The New Relativity

This happened WHEN?

Ever since Einstein convinced us that time is not the absolute thing it seems to be, but rather varies from one observer to another, it has continued to appear safe to ignore this fact at the level of everyday reality. As Woody Allen's mother told him, "Brooklyn is not expanding!" Nor is it accelerating to the speed of light. And throughout the 20th century our communications continued to grow ever more instantaneous and global. The assumption of simultaneity became second nature to us, as we came to expect to see and hear events from anywhere in the world "live" as they happened.

The telegraphy of the 19th century gave way to an interlude of radio, when we settled for people describing distant events to us while they happened. The Hindenburg went down in flames, and Edward R. Murrow got bombed in the London blitz. But then suddenly we could see those events as their images were piped through transatlantic cables. Satellites went aloft and we could see the weather down below. TV brought the Vietnam War and the moon landing into our living rooms -- something that the most imaginative science fiction writers had never predicted. Now everyone with a cell phone can be a broadcaster, and revolutions half a world away have become instantly self-documenting.

But as our horizons continue to expand the mutable nature of time is beginning to appear at the level of everyday experience. We're all familiar with the lag in transatlantic TV interviews, due to the few seconds that it takes for the signals to make a 48,000 mile round trip to a satellite and through a battery of sending and receiving equipment. We accept, reluctantly, that we won't know if the Mars lander has landed until about 15 minutes after it has, or has not, occurred. But at least we'll hear about it at the same instant as everyone else on our planet, won't we?

Well, maybe not. And it won't be Einstein's fault, either. It's because a Pause button has been added into the mix of our communications gear. This came home to me recently when I was catching part of a basketball game (go Heat!). I did some personal exulting over an incredible 3-pointer. Then a couple of minutes later I heard a barrage of cheers coming from my next door neighbor's house. I wondered what other game they could be watching. Then it happened again. Another 3-point miracle shot ... wait a minute ... two minutes ... another chorus of hurrahs from the house next door.

The explanation dawned on me. They were watching via ATT's Uverse service which includes a DVR that lets you pause anything you're watching, even "live" TV, so you won't miss a second of it. Someone next door must have gone for a bathroom break, maybe earlier in the day so they forgot, and their service was dutifully delaying all subsequent shows so that not even a commercial interruption would be left out.

Which kind of brings us back to time being relative to the observer, but in a new way. My neighbor and his game-party certainly believed they were watching "live," and I'm sure their excitement was in no way diminished by the delay -- especially because they may have been unaware of it. But from my point of view they were getting crazy about a replay. And for all I know, ATT might have been delaying the show at least a few seconds just in the process of pumping it through their vast network of copper and fiber, so my point of view might have been as divorced from real-time as theirs.

The situation is even more pronounced with the Olympics, normally taking place at a great distance -- the current games being 5 hours ahead of us, and the previous ones in Beijing about half a day out of sync. Since most of us have lives and can't watch during the day, we have to settle for digested replays in the evening hours. It's understood that some of us might like to watch without knowing the outcomes, so news reports come with spoiler alerts to warn you to turn them off, or at least plug your ears and go "LA-LA-LA-LA" for a few minutes.

The other night I watched some gymnastics with my grandchildren, and had to explain that what we were watching had happened hours ago and all the athletes were in bed by now. They readily accepted the explanation and were completely OK with the delay. All that mattered to them was that they were seeing it for the first time. Maybe they have been born into the age of relativity as much as us older folks were born into simultaneity. For better or worse, the nation will no longer cheer for anything at the same moment.

Just something to take note of, another fact of our ever-changing digital lives. If you want to put it all in perspective, all you have to do is go out and look up at the night sky: all those stars, looking just as they looked dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of years ago ... but not now.

Still Giving After All These Years

What can you say about a performer who continues to give fresh insights even 30 years after his death? That's what Glenn Gould did to me recently, even though he passed away in 1982, and even though I've been listening to him since I was a high school student in the 1960s.

One of his most enigmatic recordings was Bach's Art of the Fugue, the treatise on that form that Bach himself did not live to complete. Gould left us with a recording of it which was maddening on two counts. First, the record did not even contain all of the fugues that Bach had written as part of this opus, including the last one that abruptly ends right where he happened to leave off composing. I suppose there was going to be a volume II someday with the rest of them, but it never happened. So this was an incompleteness of an incompletion, doubly frustrating to those of us who admire Bach's work and who doted on Gould's every performance of it.

But second, what Gould recorded was not even on the piano. Instead he chose to make this his only performance on the organ. Not that there was anything wrong with that in itself -- Bach, of course, was a renowned organist in his day. And in fact, he wrote this work on four separate staffs rather than the usual two for the keyboard, leaving it up to future performers to attempt it any way they liked. Since then it has been performed by string quartets, brass ensembles, and various other instruments besides the harpsichord or piano or organ.

But the piano (no pun intended) was Gould's forte. His phenomenal touch on the keys gave him an unsurpassed ability to accentuate the various lines of polyphony, to literally give each line its own unique voice, from a thumping bass pizzacato to a vibrant mid-tone to a bell-like clarity in the high notes. For him to limit himself to the elements of phrasing available on the organ was like painting with a limited palette. Though the performance was excellent as usual, and though he characteristically selected a small church organ whose voice and acoustics would not muddy the sound, still it left many -- including me -- wishing he had just bowed to expectations and done it on the piano.

So the years passed. Gould left us, entirely too soon, like Bach before him never returning to complete this piece of unfinished business. The recordings he left behind continue to sell voluminously to the present day. His reach is ubiquitous. One occasionally comes across an item like an interview with rock poet Patti Smith where she describes herself, "listening to Glenn Gould." Or hot Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who lights up at the mention of the name and says, "I love Glenn Gould! I think he is great genius!" At least half a dozen biographical films have been made about his life, and one of these led me to a wonderful discovery.

The film in question is Glenn Gould: The Russian Journey, a documentary in which various Russian musicians including pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Sviadoslav Richter are interviewed about Gould's visit to their country in the midst of the Cold War. It's hard to overstate the impression the young Canadian made there. No one had ever heard of him, and his first concert in Leningrad was only half full. But at the intermission everyone went out to the lobby to call their friends. The interval was lengthened to an hour and a half to allow time for people to get to the concert hall. One man who received such a call reported that his friend said simply, "Stop what you're doing, get dressed and get down here, you have to hear this."

So the second half was a sellout, and the subsequent concert in Moscow was standing room only, with barely enough room for those standing. One man said that he went to hear Webern, a modern composer on the program who was rarely performed in the Soviet Union because all that atonal music was considered elitist and decadent. What he remembered instead was Bach, sounding as new and modern and fresh as anything from the 20th century. Richter, himself a giant as a piano virtuoso, said: "I could play as good as Glenn Gould. Do you know why I do not? Because I would have to work so hard."

But I digress. After watching the DVD (thank you, Netflix), I thought to look at the "extra features" on the disk. One of them was a performance of one of the fugues from the Art of Fugue -- on the piano! Could there be more of them, I wondered? A quick search online revealed that in the process of re-releasing Gould's entire catalog, Sony had given us some "lost" recordings of him playing the same fugues -- with typical beauty and perfection -- on the instrument he was born to play.

I rushed to get the full set, which includes both the organ and piano versions. Two of them are very poor quality, sounding like they must have been done on a casette recorder during a practice session, but of course we're glad to have even those. Let me be clear -- it is only the recording quality that is lacking; the playing as always is amazing. The rest of them are in studio quality sound, and the subtlety of expression, the nuances of touch, are as impeccable as anything he ever did.

Again, they are not complete, and they are not even all the same ones that he did on the organ, but at least it does include the last one, the one that ends breathlessly at the beginning of a phrase ... You might call it the completion of an incompleteness. It will have to be enough, because it's all we're ever going to get.

Miami Book Fair 2011

A belated report on last year's book fair -- quick, before it's time for the next one ....

I've certainly taken my time about posting this account of Miami Book Fair International, 2011 version, but it's not from lack of interest. As ever, there was much to appreciate, and a few new wrinkles.

Big Science

My first event involved getting tickets in advance. It's always wonderful to me that a writer can command a sellout audience. In this case it's even more amazing because the stage was shared by a pair of science writers: James Gleick, author of the landmark book about chaos theory that did as much to popularize the concept as anything else, including Jeff Goldblum's character in that Jurassic Park sequel, and whose intriguing new work is called The Information; and Dava Sobel, who had just published her biography of Copernicus titled A More Perfect Heaven.

Reviews of both books are too abundant to need repeating here. I'll just add that Gleick made me want to know more about Claude Shannon, the "father of information theory," who was a contemporary of Alan Turing and swapped ideas with him during World War II. In Sobel's presentation I was most taken with her account of inspecting the original manuscript of Copernicus' book, with it's famous diagram of the sun-centered solar system. She noticed a tiny pinhole in the center of the sun, the place where the point of the great man's compass had pierced the page while he drew the concentric orbits of the planets. If that doesn't give you goose bumps, then you're in the wrong room.

During the question session that followed, I appreciated Gleick's point that science "is about uncertainty, not truth," that it is as much about asking questions as giving answers. Let's please keep this in mind when debating Darwin with the people who don't understand him. Which reminds me that Sobel mentioned a notable parallel between Darwin and Copernicus: both of their theories were widely accepted before they were actually proved, a sure sign that they were ideas whose time had come.

Another interesting point was raised about online sources of information such as Wikipedia versus traditional authorities like the Britannica that are falling out of use. (Anyone want to buy a used encyclopedia? No? It weighs about 90 pounds and was out of date the day it was printed. Still no takers?) The questioner feared we will end up only with sources we can't trust. But Gleick expressed the hope that we are in a transitional period where we have not yet learned to vet and trust the new media, which are ephemeral through the necessity of constant update.

He is, he says, predisposed to be "optimistic without justification." And perhaps that's how he could respond to a query about the looming "singularity," when machines will take over the earth, by saying simply, "by the time they take over we will be so attached to them that we won't care." Incidentally, there is another theory about the singularity which says it has already happened and we didn't notice.

All This And Noir

After these weighty matters I made my way to the bizarre and noisy tent where Akashic Books was previewing New Jersey Noir, the latest in their series of story collections that demonstrate there is a dark side to every locale on earth. I couldn't pass this up because one dark side of my own past is that, like the panellists, I also hail from the Garden State -- so called, I believe, because they created Newark and left the rest of the land comparatively unscathed.

The panel included former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, native of Long Branch, casually clad in a black T-shirt that became him, and Alan Cheuse of NPR fame, substituting for Joyce Carol Oates who couldn't make it. Alas, my notes don't tell me which of them repeated the old gag about how they say their ABC's in New Jersey. ("Fuggin A, fuggin B, fuggin C ...") Which kind of shows how informal the whole thing was. But Pinsky did wax poetic when he spoke about depicting "the beauty of the broken, sordid, and low class" -- material which they found in abundance right there at home.

What's China Doing Here?

This tent was right across from another, larger one featuring China. Yes, the country. I confess to being nonplussed by this exhibit, which was like walking into one of those places at Walt Disney Epcot where the various wares and cultural oddities of some foreign place are on display -- except here none of it was for sale, which left us all wondering what we were doing standing around and looking at shelves and tables full of Chinese export bric-a-brac. No answers were forthcoming. But I guess since our Chinese friends are everywhere, doing everything, they might as well be here too.

If You Can Read This, Thank Your Reader

The last presentation I went to was on ebook publishing, a topic dear to me as both a reader and a hopeful author. Back in the 1990's I once asked a publisher at a writing workshop what impact he thought digital media and Internet distribution were going to have on his business. His appalling answer was a single word: "None."

As evidence, he asked, "Would you curl up in bed with a computer?" I was dumbstruck. Even though there were no ebook readers in existence back then, I already knew people who were perfectly happy to take their laptops to bed with them. How could this guy not see the writing on the wall in giant letters?

Fast forward about 15 years and it's all history -- but history that is still unfolding, as purveyors of the written word, from newspapers to magazines and books, continue to deal with the biggest disruption since the invention of the printing press.

I was very impressed with the chipper young Canadian woman representing Kobo. You may recall that they had a brief affiliation with Borders Books just before the chain went bankrupt. The Kobo reader was going to be Borders' answer to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook -- but Borders just got there too late and too many dollars short. B&N proved they were nimble enough to get into this game, but Borders just couldn't make it.

In the aftermath of the Borders collapse, I was concerned about Kobo, who were making a very nice collection of reading devices every bit the equal of the Kindle family, but with the added virtue of supporting open standards like PDF and ePub as opposed to proprietary ones like, well, Amazon. But my concern might have been premature. Kobo managed to get a major investment from a company said to be "the Amazon of Japan." They have a very serviceable (and completely open) tablet that sells for under $200 and a thriving online bookstore. So we'll have to see how it goes.

Another feature Kobo offers is unique. Kobo Pulse is something they call "social reading," a way to instantly share your take on what you're reading with your online buddies who are similarly equipped. A show of hands revealed this optional feature was not universally appealing to the audience, which tended to split along predictably generational lines. Us older folks were squirming in our chairs and thinking "oh no, not that," while the younger ones were all like, "I'm down with that."

Whether this "gamification" of reading will take hold and eclipse the traditional reading experience is something we will have to watch as it develops. On the one hand, media companies are salivating over producing "books" for the iPad and its ilk full of embedded videos and interactive features. On the other hand, I note that writers like Neal Stephenson can continue to churn out 900 page novels the immersive experience of which beggars anything Hollywood has to offer.

So the jury is out. Maybe the next chapter, so to speak, will be written, as it were, at the next version of the Miami Book Fair, coming in November.