Re[2]: GG: quote about centipede?

[mwilliamson@alston.com]

     Well, this was just fantastic; I enjoyed it immensely.  
     Thank you for posting this.
     
     With due respect to Mr. Gould, I would like to point out 
     that a centipede need not have a hundred legs; it simply 
     must have two legs per body segment as opposed to the four 
     per segment that a millipede has.  In general, a millipede 
     is many times more venomous than a centipede, and a 
     centipede is usually at least as venomous as a yellowjacket.
     
     My college biology professor passed around a live millipede 
     in a jar and assured us that if any of us were foolish 
     enough to let it sting us, the pain would be virtually 
     unbearable.


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: GG: quote about centipede?
Author:  Ed Price <edp@panix.com> at Internet
Date:    11/7/96 6:52 PM


there may be other sources but here's one:
     
``I was recently talking to a group of educators about the problems 
concerning the teaching of pianists in institutionalized technical 
"factories".  You see, I think there's a fallacy that's been concocted by 
the music teachers' profession, to wit: that ther's a certain sequence of 
events necessary in order to have the revealed truth about the way one 
produces a given effect on a given instrument.  And I said: Given half an 
hour of your time and your spirit and a quiet room, I could teach any of 
you how to play the piano -- everything there is to know about playing the 
piano can be taught in half an hour, I'm convinced of it.  I've never done 
it and I never intend to do it, because it's *centipedal* in the 
Schoenbergian sense -- that is to say, in the sense in which Schoenberg was 
afraid to be asked why he used a certain row in a certain way, saying he 
felt like the centipede, which doesn't want to think about the movement of 
its hundred legs because it would become impotent; it couldn't walk at all 
if it did think about it.  And I said: Therefore I'm not going to give this 
half-hour lesson, but if I chose to, the physical element is so very 
minimal that I could teach it to you if you paid attention and were very 
quiet and absorbed what I said and possibly you could take it down on a 
cassette so that you could replay it later on, and you wouldn't need 
another lesson.  You would then have to proceed along certain rather 
disciplined lines whereby you observed the correlation of *that* bit of 
information with certain other kinds of physical activity -- you would 
discover there are certain things you can't do, certain kinds of surfaces 
you can't sit on, certain kinds of car seats you can't ride in.
  And by this time I was getting a great laugh -- they regarded this whole
thing as a routine, which it was *not*.  I was trying to make quite a 
serious point, which was: that if this were *done*, you would be free of 
the entire tactile kinetic committment.  No, *correction* -- you would not 
be free, you would be eternally bound to it, but so tightly bound to it 
that it would be a matter of *tertiary* interest only.  It would be 
something that could be "disarranged" only by a *set* of circumstances that 
would confuse it.''
 -- Glenn Gould [Payzant p94, from Cott, _Forever Young_ p33]
     
-ed