Canons
We have been talking for my entire life about how a daily newspaper holds as much information as a medieval peasant received in a lifetime. Who said it? McLuhan? Ong? It's too late to go looking.
Except now: A daily newspaper? We'll need a new reference. A very long text? Three TikTok's? For my entire life people have been trying to get more people to pay attention to:
Classical music
Baroque music
Greek drama
Renaissance literature
Early modernism
Shakespeare
Literary fiction
Art in general
But also to pay less attention to one particular tradition because so many others have been neglected; i.e. swap Wharton and Conrad for Morrison and Achebe. To be honest? Fine. It doesn't matter anywhere near as much as people think. When I was 20 (I'm 51 now) I wrote an honors essay on the canon, and who was in there? Defending the canon? But Dinesh D'Souza. Then a youthful conservative sprout. We all have to start somewhere. I've been surprised, then, seeing him pop up, jumping from one cultural crisis to another, making his way (nearly to jail, but probation). The professor/advisor on that essay—it was for an honors class; he was a friend—left his wife for one of my classmates; his wife called me, very late at night, heavily narcotized, and asked me many probing questions about his sex life and the affair, of which I knew no details. I had no idea how to respond.
“I think she's a big Aerosmith fan,” I said.
“I can't compete with that,” she said.
The Dean also told me what she knew. There are many charms to a small liberal arts college.
These things do have a way of lodging in memory. Happiness is fleeting. I sincerely hope everyone is doing okay.
But of course in amongst all the angst and bleakness of that extremely baffling time in my life I recollect more than anything a work-study job at the Mac lab, tending to a network, helping people print. I thought that would be sufficient. I was ready to spend my life writing little six hundred word essays, and helping other people print.
Even then I had an inkling: That the real canon is not the texts themselves, which very few people trudge through, but rather the struggle over the canon. That's the actual material. Texts come and go. Social media made it visible in a way that even the French couldn't see. (Unrelated I always find it funny that the great science academy is simply called “Po.”)
We'd much, much rather fight over an author than read them. So now it's the age of smashing. MMA on the White House Lawn. Ocean sensors being decommissioned. God even knows that the NEH is today. The national body is becoming insensate. We are losing our eyes, our ears, any sense of touch. We can't even feel the weather. Ultimately only our mouths remain, demanding a steady feed of goop. We are an old man jamming crumbling cookies into his sore gums. The whole country has gone to Snak Kakes.
Today I was descending to my train home and saw an ad for the Paramount+ White House Fight Club. I gave it the finger. I support real democracy things as well, with money and time, so I feel okay with my pointless symbolic acts. All the warnings were real. Sinclair Lewis and Octavia Butler Mike Judge and Margaret Atwood. It happened. Here we are. I think we thought it would be more dignified, though.
We maintain an office in Beirut. Most of my employees get bombed weekly. Not metaphorically. I go home to dabble with keyboards and vibe code. When I go to bed I boot up the canon on my phone, in my ears. Old LP records of Shakespeare plays, from the Internet Archive. Complete with crackles. I haven't made it past Act I of Hamlet. Or Lear. Or Richard III. Or old recordings of Chopin or The Well Tempered Clavier. Which is unfortunately initialized as WTC. The western literary canon has become, for me, a sleep aid.
I don't understand Bach, despite trying very hard, so I think about him a lot. Chopin I can figure out a little more, but I can't play a bar of it. I found a century-old collection of Nocturnes on the street because a family was moving out; I grabbed it and put it in my bike bag. Our friends moved in to the house. We went to the housewarming and I talked about vibecoding, and M&A. Wives were annoyed. But I still have the book. Maybe one day I can play Nocturnes, in a book assembled about 50 years after Chopin died.
Anyway the party. I went home a few drinks in and sat at the digital keyboard and trundled through my little Bach book. It's all the things he wrote for Anna Magdalena, his wife, to help her practice. We're all Bach's (second) wife, I suppose.
I am starting to see the math of him: The twelve notes divided by seven, modulo five delicious unscalar notes, to be grabbed whenever you want a little sizzle. What I would give for my fingers to make the sounds I expect them to. At some level playing piano is kind of like manipulating a musical abacus. I tell myself that because it negates the need for talent. I just need to do rhythmic finger math for ten more years and I'll be able to understand something.
And god bless us, as a species, if you give us perfect harmony we want nothing to do with it. We could have a trombone orchestra with just intonation and everything absolutely consonant, but instead we want our half-ton grand pianos well-tempered, meaning slightly out of tune and if that wasn't enough we are going to have a lot of accidentals to make the whole thing feel slightly off.
This is the only thing that makes humans worth it: Give us perfection and we will fill it with pockmarks. That's why we're good. Hand us a canon, and ideology, a religion, a true love, and before long we will see cracks, and we will pick at the peeling paint with our fingers. If that's not enough we will open the piano and put little things on the strings, and call that “prepared.” Perfection, consonance, clarity—we say we want them but we despise them and sing the praises of artists who pour sand into the gears of form.
No canon can ever stabilize. I think this is why, over the years, classical draws me back. Theoretically it's perfect; that's why we've adopted it. But the nice thing about the Nocturnes is that someone must always be reinventing them, annoyed at their forebears, staking claim, grabbing territory. Our adoration of psychic purity is incompatible with our need to claim psychic territory. This is our one true feature. “It's perfect,” we say, and then we break it and put it back together, cracks showing. “Or, actually, now it is.” Give us perfection and we bite it.
