. I am basically an open border person.

You libertarians, you love those open borders. Go on.

Yes, but I think it is equal. The assumption about motivations on both sides is equally an exercise in some amount of truth and some amount of bad faith. There are many, many people, even relatively close to libertarian circles, who are very clearly not racist and who are genuinely worried, instead, about keeping a distinctive and powerful American culture intact, who are worried about the bottom line of the federal and state governments, who are worried about overcrowding in schools. Again, I don’t think those are good reasons to keep these immigrants out, but none of that is about racism.

Conversely, I think there are many liberals, of course, who don’t “hate” America, but I think it is fair to say of many liberals that they don’t particularly value national loyalty or patriotism very highly, and that also they think that whatever America is, it’s OK if it changes, which to a person who very highly values America as it exists right now, is not a good outcome.

Again, it’s not exactly hating America, but it is a little, and it’s not exactly racism, but it is a little, in many cases. I think it’s a fair parallel. I really don’t think there’s an asymmetry there.

OK.
It’s just that the president, who has ended DACA or put it on the road to being ended—

 

Again, if what we keep doing here is coming back to Donald Trump as an avatar of trollish conservatives, then I will never push back on that. Donald Trump is a trollish conservative. He is the worst of his form, but—

He’s also president.

But I don’t think he is representative of the median grumpy right-winger in American right now.

You say in the piece, “Liberals and people of the left underpin their politics with moral concerns about harm and fairness. They are driven by the imperative to help the vulnerable and see justice done. Conservatives and people on the right value these things as well but have several additional moral touchstones—loyalty, respect, and sanctity.” How do you think Trump fits into that paradigm, specifically regarding respect and sanctity?

I think that Trump fits into it uneasily, which is again why the intellectual right was taken by surprise by his election. That intellectual framework still strikes me as extremely true for a way to think about our deeper underlying political differences. At the same time, I think you have to work a little bit to understand how that gets interpreted on Trump. In this case, I think it is, for instance, when we talk about loyalty, and in-group loyalty in particular, Donald Trump said a lot of times on the campaign trail, “I love America. America is the greatest country. We are better than the rest of the world. We need to get the best deals. It’s our group that matters, not that group.”

This is absolutely speaking to a value that, as I say in the piece, and as Jonathan Haidt, who’s the author of these categories has said, to a person who doesn’t share that value, it sounds like xenophobia. Sometimes it is xenophobia, but for lots of people, it’s not. For lots of people, the power of in-group solidarity drives good things. This is how people feel loyalty to their church, which drives all kinds of excellent community institutions. There’s of course the family. Loyalty is not a bad thing. Just because I happen to completely lack that part of my brain—

...

My impression has been that back when the GOP was redistricting the country to try to regain some momentum at the electoral level they were not thinking first and foremost (i.e. at all!) that someone like Trump was going to land the nomination of the GOP for the presidential primary.   They might have been hoping for a Rubio or a Cruz or ... anybody but that guy who actually got the nomination.  The journalistic script that the play of the game indicates the rules of the game is something that might have to be set aside for a figure like Trump.  Now if I recall correctly what Chomsky had to say about possible actual lessons from Weimar it was something about how the intra-left battles over purity issues made it easier for a notorious group of people to seize a stronger electoral hold.  Perhaps the way to translate that proposal would be to say that while team Clinton advocates insisted on pinning moral blame on Bernie bros any would be left-of-Trump putative center wasn't together enough to pick the designated alternative, at one level, and at another level, the DNC mainstream had already settled on who the anointed future victor was supposed to be anyway so what on earth was Sanders doing throwing his hat in the ring?  It seems that it was not just on the GOP side of the intellectual conservatives that 2016 had baffling moments. 

It seems worth remembering that even if Clinton technically won the popular vote (setting aside claims made by supporters of Trump that she supposedly lost that once you get rid of all the illegal votes) the electoral college vote has been designed in a way where it can contradict the putatively popular will.  Clinton lost the actual electoral college vote by an even bigger margin than she lost the pledged votes on super Tuesday.  If there were an election in the last forty years to suggest to us as a whole that the popular vote and the electoral college vote are distinguishable things 2016 should have been that year.  Which is why ruminating on how this or that demographic of the popular vote made the difference for Trump needs some qualification.  Even if a majority of white evangelicals voted for Trump that's not necessarily a sign that what they were voting for was what writers at Slate think they were voting for.  Conversely, everyone who voted for Obama was probably not voting for a geometrically increased use of drone strikes, for example.  But that's not the kind of thing journalists seem hugely concerned about.

I try to distinguish, post-2016 between a variety of strata on the axiomatic "left" and "right" in American politics.  I find it a whole lot easier to take old lefties seriously than new lefties.  I also find it easier to take actual self-avowed Marxists seriously than folks who pay lip service to the Frankfurt school while having gone to places like Oberlin. Since I've been reading a few books by Adorno, I find there's a lot to like about his work, not the parts where he comes off like an elitist and faintly racist snob (I'm not saying he was against blacks at all, actually, but a German harboring dismissive and contemptuous views about Slavs does seem to creep up in Adorno's work) .I find it easier to take a Chomsky or a Sanders seriously than a Clinton.  If the best you can do is say in reaction to "MAGA" that America already is great then don't be shocked when you lose the electoral vote.

But it also seems as if people on the mainstream red and blue have so pejoratively defined what "populism" can mean that the mainstream political machines and journalistic platforms have gone out of their way to poison the well there.  Call it naïve but some kind of sincerely, positively defined form of populism or populist concern seems like it's something we need if, for no other reason, mainstream punditry across the "left" and "right" of the United States seem so dead set on defining populist concerns in such trenchantly pejorative terms.  We're well past the point at which John Lennon could strum his guitar and spout "a working class hero is something to be" and rock critics might still nod in approval.  They'll do it now, of course out of sacred tradition ... but that doesn't mean it's thought of in the same terms.

AI without a capacity for emotional response is probably not going to be actual artificial intelligence

Relevant to an unfortunately not-yet-written piece about ghosts in the shell old and new and on why the old "classic" film has a dead on arrival premise in its final act reveal ... something from the Washington Post about why artificial intelligence absent a capacity for affect (i.e. emotion) is probably never going to happen.  Cue up potential discussions of season 1 of HBO's Westworld for those who would want to do that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/03/02/human-machine/?utm_term=.41f3394f3c79

 

 

Technologists across the world have frantically embarked on the quest to create a new species in our own image — general artificial intelligence with superior computational brain power. But we are only just beginning to understand the foundations of human intelligence and consciousness that cannot be captured in an algorithmic formula divorced from the functions of the body and the long evolution of our species and its microbiome.

 

As the celebrated neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues in a WorldPost interview based on his new book, “The Strange Order of Things,” it is the feelings and emotions, which originated and dwell in that biological terrain, that are constitutive of human intelligence, consciousness and the capacity for cultural creation. In short, a map of the computational mind is not the territory of what it means to be human. [emphasis added]

 

 

 

“Our minds operate in two registers,” Damasio explains. “In one register, we deal with perception, movement, memories, reasoning, verbal languages and mathematical languages. This register needs to be precise and can be easily described in computational terms. This is the world of synaptic signals that is well captured by AI and robotics.”

 

 

“But there is a second register,” he continues, “that pertains to emotions and feelings that describes the state of life in our living body and that does not lend itself easily to a computational account. Current AI and robotics do not address this second register.”

 

For Damasio, the biological mechanisms behind feeling — “what we now call pain and pleasure” — were survival strategies selected and combined in the simple cell organisms of early evolution “when there was no individual suffering or reason.” He calls this process “homeostasis, which aims at the management of a living organism such that it can meet current energy needs and have enough energy in reserve to respond to stress and continue into the future. Homeostasis counters thermodynamic decay.” It is this capacity to not only survive but to thrive going forward that Damasio identifies as “the monitors and arbiters of cultural invention.”

 

“Minds,” concludes Damasio, “are not made by nervous systems alone but rather by nervous systems in cooperation with many other and far older living systems of our body, including metabolic, endocrine, immune and circulatory systems. Nervous systems are late-comers in evolution. They are useful servants of the older life systems. Nervous systems have declared a considerable degree of independence relative to the older systems they serve but they are by no means free of those older systems. They do not stand alone. Unfortunately, conventional conceptions of mind are based on the idea that nervous systems make minds by themselves.”

 

To the extent the intelligent mind is biologically embodied, it is swimming in the vast sea of the human microbiome. As Tobias Rees and Nils Gilman point out, “few are aware of how directly these microbes and their genes affect the functioning of our bodies. The human genome found in the nuclei of our cells contains roughly 20,000 genes, but the microbiome — the sum total of genetic material in the microorganisms that live in and on us — contains as many as 20 million genes, all of which are directly or indirectly interacting with and at times even controlling our genes.”

 

Indeed, researchers at CalTech recently discovered that bacteria found in the guts of mice produce serotonin, a biochemical neurotransmitter that regulates emotions and adult neurogenesis — the formation of new neurons which are the basis for openness and adaptability to outside stimulus and experience.

 

The authors worry that modern-day diets, C-section births and overuse of broad-spectrum antibiotics are degrading the integrity of the microbiome, established over millennia of evolution with unintended consequences for the emotional and physical wellbeing of humans. “The lesson of the human microbiome,” they conclude, “is that it compels us to revise our understanding of ourselves as humans: Microbes are us. In fact, it is impossible to clearly determine where a human being ends and its microbiome begins: there is a quintessential indistinguishability. We humans are not more than mere nature. In fact, we are just that — a piece of nature, deeply interrelated with the microbial environment on which we are utterly contingent.” [emphasis added]

A couple of friends and relatives over the years have commented about their skepticism about the proliferation of C-section births.  Some folks I know regard the frequency with which C-sections are urged upon women to be a whole racket in itself.  I don't think I'll comment on that because it's not something I have any direct stake in but it is interesting to have heard from women I love among family and friends that they have felt over their course of their lives as wives and mothers that a whole lot of the medical industry seems geared foremost toward what's bureaucratically optimal for the industry and not for the woman or her children. 

To put it mildly, a concept like a microbiome as a foundation for artificial intelligence has not been on the table for most sci-fi ruminations on the topic.  Even the original Oshii Ghost in the Shell could only have accounted for it by sheer accident of not addressing it thereby allowing fans of the film to impute it decades later.  But at some point I have to gear up the willpower to finish writing some version of that comparison of the two ghosts in the shell to highlight what's tragicomically off about both films.  Meanwhile, a bit of reading for a weekend. 

on marriage not going away, and on the "cornerstone" to "capstone" praxis about how Americans pursue it

Having been in the Reformed side of things for a while and having spent more than a few years in what many would call the new Calvinist wing (i.e. at Mars Hill) I've seen more than a few laments about how long people are waiting to get married these days.  Mark Driscoll, I am sure, still goes on and on about the social blight of guys not getting married as early as they used to.  It doesn't matter if the financial crash of 2008 may have gutted savings and financial opportunities.  It doesn't matter if the increasing promotion of bachelors degrees and post-secondary education have inflated the value of degrees as costs skyrocket in contexts where jobs for degree holders dwindle and the possibilities for trade work go untouched.  Never mind all that, for a certain nebulously alluded to strata of potentially upwardly mobile middle class to upper class dudes there need to be guys getting married.

I have seen reference to a "plague of singleness" more than a few times in the course of twenty years. 

Socially conservative Christians tend to fixate on the later date for first marriage rather than on the propensity for a majority of people to cohabitate in some context in which a sexual relationship is established.  Or as punkish teenagers could ask, where, exactly, in the Bible does it say that you have to go to a justice of the state and formally get permission to "be married"?  There are some pieces in The Atlantic that have been published over the years that discuss how marriage is probably nowhere near as "on the rocks" as a variety of social pundits have said it is.

The actual title of the following article is not what's in the link, it's "Marriage Has Become a Trophy".

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/03/incredible-everlasting-institution-marriage/555320/

 

The decline of marriage is upon us. Or, at least, that’s what the zeitgeist would have us believe. In 2010, when Time magazine and the Pew Research Center famously asked Americans whether they thought marriage was becoming obsolete, 39 percent said yes. That was up from 28 percent when Time asked the question in 1978. Also, since 2010, the Census Bureau has reported that married couples have made up less than half of all households; in 1950 they made up 78 percent. Data such as these have led to much collective handwringing about the fate of the embattled institution.

But there is one statistical tidbit that flies in the face of this conventional wisdom: A clear majority of same-sex couples who are living together are now married. Same-sex marriage was illegal in every state until Massachusetts legalized it in 2004, and it did not become legal nationwide until the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Two years after that decision, 61 percent of same-sex couples who were sharing a household were married, according to a set of surveys by Gallup. That’s a high take-up rate: Just because same-sex couples are able to marry doesn’t mean that they have to; and yet large numbers have seized the opportunity. (That’s compared with 89 percent of different-sex couples.)

The move toward marriage has not been driven by young gay and lesbian couples rushing to the altar. In both the year before and the year after Obergefell, only one out of seven people whom the Census Bureau classified as in a same-sex marriage was age 30 or younger, according to calculations I’ve done based on the bureau’s American Community Survey. In fact, half of them were age 50 or older. The only way that could have happened, given that same-sex marriage has been legal for less than 15 years, is if large numbers of older same-sex couples who had been together for many years took advantage of the new laws. In other words, changes in state and federal laws seem to have spurred a backlog of committed, medium- to long-term couples to marry.

Why would they choose to do so after living, presumably happily, as cohabiting unmarried partners? In part, they may have married to take advantage of the legal rights and benefits of married couples, such as the ability to submit a joint federal tax return. But the legal issues, important as they are, appear secondary. In a 2013 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of LGBT individuals said that “love” was a very important reason to marry, and 71 percent said “companionship” was very important, compared to 46 percent who said that “legal rights and benefits” are very important.

Yet the emphasis on love and companionship is not enough to explain the same-sex marriage boom. Without doubt, most of the middle-aged same-sex couples who have married of late already had love and companionship—otherwise they would not have still been together. So why marry now? Marriage became for them a public marker of their successful union, providing them the opportunity to display their love and companionship to family and friends. One reason, of course, was the desire to claim a right so long denied, but that only further underlines the way in which marriage today signals to the wider community the success of a long-standing relationship.

In this sense, these gay couples were falling right in line with the broader American pattern right now: For many people, regardless of sexual orientation, a wedding is no longer the first step into adulthood that it once was, but, often, the last. It is a celebration of all that two people have already done, unlike a traditional wedding, which was a celebration of what a couple would do in the future. [emphasis added]

Consistent with this shift in meaning, different-sex couples, like the many of the same-sex couples who have married recently, are starting their marriages later in their lives. According to the Census Bureau, the median age at first marriage—the age at which half of all marriages occur—was 27.4 for women and 29.5 for men in 2017. That’s higher than at any time since the Census began keeping records in 1890. It is six years higher than when I got married in 1972 (at the typical age of 24). In my era, a young couple usually got married first, then moved in together, then started their adult roles as workers or homemakers, and then had children. (I scandalized my parents by living with my future wife before I married her.) Now marriage tends to come after most of these markers are attained. [emphasis added]

 

If socially conservative punditry only emphasizes how late to the rite people are going for marriage you'd get the impression that marriage isn't a goal.  Yet the prevalence of gay marriages should disabuse us all of the idea that people somehow don't view marriage as a good to be pursued.  But the "capstone" rather than "cornerstone" view needs to be kept in mind.  And, as anyone who has read any degree of Marxist cultural theorizing should be able to point out, there's also the matter of class and in Anglo-American contexts it's pretty hard to separate class from what's conventionally known as educational attainment.  So ...

The main distinction in marriage patterns today is between Americans who have attained at least a bachelor’s degree and those with less education. The college-educated are more likely to eventually marry, even though they may take longer to get around to it. In addition, nearly nine out of 10 wait until after they marry to have children, whereas a majority of those without college educations have a first child before they marry. Rates of divorce have been dropping across the board since about 1980, but the drop has been steeper for the college-educated. In the mid-20th century, people’s educational level had less impact on when, whether, and for how long they married. Today, marriage is a much more central part of family life among the college educated.

Nevertheless, the last-step view of marriage is common across all educational groups in United States. [emphasis added] And it is being carried to the nth degree in Scandinavia. In Norway and Sweden, a majority of the population marries, but weddings often take place long after a couple starts to have children, or even after all of their children are born. The median age at first marriage in Norway is an astounding 39 for men and 38 for women, according to a recent estimate—six to eight years higher than the median age at first childbirth. In Sweden, one study found that 17 percent of all marriages had occurred after the couple had had two children. Why do they even bother to marry at such a late stage of their unions? Norwegians told researchers that they view marriage as a way to demonstrate love and commitment and to celebrate with relatives and friends the family they have constructed. This is capstone marriage: The wedding is the last brick put in place to finally complete the building of the family.


As for the capstone rather than cornerstone, that's discussed over here, too.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/how-marital-infidelity-became-americas-last-sexual-taboo/276341/

…

The polls show that a growing number of us want our fellow Americans to be able to marry whom they love, regardless of biological sex. Those same polls show that we also want to have the right to leave a miserable marriage as easily as possible. Those aren't inconsistent positions. They reflect the modern sense that marriage is primarily about individual happiness rather than making babies or ensuring communal stability. Everyone should be able to take their chance at the unique set of rewards we imagine that only marriage can offer; everyone should be able to leave if those rewards are not forthcoming.

 

The growing abhorrence of infidelity is linked to this more individualistic view of marriage. Just a few decades ago, divorce was scandalous; if your marriage came to an end you and your spouse were likely to face cruel gossip and painful social ostracism. The fear of the public humiliation that attended divorce kept people in unhappy marriages. That fear is gone, replaced by a growing anxiety about the more private humiliation of sexual betrayal. "I'd rather be left than lied to" is the prevailing sentiment that the polling reveals; it's not a stretch to suggest that the reverse would have been true just a few decades ago.

As Karen Swallow Prior wrote here at The Atlantic in March, young people are marrying later because they see marriage as a "capstone" to a well-ordered life rather than a "cornerstone" upon which to build. Whatever the wisdom of delaying first marriage for the sake of a richer set of life experiences as a singleton, there's little doubt that the "cornerstone" model builds in an expectation of difficulty that the "capstone" paradigm doesn't.

We expect couples who marry young to "struggle"—a common euphemism that encompasses everything from fights over money (of which there is almost invariably not enough) to extramarital flirtations and affairs. The cornerstone model presumes, optimistically, that men and women are transformed for the better by sticking it out through the "tough times" that everyone concedes will attend the marriage of the young, the poor, and the naïve. The expectation of struggle doesn't condone infidelity so much as it concedes its near-inevitability.

The "capstone" model presumes, as one of my friends puts it, that you only should get married "after you've got your shit together." Capstoners believe that marriage is something you enter into only after you've finished sowing your proverbial oats—and come into possession of the financial, emotional, and professional sophistication you'll need to blend your life with another person without becoming dangerously dependent upon them. The capstone model is much less forgiving of sexual betrayal because it presumes that those who finally get around to marrying should be mature enough to be both self-regulating and scrupulously honest. The increased unacceptability of adultery is linked to the rising age of first marriages. The evidence suggests, however, that the capstoners are more than a little naïve if they imagine that a rich set of premarital life experiences will serve as an inoculation against infidelity.  [emphasis added]

It may just be that we can move the naivete from one domain to another about marriage as a social institution and interpersonal relationship but that we can't remove it from ourselves. 
 

The same Gallup poll that found near-unanimous disapproval of cheating also found rising acceptance of many other non-traditional, consensual sexual relationships. The new ethical consensus that you can do whatever you like as long as you're not hurting anyone—and as long as you're being rigorously candid—reflects a thoroughly modern mix of tolerance and puritanical censoriousness. We've become more willing to embrace diverse models of sexual self-expression even as we've become ever more intolerant of hypocrisy and the human frailty that makes hypocrisy almost inevitable.

A Google search for "ethical non-monogamy" returns plenty of results about polyamory and open marriage. It also brings up sex columnist Dan Savage's notion of "monogamish" relationships, in which partners pledge enduring emotional commitment while enjoying "flings, affairs, three-ways, and swinging experiences." Even the monogamish life, however, is predicated on one key rule: telling the truth. As Savage argues persuasively, ethical non-monogamy can certainly lead to happiness. But non-monogamy and infidelity aren't synonyms—only the latter signifies betrayal. [emphasis added] For non-monogamy's growing number of advocates, total candor is the non-negotiable admission price to liberation; "ethical dishonesty" remains an oxymoron.


As has been discussed here over the years a few times, socially conservative Christian pundits who fixate on the lateness to the marriage game dynamic seem to be skipping altogether past questions of how and why people wait longer and longer to get married.  The idea that marriage has shifted from a "cornerstone" to "capstone" paradigm for socioeconomic reasons and that the more traditionalist approach to marriage is more typical of middle and upper class than lower class seems to be off the table. 

As Mark Driscoll made the rounds on the conference and interview circuit in the Christian media scene in the wake of his resignation he showed that he's still eager to talk about how he wants to compel the young men to grow up. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/2015/06/29/hillsongs-brian-houston-interviewed-mark-and-grace-driscoll-after-all/

http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/warrenthrockmorton/files/2015/06/DriscollHillsong.mp4

03.00ish
I've made a lot of mistakes and one of them was going too fast. There's the Lord's calling and there's the Lord's timing and I should have waited longer. I should have been under godly spiritual authority, for Grace and I to be under a godly couple, that was [a] senior pastor, so that we could learn and grow. I, I, my character was not caught up with my gifting and I did start to young. And I believe God called us to start the church and he was very, very, very gracious to us, uh, but had I to do it over again I would not look at a 25-year old and say, "Do what I did." :

03:57ish
... We went into the urban core and we felt, specifically, called to go after young, college-educated males. That was really my heart. I wanted everybody to meet Jesus but I felt particularly if we were gonna make in the city and the legacy of families and, you know, the way that women and children and culture treated, that getting young men to love Jesus would be paramount. [emphasis added] So that was really the focus and I didn't think the church would amount to much. The first three years we didn't collect a salary; it was very small; we met at night; we moved a lot because we kept losing our rental location; the offices were in our house, so it wasn't a big deal and we didn't anticipate that it would become what it ultimately did.

37:26
... young men aren't going to church. Young men aren't going to college. Young men aren't marrying women. Young men are not raising their children and I have such a deep burden and passion to see men--you know, 1 Corinthians 13--I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I acted like a child. When I became a man I put childish ways behind me--I want, I want to compel young men to grow up, to take responsibility. And sometimes, in doing that, I have communicated that in a way that demeans women and that's not helpful and that's not right. In the grace of God I need to repent and be better about that  but I still want, I mean no one would say young men are, in the Western world, highly impressive and we're all encouraged. There's a lot of work to be done. [emphasis added]

And so I regret the times that I have not communicated in such a way that, in trying to compel the men up it seemed like I was pushing the women down and that's my fault.

This is "cornerstone" boilerplate and in an economic and cultural context in which a whole lot of Americans have moved to the "capstone" paradigm, to the point where it's taken as axiomatic by at least a couple of authors at The Atlantic, it doesn't seem unfair to ask why a social pundit like Mark Driscoll can't account for that in his bromides for bros.  In the double standardized realm of tests of character it's hard to see how Mark Driscoll is ideally situated in the wake of his controversies about plagiarism and Result Source and non-disclosure agreements and resigning in the wake of a restorative disciplinary process he claimed he initiated that a guy like Mark Driscoll is really in any position to talk, even on the basis of his own previously stated ideals, about how he wants to "compel young men to grow up, to take responsibility."

If that's what he wants then he may have to go about doing that the way just about any parent does, leading by example and not just precept. 

Now there could be a few things said about the dangers and risks of a "capstone" approach to marriage but those would involve criticisms of cultural standards of consumption and issues of class and caste.  Socially conservative Anglo-American Christians can lament the "capstone" approach but they will also have to more directly address how many of the real and perceived problems with a "capstone" praxis highlight the ways in which the "cornerstone" theory and praxis presuppose the power of the state to legitimize or delegitimize a set of practices that are decreasingly manifest in the less educated strata of American society.  If the vehement disapproval of infidelity even within a "capstone" cultural context is anything to go by people get that adultery is a terrible betrayal whether there's an official marriage license or not. 

Since the second article invoked Dan Savage I might suggest that one of the points at which we can step back and consider where "we" are at is that it has even been possible for grandstanding pundits like Dan Savage and Mark Driscoll to have gained any cultural currency to begin with. 

 

Simpsons creator Matt Groenig seems a bit indifferent to the Apu criticisms and some are not indifferent to that

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/04/27/thesimpsons-matt-groening-new-record-fox-animated-series/524581002/

“I’m proud of what we do on the show,” Groening told USA Today. “And I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended.”

https://www.cbr.com/simpsons-matt-groening-apu-criticism/

Pretend they are offended ... is not what the people who are offended seem to have been doing.  No, it seems people are genuinely offended.  The accounts of how and when "thank you, come again" began to be appropriated as a kind of racial/ethnic slur has been discussed in enough places I don't feel like dredging that up.  If you want to find that writing it's not too difficult to find.  This is something where giving my mixed lineage of American Indian and white ancestry I'm frankly willing to have some sympathy for those who are annoyed by the frequency of ethnic and racial stereotypes in popular culture.  I don't like to listen to the radio as a matter of course in day job life but coworkers like to listen to the radio and, well, I hate GEICO ads.  Most attempts at wit in GEICO ads are glib and stupid and one of the most annoying ones was the one about the "really charming snake charmer".  There are times when I enjoy humor and there are a lot of times where, honestly, I don't.  It's not just Mere Orthodoxy writers who in their attempts at wit come off as witless, it's also just about every GEICO ad that includes "surprising" (which is all of them).

On the other hand ... nobody truly familiar with animation as an art form and an industry can take complaints about  a person like Azaria voicing a character like Apu as prima facie evidence of racism or stereotyping without any regard for content or context.  Yes, Apu can be thought of as a stereotype but humor traffics in stereotypes and can be distilled to laughing with or laughing at.  Since I like to read sermons by Richard Sibbes and think the Puritans have become too lazy and popular a stereotypical scapegoat for social and ideological problems that pervade contemporary American culture I think there's room for being, in select contexts, a humorless Puritan. 

Even the bromide about the dangers of the Puritan legacy is itself an appeal to an egregious stereotype.  John O'Sullivan, the one who articulated Manifest Destiny was not, for instance, a Puritan.  A lot of the legacy of Puritanism that is considered terrible can be pinned on Calvinism rather than on postmillennialism and if we have to pick one of these two that goes farther in explicating the negative impact of American colonialist religious ideology the postmillennialism is a far better option than what is at this point a mere five-point soteriology in favor of monergism in Anglo-American religious thought in just the Christian subset of Anglo-American religion.  That doesn't mean a comparably dangerous and facile sense of personal destiny can't be dredged up from a post-Joseph Campbell form of Jungianism in popular culture colloquially known as "the hero's journey". 

But at a more practical level, as I've noted before, if the problem is that Apu is not voiced by an east Indian that's a misunderstanding about animation and voice acting.  Phil LaMar doesn't have to be Japanese to do a magnificent job voicing Samurai Jack any more than Mae Whitman has to be a Pacific Islander to do a magnificent job voicing Katara in The Last Airbender series. Groenig is in many respects on solid ground being dismissive of a controversy that has emerged after his creation has been on television for longer than many people who watch the show have even been alive.  That doesn't mean his dismissal can or should seem altogether justified.  It's possible for Groenig's response to be irresponsibly glib at one level and perfectly understandable at another.  It's also possible to take seriously the concerns people have about racial stereotyping in a cartoon character like Apu seriously at one level (i.e. the case that when Apu is the "only" presentation of a type that that type can be negative) and not seriously at another (as more entertainers who are actually east Indian have roles in the entertainment industry there's room for development and there's problems of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the nature of animation as a field if the rules of purity and presentation for live-action representation are applied to an art form in which you never have to look like the character you play in order to voice a character, something I'm sure Peter Cullen has been grateful for every day of the last forty odd years he's voiced Optimus Prime).

another witticism fail for Mere Orthodoxy

Every once in a while I'm reminded of why I wrote a particular haiku in an older post.

 

if brevity is
the soul of wit, then ramblingaborts a satire

 

I provided a counter-example of something I think is more in keeping with attempts at wit and the brevity that wit axiomatically depends upon.

 

O Pulpit & Pen
you're the Dale Gribble of the
Christian blogosphere

 

Over the last six years I have started to find some contributions to Mere Orthodoxy more groanworthy than praiseworthy.  More often than not the posts that seem to strike out are the ones that attempt some kind of Doug Wilson style serrated edge attempt at wit and wisdom and not altogether unlike Doug Wilson it can be a bit tough to conclude that either wit or wisdom ends up getting written, even if the author may clearly be convinced that wit and wisdom have been bountiful.

 

So ... this ode ... to the Pence rule.  

https://mereorthodoxy.com/avoidance-not-purity-ode-pence-rule/

The poem lacks wisdom and wit across the board since anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the plight of slaves anywhere could guess that Joseph probably did not have a choice about how often he interacted with his owner's wife.  The idea that any variation of any contemporary Pence rule could be applicable to a slave seems daft.  That point was, unsurprisingly, raised by Aimee Byrd.

 

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/housewife-theologian/will-the-real-potiphars-wife-please-stand#.WvYRYGeGNoI

 

Whereas Carl Trueman raised another point, about how predictably rote the presumption of heteronormative temptation the Pence rule is in both theory and practice but pastors have to be aware that that's not the only kind of temptation that people can run into.  The Pence rule would seem patently useless for intra-gender temptations to misuse power, authority or social resources.  Ted Haggard, for all we don't know, could have kept the Pence rule meticulously.  Since I can hardly forget that here in Seattle back in 2006 Mark Driscoll used the Haggard scandal as an occasion to soap box I'm not surprised someone like Carl Trueman might remember it and point out that some of the higher profile scandals among pastors weren't men-with-women scandals.

 

http://www.alliancenet.org/mos/postcards-from-palookaville/the-pink-elephant-in-the-room#.WvYRWWeGNoI

 

On the whole Mere Orthodoxy crashes and burns every time they try to run with satire; write something funny; or display any ideas of what they regard as wit.  They're at their best in writing that is plodding, stentorian and earnest.  :)

Even as a moderately conservative Presbyterian sort odes such as the one linked to above have the illusion of wisdom and wit but, even to a conservative, suggest a self-satisfied and self-assured notional form of wisdom of a sort that builds its conclusion into its premise and then produces didactic doggerel that confidently expounds upon axiom and counter-axiom without, perhaps, understanding either of the axioms at hand. 

on the sea and sea food (a haiku)

seals are sea beagles

and, to a pod of orcas

they are sea bagels

 

while reading Adorno's "Coherence and Meaning", a haiku

intent and result,
so distinct in reception,
are entwined in art

Just because half the time I think Adorno is wildly wrong doesn't mean that half the time I can't find his writing challenging, stimulating and interesting to read.

Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in A major

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDxYmhze5Do
This is another entry in the cycle for which we have a video of a performance, by Asya Selyutina.  This is, owing to the key of A major, one of the brightest and most festive of the entries in the cycle. 

Prelude (starts at 0:22)

This is a laconic 3/4 work marked "Andante largo".  While Koshkin is famous among classical guitarists for his macabre Poe-inspired "Usher Waltz" this waltz in A major is about as far away in mood and idiom as Koshkin could while still being Koshkin and still being in 3/4.  A predominantly chorale texture permeates this prelude, though a chorale with many ninth chords and secondary leading tone chords.  I would do a more detailed harmonic analysis if there were a way to do so without actually showing you what's in the score but I'm not in a hurry to get into any infringement activities.  The prelude is dominated by four-measure phrases.  Koshkin plays a lot with secondary leading tone chords and what are known as passing chords.  He opens with a bright A major that shifts by measure 2 in what looks on paper to be a second inversion minor dominant chord but because of the laconic harmonic rhythm what this signals to us (especially if we're listening to this performed) is that this opening A major chord has been swiftly transformed into a secondary dominant, that of the subdominant.  Sure enough we get a subdominant in measure 3, though it's in first inversion and it's a D major seventh chord.  This leads to an F major chord with an added sixth (the D natural hidden in the middle of the texture at the third beat) but this is a passing chord.  It has linear contrapuntal meaning but is not easily defined in terms of functional harmony.  You get used to seeing a lot of this in Russian music in general in my experience; it's one of the things that make Russian music fun.  The D major seventh in first inversion is transformed into B dominant seventh, which, of course, is the secondary dominant to the dominant and the dominant is precisely what we get at measure five, which augurs in the second phrase.

All of this transpires quickly within the first few seconds of the prelude and like any good prelude it telegraphs the harmonic and melodic language we'll be hearing to the end of the prelude.  I mention that and make a point of it because when I was studying Igor Rekhin's cycle of preludes and fugues I found myself liking his subjects and thinking his fugues were okay, and I liked his preludes about half the time but I found myself puzzled by what could be the wild disconnect between his preludes and the subsequent fugues.  For instance, there's an abrupt mood shift between his prelude in B flat major and the fugue in B flat major. 

Again, if you're reading this and don't have a copy of the score at hand there's only so much I can do in a mere blog post, but the modal ambiguity of this prelude has to be seen as well as hear to be fully understood.  Koshkin uses passing chords to shift in and out of the key of A major at will but quickly gets back "on key" throughout.  He may land on a C major seventh chord with a ninth at measure 11 (); or he may build up to a deceptive cadence that leads to a subtonic that simmers in lydian inflections at measures 21 and 22 (starts at 1:16) but there's only so much I can describe here.  This is an A major piece, to be sure, but there's something wistful and detached in this prelude and it has everything to do with subtle and rapid modal mutation on a chord by chord basis as the simple and faintly plaintive melody makes its way from start to finish. 

We do, however, get a very upfront and obvious dominant pedal section at 1:37 and we get a very firm harmonic and melodic resolution at 1:50 that signals the syntactic climax of the prelude has been reached.  From that point Koshkin gently winds down an already gentle prelude and closes with a series of chords to be played using natural harmonics.

Now, about those chords in harmonics--measure 43 is easy. Take your fourth finger and lay it across strings 1 through 5 at the seventh fret exactly as instructed in the score.  With your first finger touch the sixth string at the fourth fret as indicated.  Easy-peasy.  It's that simple.  Koshkin's instructions are aligned with the rising order of the pitches.  Having written a dozen studies in natural harmonics over the years, and having a handful of them up online for consultation, I could improve my right hand technique but I think my left hand technique is basically competent.  So I can walk you through the basics of how to execute the closing chords of this prelude.  If you're an experienced guitarist and saw how Selyutina played the chords already you won't really need to read the rest of this discussion of the prelude.  Now I think the kinds of chords in harmonic Koshkin calls for should be chords any and every guitarist learns how to play.  It's just part of mastering the full range of musical possibilities on the instrument. 

IF there's any tricky part in the chord at measure 43 for those not already used to this kind of playing it's the RIGHT hand, not the left.  The G sharp should be taken by p, which could also take the E natural.  Nevertheless I recommend you play the E with i rather than p because depending on how your nails and attack are you get noises you don't want.  You also won't be able to pull off the chord with the completely unrolled effect that is patently in the score for guitarists who may need to be reminded that you never just roll chords just because that's what you're used to doing if the score doesn't explicitly call for it.  That leaves the F sharp and D respectively to be taken by the a and m.  You'll likely need all four of pima from the right hand to execute the chord all in one go but it's worth it and the left hand part really is as easy as I just described in the preceding paragraph.

Now for that second chord in harmonics at 44.  The principle of execution is similar.  You create a barre with your fourth finger at the twelfth fret and you're good to go for that part.  The tricky part for an inexperienced guitarist is the A and C sharp.  You get the A, as instructed, at the seventh fret of the fourth string. You get the C sharp at the ninth fret of the fifth string.  Play the A with the first finger of the left hand and the C sharp with the second finger, and just see to it the third finger stays out of the way.  That should make the second chord manageable.  It may be difficult at first and you may have to practice the preliminary stretch but the left hand and right hand execution are, in principle, more or less like the previous chord. 

The last "chord" is the C sharp and A dyad that ends the prelude.  This is a charmer and it will be scary for guitarists who up until now have gone their whole playing careers not realizing all the harmonics you can play at the third and fourth frets in addition to the usual suspects.  Sor knew where the third fret harmonics were, and the ones at the sixth fret, too.  In this case all you have to do is place your first finger at the third fret of the fourth string and your second finger at the fourth fret of the fifth string. An important proviso here is that depending on the fingerboard and intonation of your instrument you may want to position the first finger JUST BELOW the third fret rather than on the third fret, which will feel weird at first because it will look like you're cramming two fingers together on adjacent strings within the space of two frets rather than having a fret for each digit.  Don't worry about that.  What you do want to worry about is making sure that high A harmonic sounds properly and experience has taught me over the last twenty years that you put your fingers where the natural harmonics ring out best and if it's not literally, exactly ON the third fret you don't sweat that part. 
Having written a dozen studies in harmonics I'm hugely biased here but I think this resolution to the prelude is gorgeous.  I'd expect nothing less from Koshkin. 

Now for the fugue

Fugue (starts at 2:30)
The fugue opens with an elegant and lengthy subject in 3/4 full of ascending runs.  The first thing that comes to mind is that it's kind of an upside down guitar version of the subject from the final movement of the Hammerklavier which you can hear at 2:53 in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XEY2ej_U0I

Koshkin's fugue subject rises where Beethoven's falls and it rises up to a peak before steadily descending where Beethoven's subject rises but the overall arc feels similar, which is hardly a bad thing, I happen to like late Beethoven.  This eight measure fugue subject gets an answer at measure 55 (2:39) at the dominant and gets a countersubject before the third and final entry of the subject, in the lowest voice, appears at 2:50.  We get a soprano, alto, tenor/bass series of entries which is nice and dramatic for the guitar in this key. 

Now given such a long subject (eight measures) episodes for a fugue such as this can actually be pretty short because the sheer level of fragmentation you can subject the subject or countersubject to can let you effect a modulation with a few changes without having to let the entire subject run its course.  So the first middle entry shows up bright and early at 3:01 in B minor. The next episode begins at 3:11 and is pretty large, full of sequential runs, bouncing bass lines, and antiphonal back and forth between voices taking up the initial measures of the subject. There is constantly the promise of a middle entry in which the subject will be presented in full but that doesn't arrive until measure 108 at 3:38, when we get a middle entry in F major.

A mere ten seconds later, at measure 117 (3:48), we're in a new middle entry in B flat major. From here we get another extensive episode and I could try to describe it but there's such a thing as recognizing that you can't really explain a fugue that moves this quickly and brightly with mere words to people who don't already have the score.  Koshkin does work toward a dominant pedal tone on the low open E that prepares the way for an A major appearance of the subject which springs up at 4:29. Having played the subject in full in so many middle entries Koshkin doesn't present the entire subject unaltered. Instead he transforms the subject into a tonic and chromatic submediant alternation that signals the climax of the fugue having been reached, we're heading in for the home stretch.

Part of that journey is a brief detour into parallel minor at 4:40 (measure 161). Instead of building up to a giant, bright, explosive resolution Koshkin winds things down to an impudently quiet authentic cadence at 4:57.

This is a charming, fun fugue.  Having sung it's praises I do feel there was a missed opportunity here.  A diatonic inversion of this subject would have made for a fantastic middle entry in an already pretty good fugue. 

a curious juxtaposition at LitHub: Ursula K LeGuin claming dictators are always afraid of poets even though dictators such as Stalin and Mao actually were poets, if not poets praised by academics

https://lithub.com/ursula-k-le-guin-dictators-are-always-afraid-of-poets/ 

...

 

UKL: After all, dictators are always afraid of poets. This seems kind of weird to a lot of Americans to whom  poets  are  not  political  beings,  but  it  doesn’t seem a bit weird in South America or in any dictatorship, really.

 

***

 

Ah, but famously sometimes dictators and despots ARE poets, if not always poets recognized by the clergy of canonized writers 

 

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171025-why-tyrants-love-to-write-poetry

  

and sometimes, in the case of Edmund Spenser, the despotic person of letters can be a brilliant and influential poet.

 

https://lithub.com/9-murderous-tyrants-whore-also-failed-writers-and-one-ok-poet/

 

 

Whether Bannon's role in the US leaving the Paris accords makes him at the same level as a Mao or a Stalin seems like an assertion made a little too readily. That poets can be despots doesn't seem that hard to grant within the Western tradition if we take the authorial ascriptions to David for any number of Psalms at face value. He was a poet and a musician yet also, to put it bluntly, a tyrant, since kings and regional warlords are despots and tyrants more or less as a matter of practicality.  Sure, there's the ideal of the enlightened despot that suggests so very many despots were not enlightened ... but it would seem by the 21st century only a fool would seriously say that dictators are always afraid of poets.  That's as foolish as insisting that all real poets are afraid of working real jobs in the real world.  William Carlos Williams famously worked as a doctor, Wallace Stevens had an office job, T. S. Eliot did, too. 

 

It just seems that so lionized a writer should know better than to say something as stupid as that dictators are always afraid of poets. 

 

Arts funding getting gutted would seem like it's bad enough a threat as it is without this sort of inane bromide.  It's a shame, really. 

 

I admire a few poets (Donne, Levertov, Stevens, Frost, Cummings, Eliot and a few others).  I'm not against poetry at all ... but I do find the self veneration and self-congratulation of vocational artists and writers more than faintly aggravating.  I feel that art would be a thing to take more seriously if artists didn't take it and themselves quite as seriously as some of them do.

Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in B minor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-o8NxFIX0

This is another prelude and fugue from the cycle for which we have a video performance.  In this case the prelude is melodically simple but harmonically complex.  It makes sense to provide a schematic analysis that doesn't attempt to get too involved in the harmonic activity of this prelude, even though a theoretical analysis could be a lot of fun to do.  This is a series of blog posts, after all, and for blog posts it should suffice to give guitarists and theorists a foundation for more detailed score analysis at their leisure.  

Prelude (0:06)

This block chord chorale is 39 measures long and is predominantly in four measure phrases in common time.  Its form is probably best described as a kind of rounded binary form that can be mapped out as follows:

A   (0:06 to 0:35) measures 1-8
A'  (0:35 to 1:00) measures 9-16
B   (1:01 to 1:24) measures 17-24
A'' (1:25 to 2:23) measures 25-39)

Although the phrases are in four-measure increments the larger phrase units tend to be eight-measure phrases.  A is firmly in B minor while A' shifts into D major with the promise of a resolution back into B minor which is deceptively resolved not to the submediant key as would be typical, but to an F major added sixth chord that is the dominant to B flat major that is the tonality that the B material moves within.  On the whole all the melodic activity is reliably diatonic until we get to this B section, even if the harmonic support is often chromatically divergent from the "home" key.  The B material closes with a presentation of the G major chord that would be the "expected" submediant chord of a conventional deceptive cadence--we get the expected chord for such a deceptive resolution but it's postponed until the end of the B material in this rounded binary form.  A short chromatic rising passage leads us to a recapitulation of the A material as A''.  The initial idea returns but the phrases are shortened and more halting, the rhythmic values more expansive.  We're obviously winding things down.  It's worth noting, for those into this kind of analysis, that the return of the A material at measure 25 corresponds closely to the Golden Mean of the prelude. 

As to the mood of this prelude, which I like, it gives me the impression of a kind of Scriabinesque take on the old American song "My Funny Valentine". 

The fugue is introduced in the film by a change from a black background to a white background in this film, which makes it very easy to point out when the fugue begins.

Fugue  (2:25)

This is a serpentine 6/8 subject that's four measures long and is dominated by a chromatic descent that winds up into eighth notes that lead to a countersubject in the uppermost voice as the alto enters at measure 5 with a tonal answer that affirms the dominant (2:31). The countersubject appears in a transposed form at measure 48 (2:36).  It's worth noting here that tonal answers modify the subject in some way to adhere to the prevailing tonality of the exposition.  When a subject starts on the dominant scale degree and you don't want to change the character of the subject's linear activity then you may want to provide a real or tonal answer at the subdominant, but if you want an answer at the dominant to affirm the key of your fugue exposition and you are willing to "bend" the contour of the subject then tonal answers are more satisfying.  It's possible to favor tonal answers (Bach) or real answers (Handel) depending on preference.  Neither is necessarily easier than the other to master.  In this case Koshkin opts for a tonal answer at the dominant in which the subject starts on the third scale degree.  As noted previously, he has a countersubject that is transposed for the appearance of the third and final voice in the texture which arrives in the tenor/bass voice on F sharp just as would be expected.

We move from the end of the exposition into development at measure 52 (2:42) and right away Koshkin shifts to F natural, signaling that the chromaticism of the subject opens up possibilities for abrupt modal mutation and chromatic shifts into remote keys.  Despite the three voices of the exposition by its completion this fugue will be characterized by two voiced textures.  This is not a weakness in a fugue such as this, given the activity of the subject and its brevity.  As George Oldroyd put it in The Technique and Spirit of Fugue, if memory serves (and it may not) one of the mistakes music students make in writing fugues is assuming that once all three or four voices in a fugal exposition are introduced every last one of them must be active constantly throughout the duration of the fugue. Anyone who has surveyed the fugues of Bach or Buxtehude or ... just pick someone, you'll find they rarely ever did that.  So you don’t' have to, either.  Koshkin demonstrates a firm grasp of contrapuntal writing by recognizing he doesn't need all three of his voices active all the way through this fugue.

The first middle entry appears at 2:50 and is in the very remote key of C minor at measure 58.  After another episode the second middle entry appears at measure 70 in the key of F minor, yet another wildly remote key from the initial B minor key we started in. A very brief transitional episode takes place and by measure 75 (3:13) we're already in a new middle entry in E minor. Koshkin clearly grasped that one of the things you can do with a fugal subject like this one is move quickly from middle entry to middle entry with little episode transition thanks to the chromaticism inherent in the subject. This passage in the fugue is also noteworthy for the way in which the F minor middle entry places the subject in the tenor/bass voice while the E minor middle entry places it in the alto voice. He also features the countersubject in the earlier middle entry and omits it in the later middle entry, which is something else you can do when writing fugues. 

By measure 3:20 we have still another middle entry at measure 80, in G minor. This is followed up by an extended modulating episode that downshifts with descending sequential activity in linear terms but which culminates in an "uplift" at measure 92 (3:35) in a new middle entry in A major.

By measure 100 (3:48) we have a new middle entry in which the subject appears to have returned in B minor but it's not B minor.  Though the F sharp appears at the top of the treble clef just like it did at the start of the fugue it is floating above a harmonic tenth of E at the bottom and G in the upper part of a dyad.  The fugue subject has returned but as the ninth rather than the fifth, part of a middle entry that is more readily identified as E minor than B minor. That's something else that makes fugue subjects with a pronounced chromatic character so much fun, you don't have to bring them in at the tonic or dominant if you know you can transpose them in some other way.  If you want an example of a fugue that runs with the possibilities of a chromatically ambiguous subject as being able to appear at any factoral relationship in a chord (tonic, third, fifth, seventh) go over and listen to fugue no. 2 from Rodion Shchedrin's cycle of preludes and fugues. Go over here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0KH-wDfTlc&t=36s
His fugue in A minor starts at 2:55.

Now, back to Koshkin's fugue.

The E minor middle entry with the subject at the ninth leads to an extended episode that can be thought of as a preparation for a "real" E minor middle entry that finally arrives at measure 112 (4:02) with the subject appearing at the fifth of the chord as we would expect. There's even a quasi-stretto going on in which the subject in the treble strings gets a semi-canonic response by a transposed form of the subject in the middle voice.  This overall rhetorical flourish is, by the way, almost a Haydnesque trick, giving the subject in a middle entry at an unexpected interval in a harmony and then preparing for a payoff in which the subject appears at the "correct" register later in the work.  This is followed by a flurry of sixteenth note scalar runs that begin to get support from an F sharp in the lower register. As wind ups to fugal climaxes go this is a class decorative series of runs on a dominant pedal point; this is exactly what makes sense for a guitarist to do in a fugue in B minor and it makes for a satisfying climax in which the fugue subject arrives in its original B minor as B minor at measure 123 at 4:18.

As the subject reaches its end it gets interrupted by florid runs that preempt a full resolution of the subject in harmonic and linear terms.  Koshkin goes through a series of evaded cadences to build suspense. He finally gets back to the motto of his subject at 4:42 (measure 137) where the subject becomes fragmented and the basis for winding down coda that reaches an E major chord (though it has an added sixth and no fifth) at measure 147 that turns into a florid scalar ascent culminating in a natural harmonic that is followed by a subdued piano tonic chord close.
Oh, one more thing about the fugue subject, if you take it and subject it to modal mutation the retrograde of the subject would sound fun in E major.  You could also take this fugue subject and tonally invert it and it would sound charming. Koshkin didn't do that with the subject in the fugue so far as I can tell but they are both legitimate possibilities for a fugue subject such as this.  My own philosophical approach to fugal writing for the guitar is you discover that you can get a non-prime version of your fugue subject to work you should look into having at least one middle entry in which that form of the subject can be presented, whether it's the inversion, the retrograde or even a retrograde inversion.  It doesn't even have to be a middle entry as such, it could appear in the coda or you could work the alternate form of the subject into a counterfugue if that is your thing.

Which is not to say that what Koshkin did with this fugue isn't beautifully well-made, it certainly is.  I'm just noting as a guitarist composer who has written a set of preludes and fugues that there's room for fugal writing in which the subject doesn't always have to appear in its prime form. 

That said, this is another fine entry in the cycle and it's fortunate we have a video that helps us walk through the prelude and fugue to discuss Koshkin's compositional approach.  Many of the videos are for works in the first half of the cycle.  We'll be more and more "on our own" the further into the second half we get. 

Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues: Prelude and Fugue in D major

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDKgZV0E66I

In this case we have a film of a live performance that was posted to Youtube.  Since the prelude and fugue comprise an even more organically unified whole than is typical of this cycle it's almost moot to discuss the prelude and fugue separately.  But for sake of readability that's exactly what we'll do.

Prelude (starts 10 seconds in)
This prelude is a lyric pastoral and while it could be described as very broadly binary in form the two themes are in D major and A major, with the second theme ending in such a way as to lead into the fugue as a kind of developmental interruption. 

The movement is scored as "Andante" but if I were to try to describe this prelude it would be as a Koshkinesque take on the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, weird as that is likely to sound to fans of either Mahler or Koshkin or possibly to fans of both.  That's just the kind of mood this prelude suggests to me.  Others will, naturally, have a different set of impressions.

While all the phrases are in simple two-measure building blocks the first two larger phrases are six measures each before settling into more persistently duple patterns across the phrases.  I identify Theme 1 as spanning the entirety of measures 1-17 with the transition to Theme 2 starting at 18 (1:21) where Koshkin switches from D major to D minor and introduces a more agitated take on the gently pulsing eighth note accompaniment figuration. 

Theme 2, in A major (1:44) starts at 24 and is gentle and quiet. The pulsing accompaniment hasn't changed but the melody is written out in half note values, making it seem more restrained and subdued than even the opening theme.  It's a simple motto of C#, F#, F natural and E, transposed up an octave in the second phrase (measures 26-28) This is very nearly simple a cadential formula presented as a secondary theme, which in many respects it is, but it accomplishes an A major chord that prepares for what's coming next. It could almost be thought of as a kind of slow sonata form in which the development is substituted out for a fugue, to which we now turn.

Fugue (2:26)
The fugue subject is not necessarily related to the initial theme of the prelude.  At first glance you can see that the whole thing is scored in a single voice and ask whether or not this thing is even a fugue.  It is, it's just that the subject and associated material is so staccato it makes sense to score it as a single voice rather than attempted to flood staves with notational indicators of how each of the lines in the fugue need to be delineated.  If this were scored for string quartet, by contrast, highlighting the separate melodic lines would be easier. 

The subject is a four on the floor quasi-blues riff and the subject and respective answers are presented no less than five times.

presentation 1 is in the tonic at 2:26
presentation 2 is in the dominant at 2:33
presentation 3 is in the tonic at 2:39 (or 2:40 depending on sync issues)
presentation 4 is in the dominant at 2:46
presentation 5 is in the tonic at 2:53

Once you recognize the subject you can hear the five presentations of it in the spritely exposition.  With a subject this springy and short we unsurprisingly have just a few middle entries.  The first middle entry shows up in C sharp minor at 3:05 (measure 62). After another episode the second middle entry appears at 3:24 but it's ambiguous. If you were to merely look at the score and the linear patterns you could see the fugue subject appears in F major BUT there's a preliminary appearance of D natural in the bass strings at the end of measure 68.  I would say this recontextualizes the entire middle entry as really being in D minor.

At 3:37 (measure 76 Koshkin introduces a flurry of sixteenth note arpeggios that rise up aggressively six measures into a two chord pedal point at measure 82 (3:52) that prepares for the formal return of the subject in D major, which happens after a dramatic pause at measure 83 (4:00). This gentle piano climax lets the subject wind down still further into a half-cadence which resolves itself at measure 91 (4:27) into a recapitulation of the opening measures of the prelude.  The fugue can be thought of as an eruption of energy intervening as an interlude between what could be thought of as the B section and the reprised A section of a truncated ternary form. The opening two measures are brought back with the melody in the trebles and then in the bass strings before coming to pianissimo close at 5:05.  There's more than a little bit of coughing throughout this live performance, which is too bad.  Despite the coughing the performance itself is solid and conveys the substance of the prelude and fugue.