Koax! Koax! Koax!

The verse-chorus form of pop songwriting, part anchor and part foundation, reminds me of Clifford Geertz's observation that the webs of significance that comprise human culture both constrain us and support us.  The structure that this form imposes seems very rigid if you look at it on paper, and it is very small in scale.  But because of its limits, it has also given thousands upon thousands of modestly able musicians a space in which they can use their small fund of talent to craft something indelible.

It's hard to know what kind of musician Elliott Smith would have been in another time, or had he had a different life.  But he grew to maturity working in this simple form, and he never left it, even as his modest talent developed into an astounding profligacy.  It's all on display in this song, a pop song that's four minutes long and six hours wide.

The first statement of the verse is, in its arrangement, spare and simple:  an acoustic guitar playing through its seven chords with a simple strum on every quarter note, and Smith's voice, double-miked to pick up a little reverb, presenting the song's melodic line.  The arrangement may be simple, but the melody is not:  there's a statement, an elaboration, and then three repeated responses, helpfully called out for you by the phrasing in the lyrics:

I have become a silent movie
The hero killed the clown
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound

If you listen to the first thirty seconds of the song, those five pieces should be very clear in your mind.  And at any rate, to make sure you are familiar with them, he repeats the five pieces again in the second verse.  The arrangement broadens in the second verse, with sustained strings filling out the simple strumming, doubled by a subtle vocal descant starting in the second phrase.

Now, there's something else to notice in this melody, which this repetition helps us with.  The second syllable of "movie" descends three notes, but "clown" stops on a single note.  The first two "sounds" bend down, the last one doesn't.  The melisma in this song seems casual, but it is in fact deliberate and careful:  the descending notes at the ends of these phrases signal that continuation is coming, that they're a part of a longer gesture.  These notes are present again in the second verse, in the same form:  "doing" is sung just as "movie" was, with the same three note drop-off in the last syllable.  These seem like ornaments to the melody when you first hear the song, but they're intrinsic.

After the second repetition of the verse, we get the chorus, and again, because we're being introduced to the song still, it's done nakedly:  the strings and backing vocals go away, and we're back to the simplicity of acoustic guitar and voice. 

The chorus holds two surprises in store:  after the first line, there's a little guitar riff, the first time in the song where the accompaniment, and not the melody, stands out.  And then the second line, with the highest (and loudest) notes sung so far, reveals that the chorus is not nicely divided into halves:  we're suddenly led into the second verse a little before we were expecting.

The second verse is where it all comes together.

The arrangement here shifts:  up until now, we've been in coffeehouse-folk mode, with a singer and an acoustic guitar.  Now, though, we have a rock and roll band:  drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar.

And what a lead guitar it is.  The lead guitar line here is played with every subtle gesture of tone and dynamics that Smith infused the first verse's vocals with.  The call-and-response, the descending melismas at the end of the phrases, all present here, played with a fluency and grace that George Harrison spent his whole life working towards.  Harrison would have been proud to play the rhythm guitar here too, which has expanded the open chords of the first verse into syncopated descending arpeggios, played so precisely that it's easy to think that both lead and rhythm are being played on the same instrument. 

The lead ends the second phrase with a flourish of ascending groups of sixteenth notes that may be my favorite guitar riff ever:  instead of ending the second phrase with its descent and a pause, the melody is turned around and opened up.  These notes announce that the structure of the song is breaking open.  The first two phrases of the verse, the statement and elaboration, now get to develop in repetition before the response arrives.

Born in the role, but he can't stop
Standing up to sit back down

go the vocals (and yes, there's that three-note descent on "stop"), now firmly backed by the drums and rhythm guitar.  But then the last line's melody repeats again:

To lose the one thing found

with vocal harmony suddenly appearing, an ascending alto contradicting the descending tenor, "found" ending on a mordent that leads right into a repetition of that beautiful guitar figure.

And then the verse starts for a third time, with the harmonizing vocal line now almost taking the lead:

Spinning the world like a toy top
Till there's a ghost in every town

...and with strings swelling to fill the harmonies even fuller, until the response finally comes:

Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound
Can't make a sound

...this in a form essentially unchanged from its first appearance.  Except that it too gets an elaboration, one more

Can't make a sound

to lead into the second chorus. 

But the chorus is not expanded at all, it's still the same two lines of melody that were present the first time.  What's different in its repetition, though, is the stomping guitar line, that overlays it, the arpeggiating rhythm guitar now asserting itself into the lead.  The long notes of the melody -

Eyes locked and shining

have turned into a root that the guitar is now playing against.  The guitar's phrase fills the space after the first line, and the end of this phrase leads into the second:

Can't you tell me what's that burning?

And the chorus has again performed its function:  again it ends with unexpected abruptness, again it leads us into a change in the character of the song. 

Instead of the spare simplicity of the first verse, and the baroque elaboration of the second, the third verse begins with a furious barrage of jangling strumming on the electric guitar.  And instead of subtle developments in the arrangements, we just get the two lines repeated again and again:

Why should you want any other
When you're a world with in a world

with the entire ensemble:  drums, bass, guitars, lead and backing vocals, strings, all turned up to 10 (and still, reliably, the last syllable of "other" is those three descending notes).  They repeat four times, and then the last few repetitions are left to the strings alone with the guitar.

There's something haunting about the sound of the guitar at the end of this song.  Its tone is raucous and round and harsh, but it's also played with precise voicing, down to the mordent at the end (where the last "world" was sung).  The strings balance it with sweetness, and help it come to earth in the last few notes, from which there's a subtle fade-out to silence.

You see the word "Beatlesesque" used to describe Smith's work.  I suppose that's good as a convenient shorthand, but it really doesn't begin to get at what he's doing in this song.  This is a song whose arrangement and melodies and harmonies are in constant movement and development, and much as I love the Beatles I can't think of anything they did that compares to the ambition or accomplishment of this song. 

I think that on his good days, Elliott Smith had as much talent as any three Beatles.  I wish he'd had more good days.  I wish he were still having them.

First the sublime:

On the flowering of classical-music blogs, though it is true about so many other things, many of them not rhyming with "Ron Paul":

Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the "Snakes on a Plane" rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world.

-- Alex Ross, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Now the ridiculous:

A protege of Dr. Dre's who spent part of his youth in Detroit, [Eminem] had to be better than the local black competition simply in order to be accepted - a fascinating inversion of the racism that many blacks have encountered in the workplace.

-- Sasha Frere-Jones, in The New Yorker (10/22/2007)

Here is a man going out of his way to tell you that he finds the obvious to be fascinating.  A fascinating inversion!  What on earth could be fascinating about something so ordinary?  And savor the rest of that sentence:  "that many blacks have encountered in the workplace."  The days are gone when you'd tack on something like that as a result of a query from Mr. Shawn, concerned that the reader might not be familiar with the problem.  No, I feel like Mr. Frere-Jones is one drink away from telling me that you know, just because Diahann Carroll got her own show doesn't mean that racism's a settled question in this country.

This is a person who's decided he's up to the task of explaining that it's okay to dislike the Arcade Fire and Pavement because they didn't listen to enough of what the radio stations used to call race music.  (You're not going to hear any mention of Stephin Merritt, but you knew that.)

This is a person who name-checks the Decemberists and then, not long after, cries, "Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience - to entertain?"  God in heaven.  You can say any number of bad things about the Decemberists (or the Arcade Fire, for that matter), but if you think they're not trying to reach out to and entertain an audience, you're dumber than I've already alleged you to be.

Just as a rule of thumb:  if your entire corpus of public works is deracinated and etiolated (and no, liking Kanye West does not suffice), you probably should reconsider the wisdom of publicly attacking people for for being too white. 

And for God's sake, you shouldn't close your argument like this:

Rock and roll was never a synonym for a polite handshake.  If you've forgotten where the term comes from, look it up.  There's a reason the lights were off.

Or to put it in the terms of one of Frere-Jones's heroes:  "White girls they're pretty funny/sometimes they drive me mad/black girls just want get fucked all night."

I don't know what motivated him to do this - I suspect it's that nobody's paid attention to him in a while - but a few days ago Michael Medved got it into his head that it was time to set the record straight about the history of slavery in the United States. 

A movie reviewer who has built a career as a right-wing pundit by crusading for decency, Medved is about as qualified to write about the history of slavery as he is to pilot the Space Shuttle.  The result (found here) is comedy gold. 

Come with me and we'll take a little trip through what he's calling six "inconvenient truths" about slavery.

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION. 

This first section exposes us to the Medved method, which is to assemble a loose set of unrelated facts and organize them so that they're all pointing in the same direction without giving too much thought to their deeper implications. 

For instance, he's exceptionally pleased to have found a tribe in South America that not only enslaved its captives but ate them.  Well boy howdy, that's something we can hang our hat on:  "America:  We Didn't Eat Our Slaves!"  There's also some great back-of-the-envelope math here (we'll see more of this when he gets into economics), proving that the Islamic world is worse than America because they enslaved more Africans than we did.  Which is true, if you don't count children born into slavery among the enslaved, and though it did, as he admits, take them more than a thousand years to accomplish this.

The question he doesn't trouble to ask himself (though David Brion Davis, whom he name-checks, does), is:  was there anything distinctly different about the American institution of slavery?  And, why, yes, yes there is, and it's the core of a problem that Medved spends the whole piece tiptoeing around:  the basis of American slavery was race.

The Greeks and Romans enslaved people they defeated in war.  Their justification for slavery was, as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly put it, that there are men with guns, and men who dig.  Growing up Corinthian during the Peloponessian War meant you had a pretty good chance of ending up a slave yourself.  (The Greeks, whose wars involved a little more commitment than ours do, didn't have a word like "chickenhawk.")  But when slaves bore children, those children weren't enemies captured in a war, they were children born in Rome or Athens.  And as such, they were free to become citizens.

Not so in America.  Our justification for keeping African slaves wasn't that we beat them in a war:  it was that we thought black people weren't fully human. 

Since they weren't fully human, their children weren't fully human either.  Slavery may be a "timeless norm," as Medved blithely puts it.  But enslaving people because they were subhuman, that was new and different.

It had lots of implications that didn't exist in the Greek or Roman versions of the institution, too.  Romans didn't consider their slaves to be livestock.  They didn't try to cross different strains to get better field hands.  They didn't breed slaves for sale.  The Greeks didn't have words like "mulatto" or "quadroon," either.  They didn't need to figure out what race a person belonged to in order to determine what rights the person had.

The American version of slavery is especially arresting because it fixed African captives and their descendants as less than human in the eyes of the law at the very same historical moment that we were founding a new nation based on universal human rights.  Those are the two central facts of our nation's history.  The American idea is founded on ideals of liberty secured by men who considered non-white people to be subhuman. 

This doesn't mean that you should therefore hate America.  Far from it.  But if you don't understand this central truth, your love for this country is like the love of a wife who tries not to think about what her husband does when he's drunk.

2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS. 

Medved is delighted to find that in all the time that the US was a going concern, slavery was legal for 89 years and not for 142.  See?  We win!  We're not bad anymore!

(Here is more of Medved's facility with numbers:  the century and a half before 1789 doesn't count, because we weren't America yet.  So we get a pass on that.  He hasn't really thought this through, either.  Let's suppose we let him keep his thumb on the scale.  How bad could the world of Islam really be if it took them ten centuries to take more slaves than we did in 89 years?)

He also notes that "slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War." This should give you an idea of his qualifications:  he doesn't know that this isn't true, and he doesn't know why it isn't true.

Slavery had been outlawed in exactly half the states until exactly one decade before the Civil War.  The balance between slave and free states was, for instance, the basis of the Missouri Compromise in 1820:  Missouri got admitted as a slave state at the same instant that Maine was admitted as a free state, keeping the Senate balanced between pro- and anti-slavery votes.  The only way California got admitted as a free state in 1850 was that the new state sent one pro- and one anti-slavery Senator to Congress.  It wasn't until 1858, when Minnesota was admitted as a free state and Kansas's admission as a slave state was blocked, that the balance tipped.  Not coincidentally, secession followed two years later.

But that's just ignorance.  Let's move on to cant.

The cant is in that bit about the "tiny percentage."  America can't be held responsible for slavery today, Medved is arguing, because so few of us are descended from slaveowners. 

Look, pal, your nation's history is your nation's history.  Suck it up.  You'd heap scorn on anyone who said that modern America doesn't get to bask in the glory of Washington and Jefferson because so few modern Americans are descended from them.  If you're going to lecture people about morality and honesty, the least you can do is be moral and honest.  Which brings us to:

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. 

Here the argument takes a decidedly loopy turn.  What makes America great?  "We're not genocidal, given the proper incentives!"  Well, I do feel better about my country now.

Medved is weirdly happy to report that, unlike the short-sighted Nazis, who worked their slaves to death, America had the good sense to keep them healthy enough to breed.  This strikes me as a remarkable thing to find worth celebrating. 

And, as is so often the case, Medved hasn't really thought through the implications of the "inconvenient truth" that cheers him so.  For instance, the same economic motivation that kept slaveowners from indiscriminately working their property to death also led captains of slave ships to throw sick slaves overboard and then try to collect on their insurance.  That's the sort of thing that happens when you think human beings are fungible.

4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES.

Ultimately, sure.  In the long haul, producing raw materials isn't going to make as much money as producing finished goods.

But that doesn't mean that the US didn't become a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor.  The US became wealthy because of the development of its roads, its canals, its ports, and its manufacturies, without which it could neither have produced the goods it exported to the world nor gotten them to market.  That development is the basis of all American wealth before about 1875.

What paid for that development was the great influx of foreign capital during the late 18th and early 19th century.  Overwhelmingly, that capital came from the exportation of cotton, tobacco, indigo, sugar, and rice. 

And guess how we raised all those great cash crops?

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION.

Well, bully for us. 

There's so much wrong in this particular piece of his argument that it's hard to know where to start.  His characterization of the Civil War as being one between Confederate soldiers, "very few of whom owned slaves," and Union soldiers and sailors "proudly risk[ing] their lives for the emancipation cause" is probably a good one.

Medved's trying to craft a bold new narrative for the Civil War:  one in which neither side was defending slavery.  This leads him to say, with a straight face, that 364,000 Americans - "the stunning equivalent of five million deaths as a percentage of today's population" - died in the service of freeing the slaves.

No, seriously.  That's his argument.  The Civil War was a war to end slavery, he says, and we should stand in awe of the number of Americans who died. 

Well, I for one do stand in awe of the number of Americans who died in the Civil War.  But I recognize that one half of them went to their deaths for the principle that a bunch of politicians in Washington had no right to tell Georgia whether or not it was allowed to keep its Negroes in chains, and the other half of them went to their deaths for the principle that they weren't going to let their country be split in two by the slave power.

How do I know this?  Because, as David Cross put it in another context, they fucking said so. 

You have to be monumentally ignorant of the Civil War to assert that the Union was moved to war by abolitionism.  Even at the dawn of the Civil War, the idea that slavery should be abolished because it was wrong was a crazy fringe movement.  Abolitionists occupied about the same place in the political spectrum of 1860 that PETA does today. 

Unionists didn't hate slavery because it was morally wrong.  They hated it because it provided unfair competition.  The whole basis of the Free Soil movement, for instance, was that the decent American yeoman farmer working his land didn't stand a chance against the powerful men south of the Mason-Dixon Line with their armies of slaves.

When Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, with great reluctance, in 1863, what spurred him to action was not the moral imperative of abolition, but the economic necessity of total war.  Lincoln set the slaves free for exactly the same reason that Grant, one year later, let Sherman burn everything in his path in the march to Savannah.

But okay, let's put that behind us.  Let's move on to an even more impressive demonstration of Medved's acuity.  This is good enough to quote in full:

Moreover, the economic cost of liberation remained almost unimaginable. In nearly all other nations, the government paid some form of compensation to slave-owners at the time of emancipation, but Southern slave-owners received no reimbursement of any kind when they lost an estimated $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars (about $70 billion in today’s dollars) of what [David Brion] Davis describes as a “hitherto legally accepted form of property.”

That's right.  The almost unimaginable cost of liberation.  Let us just savor that for a moment.  Let us, to use Joan Didion's turn of phrase, enter into the argument on its own spooky level.  Wow.  $70 billion eliminated with the stroke of a pen.  That does sound like an enormous cost for the nation to bear.

Okay, back to reality.  Here's some more math that Medved hasn't bothered to do.  If you're going to assert that the economic cost of emancipating a million slaves is $70 billion, you are also asserting that the economic benefit of giving a million people their freedom is:  $0.  This is certainly the way slaveholders looked at the balance sheet.  Apparently Medved does too.

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA.

For someone who claims to be a crusader for decency, Medved sure has some weird ideas about morality. 

I mean, seriously.  Let us suppose, for instance, that someone swept up Medved and all of his living relatives deemed useful enough, threw them in a cargo hold with hundreds of other people, and let them spend a couple of months living in their own filth, during which time a quarter of them sickened and died.  When he arrived at the destination, we'd take his surviving kids away from him and sell them.  If he had a daughter of the right age, we'd clean her up nicely, because they always fetch a good price.  His wife might luck out and get sold as a domestic.  Medved's best hope would probably to be a field hand on a cotton plantation, where he'd be much likelier to survive than if he got stuck growing sugar or rice.  But that wouldn't be up to him.

So, thousands of miles away from everyone he's ever known and everything he's ever owned, stripped away from his people and his language and his family, Medved would then spend the rest of his days doing back-breaking work.  Eventually, at the end of his days, he might learn to stop thinking about who bought his daughter and wondering if any of the new quadroon girls his owner just came back from New Orleans with were his grandchildren

The thing is, this is all okay.  Because one of those quadroon girls is going to have a grandchild of her own someday.  And that grandchild might go to college.

Just so that we're clear on what a beastly and immoral assertion this "inconvenient truth" is.

This "inconvenient truth" carries the odor that permeates Medved's whole argument.  He doesn't want to face up to this, but everything he's saying here derives, one way or another from a central idea:  black folks are just like you and me, only worse. 

Breeding them and selling their children:  hardly worth mentioning.  Writing their fundamental inhumanity into the Constitution:  not worth our notice.  Setting them free:  a big economic negative for the poor slaveowners, but what are you going to do?  And look at what a dog's breakfast they made of Africa.

We knew going in that Medved wasn't qualified to write about the history of slavery.  What this piece reveals is that he's also not qualified to write about decency.

I finally decided that Drupal, fine though it may be, required me to care a little too much about its innards.  So I'm gradually porting everything over to Movable Type, which is something less of a pain to manage and update.  We'll just see.

I'm fortyish, smartish, funnyish, living in San Francisco with two aggressively shedding cats, a couple hundred board games, and too many books.

I've been developing software professionally since the Ford administration. At the moment, I divide my professional time between clients, refactoring a legacy system that I had no hand in creating and developing futuristic add-ons to a venerable case-management system for courts.

Of course what I'd really like to do is direct.

If you like the self-portrait, there are a lot of better examples of the genre here , which is where I got the idea.

The Economist, a publication staffed by many smart people, has just run a sort of response to Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie. I don't know if you've heard about the picture; it's a little independently-produced art-house film that's only playing in three or four theaters in major cities. Okay, that's a lie. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is everywhere, and has been everywhere for long before it finally opened. And you know, it may not be the funniest movie ever made (especially if you've seen too much of Borat already, which is one of the many problems with this sort of pre-release publicity), but it's got its moments.

But what I want to talk about here is the remarkable blockheadedness of the Economist's piece about it.

Its basic message: Your correspondent has been covering Kazakhstan since before the Soviets fell, and it's a pretty damn important place, even though nobody in the West seems to know this. In short, he (one presumes it's a he; part of the Economist's old-school institutional tone is not providing its writers with anything so crass as a byline) pinned a Kick Me, I'm Humorless sign on his back.

But if you pick your way through the piece, something begins to emerge loud and clear. He hasn't seen the movie.

The result is something that's maybe not as horrible as Germaine Greer's "you had it coming for teasing that poor animal" encomium on the death of Steve Irwin, but it's still fun to watch. Here's my favorite:

The slick, self-satisfied Anglo-American creative elite is so devastatingly witty at other people’s expense, but ultra-prickly when it comes to its own dignity.

Okay, sir. Just so you know, there is a very long, extended fight scene in this movie in which slick, self-satisfied Anglo-American creative elite Sacha Baron Cohen engages in an insane, furious bout of hand-to-hand combat with his 300-pound-plus co-star. Both combatants are stark naked. This is broad physical comedy of the grossest kind ("What's funnier than a fat man? A naked fat man squashing his testicles in your face!"). Whatever else you can say about it, it is quite possibly the least dignified thing I have ever seen any comedian do. John Cleese's inadvertent nude scene in A Fish Called Wanda is Pinter next to this.

There are other what-rock-have-you-been-living-under moments. "There is plenty for thriller-writers to chew on, too: the combination of cynicism, sleaze and geopolitical arm-wrestling across the ex-communist world cries out for a return there by Le Carré." Well, not so much. Le Carré's Our Game, which covers the cynicism, sleaze, and geopolitical arm-wrestling across the ex-communist world, was not a great success: like so many before him, the poor man seemed to have wandered up into the Caucasus mountains and gotten lost.

And then things turn, well, a little creepy. "Kazakhstan is an easy target for a lazy wit," the writer continues. "There is no powerful Kazak diaspora to threaten a boycott." Hmm, what kind of powerful diaspora that threatens boycotts does the writer have in mind, exactly? Is he thinking, maybe, of Cubans? No, that can't be it; they're not really powerful once you get out of Florida.

You know, there's only one group of people I can think of that a writer would use "powerful diaspora" to describe: the group that Stalin used to like to call "rootless cosmopolitans."

This movie isn't really "flogging the tired old gag that the ex-captive nations are amusingly obscure and backward." Sure, Baron Cohen makes good use of that for the fish-out-of-water parts of the movie. But that isn't his point. This movie stings not when it's making fun of fictional Kazaks, but when it offers real plain-as-day Americans the chance to reveal themselves to what they believe is a real plain-as-day Kazak. The ways in which these Americans invite Baron Cohen into their world and then explain it to him are often very funny.

But they're also often horrifying.

And they leave one with the impression that even a culture so civilized that it knows to swathe its prejudices in phrases like "powerful diaspora" is really five or six bad years away from conducting its own version of the running of the Jews.

It's from Freeman Dyson's review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spirit: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, from the June 22, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books.

At one point in this long essay, Dyson argues that "Parents with fundamentalist beliefs have a legitimate grievance, being compelled to pay for public schools which they see as destroying the religious faith of their children." If you're reared on the absolute church/state separation, as American agnostics like myself are, this is a pretty uncomfortable stance to encounter, because, well, it's kinda true. Dyson points to England's approach, which has since the nineteenth century been to teach religion in its schools. Not because religion is supported by the state, but because religion is part of England's culture, and it's something students should know about. He then acknowledges that this might not work in the United States, but argues that what's needed is a little less ideological rigor on all sides:

To be workable, a solution does not need to be scientifically or philosophically consistent. When I was a boy in England long ago, pepople who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was travelling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: "Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according." The rules governing religious education should be administered with a similar freedom of interpretation.

---

Postscript: the August 10, 2006 issue of the NYRB contains a letter from Nicholas Humphrey rather pointedly indicating that this episode is not from Dyson's life but from a cartoon in an 1869 issue of Punch. Reads the caption:

Railway Porter (to Old Lady traveling with a Menagerie of Pets), "STATION MASTER SAY, MUM, AS CATS IS 'DOGS,' AND RABBITS IS 'DOGS,' AND SO'S PARROTS; BUT THIS 'ERE 'TORTIS' IS AN INSECT, SO THERE AIN'T NO CHARGE FOR IT!"

Dyson's response:

My memory of travelling with a tortoise has two possible explanations. The first and more probable is that I heard of the conversation recorded in the Punch cartoon and transformed it over the years into a memory. This would not be the first time that I remembered something that never happened. Memories of childhood recollected in old age are notoriously unreliable. The second possible explanation is that the memory is accurate. In that case the conductor on the train knew the cartoon and said what he was supposed to say according to the script.