… for later thoughts and developments:
1. Found an article/chapter on Mendelssohn and psychological aesthetics.
2. Researched more WordPress ‘crap’
3. Went to a rehearsal tonight and took 100+ photos for the director.
Plus: lentils + bulgur + sweet potato? YUM.
I. Mendelssohn
We’re all familiar with Felix Mendelssohn, 18th-century Romantic composer, perhaps best known for his e minor violin concerto (Op. 64) and/or his Songs without Words; less well known but similarly talented was his sister, Fanny.
The Mendelssoh who interests me, however, is their grandfather Moses –en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Mendelssohn, a major figure in the 18th-century Berlin Jewish community and the Enlightenment in general. A trinket and triviality is that his glasses are on display at the Berlin Jewish Museum. His (reconstructed) grave site is about two blocks from my old Berlin apartment.
Of importantance and interest to me is the work Mendelssohn conducted with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — critic, playwright, philosopher — and Friedrich Nicolai with regard to German letters. 18th-century German ‘philosophical’ aesthetics can be broken into three roughly chronological phases: a rationalist, dogmatic beginning, that works top-down from rules and expectations; a psychological and historical middle period that attempts at being empirical; and a critical and philosophically almost phenomenological third period. The third is represented mainly by Kant, Schiller and Goethe; the first by Gottsched as well as Baumgarten and even the Swiss Bodmer & Breitinger; but the second — critical of the former and paving a path for the latter — is the realm of Lessing and Mendelssohn. The *early* Kant (1760s) fits here, too.
In that middle period much of the terminology is borrowed from the English empiricists, such as Locke and, later, Burke. Hume, who would be a contemporary, didn’t make much of a mark at this point. In contrast to the ‘early’ period of that century’s aesthetics, those in the middle period were less interested in the rules by which art should be constructed, the social expectations that should be met, or the lessons embedded in works, and were more intersted in the subjective experience, the feelings felt, audience reactions, and the like.
Despite being well-versed in the works of Lessing, when it comes to my work on 18th-century aesthetics, I am least able to discuss the details of this ‘psychological period’ … it’s the one where i need to look things up, check references, etc. Even with Kant and Lessing, whose works I know well, I find myself looking things up. In contrast I rarely doubt my recalled details of the early and later periods in century. I reference to confirm, not to learn. This is not just a quirk to my education or capabilities: it’s almost systemic to studies of the century. The rationalist-dogmatic period presents itself as a German branch of the French debates about the ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns,’ and it is seen, likewise, as the first stirrrings of a ‘German’ discipline and obsession. It’s considered ‘wrong’ or ‘oudated’ and left little in the way of enduring art or thought, but it has symbolic value, and so we start there and retain it. In contrast the end of the century, with Kant in philosophy and Goethe & Schiller in the letters (to simplify), is a high water mark: until the Modernism of the early 20th century this is the most densely populated portion of the German literary-philosophical canon. Even if we disagree with these works or their modern artistic merit, we acknowledge them as ‘classics,’ and that from which almost everything following springs, either as a continuation, a challenge, a rejection, or a revival.
The middle part of the century, up to the 1770s and a bit beyond, doesn’t fall off the radar entirely, but it is the domain of ‘experts’ or ‘specialists,’ not so much in the period but in specific authors or interests: Lessing, the development of drama, the German book trade, Judaism, and so on. It doesn’t help that while what followed became the basis for whole disciplines, and what came earlier was already attached to fields of inquiry, the ‘psychology’ and similar of this period is antiquated and what follows a *century or more later* does not really lay claim to it as an ancestor. In fact, much of it — quite rightly — rests in disgrace, such as the physiognomy of Lavater and his contemporaries … at best it’s seen as a quaint pseudoscience in the mold of astrology and mesmerism.
We cannot really refer to the works of Mendelssohn and Lessing as contributing to “psychological aesthetics”: the term itself should more rightly be reserved for and applied to works of the late 19th-century, when experimentalism and at least the trappings of scientific rigor entered play but before the development of psychoanalysis. It is then that we have the emergence of Gestalt psychology, and not far afield the birth of phenomenology as a philosophical trend, as well as Poincare’s intuitionism in mathematics. This psychological aesthetics, however, with its scientific focus, aimed for ‘objectivity’ and ‘certainty’ (even as those two traits were undermined by phenomenology, for example). It was an era of scientific system-building and, indeed, institution-building throughout Europe. Our modern notions of what physics, chemistry, and biology are, and how they are practiced, comes from this time. Archaeology? Anthropology and sociology? Likewise.
The 18th-century work of Mendelssohn and Lessing (and others), by contrast, is not institutional, and it was distinctly philosophical rather than experimental-scientific. I like to place it relative to its neighbors. What came before was arbitrary but objective: standards were set outside the subject, they were written down and agreed upon, and could be reflected in specific traits in a work of art. That they did not have some sort of solid, universal footing did not make them non-objective, only arbitrary or culturally contingent. The age of Lessing and Mendelssohn is an age of the discovery of cultural relativism, and part of their work is in exploring *differing* reactions to art and the changing standards over time. But on the psychological front they considered not the objective traits of a work, but the subjective effects it had upon the viewer, reader, or audience member. And these subjective effects were not absolute or universal: they were contingent, relative. This is an ever growing world, one that is learning more about the past (the Greeks, the Romans, but also the Egyptians) and its geographic and cultral extent (Asia, the Americas). That is to say: aesthetics not only as psychology (individual mental response), but also anthropology (cultural response), and — in the birth of biology as a discipline — physiology (bodily response). These are, categorically, not of interest in the early Enlightenment. And these interests more or less disappear a decade or two later: the trivial objectivity of the early period and the relative subjectivity of the middle period are explored and criticized, and supposedly overcome by exploring not the work of art or the subject’s response, but rather the *nature* of Art, the Beautiful, and the Aesthetic themselves as Ideas and Ideals.
But that’s another topic for another day.
And so now is a period in my writing when I need to focus on this psychological segment, which is what I was doing Tuesday afternoon.
II. WordPress
I’ll keep this section brief. To recap:
I take these two as ‘givens’. But accepting that, I still find myself working from time to time with WordPress, both as a blogging platform and as a piece of software whose internals I need to explore … looking at themes and dealing with PHP.
This is then a note for me to look at later, rather than a well-thought-out critique or analysis. The short version is: WordPress templates confuse file flatness for document flatness.
A file is ‘flat’: it is a string of characters from beginning to end. Those lines? An artifact of inserting an invisible character that says “new line!” or “carriage return!” (or a combination of the two!), and so your editor or similar presents you with broken lines. At the file level there is no internal structure, only one character after another until you get to the end. If you have ‘markers’ in your document, you can break it up. You can say, ‘from ‘A’ until ‘C’ we are in the ‘head’ and from ‘D until H’ we are in the body …’ or similar. This is still only a pale imitation of syntax or structure; it’s the mere and pure linearity of a flat file. But for decades in the document world we’ve been dealing with greater complexity in documents, and with SGML and XML and the like — and, thus, with HTML — we can have *nesting*: elements within elements … within elements … within … HTML documents are ‘containers’; even or especially the DOM (Document Object Model), used by browsers now and by Javascript, etc., recognizes this. Treating web pages as a flat stream of text is something we’ve tried not to do, except in legacy software, which is a pain to maintain, for many years.
I’ve grown if not to love then at least to accept and appreciate the Django templating language, and that of similar templating engines. In those you often have a default, syntactically correct base template. You may also have ‘chunks’ of correct markup you can import/insert with commands. With inheritance you can override the base values with ones specific to a new template. It follows ‘DRY’ (Don’t Repeat Yourself).
WordPress templates minimally follow DRY. But they see the world as flat. Accepted practice is to imagine you have a syntactically correct HTML page/template, and then linearly take everything from the DOCTYPE declaration to the end of the body’s header content (NOT the HTML head element!) and put it in a file named header.php. Then a file named index.php contains the so-called page content. And everything after the page content is put in footer.php. It’s minimally DRY because what’s in header.php and footer.php will be common to most if not all page types on a site. But none of these three base templates is a value HMTL file; this is acceptable because what they are is PHP files; they’re code, not markup. I get that.
But we think of them as templates, we think of them as part of what designers — not programmers — work on.
For developers rather than programmers to work on such files, they should be HTML templates with PHP embedded, not PHP with HTML embedded.
WordPress has hardcoded a header + two-column + footer page layout into its conventions. In addition to header.php, footer.php, and index.php, there’s sidebar.php. The biggest problem I have with header.php is that it equivocates: it is about both the HTML head as well as the page header … but these are not the same thing! And it resolves the issue but treating a document flatly, neither syntactically nor semantically … just a collection of code from one marker to another. There are shortcuts for the four above-mentioned files; for other snippets you use a slightly different import syntax.
And what I’ve been thinking is: if one forgoes those easy imports and instead opts to use the generic import mechanism for all files, one could probably write more or less syntactically correct & complete HTML templates with embedded-PHP.
But then again, if one did this … why would one be working with WordPress in the first place?
III. Rehearsal
A local school is putting on a production of Oscar Wild’s (1854-1900) “An Ideal Husband,” directed by Ms. S., and since Tuesday was her last rehearsal (she can’t be there for the final dress due to work), she asked me to come along and take photos.
I recently got a ‘slightly-used’ Olympus Stylus 5010 (14 megapixel) camera that replaced my 7-year-old Canon PowerShot (4 megapixel). The old Canon relied on AA batteries — I used rechargeables, several sets over the camera’s life — and while there was a mini-USB connector, since it did not provide any power, I always just removed the SD card when transferring photos. The Olympus is just like using my phone, iPod, or ebook reader … USB that does data and power. It’s a welcome interface improvement.
Alas, the camera was not fully charged, and so while I was able to take well more than 100 shots, I had to also use my lower-megapixel phone that doesn’t react as well to light for other photos. An Ideal Husband, but not an ideal solution. The Olympus is nice, but shutter speed — at least with flash off — is a bit slow, though perhaps I can play around with it a bit by mimicking ‘faster’ film. As a result there are a lot of slightly-out-of-focus pictures, especially if one actor is moving. I couldn’t get ‘action’ shots. Ah, what I wouldn’t have given for additional lenses and a digital SLR!
But we got a few good pictures that can go in Ms. S.’s directing porfolio.
