Philip Glass tells all and Lovelace and Babbage get the comic novel treatment El Reg bookworm Mark Diston chews through the latest literary treats with a fascinating autobiography from composer Philip Glass. Jesse Armstrong of Peep Show fame has a debut novel and for comic novel fans we've a curious take on the development of the first computer from Sydney Padua. Words Without Music Philip Glass is a …
Anecdote: A N.Y. music critic was writing a review of a Glass piece in the early days and was surprised when the guy fixing his washing machine came over to correct one of the descriptions. It was the composer.
I read a blog post by the critic a few years ago but google is flooded with links to book reviews at present so I'll have to dig for the source. Might be in Kyle Gann's Minimalism book.
Coat icon: I'm off down to Waterstones now to see if they have a copy in yet
Is Byron really overrated as per the article? He may have been at the time and during the Romantic period, but I doubt if he has been for some time.
And Babbage dying a failure? Not really. He's only a failure if you regard him purely from the point of view of being a little too far ahead of his time for his mechancial computers to be completed. In terms of his overall effect on his era, he was very successful. You might as well argue Brunel was a failure because his broad gauge was eventually reduced.
Newton's remarks about successive generations standing on the shoulders of giants are relevant here.
Glass sure is overrated in general.
I liked Einstein on the Beach many years ago. Ashamed of my lack of taste at the time, now.
Still love his soundtrack to Schrader's Mishima, a Life in Four Parts. Some is dull, most is very fitting and really works well with the film. ... but that is a movie soundtrack, presumably not what Glass would like to be remembered for.
Favourite for me.
...was a failure because his broad gauge was eventually reduced.
Brunel, like all engineers working at the bleeding edge, had many, many failures in his lifetime, and his vision could not only be strangely limited, but tunneled to the nth degree.
The broad gauge issue is a case in point.
Brunel's broad gauge had many advantages, chief of which was a much smoother ride than the standard gauge railways of the day, but it was more expensive to build and maintain than standard gauge railways were and could not be integrated smoothly into the national rail network, already established and growing apace and almost universally standard gauge.
For a man who understood so much, his attitude to broad gauge and the huge national public stink the "break in gauge" issue generated is a genuine puzzlement. Money was poured into the broad gauge rail system even when it was obvious to everyone that it could not survive.
Another gotcha in the GWR that should have been obvious as Bad Design from the get-go: a semaphore signal protocol that declared that horizontal means caution (or stop) and pointing downward means go. Everyone else realized that in the event of a broken actuator, gravity would be working in the cause of rail safety. Brunel's design called for counterweights to be added to make it all work the same way. More expensive, more complex, less failsafe (because there's ways the weights can fail too).
Brunel was a great man, but he was wrong a lot.
And the Broad Gauge was a gorgeous, magnificent, inspiring failure.
And I say this as a lifelong fan of God's Wonderful Railway and the people who built it.
The South Devon Atmospheric Railway. The Great Eastern, both excellent examples of how not to do it. Only only just managed to build and survive his Thames tunnel by the skin of his teeth, the floods there were seriously fatal.
And as for locomotive design, the directors of Gods Wonderful Railway took that away from him because his designs were crap.
What he was good at was civil engineering : railways, bridges and his later tunnels -e.g. the Severn Tunnel
Please God no, don't put on a Philip Glass LP !
His music is the most boring, pretentious, rambling, self indulgent drivel I've ever had the misfortune to hear.
I quite like a lot of his music, and I think he would have to be considered one of the great composers of the 20th century although that is damning with faint praise to some extent.
Pretentious? Rambling? Certainly. He's one of those individuals of whom your opinion always nosedives the instant he opens his mouth. So, no, I'll pass on that I think, wouldn't want to sour the music.
just repetitive and bombastic.
Generally overrated.
I will again recommend Schrader's Mishima, a Life in Four Parts, and the Glass soundtrack.
The movie was long-banned here, because his widow has sway with the habitual ruling party, and members and friends of the party don't like like the brief depiction of his gay side.
For goodness sakes, it was a central theme in his own novel.
I recommend Mishima, a Life in Four Parts, to all Regtards, it is a brilliant movie, and IMHO, work of Glass on the soundtrack, not always great, is great in many places.
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I I found Sydney Padua's Lovelace and Babbage comic quite enjoyable. I believe the problem is the reviewer expected an accurate, historical fiction, where this is a joyous romp through the tropes of the Victorian age, with a bit of historical references and a lot of tongue-in-cheek.
Padua underlines a few entertaining elements of her historical figures, such as Lovelace's maths keeping poetry at bay, or Babbage's Aspergerian intolerance for street musician and his perpetually scatterbrained work. This can be better appreciated by people who actually know and love this tragic couple and their time. Otherwise, some jokes could be missed.
If you are a history buff, if you ever read a biography of either Babbage or Lovelace, you should read Padua's book. You'll get a great kick out of it.
A similar anecdote about Glass is that after a concert of his at somewhere like the Carnegie Hall, back in the cab for the late shift he gets a fare taking a couple home from a restaurant. As the lady tips him she says "Young man, do you know you look just like the composer we saw this evening, and one day he'll be very famous".
The Guardian, 24 November 2001 "Einstein on the Beach was premiered in Avignon on July 25 1976. Glass and Wilson were then offered the option of two performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where the critical reaction was delirious: "One listens to the music just as one watches Wilson's shifting tableaus," wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times, "and somehow, without knowing it, one crosses the line from being puzzled or irritated to being absolutely bewitched." The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: "I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure," he says, "when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer'."
"I I found Sydney Padua's Lovelace and Babbage comic quite enjoyable"
Me to, and I recall the online comic being reasonably coherent too. I don't know if the reviewer simply didn't like it (which is certainly fine) or if some bits got cut between the online comic and book.
Also... I hate to say it, it's a little harsh to call Babbage a failure but... although his contributions then and now were important, he did end in his later years flat broke, destitute, and bitter (basically from going broke before he could complete building his inventions.) Some inventors and people who start startups now use the phrase "go for broke" (invest everything into your invention or startup), and he literally did.
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