I'm really getting into Eno's new album Drums Between the Bells, which features poetry by Rick Holland. There's a difference between poetry and song lyrics. In a song, the music carries the lyrics along with it. In poetry, the words should be able to stand on their own, enduring our intense gaze. Setting poetry to music almost requires that the music move to the background. And this is what is Eno does in some pieces, like "The Real", a philosophical reflection where the music flows slowly as glass:
Other pieces have much more of a rhythmic thrust, like "The Airman", which ends with the hauntingly repeated phrase "where we are":
Would you like
a car with bones —
a car that is grown rather than manufactured?
July 17, 2011
Back from Montreal! After a grueling flight via Frankfurt, Lisa and
I showed up in Singapore at 6:30 am today.
I've been using Google Plus lately, and while some people use it for chitchat, Ruchira Datta is a pretty reliable source of nontrivial news links. The concept car above is one of the goofier examples. Here's something more serious:
Since I'm battling a pre-diabetic condition myself, this sort of news touches on matters of life and death for me. The actual substantive part of the article starts fairly far down, somewhere around here:
When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of "added sugars" as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that's indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year. That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it's tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn't changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.
This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It's more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.
© 2011 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu