“With most kinds of musical performance, the listener can sense, in their heart and their gut, how demanding the musician’s task is. To possess the infinitesimally sensitive fine motor skills required to make a violin sing, or the poise and breath control needed to coax beauty out of a trombone, is to be not only an artist but an Olympic athlete in command of invisible muscles.”
“Conducting is different. I would bet that practically everyone who’s seen a conductor leading an orchestra has had the fleeting thought Come on, anyone could do that. They’re just waving their arms! Aren’t they? And if not, then what exactly are they doing? Plenty of people—plenty of musicians, even—mistrust the abracadabra mysticism that so frequently surrounds practitioners of this elusive and slightly dubious art.”
• An essay on thickness in art.
“Great works of fiction—for that matter, great works of any art—unfurl in response to your attention. The more time you spend with them, the more you get out of them.”
“…thickness comes from surfacing a few facts well, and in such a way that you realize the existence of entire universes of additional facts that could be known.”
• An essay on AI jargon in speech.
“But now the reverse is occurring in everyday speech—a sort of modelmorphism, wherein people describe themselves as if they were large language models.”
“Language subsumes new idioms over time and masks their origins.”
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