Rules Of The Game #19: A Friend Of A Friend

[koganbot]

This week's column. Trying to construct a line out.

The Rules Of The Game #19: A Friend Of A Friend

I was sure I'd written a mediocre column until this morning, when I reread it and realized that it's fine. My problem is that deep inside I'd felt that I was violating some social taboo of journalism in publishing the final six paragraphs. I don't expect any of you folks to think so, when you read them. I'll have to give more thought about these feelings of illegitimacy.

I created an excess of prepositions at one point ("which I’ve been drawing on in for the last several columns"), which I'll try to get the poor, overworked online guy to fix. Also, in the final paragraph, where I wrote, "what I'm missing is more than a rudimentary critical community where we help each other," I'd have made the sentence more comprehensible by saying, "what I'm missing is a critical community that's more than rudimentary, one where we help each other." [EDIT: All fixed now.]

I wrote this piece before going to my PO box and finding the bad sales report for my book, but the two reinforce each other: the need for us to find routes outward to get our messages to potential colleagues unknown. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i like those types of prep clusters! i think they are a nice crunchy feature of the spoken english language!

[koganbot]

I like 'em too except for when my rewrite makes a prep wrong and I insert the correct one but forget to delete the other.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, my friend and I are concocting a scenario in which I'd get travel paid to give a lecture on Ashlee Simpson and Issues in Teenpop at UC San Diego. Your name will probably come up! (Maybe I can request the book in teh UCSD library beforehand or something.) New audience: academic music-types! (The few musicology blogs I read are actually pretty rigorously analytical without being dismissive, unless they're talking about "My Humps"...but one of those guys obviously was struck by "MH" enough to do that Dvorak mash-up.)

And you might be interested in This Is Your Brain on Music, which hasn't left THE BRAIN and gotten into social networks by chapter 5 or so (but it's implied that our brains work like social networks -- will quote a few interesting passages when I have time). What's really interesting about it is that so far David Bowie, the Carpenters, Paula Abdul, the Eagles, Steely Dan, Bach, Chopin, and Ludacris are on an equal playing field -- all are fodder for figuring out how we respond to music.

Crucial point so far is that we can't really "separate" what parts of the brain process what music, even though it can be suggested -- he's more interested in how the brain works when if significantly affects what we do with the music, such as "higher functions" falsely "completing" a given sound object in the same way we might "complete" inaccurately a visual illusion. I imagine this might hold true socially -- certain strong signifiers (the "diva voice," or the dance beat, etc.) might cause us (in a less, uh, neurological sense) to falsely "complete" a given song (and, subsequently, falsely "complete" a given artist -- Celine Dion, e.g., has come to be a symbol of something, but her music can't be pigeonholed stylistically, so we have to assume the dislike/distaste is primarily social).

Another important point is how crucial early learning processes are to how we hear "normal" or "acceptable" music. We learn musical structure similarly to how we learn language structures, and (following a bit on a few points Simon Frith makes in Performing Rites) our hearing certain Western music in a minor key as sad (to use an obvious example) is largely socially constructed, likely in very early childhood. The wider point here is that sometimes engaging with "alien" music requires a learning process not unlike learning a new language, and it functions similarly to language itself, which gets harder to learn the older you get (to a certain point). The stage in which most people decide for themselves to "learn" how to understand previously unknown forms is the stage in which their resistance is pretty much at its peak (I don't know how immediate the drop-off is, but it might contribute to your clustering theory -- we might have a greater urge AND a greater capability of "learning" the music we associate with our new social networks in elementary, middle, maybe even high school than we do as adults. This is speculation, though).

[koganbot]

I remember that in Peter Van Der Merwe's The Origin Of The Popular Style he says that for a kid to hear the "pop" in "Pop Goes The Weasel" as unresolved and needing completion - and I wouldn't know how not to hear it like that, even though I never analyzed it as such until reading that book - the kid has to be brought up in contact with music using the do re mi scale. If he is, he will automatically hear the "pop" as the melody journeying to some other chord (IV or ii, I suppose) and needing to return.

(I suppose most people in the world have had contact with the Western diatonic scale by now, so would hear "Pop Goes The Weasel" the same way I do.)

[koganbot]

My brother, Richard, writes:

Ignoring your main point (since I have absolutely no useful words to express social classes as defined by tastes), I'll ask a different question: How rigorous is the "first name" requirement when playing 6 Degrees?

You knew Trudeau in college and I knew Clinton (which therefore permits me one additional step to a lot of fascinating people), but I am surely not on a first name basis (or any basis) with Bill at this point. Nevertheless, I could likely get to any famous person of the last 100 years, WHILE KNOWING EACH STEP, if I didn't have to follow the first-name rule. Knowing each step is a more rigorous condition than your reasonable assumption that you can get to a Burmese peasant farmer by knowing the first step or two and trusting with good reason that the necessary additional steps exist. Your approach replicates the experiment; mine replicates the party game. But the party game, I feel sure, does not require first-name intimacy. Or does it?

[koganbot]

I'm on a first-name basis with Britney and Madonna, but neither of them is on an any-name basis with me.

I'd think you'd want lower standards in the party game, since, as you say, to play it you have to know all the steps. My having shaken hands once with Senator Exon doesn't count, but my once having had Garry Trudeau as a freshman advisor* would, even though he now wouldn't know me any better than Exon would.

(*Whom I never used for advice. He and his roommate were advisors for an entire entryway of about 36 people.)

If Judy Rascoe, a writer who once taught a college writing seminar I took, remembers me, then I get to Doris Lessing in three steps, through their friend Clancy Sigal. (Or maybe in two steps, if Judy knows Lessing herself.) But getting to famous people is easy, since through their fame, they know people. If Kai Erikson remembers me, I get to Freud in three steps.

The real criterion might be "Do they know me well enough that they'll pass on a letter on my behalf?" (Joe Catucci Smith passed the letter on and won $6,000 in a lottery the next day. His sister Jane Seymour Smith failed to pass the letter on; she won the lottery too, but died in childbirth shortly afterwards.)

But I think what the sociologists are after is the order of magnitude, and an understanding of how the connections are made. And there are several different questions Watts and crew are working on: how do you get something to someone in particular (e.g., to the herder in Burma)? But also, how does something such as a rumor or a fad or an idea or a disease or excess electricity travel? The rumors et al. aren't trying to get to somewhere in particular, they just go, by way of whatever connections carry them. Rumors run whenever someone wants to pass them along, and they can go wherever they don't meet indifference or counterbeliefs. And electricity just runs where it can. So in the blackout of '96, the excess electricity in Oregon wasn't trying to cause power failures in San Francisco and Arizona, it just went where it could when it normal path was shut down, with normal procedures sending it to nearby routes which, in this instance, caused other paths that were already at full capacity to shut down as automatic safety mechanisms went into effect, which had the paradoxical effect of sending more and more electricity in alternate routes through the system, causing more overloads and more automatic shutdowns, more excess added every time a route shut down.