The Celestial Monochord

A Geography of the Anthology

Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as a Google Map
by The Celestial Monochord



My rusted old pickup is in the shop, again.  That's the bad news.

On the bright side, I climbed yesterday into a rental car and was elated to find it equipped with XM radio.  YES!   For a few days, I can finally listen to Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, and that other stuff down along that long, lonesome dial.

Also yesterday, as if to elbow me into seeing the metaphors in this, the mailman delivered a copy of It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.

It's hard to think of a more worked-over subject for a book — motoring along America's highways in search of its roots music.  The author, Amanda Petrusich, even includes her personal snapshots of roadsigns she saw along the way.

But who am I to say so?  My entire life has come to revolve around driving off to look for traces of my musical roots and yours.  If I ever got the Do Re Mi, my cubicle would instantly become a faint memory and nothing would keep me off that same highway until the day I died.

Unfortunately, high gas prices and my dying truck have helped keep me close to home this summer, even more than the cube usually does. 

At such times, I often think of my favorite recording of "Shenandoah."  Performed by the Ebony Hillbillies, it strikes me as a song about a guy whose day job is a wedge driven between him and what he loves most:

O Shenandoah, I won't deceive you
(Away, you rolling river!)
O Shenandoah, I'm bound to leave you
Away, I'm bound away
Across that wide Missouri.

I haven't sought out the standard interpretation, because this one suits me fine.  Almost the very day America was founded, someone sat right down and wrote an anthem about money bearing him away from his own heart. 

Which, in turn, brings me to my favorite photograph of any musician, a photo taken by Mike Seeger.  It's in the liner notes to Seeger's collection of field recordings, Close To Home, and is the size of a postage stamp.

In it, autoharp virtuoso Kilby Snow is taking a break from his construction job, in 1957, to play 19th-century tunes with his swollen, stained hands.  His intelligent, bespectacled, ironic eyes glance sidelong at the photographer. Snow's cut on Close to Home is the stunning "He Will Set Your Fields On Fire." 

And in that photo, he sits with his autoharp on the hood of a big, beautiful, Cold War American car. 

Maybe that's Mike Seeger's car, the same one he drove through the gathering gloom the night he finally found Dock Boggs, his restless wife and kids along for the ride.  Maybe it's Snow's own car.

Chatting recently with a friend-of-the-blog, Boney Ernest, I wondered what would've happened to our musical culture if Americans had always paid the real cost of their gasoline. 

What if, for example, Northerners couldn't afford to drive South in search of somebody else's grandparent's music?  What if we had to remain content with OUR OWN grandparent's music? 

And what if the next Folk Revival was finally, truly local? 

Maybe, at last, we would arrive at a better answer to R. Crumb's famous question: "Where has it gone, all the beautiful music of our grandparents? It died with them, that's where it went."

If we at least play along with this notion, the various "Americana" revivals of the 20th century were not fueled by a desire to discover the roots of rock-n-roll, or to explore America's collective unconscious.  They were not fueled by great music, nor even the lust to exploit it.  They were simply fueled by … fuel.

My rusty old truck not withstanding, I don't feel too bad about my carbon footprint.

For two and a half years, I've tried to explain to people why I'm dedicating so much time, energy, and earnings to researching "The Moonshiners Dance," recorded in Minnesota by Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra in 1927. 

It's impossible to express in a few words.

Usually, I've waved my hands in the air, describing a hypothetical Google Map showing the geographical origin of each cut on Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music. 

On such a map, "The Moonshiners Dance" would stand out like a sore thumb, completely alone as the only selection from anywhere near "us" — me and the person I'm boring.  In the past week, I asked myself, seriously, why does it have to be hypothetical? 

And so, Google Maps and I present A Geography of the Anthology.

The Methodology of a Geography of the Anthology

In creating the map, I used the 1997 Anthology liner notes and some Wikipedia to choose a location that most shaped each Anthology selection.  This was not easy, especially limiting myself to one "pin" per recording. 

But I gave it a shot and didn't much fret about it.

For example, Henry Thomas' work is a profound contribution exactly because it's so richly about being unstuck from any particular place — it's all about the road.  I put him in his home town in the state of Texas.

Many of the Memphis performers were from other communities in the same region, but it matters that the Memphis Jug Band is from Memphis, regardless of where its members were born.  So there they are on Beale Street.

I've made an attempt to be accurate but not precise.  Look very closely at Memphis.  Nine Anthology selections belong in Memphis, in all fairness.  I've stuck my pins every block or two all the way down Beale Street, even though I don't really know where in Memphis these people did their thing.

Sometimes, it was tempting to emphasize the isolation of "The Moonshiners Dance" by skooching my decisions southward. 

The leader of the Cincinnati Jug Band, according to the 1997 liner notes, "was apparently from around the Alabama-Georgia state border." But it would've been too absurd to follow such vague instructions just to keep the Cincinnati Jug Band out of Cincinnati.  

The two selections by Chicago church congregations complicated my visual argument.  Those congregations and their recordings are products of the "great migration" of African Americans from the South to the great industrial cities of the North.  In a sense, they illustrate how far north the southern culture represented in the Anthology managed to flow.

I could have placed those congregations in the southern states where their leaders were born, but that would have been so wrong on too many levels.  For one, the music came out of a very distinctly Chicago experience.  I decided to trust the viewer to understand what those pins represent.

Ken Maynard was probably the hardest to place.

He was raised somewhere in Indiana, but "claimed Texas as his home," according to the liner notes.  He traveled around as a rodeo and circus performer, worked as a real cowboy, and went to Hollywood in 1923, where he was billed as "the American Boy's Favorite Cowboy."  His photo makes him look like a little Midwestern kid playing dress-up.

So where do you put Ken Maynard?  A random spot in Indiana?  A random spot in Texas or in "The West"?  In Hollywood?  I decided that his song describes an image of the West in the mind of somebody who was from somewhere else.  I placed him as an Indiana boy dreaming of cowboys and Indians.  Maybe you have another idea.



_

The Devil in the White City

 

... all his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of this statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that has touched his heart.

This is a police detective's description of H. H. Holmes, the masterful liar and serial murderer of Erik Larson's book — one of the devils in his white city. The description comes late in the book, by which time it comes off as a wonderfully perverse joke shared between Larson and you, the reader who has by now come to think of Larson in exactly these terms. Larson is a very slippery and hypnotic liar. Like the guards who mourn when Holmes is executed for his murders, you wish Larson could go on lying to you much longer than he does.

Larson's misdeeds are not serious, and I probably care about them only because of my own struggle to learn the lost details behind The Moonshiner's Dance. Often, I would sell my soul to the Devil to discover the level of detail Larson seems to have for events that took place 35 years before the subject of my own research.

Early in the book, Larson describes the first meeting between Holmes and one of his victims. As if to torment me personally, Larson places the meeting in a music shop in Minneapolis:

Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

A wonderful passage, but ... but DID a clock tick? IS that what the dust did? Did ANY of this really happen? No footnote is provided. It is clear, though, that Larson has studied late 19th-century Chicago much more closely than Minneapolis, which was not "full" of farmers of any description. It was a pretty rough place, and about as densely populated with prostitutes, drunks, businessmen and laborers of all ethnicities as Chicago was. Ask anyone from Lake Wobegon — they'll tell you about Minneapolis.

More substantial stretches of fiction get footnoted as such. Larson describes Holmes' tour, with his wife and sister-in-law, of the Union Stockyards —

Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage.

On the same day, they also saw the 1893 Columbian Exposition, known as the White City —

Minnie and Anna rapidly grew tired. They exited, with relief, onto the terrace over the North Canal and walked into the Court of Honor. Here once again Anna found herself nearly overwhelmed. It was noon by now, the sun directly overhead.

The footnotes acknowledge that the description, while long and detailed and vivid, is entirely bogus, except that it traces the SORT of tour that Chicago residents often gave to visiting relatives.

I love this book, and find the paperback edition's blurbage to be mostly well earned. It is indeed a gripping page-turner, thanks to Larson's use of every tool in the novelist's bag. I have enough interest in urban geography to have taken a half-dozen graduate-level courses in the subject while I was in academia (which Larson seems to detest). Reading The Devil in the White City, I often wished I'd had it in grad school to get a much better feel for this Columbian Exposition that everyone thought was so important. Likewise, I grew up in the Chicago area and often visited the Museum of Science and Industry without ever grasping that it was the last remaining structure of a history-making fair [see Comments]. I wish The Devil in the White City had been published in 1976 and placed in my hands then.

As a developing writer of history, there's a great deal to learn from Larson's work that I haven't often found in the, let us say, "less imaginative" histories I ordinarily read. Now and then, I wanted to slap myself on the forehead and say "Of course!" For example, I know very well what the weather was like on the night of Christmas 1924, when the Victoria Cafe opened in St. Paul, but Erik Larson reminded me that — and how — that weather matters.

The Devil in the White City, like any other measuring device, is useful precisely because it goes too far. You can use it to get a fix on how far you'd like to go in contriving history only because Larson's dial leaves a few more tick marks to the right of your own level. To me, much of the drama in this very engrossing book is in watching as both Holmes and Larson get away with murder, and in following the details of exactly how they succeed so well.

 

A Guest of Honor

 

One night in Tucson in April 1988, on a whim, I turned on a TV. I hadn't owned one for the previous four years, and wouldn't for another six, so anything I saw that night would have made a strong, if dream-like, impression.

By chance, what happened to be on PBS was the Houston Grand Opera's production of John Adams' minimalist opera, Nixon in China.

I remember having no idea what to make of it. I was 23 and had recently seen Koyannisquatsi, with its score by Philip Glass — my first exposure to minimalism. My deepest immersion in opera to that point had been an afternoon at a University of Arizona production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte.

I no longer have any recollection from that night of Nixon in China's music — maybe I couldn't make enough sense of it at the time to register an imprint. What I do remember was a colossal Air Force One taxiing onto the stage. Now THAT made an impression ... which I guess is what Air Force One is for, no matter where it turns up.

Mostly, I recall feeling ill-at-ease with the idea of a grand opera about Nixon's trip to China. Was the composer a Republican? Was this propaganda? Wasn't high art a liberal thing? And wasn't opera supposed to be about the olden times, not something that happened in 1972? I would have had no qualms about PBS airing Wagner's Parsifal — but Nixon in China?

Today, I'm reading Edward Berlin's great King of Ragtime, a biography of composer Scott Joplin. It's not an ordinary bio. Before this book, much of what was known about Joplin was legend and assumption. Berlin conducted and collected the most minutely meticulous research available and his book catalogs the many questions raised by the new information. When Berlin takes a position, it is the most cautious, cool-headed judgment possible. I find the approach intensely gripping and beautiful ... maybe it's me.

Anyway, it turns out that Joplin wrote and staged the world's first ragtime opera, entitled A Guest of Honor. Its subject was the 1901 visit of African American leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, where he dined with President Teddy Roosevelt. (Note: A reader suggests some controversy over the subject of this opera. See comments to this post.)

The visit was politically risky for the President, according to Berlin [euphemism added by me]:

Newspapers in the South condemned the invitation as an unwarranted attempt to place the black man on the same social plane as the white man; Roosevelt's act put him in a category with Ulysses S. Grant, and he would never be forgiven. The Sedalia Sentinel printed a poem on page one entitled "[N-word]s in the White House," which concludes with a black man marrying the President's daughter.

Scott Joplin seems to have had kinder feelings toward the event. That a black educator would participate in that symbolic ritual of advancement, The White House dinner, seems to have meant a lot to the composer, who was then working to elevate ragtime — widely disparaged at the time as degenerate black noise — to a high art form.

In 1902, he named his latest two-step, "The Strenuous Life," after a phrase in one of Roosevelt's speeches. He staged the ragtime opera A Guest of Honor in 1903 — barely two years after the events it depicted.

So this was an opera about events as contemporary as Katrina's landfall is today, in a form about as new as gypsy punk. In comparison, Nixon in China was conservative, portraying events of 15 years before in a 20-year-old music genre.

Working out these comparisons in more depth might bare a little fruit. While A Guest of Honor was probably meant to elevate a "low" form, some might say Nixon in China went the other direction, increasing the public's (including my own) awareness of minimalism, a high art "descending" into popularity.

And so on ... when Booker T. Washington visited Teddy Roosevelt, who was Nixon and who was China?

But, for anyone seeking to compare the two operas, the biggest obstacle would be our collective amnesia — the same universal, maddening, heart-sickening forgetfulness I've encountered since beginning my own original research into music history.

Joplin brought A Guest of Honor to less than a dozen stages across the Midwest in September 1903, but — according to the best speculation Berlin can support — the production was robbed of its receipts in Springfield, Illinois. Unable even to pay the bill for the touring company's stay at a Springfield boarding house, Joplin was forced to leave behind a trunk as collateral. It contained some of his personal effects, including unpublished manuscripts that may have included the score of A Guest of Honor. Those items were never recovered. Although a copyright for A Guest of Honor was applied for, the copyright office never received the customary copies of the score for its files.

In a book full of careful modifiers and provisional judgments, one sentence stands out for its disheartening brevity: "A Guest of Honor is lost."

Of course, various productions of Nixon in China are available from Amazon and iTunes in a variety of formats. Its memory is safe, despite having been composed in what I think of as our forgetful era. John Adams himself seems on track to be long remembered as one of the 20th Century's major composers.

Though we're more likely to learn about him on Antiques Roadshow or History Detectives than on Great Performances, the researcher who stumbles across an overlooked copy of A Guest of Honor would be remembered at least as long as Adams. Like Berlin's King of Ragtime itself, the thought puts me in the mood to work.

 

Oysters Monochord

It's a measure of my laser-like focus on Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe that The Celestial Monochord has gone without any mention of oysters until this month. For you see, not only do I love raw oysters, I've also read two — count 'em, TWO — books about oysters since last spring.

The first was M. F. K. Fisher's Consider the Oyster. Fisher seems to have been almost a food-focused Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay — you know, a brilliant writer, and an independent, bohemian, bisexual, martini-swilling raconteur. More or less.

Her Consider the Oyster is a beautifully-written, tiny little book — elegant and kind and wickedly funny, if sometimes a bit too silly. Open the book to any paragraph and you'll see. Here she is early in the first chapter, discussing the early life of an oyster:

He is small, but he is free-swimming ... and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.
   It is to be hoped, sentimentally, at least, that the spat — our spat — enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why. [all original punctuation, etc.]

She gives many oyster recipes, and her ability to splice them seamlessly into a great story is dazzling. Writing before 1941 with an intimate eye for detail, her stories are vivid views of all sorts of gone worlds — fancy restaurants in France, roadside shacks in Maine, a girl's school in Michigan, if I remember correctly. It's only 76 pages long, and even I — slowest reader on Earth — finished it in a weekend. I'm even tempted to re-read it before the months without R's begin.

By the way, Fisher says refrigeration had already rendered oysters safe to eat even in Oskaloosa, Iowa in any month of the year. Avoiding the R-less months might help the oyster farmer, since oysters lay their eggs during the warm months, but no season renders them dangerous to eat. Besides, some say summer oysters taste better.

I do recommend the other oyster book I read last year ... it's not Mark Kurlansky's fault that a world-class stylist got to the subject first, and it's even less his fault that I read Fisher's book immediately before The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.

Kurlansky writes those pop history books where some very improbable thing changed the world forever — 1968, cod, salt. Stylistically, he's as workmanlike and kitchen-sinky as you might expect. But his oyster book did transform my view of both New York and oysters, and made me enjoy the education.

The Big Oyster begins with Europeans sailing into New York Harbor for the first time, which allows Kurlansky to show how beautiful, bountiful and sweet-smelling its waters used to be — how much New York's very existence was ABOUT those qualities. For me, it was an opportunity to finally wrap my mind around the confounding geography of New York City, and beginning with the estuary in its natural state turned out to be key.

But The Big Oyster has organizational issues, and can feel frustratingly directionless. I frequently thought of the fish in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life — the ones who complain there isn't much in the movie about the meaning of life. Still, there are moments when your mind spins. Do you know why Manhattan city fathers laid out two hundred streets going from side to side (the short way) but only about twelve the long way (Bronx to Battery)? Because they thought the main flow of traffic would be between the two riverfronts. New York used to know where it was situated.

Kurlansky does leave us much more savvy about oysters than Fisher does. You can read Fisher closely without really realizing that all oysters you're ever likely to eat have been seeded, grown, and harvested by farmers — and it's been like this for at least 150 years. There hasn't been a natural, unmolested oyster bed essentially anywhere for more than a century. If there were, you wouldn't want to eat oysters from it. Natural oysters tend to get huge, and eating them is like "eating a baby."

 

Editor's Note: Well, here I am! The Celestial Monochord is trying to post an entry every day during the month of February. This here is installment 21 of 28. Whoo-hoo!

 

M.o.M.A. Don't Allow It

(photo from The Bizargrass News Network)

Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has been telling a story lately in interviews and during her stage show. She wanted to make an opera out of the novel Gravity's Rainbow, written by the notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon:

I wrote him a letter proposing doing an opera based on "Gravity's Rainbow". I got a beautiful letter from him saying he'd be delighted, but with one stipulation: that it be scored for solo banjo. Some people have a great way of saying "no way". At some point I'd like to try again to see if he's expanded the instrumentation.

Now, I try to use The Celestial Monochord to talk about things I like, in hopes of understanding them better and helping them grow. And I certainly don't know what Thomas Pynchon may have been thinking — or certainly there's no good evidence that I know better what he was thinking than Laurie Anderson does. Nor, for that matter, am I certain just how facetious Ms. Anderson may have been in recounting the story ...

but ... but ...

IS SHE OUT OF HER MIND? It seems obvious — at least given the little information I have, which is Anderson's own multiple descriptions of the incident — that had she accepted the challenge, we would have an opera of Gravity's Rainbow, written for banjo. How perfect is that?

It's well to remember that Pynchon is a considered one of the most innovative living artists, but he doesn't hang with the literary or high-art crowd ... for some reason. Perhaps he finds them too closed-minded, too predictable. Some reports have him as some kind of aerospace engineer working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I think it was.

My theory is he was not politely saying "No." He was saying, "Yes, but only if you make an effort to broaden your imagination. You've been doing the same schtick since the 1970's. Why not try something else?" The fact that Anderson interpreted Pynchon's proposal as a solid "No" suggests (to me, anyway) that Pynchon knew exactly who he was dealing with and how she would react. I can think of at least a half-dozen brilliant, innovative, and versatile banjoists who should follow up on this signal from the mysterious Mr. Pynchon. I wonder if playwright and banjoist Sean Dixon of BanjoBanjar knows about this ...

And Anderson's a fiddler! She should know better.

Breakdown

As you've noticed, The Celestial Monochord is on a brief vacation. It will be back very soon, I promise! In the mean time, I'm upgrading my workstation so I don't have to upload from work, nor from my wife's computer. I also have two new kittens, and several other distractions ... including ...

I'm finally reading Robert Cantwell's first book, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound. I haven't read it before because I'm not very interested in bluegrass and when I did read the first two chapters, I found them somewhat peculiar. Now that I'm a little further, I realize the error of my ways. It's great, a worthy predecessor to Cantwell's brilliant When We Were Good: The Folk Revival.

Bluegrass Breakdown will no doubt get a lot of airplay here in the future. For now, I'll briefly commment on the subtitle, "The Making of the Old Southern Sound."

Bluegrass is not an old music, not an ancient folk form. It did not exist before 1945 or 1946, when it was unleashed by Bill Monroe. It's the personal style of that one very original musician — but bluegrass was so widely, enthusiastically, and creatively imitated that it came to be seen as a genre unto itself. Monroe invented bluegrass at the same time others were inventing Rock & Roll.

Nor — in certain significant ways — is it particularly Southern. Monroe grew up on a Kentucky farm, but his family sent him north, in 1929 when he was 18 years old. It was during this long removal from the South, living among other exiles from Appalachia, working in a factory washing out barrels using gasoline, listening to Chicago radio stations, that Monroe began to dream of a contemporary sound that would thrive (or help him thrive) in the environment he occupied.

Bluegrass is nevertheless heard by its audiences as both old and Southern, so Cantwell's book traces "The Making of the Old Southern Sound" — that is, how and why this thoroughly modern music came to be "about" certain times and places from which it did not arise and which it had never actually occupied.

Families of Trees

Leaf shapes (don't have much to do with families of trees)

After five years of working for a professional society of plant biologists, I am finally educating myself about plants. My mother-in-law gave me The Golden Field Guide to Trees of North America. It is an excellent book, and I've spent many hours staring at the 1950's-era color drawings of trees, leaves, fruits, bark, etc.

I'm struck by the "families" of trees. You may know about the classification systems for living things — the basic level being species, such as the oregon crab apple (Malus fusca) or the Biltmore crab apple (Malus glabrata). The next highest level is genus, such as apple (Malus), ash (Sorbus), and hawthorn (Crataegus) — each having various species within them. Genus and species has always made sense to me.

The next level up (that is, the first of the "higher taxa"), the families, has always been something of a mystery to me — although I've heard of some families and I've even seen them mentioned in articles I've worked on for a living, it hasn't mattered to me what family a living thing belongs to. Now I get it, thanks to a very small amount of study.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Rosaceae, you mean it's part of a sprawling, dizzyingly varied, historically pivotal family of plants that includes more than 3,000 species and dozens of genuses, including the roses we get on Valentines Day, all apples, cherries, plums, pears, almonds, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, ashes, hawthorns, and more.

When you say a tree belongs to the family Platanaceae, you mean it's a sycamore, also known as a plane tree. The family contains only one genus (Platanus) and about six species.

Now I understand that when one biologist says that such-and-such is in this-or-that family, this may be hugely significant information to an informed listener. This confirms the assertion (of the movie Animal House) that "Knowledge is Good."

Banjos, Stars, and Creative Commons

In elementary school, when we sang "This Land is Your Land" and the teacher told us about Woody Guthrie, it seemed like Guthrie must've been around before the USA was founded. He must've been a contemporary of ... of Paul Bunyan's. But to my great surprise, it turns out Guthrie had just died when I was 3 years old — and when he was only 55. I won't tell the whole story of how Guthrie came to hold such a mythical status so quickly — but if I were to tell it, it would mostly be a story about Pete Seeger. Seeger made building the Woody Guthrie myth into one of his major projects.

The more you know about Pete Seeger, the more you realize he wasn't just "famous" or "influential," he truly helped engineer what "folk music" means, and even the terms on which "the folk" themselves exist.

Anyway, here's the point. His book, "How to Play the 5-String Banjo" has been known to virtually every banjo player in the world for about half a century. Seeger mimeographed the first edition himself while on the road in 1947, working for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. He refused to copyright it, believing a copyright would hinder the spread of banjo-playing.



More recently, a guy named Pat Costello has written some excellent and entertaining instruction books, and declared them part of the "creative commons." According to Costello, sales of his books increased spectacularly after the books went copyrightless. The books are worthy successors to Seeger's landmark book — and I think the writer of "This Land is Your Land" would have appreciated them as well.



A collection of fine star charts has also now gone online (here too) as part of the creative commons.

Philosophy of Science, Part 2 of 2

I got to meet a philosphy of science hero of mine, Joseph Rouse, and talk with him at length. At the end of the conversation, I asked him to sign my copy of one of his books. For a moment, he looked very puzzled — apparently, philosophers of science do not regularly have fans who ask to have their books signed. Once he got the idea, though, he seemed to relish the opportunity.

A minor point in that book keeps coming back to me. Imagine, if you will, that you and a friend are walking along and happen upon two people who are having an argument.

One is insisting, "Snow is white."
The other insists, "Snow is NOT white."

I don't know why — maybe they're artists, or meteorologists, or, maybe ... zoologists?

Anyway, you and your friend are philospophers of science. You eavesdrop for a while and then get into your own argument.

You insist, "The statement 'snow is white' is true."
Your friend insists, "The statement 'snow is white' is false."

Now ... the question is, what are you two philosophers contributing to this debate that the two orginal debaters could not contribute on their own? Unless you're very much more careful, the answer is: Diddly Squat.

The problem has to do with what philosophers can do for (or do about) science without either becoming scientists on the one hand or, on the other, being totally irrelevent. If you want to debate whether quarks "really exist," or whether scientist's conclusions really follow from the evidence they've gathered, you are likely to repeat the same arguments scientists themselves debate very regularly and with a much better command of the complications involved than philosophers usually enjoy.

Thinking about this deeply left me finally agreeing that science — if well done — is something I ultimately trust to answer its own questions. It also left me feeling that I should leave the question of the value of the philosophy of science to others.

Philosophy of Science, Part 1 of 2

I studied a lot of philosophy of science in grad school, and I'm very glad I did — it deepened the way I understand a lot of things that are very important to me personally. Still, looking back, most of the big questions I thought I was grappling with then no longer seem important to me, and ring a bit hollow. But two details do seem to keep coming back to me ... and if they keep following me around, they must matter somehow.

We spent a lot of time talking about how much the stuff scientists talk about are "social constructs" — stories scientists tell each other as a group of folk that make up a culture — and how much they're something else having more to do with the universe they study.

Always, during these discussions, some guy or other would get rather aggressive and try to prove that "things exist" by banging his fists on desks, kicking chairs, thumping his chest like an ape, etc.

Eventually, it became clear to me that whether or not desks are, in fact, hard is rarely a question that real scientists debate for very long. More typically, they debate things like, say, how to reconcile two experiments that give different answers for the precise magnitude of dark energy, or whether a certain experiment in a particle accelator really did create a certain particle for a miniscule moment, thereby implying some new form of energy field, and so on. There's no need for philosophers of science to go around slapping themselves. The real questions are much more subtle.

You can draw whatever Moral of the Story you please. I suppose one lesson is that the most vivid, dramatic, immediately impressive arguments are very often not correct.

Thanks go to "The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations" by Ashmore, Edwards and Potter, in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology.