Our story begins last August, when I bought a used piano off CraigsList. I've had a piano for most of my life, but only intermittently since moving to Seattle. I had intended to get one since we first moved into this house, but somehow I kept putting it off for two years, the longest I've ever gone without.

In the past I've usually had my bookshelf full of music right next to the piano, but this time my household geography was different: except for what could fit in the piano bench, all the music resided in another room. A small collection of favorite books ended up in the bench, and I ended up playing mostly from them. One of them was my book of Scott Joplin rags.

I've had this since I was a child, or at least our family had it. The book was published in 1972 (second edition), and we must have bought it not long after that. I'm pretty sure the copy I have is the original, though I know my sister has a copy of the same book. All three of us played a lot of Joplin as kids. In retrospect I realize I almost never played the pieces my brother played and vice versa. Whether I was deliberately avoiding his territory or he was avoiding mine, I don't know. The exception is Bethena, which all three of us played. My main memory of my sister with Joplin is that she and I would often play rags as duets with me playing the right hand part and her playing the left hand, a tradition we have continued to occasionally repeat as adults.

The book is properly titled The Collected Works of Scott Joplin: Volume I. Volume one is for Joplin's works for piano, which the publishers surely must have known would sell better than volume two, works for voice. The latter is of interest mostly to scholars, and consists mostly of the piano-vocal score of Joplin's opera Treemonisha. Many years later I borrowed volume two from a library. As a big fan of Joplin and a big fan of opera, I thought the idea of an opera by Joplin sounded very exciting. In fact, it was a big letdown. For one thing, it's not very "operatic", being more in the operetta-ish style of, say, Reginald de Koven. For another, it wasn't particularly good. Joplin was genius as a composer of ragtime, but as an opera songwriter he was run of the mill. I like turn-of-the-century American operetta as much as the next guy — actually, I like it considerably more than most people do, even limiting the comparison to the small minority who have any opinion on it at all — but there's nothing special there.

But I digress. Some time last fall, I got the idea in my head that I'd play through the entire book from start to finish. Since I had played very little Joplin in the past 10 years, this would be a fun trip down memory lane. I wasn't even sure if I had played every rag in the book. Indeed, I'm still not sure. Many were familiar from my own playing or from hearing my brother's; many others were felt unfamiliar, but that doesn't mean I never played them once or twice way back when.

In the course of playing through, I noticed that some that I thought I liked weren't as good as I remembered, and others I thought I didn't like were better than I remembered. That gave me the new idea of picking out a top ten list of favorite and ranking them. So I played through the whole book again, though skipping quickly through the obvious chaff and taking notes on the better ones. I spent much of January playing the top candidates over and over until they fell into a ranking.

Whenever I read music criticism or analysis, I ponder the question of why such writings are usually so wretched and unreadable. Since most of my musical readings are from the classical genre, I am often driven to ask: Must every music critic be an insufferable blowhard spouting meaningless academic nonsense? But then on reflection, I wonder if the fault isn't with the writer so much as with the subject. Perhaps the aesthetics of music is such a personal and non-verbal subject that it isn't easily expressed in words, and whatever words are chosen don't do a very good job of conveying what the writer had in mind. Maybe what seems like nonsensical drivel is actually intelligent opinion that would make sense to me if only it could be communicated telepathically directly from the author, but when put into words on paper too much is lost in the translation.

Being on the other side of the equation now, I wonder if my own descriptions will seem just as nonsensical to my readers. Here in my Joplin list, if I say that one rag has good "story" while another does not, is my reader going to ask, "'Story'? What the heck does that mean?"

As I hope many of you know — and if you don't know this, I'm afraid this very specialized post will mean little or nothing to you — Scott Joplin wrote ragtime. Indeed, the "King of Ragtime" so far outshines all other authors that he practically defines the genre.

The rag, like the sonata or the rondo, is a very restricted form. A properly constructed rag has four themes. Each theme is exactly 16 bars and each theme is repeated without variation. Typically, the second theme is followed by a single repeat of the first theme. The right hand always carries the melody, while the left hand carries the harmony. The left hand keeps a steady beat, typically in an "oom-pah" pattern of bass notes alternating with chords, while the right-hand melody is typically heavily syncopated. Throughout the entire piece, there is little or no variation in tempo (a vestige of the genre's dance origins).

Of course there is no enforcer compelling the composer to follow all of these rules, and indeed there are many many exceptions throughout the ragtime corpus. But whenever one departs from the pattern, one loses a little bit of what makes a rag a rag. Too much variation and it's no longer a rag. The ragtime formula works. If you depart from the formula, what you get instead may or may not work.

But at the same time, the formula severely limits what one can do artistically. The oom-pah plus melody can become quite dull very quickly. The obligatory repeats don't allow much freedom to develop a theme. The unchanging tempo makes it hard to express any variety of emotion. And while there's nothing to prevent one from alternating between loud and soft, the general uniformity of mood and tempo doesn't easily lend itself to dynamic variety that is meaningful.

Because a typical rag consists of four otherwise unrelated themes chained end to end, it is a challenge for a rag to be more than the sum of its parts. There isn't much scope for making each theme meaningfully follow the previous one, as opposed to being tacked together in some other order, or mixed and matched with themes from other rags. Many of Joplin's rags (and many more rags by other composers) I would say fail on this count. Where they succeed, Joplin had a variety of strategies, but the commonest pattern tended to give each theme a certain characteristic. The first theme, which besides introducing the piece is usually the only one to recur later, wants to have a friendly and accessible sound. The second theme wants a sense of progress as if it is taking us somewhere. The third theme is usually the most interesting harmonically, and often the most exciting in general; this is where we often get lots of dominant sevenths with chromatics from outside the main key. The fourth theme needs to have a sense of completion, either as a satisfying denouement from the climactic third theme, or by carrying the climax even further and driving it home with a flourish.

This is not the only strategy, but the point of it or any other strategy is to give the rag a feeling of completeness and direction that makes it more than just four themes played in succession. That is what I mean by "story".

The challenge for any rag is to cope with the limits of the ragtime form. The rags on my list succeed in one of two ways. Either they stay within the form and find a way to be beautiful in spite of the limits (eg, Easy Winners), or they push the envelope and expand the form without breaking it, either a little (eg, Maple Leaf) or a lot (eg, Solace). Likewise, the rags that fail to be great can fail in one of two ways. In a few adventurous rags, the innovation doesn't quite work and the result is a mess (eg, Euphonic Sounds). More often, they are safely within bounds but remain limited by it. Of these latter, there are many.

Lest I be misunderstood, I want to clarify that where I say a rag "fails" I don't mean it's really a failure. Almost all of Joplin's rags are good, and many of the ones that don't make my top ten list are still very good, they're just not quite as good as the top ten. Among Joplin's piano works there is very little that I would say is actually "bad", and even that isn't nearly as bad as bad ragtime by other composers.

When we were kids we had another book titled "Ragtime Rarities" with rags by composers other than Joplin. (I probably still have that book, packed away in a box somewhere.) Some of those were really awful. My sister and I, having fun with the book's title, liked to comment after trying a particularly bad one, "wow, that one is really rare!". Even the worst of Joplin never came close to those. He isn't the king for nothing.

For further discussion Joplin rags, I recommend Perfessor Bill Edwards' ragtime website. I know Joplin fairly well, but the Perfessor knows him way better than I ever will. He offers brief opinions on every rag, and some of his differ sharply from mine.

I mention this here, ahead of my own commentary, only because I know some of my readers may want to listen along to the pieces. If you're going to do that, your best bet on the Internet is Perfessor Bill's midi files. A midi file is not the same as a wav or mp3 sound file. It does not record the actual sound; rather it records data describing notes, duration, dynamics, etc, and plays them back using your own computer's resources. Among other things, this means that if your computer has a crappy piano midi patch (which it probably doesn't, since almost every operating system has a decent piano nowadays), the midi files will sound like they're being played on a crappy instrument.

The reason you want Perfessor Bill's midi files instead of someone else's is because he has provided sophisticated midi data that incorporates nuances of dynamic, tempo, etc, so that it actually sounds like a real person is playing. (Indeed, I assume the Perfessor really did play the pieces, on a special keyboard designed to capture the performance as midi data.) There are other sites offering Joplin midi files, but these are simple transcriptions from the notes on the page, so they are "played" mechanically with no human interpretation. Ragtime suffers quite a bit less from a mechanical interpretation than does most music, but even so, some of these plain midi files sound awful. Listening to these them is a good reminder of how important human interpretation is in any genre of music.

If you're listening along with Perfessor Bill, you should know that he takes great liberties with the music. Not only does he add considerable ornamentation, but he doesn't hesitate to change notes and rewrite wherever he sees fit. His Maple Leaf, for instance, is rather drastically rearranged. There's nothing wrong with this. I'm not well-versed in ragtime musicology, but I know there are plenty of other genres where the composer never intended the music to be played exactly as written, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's true of ragtime as well. I mention it only because what the Perfessor plays might not always coincide with what I discuss here. I'm judging the rags strictly by how they are written and published.

It has become traditional when announcing rankings to list them in reverse order. This creates some suspense, but only paradoxically. True, you have to wait longer to hear the top choices, but along the way you have narrowed the competition so the only real suspense is the order of the top few. Unless your list is short, by the time you reach number one, there's no doubt who it will be: the nine next-best have already been ruled out. Of the candidates remaining, one will get the top spot and the others will be omitted entirely. Unless the competition is extremely clumped at the top, it will be pretty obvious.

If you're actually going to sit down and play them all, I do recommend going last to first, but for listing them here I prefer to simply start at the top.

1. Solace: A Mexican Serenade (April 28, 1909). This is truly Joplin's masterpiece, and it's not even close. Many rags succeed by having four themes all of above average quality. Others succeed by having one extraordinary theme while the others are decent. In Solace, all four themes are extraordinary, brilliant even, and expertly crafted as well. Everything about the piece is perfection.

Besides being the best, Solace is unique in Joplin's canon in several ways. Technically, the left hand plays a tango rhythm in three of the four themes. That rhythm is used a little bit in Wall Street, but nowhere else that I can think of.

Stylistically, Solace has a softness that most Joplin pieces lack. Ragtime is not a romantic genre. Here and there among Joplin's works, one might find bits of lyricism or romantic lushness, but even those aren't very deep. Solace goes way beyond that. The entire piece is deeply sentimental, suffused with a serene beauty.

Solace was featured prominently in the sound track for the movie The Sting. It is used in places that require music that is poignant and emotionally evocative. It's hard to imagine anything else by Joplin could have served the same purpose. In contrast, one can easily imagine a dozen other themes that might have replaced the first movement of the Entertainer as the main theme.

2. Bethena: A Concert Waltz (March 6, 1905). As a general rule, I don't care for Joplin's waltzes (nor for his marches, which are typically written in 6/8). Like his contemporary, John Philip Sousa, Joplin wants to write in triple meters, and he never stops trying, but he only really shines in 4/4 or 2/4. And yet Bethena is a prominent exception. It's the only Joplin waltz that's any good at all, and it's marvelous.

Like Solace, Bethena is an outlier among Joplin's works, unlike anything else he wrote. It is easily the most complete and polished of Joplin's works, very thoroughly and formally constructed, like a Mozart sonata. The label "concert waltz" suggests what Joplin was aiming for. Though not nearly equal in scope, in style it's a lot like a Chopin waltz. (I'm thinking of the one in Eb, opus 18).

Joplin completely breaks the ragtime mold with this one, so much that it's hardly a rag at all. It has five themes, structured A-BB-A-CC-DDEE-A, with episodes in bridging all the gaps. The whole piece is Mozartean — recalling the anecdotal idea of every note being exactly right, neither too many nor too few — but it's the exquisite little episodes that are most Mozartean at all. Breaking the mold allows Joplin to avoid the usual shortcomings of ragtime. Whereas rags are typically just now loud, now soft, with punctuated accents, Bethena has real depth of dynamic. And it has a story arc that few if any rags match.

3. Wall Street Rag (Feb 23, 1909). As special as Solace is, it doesn't come out of nowhere. Wall Street, which preceded it by only a few months, is similar in both style and structure, and it's an excellent work for most of the same reasons. In pure inspiration, the fourth theme is one of the best Joplin wrote, as well as one of the jazziest. It is his most audacious as well as the most successful use of what were called "crazy chords" (ie, tightly spaced chords with lots of added 6th, 7ths or 9ths resulting in clusters, but written high enough above the bass root that they're still basically concordant) giving a sort of raucous, jangly feel.

Uniquely, it is published with little text notes telling a pseudo-story (about Wall Street brokers reacting to ups and downs of the market). I don't hate these as much as Rudi Blesh does. I think they're sort of cute, so long as you don't try to take them too seriously. Any failure of the specific Wall Street imagery shouldn't hide the truth that this piece tells a good story, moving neatly from mood to mood in satisfying progression. In many ways it's more exciting than its sister piece, Solace, but it doesn't quite achieve the latter's pure beauty.

4. Elite Syncopations (Dec 29, 1902). Ragtime is feel-good music. A good measure of a rag is whether it makes you smile. Elite Syncopations makes you smile from beginning to end. This is the best of Joplin's early works, in my estimation even beating out his smash hit. All the themes are solid, and they're put together in a way that makes the whole greater than its parts. Elite Syncopations stays very true to the standard rag form, and there's nothing really novel or daring about it. The first three themes are mostly unadorned one-note melodies with traditional accompaniment, which nicely sets up the booming and exuberant fourth theme. There's no great novelty or gimmickry here. It's just a very well-written traditional rag that bubbles over with pure joy.

5. Maple Leaf Rag (Sept 18, 1899). Before The Sting, this was easily Joplin's most celebrated rag. Unlike the Entertainer, it deserves its reputation. Maple Leaf was Joplin's first and greatest hit. That's an understatement. Maple Leaf was the blockbuster hit of the decade. It put Joplin on the map. It put ragtime on the map. It was the first non-vocal sheet music to sell a million copies in the United States.

The Maple Leaf Rag came surprisingly early in Joplin's career. Before it, he published only four other works; three of those are junk, and the fourth (the Original Rags) were actually written after Maple Leaf but published sooner. Maple Leaf is startlingly mature for its time period. Although it doesn't go as far as Joplin's later works, it's noticeably more sophisticated than most of the rags that followed for the next several years.

Maple Leaf would stand out in any case, But what really sets Maple Leaf apart is its excellent bass line. It seems almost trivial now, when compared to more obvious innovations that followed, but Maple Leaf broke the rag out of the oom-pah mold. If you're a pianist, read through Maple Leaf playing just the left-hand part and notice how musically interesting it is. Then play the left-hand part of the Peacherine Rag (Joplin's next big hit) and see how dull it is in comparison.

The bass line is why Peacherine is OK and Maple Leaf is brilliant. (It's also what gives Elite Syncopations' fourth theme its climactic feeling of completely breaking out.) The listeners of the time may not have analyzed it so, but they surely felt the difference. Joplin's improved bass lines, full of movement and accent, is what gave his rags that extra oomph that had been missing. That, in turn, is what turned the rinky-dink dance-club genre into a real musical movement. It's also what made Joplin the master of the genre. Throughout his work, it is his mastery of the bass line that really sets him apart.

Besides that, Maple Leaf has four strong themes and it's extremely well-crafted. Joplin worked on this piece for many years before it was published, and one senses that he took all that time to be sure that every note was as good as it could be. (With later works, after his fame was secured, he wasn't always so careful.)

6. Pine Apple Rag (Oct 12, 1908). If early rags like Maple Leaf and Elite Syncopations are Joplin's Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata, and the brilliant works from his later period like Solace and Wall Street are his Aïda and Otello, then the Pine Apple is his Ballo in Maschera, pointing the way from the one to the other. The traditional (and somewhat dull) first theme is rooted in the past, but the other three are all inspired and point to where Joplin is going: The jangly second and exuberant fourth themes hint at Wall Street, and the uncharacteristically low and mellow third theme hints at Solace. On its own Pine Apple is a good solid rag, packing lots of novelty without breaking the mold.

7. Gladiolus Rag (Sept 24, 1907). Joplin wrote several rags which, consciously or unconsciously, imitate the Maple Leaf — either in the overall structure of the whole or just in the first theme, with its very characteristic pattern (ie, a two-bar melody, repeated; two sparse bars that stop the flow, usually in minor or diminished harmony; two ascending bars, made up of a half-bar figure repeated in four octaves; and finally a four-bar melody, played first in the upper octave then repeated in the lower octave). The worst of these (eg, Leola) feel like a cheap ripoff, but the better ones make you smile and say, "Hey, that's kinda nice ... reminds me of Maple Leaf."

The best of the Maple Leaf clones is Gladiolus. It's a glorious rag for pretty much the same reasons Maple Leaf is: strong themes, strong bass line. The last two themes work especially well in Gladiolus. Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus is written thick. Some rags (eg, Elite Syncopations) shine with simple one-note melodies, like a pretty little babbling brook. Gladiolus, like Maple Leaf, is a gushing river, flowing with big handfuls of notes. The third theme of Gladiolus is as grandiose as Joplin ever gets. (Again, I'm reminded of Chopin; this time a ballade or maybe a polonaise.) Like Maple Leaf, Gladiolus reaches its climax in the third theme, but rather than just dropping off after that, the fourth theme is written in a way that feels like it continues to coast blissfully on the waves created by that climax.

In some ways Gladiolus is better than Maple Leaf. It's certainly bolder, but it's also less refined. I find it hard to judge in isolation, knowing as I do that Maple Leaf is the original and Gladiolus is the imitation. If I could hear the two rags for the first time not knowing which came first, would I consider Gladiolus the superior work? I really don't know.

8. The Easy Winners: A Ragtime Two Step (Oct 10, 1901). The Easy Winners is the purest example of mastering the traditional ragtime form. It is a simple piece with very little innovation, but it is so artfully crafted that it gleams with its simplicity. It's also one of only two* Joplin rags in which I feel any bond between the music and its title. With most rags, there is no connection whatsoever: the Maple Leaf, Pine Apple and Gladiolus rags, for example, have nothing at all to do with their respective botanical eponyms.

The cover illustration for the Easy Winners shows four little illustrations of sporting events: a baseball scene, a football scene, some jockeys racing on horses, and some racing yachts. Given that little visual hint, I find the music very reminiscent of a sporting campaign. Each new theme tells of an episode on the way toward the championship, another challenge successfully met, culminating in the exuberant celebratory final theme.

That final theme is surely the best, one of my favorites in all of Joplin, but it's made all the sweeter by the journey. Knowing the piece as I do, I find myself smiling in anticipation through the first three themes, knowing how it will end. And yet, I'm in no hurry to get there, happy to play every repeat because the whole process is so much fun. Somehow it feels right to know how the piece will end. There is no drama in this campaign, no dark moment of crisis, no doubt. These winners are easy winners. The great charm of the piece is the tone of easy confidence that pervades it.

*(The other is The Cascades — named for a monumental fountain display at the 1904 World Expo in St Louis, not the mountains in Washington and Oregon — which has a few instances of waterfallish tone painting. I suppose "Solace" is descriptive, too. The Wall Street Rag, in spite of it's attempt at a written storyline, really isn't)

9. Rose Leaf Rag: A Ragtime Two Step (Nov 15, 1907). There are three Joplin rags omitted from my book. I'm told that newer editions of the complete works include them, but when the collection was first published in 1971 many of the rags were still under copyright protection, and the publisher was unable to reach terms with the owner of these three. All three have long since come into the public domain and with a little effort they can be found on the Internet. In the course of my ranking, I hunted them down and added them to the audition.

The Rose Leaf Rag is strongly reminiscent of the Wall Street Rag, which followed a little more than a year later. In all four themes it shows distinct and direct similarities, which makes it hard to play the one without thinking of the other. Like the talented boy with an even more talented older brother, poor Rose Leaf suffers in comparison. It's hardly fair. If Wall Street didn't exist, I'm sure I'd appreciate Rose Leaf even more than I do. It has four excellent themes (especially the second theme, which I love), but when I play the third and most especially the fourth theme, I can't help thinking that, as good as this is, I know that Wall Street is even better.

10. Weeping Willow: Ragtime Two Step (June 6, 1903). This is another early rag that succeeds by making the most of the traditional form rather than breaking out of it. What sets it apart is its sense of unhurried, casual elegance, which is rare in ragtime. All four themes are nice, but if there's a weakness it's that there's no real climax. Easy Winners and Elite Syncopations, the two on my list that are in the same style as Weeping Willow, both end with an energetic fourth theme that brings down the curtain as it were. Willow's fourth theme is nice but doesn't have the same power.

Two of Joplin's rags — the Maple Leaf and the Pine Apple — were also arranged and published as songs with lyrics. If ever saw these in volume two, I don't remember them. I suspect they were chosen for their sellability, not their singability; neither tune seems an obvious candidate for vocal adaptation. The one Joplin rag that feels to me like it wants to be sung is the Weeping Willow. Though ragtime is almost always melodious, it's rarely cantabile. Willow is an exception. It's like a serenade. A serenade on the veranda on a lazy summer evening.

There are many, but they can wait for another day. This post is long enough.

7:58:26 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

What if God does not exist, but those who believe in Him anyway go to Heaven?

2:02:27 AM  [permalink]  comment []  

Today I'm thinking about the word "ulterior". It is an example of what I like to call a monogamous adjective. There is only one noun it ever consorts with. One never hears about ulterior meanings, ulterior virtues, ulterior dreams, or even ulterior designs. It's only ulterior motives.

I feel like I ought to be able to offer other examples, but, although I can think of other non-adjective words that are limited to specific phrases, no other monogamous adjective come promptly to mind. Anyone?

Ulterior's lack of versatility threatens to atrophy its meaning. I daresay that most people who speak of ulterior motives aren't really clear on what makes them ulterior. It's not uncommon to hear about "obvious ulterior motives" or "blatant ulterior motives". If they're obvious, are they really ulterior? I don't think so.

The Latin suffix -ior makes the comparative form for adjectives. So while fortis is strong, fortior is stronger; while rubicund is red, rubicundior is redder. (Hence "rosa rubicundior, lilio candidior", "redder than the rose, whiter than the lily", which I know from Carmina burana, but an abundance of Google hits suggests is in some other popular song as well.)

Latin adjectives, like most Latin words, can take on various endings. I'm inexpert in Latin and I couldn't tell you the difference between fors, forte, and fortis, nor would I know what to include and what to truncate before sticking the -ior on the end. I just generally figure if a word ends in -ior and something on the front resembles a known adjective, it's probably a comparative form. (But this assumption leads me astray in the continuation of the Carmina lyric, "omnibus formosior, semper in te glorior", where, as I learned only just tonight, glorior is actually a verb: "more beautiful than everything, always in thee I glory.")

There are several short Latin words whose meaning describe a locational relationship, and which might be adjectives, adverbs or prepositions depending on form, which can end in either -ra or -er. Supra, infra, extra, and intra mean above, below, outside, and inside. These words find their way to modern English if not as words at least as prefixes. So too do their comparative forms — superior, inferior, exterior, and interior: higher, lower, outer, and inner.

Ultra is similar to extra. Both might be translated as "beyond", but extra suggests being outside the confines of some boundary while ultra suggests being on the other side of something. Those who are ultramontane are on the other side of the mountains, and an ultramontanist was someone who believed that Papal authority ought extend to beyond-the-mountains people like French or Germans. When the medieval Venetians referred to their holdings in the Near East as the "Oltramare", they were simply acknowledging the location of those lands: beyond the sea. The French Outremer and English ultramarine are cognates. (The former should be mentally parsed as "outre-mer", not the tempting "out-remer".)

If you knew that ultramarine is a shade of blue, you might have assumed it has something to do with the color of the sea. If so, you'd have been wrong. Ultramarine is the color of lapis lazuli, a deep rich blue hue that the sea rarely approximates. The blue silicate can be extracted from the lapis lazuli stone and used as a pigment, called "ultramarine". It is so named because the stone comes to Europe from the Middle East, by way of the ultramarine trading colonies. (Another colorful rock, the turquoise, is similarly named, the word being the French feminine adjective meaning "Turkish". At that time, Europeans would indiscriminately apply the label "Turkish" to anywhere in the Muslim world, not just the region of the country we now know as Turkey. The turquoise stones almost certainly came from Persia.)

If something is the ne plus ultra, it is the best of its kind because there is "no more beyond".

In modern English, the prefix ultra- doesn't stray too far from the Latin meaning. If you are an ultra-liberal, you're so far beyond liberal that you're on the other side of garden-variety liberal. Likewise if you're an ultra-conservative, you're beyond ordinary conservatives.

Superior, inferior, senior, and junior retain a strong sense of the comparative, but they don't require explicit statement of any comparand. A person might simply be junior, or a being might simply be superior, without any specification of exactly what they are junior or superior to. Ulterior, in its most literal sense, is "more beyond", or more distant, remoter, further. My Merriam-Webster says "going beyond what is openly said or shows and esp. what is proper". That final "especially", I think, acknowledges recent evolution of the meaning. When people speak of ulterior motives today, I doubt they have any sense of them being beyond that which is openly acknowledged; I think the primary sense is just that the motives are naughty.

I would consider that an example of Bernstein's second law: a bad meaning driving out a good. I wouldn't say that ulterior in its earlier sense is any treasure, but it has more value than the vague and muddled newer sense.

10:23:30 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

With tax season is in full swing, the only posts likely to make it to completion are short recollections of random thoughts I had during the five-minute drive to work.

I don't remember what triggered it, but this morning I was contemplating the group defined as younger brothers whose elder siblings rhyme with each other but not with him. No, that's not a precise definition. They don't have to be siblings, just names that are routinely listed as a group.

I thought I was going for trios, but three of the four I came up with before arriving at work are quartets, and two of the quartets include another non-rhyming brother (Cottontail and Miney). The only trio I can think of is Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

I'm sure there are more out there. Who am I missing?

By the way, for those of my readers who were not teenage nerds in the early 1980s (and you know who you aren't), Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are the nicknames of the four ghosts in Pacman.

Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter really are siblings, I think, in Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit stories. When I was young, my sister had a French translation of Peter Rabbit. I remember this only because I was amused by the rabbits' French names: Flopsaut, Mopsaut, Queue-de-Coton, et Pierre. I especially love "Queue-de-Coton", which tumbles so quickly from the mouth, like a triple-tonguing woodwind player. (Um, no, let me rephrase that....)

10:34:27 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

Benzene celebrates Black History Month! Well, sort of.

All I have to say in this short post is that today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Scott Joplin's Wall Street Rag, my third favorite Joplin rag.

I know its ranking in my esteem only because I've been on a Joplin mission for the past several months. I was hoping to use this occasion to unveil my "best of" list, but somehow the project became too gargantuan for one post. It's 11:30 now, and I'm not even close to complete.

So I guess that means stay tuned for April 28.

10:58:29 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

As part of an anti-Valentine's Day gesture, this morning I wanted to know which saint's day is today. The first webpage I consulted had a bewildering long list of saints for each day, with variations for the different orthodoxies and many of them bouncing around like Easter does so that there isn't a simple correspondence of one saint to one date. Happily, I next found this page, which makes it all very simple (perhaps at the cost of accuracy — I can't tell — but I don't really care that much).

It tells me that today is St Apollonia's Day. Apollonia is, among other things, the patron saint of dentists, apparently by virtue of having her teeth knocked out shortly before being martyred.

Glancing two boxes to the right, I was surprised to see that on this calendar February 14 is not St Valentine's Day at all. Rather, it is the day of Saints Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs. As chance would have it, Cyril and Methodius are the only saints on the page that I'm the least bit familiar with. Having once specialized in medieval Balkan history (really), I actually know them rather well.

My initial reaction was to be surprised to see them on a Roman Catholic calendar, since I associate them more with the eastern Orthodox church. But I suppose if a saint is great enough everyone wants to claim him. Anyway, though there was plenty of political rivalry between the Empire in Constantinople and Charlemagne's newly anointed Frankish kingdom, the true schism of the Church was still three centuries in the future, so I suppose either wing of the Church can claim Cyril and Methodius as their own, sort of like how both Christianity and Islam claim Aristotle and Alexander for their cultural history.

It was this political struggle that got Cyril and Methodius their famous mission. It's the 9th century, and Ratislav, prince of Moravia, is ready for his kingdom to adopt Christianity. He's wary of being dominated by the neighboring Franks, so rather than enlist Latin missionaries, he sends to Constantinople asking for Byzantine missionaries who will teach his people in their native language. Cyril already had quite a bit of experience as a missionary leader, and he and his brother Methodius were fluent in a Slavonic language that was a sort of proto-Macedonian — not quite the same as the proto-Czech that Ratislav's people would have known, but close enough — so off they went.

Offering liturgy in the vernacular was controversial at the time, so they were soon summoned to Rome. The Pope found the brothers to be loyal and competent and so the Church in Rome supported the project, even if the Holy Roman Emperor in did not. Before long, the pendulum swung in Moravia; Ratislav was turned out, and a pro-Frankish successor was installed. The Slavonic liturgy was snuffed out in Moravia, but it spread to the eastern and southern parts of the Slavic world where it thrived.

Conventional wisdom says that Cyril and Methodius were inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet. This is untrue. It is arguable that they invented the Glagolitic alphabet. That's probably false, too, as the Glagolitic alphabet seems to have evolved from various sources. But it was surely the sainted brothers who adopted and promoted the Glagolitic alphabet and made it the vehicle for ensuing spread of Slavonic literacy. The Cyrillic alphabet evolved from the Glagolitic over the next few generations, as the followers of Cyril and Methodius found the alphabet neeed improvement. They named the new and improved model after their movement's founder. The honor was not intended as a claim that Cyril invented the alphabet, though it was later taken that way.

But I digress. What of St Valentine? Wikipedia tells me that he was removed from the roster when the calendar of saints was reformed in 1969, the same time that St Christopher got the boot and for a similar reason. The Church determined that in spite of all the popular legend that surrounded him, precious little was known about any actual person named Valentine, if indeed he was a real individual at all.

9:44:14 PM  [permalink]  comment []  

The problem with ideological partisanship is that when people get too used to lining up behind one idea or another, they lose track of what principles led them to espouse the idea in the first place. Notwithstanding President Obama's exhortation against outdated partisan battles, everyone is still talking about tax cuts vs spending increases. The distinction between the two is far less than it appears.

In the same comments thread I quoted from yesterday, someone brought up the topic of "MetroChecks". I don't know what city he lives in, but every big city has a program like this. The MetroChecks are vouchers which can be spent on various sorts of mass transit. I got similar vouchers when I worked in San Francisco. When I lived in Alameda I used them to buy my monthly bus pass, and when I was in Rockridge I used them to buy high-value BART tickets. Employers give these vouchers to employees as a fringe benefit. I suppose Daschle's car brought them to the commenter's mind, prompting him to observe that no one reports those vouchers on their taxes.

They're not supposed to. The vouchers are tax-free, which is exactly why so many employers give them out. For every $100 on your paycheck, your employer has to pay $7.65 to the IRS for FICA and Medicare. Additionally he must withhold the same amount from your check as well as whatever you chose for withholding of regular income tax, maybe about $15. The result is that it costs the employer $107.65 to compensate you by $77.35.

If your employer gives you a transit voucher for $100, it costs him only marginally more than $100, and if you ride the bus or train to work anyway, it's worth only marginally less than $100 to you. Everybody wins. If your employer could pay your entire wages like this, he would. But he can't. By default, fringe benefits (like Daschle's car) count as taxable income. These vouchers do not because there is a special section in the Tax Code exempting them (section 132(f)). It lays out rules for what sort of transportation qualifies for the program, and it imposes a limit of $100 per month per employee.

It's easy to imagine how this program came about. Somebody wanted to use the federal government to increase ridership on mass transit. Of the various ways that might be effected, this is a fairly easy one to implement. No new bureaucracy is required. The tweak in the tax code creates an incentive for employers, someone will step in to meet the need (for a small fee), and the federal government pays for it in the form of reduced revenues.

How effective the program is in achieving its goal is hard to determine. An employer in a low-traffic suburb, like my current employer, would never subscribe. His six employees all drive to work. Riding the bus would be impractical, and none of us would do it even if it were completely free. For him to pay us in vouchers would be a waste of money, so he doesn't. The program has no effect on him.

The last regular day job I had was in downtown San Francisco. Nobody who works in downtown San Francisco drives to work unless they're rich or crazy. That employer paid us transit vouchers, and we all used them. I suspect that every employee there (about 12, though it varied over the years) would have taken public transit even without the voucher, so while we did all participate in the program, I'm not sure it had any effect on changing anyone's habits.

But presumably there are in-between cases where the vouchers make the difference for employees with a marginal decision to make.

In the Reagan era, when "supply-side economists" made the case for reducing taxes, the argument was that it would benefit the economy. These people were called "free-market conservatives" because they were conservatives who believed in the efficacy of the free market. In terms of serving progress, they believed, the free market could be expected to allocate resources more efficiently than could government.

Their logic on taxes goes something like this: If the government takes $1 zillion from the citizenry and spends that same $1 zillion on various programs to benefit that citizenry, the government will have allocated those resources. If the government cuts those programs and reduces taxes accordingly, then the people have $1 zillion less in government programs but they also keep $1 zillion more money in taxes which they can then spend how they choose.

Reality is always messier than theory, and undoubtedly many politicians and voters had many other reasons for supporting a reduction in government, but the pure economic rationale was this: if you suppose that the free market is a better allocator of resources than the government, you can achieve better results by reducing taxes and public spending. Free-market conservatives (and others with different motives who wished to hide behind a respectable argument) thus favored tax cuts and opposed public spending. Twenty-five years later, they still do, though many have forgotten why.

Today we're seeing the exact same reasoning applied in reverse. In the context of what to do to stimulate the economy, liberals and conservatives are once again arguing between raising spending and cutting taxes, only now the pro-spending liberals seem to have the upper hand. According to basic Keynesian theory, increasing government spending will stimulate the economy more effectively than cutting taxes.

The reasoning here is exactly the same, the only thing that has changed is the premise: where the free-market conservatives argued that the free market is better at allocating resources than the government, the Keynesians are saying that in the current situation the opposite is true. In this extended recession the market is not allocating resources well, and that's why the government needs to step in and forcefully reallocate them to something better. With the wrong kind of stimulus, people might just choose to keep their money rather than spend it. (How it should be that, in a recession triggered in large part by lack of savings, for the people to save more money would be a bad thing is an interesting question which perhaps I'll address some day.) Our stimulus package needs to consist of specific spending programs because otherwise we're letting the market decide, and the market is less smart than the government right now. The whole point of the stimulus is to take control away from the market.

Thus we have the same old debate about taxes vs spending but in a completely new context.

What people on both sides of this debate are missing is that, whichever premise you subscribe to, the reasoning that follows is flawed. It is flawed because the distinction between tax cuts and spending increases are so muddied that they no longer correspond neatly with the free market against the government.

Consider the transit voucher program. That program decreases government revenues and does not increase government expenditures. Therefore it counts as a tax cut. According to the rationale of the tax-vs-spend argument, that means it empowers the market at the expense of the government. Does it? No, it does not. Indeed, the whole point of the program is for the government to wrest control away from the market. Too many people were choosing to spend their own money by driving to work, so we chose to use government muscle to coax them into buses and trains. If a free-market conservative supported this program on grounds that it's a tax cut, he was betraying his alleged free-market principles.

One of the new goodies on this year's tax return is a first-time homebuyer's credit. If you buy a home between April 2008 and July 2009, and this home meets the definition of first home as spelled out in the tax rules ("first" is something of a misnomer there...), the IRS will reduce your tax bill by up to $7,500. There is a small catch, however. The IRS will then increase your taxes by $500 per year for the next 15 years, so it's not quite as good as free money, but it's still a 15-year interest-free loan from the government, which is good for something.

This, too, reduces revenue for the government without increasing spending, so it too counts as a tax cut. According to the rational of the tax-vs-spend argument, that means it fails to stimulate the economy. Does it fail? No, it does not. This program gets excellent stimulus return on the dollar because one has to buy a house in order to get the credit. Again, the whole point of the program is to coax people to buy what they otherwise wouldn't. Too many people were choosing to save their money instead of spending it in a scary housing market, so we chose to use the government muscle to coax them into buying anyway. If a Keynesian liberal opposed this program on grounds that it's a tax cut, he was betraying his alleged Keynesian principles.

One could list dozens more examples. Well, one in the tax business could anyway.... There are tons of targeted tax incentives stinking up the Tax Code, some very narrow, like the credit for buying a hybrid car; others very broad, like the home mortgage interest deduction.

The problem here is that we routinely define "tax cut" as anything that reduces government revenues, and "spending" as anything that increases government expenditures. The correlation of this with whether allocation of resources lies more with the free market or with the government is imperfect. Indeed, to the extent that political pressures reward government programs that can be labeled "tax cuts", that correlation is being actively eroded.

The solution is to let go of the phony distinction between "spending" and "tax cut" and look specifically at whether a program entails government allocation of resources. There's a huge difference between targeted tax cuts and untargeted tax cuts.

The latest Senate stimulus bill includes a provision sponsored by former real estate agent Sen Johnny Isakson (R, Ga.) which would double the homebuyer's credit while extending it all homebuyers without any means test or "first" requirement. Another provision, sponsored by Sen Barbara Mikulski (D, Md.) would allow a tax deduction for sales tax and interest payments on any car purchased this year. Both of these are tax cuts, but both involve the government aggressively directing the market. Any free-market conservative who still believes the market knows best has no business supporting these on grounds that they are "tax cuts". Likewise, any traditional liberal who insists that tax cuts are less stimulative than spending has no business opposing them on those grounds.

Compare these to non-targeted tax cuts. Economist Greg Mankiw advocates an "immediate and permanent" reduction of the payroll tax. New Jersey Sen Bob Menendez made sure that the Senate's bill contained an "AMT patch", the annual ritual by which the alternative minimum tax, designed to limit the deductions available to upper-income taxpayers, is "temporarily" held at bay for another year. (Curiously, the tax cut supported by Menendez, a Democrat, benefits the upper middle class, while the the proposal by Mankiw, known as a conservative, would give most benefit to the working poor.) Whatever other merits or demerits these two proposals may have, both would return huge amounts of resources to the public, therefore empowering the market rather than the government. These tax cuts, unlike Isakson's and Mikulski's, are thus vulnerable to the charge that they are less effective dollar per dollar as a stimulus. (Mankiw acknowledges this, but argues that other considerations compensate for that.)

I would suggest that any discussion that draws a bright-line distinction between tax cuts and spending while ignoring the difference between different types of tax cuts as these is due more to knee-jerk traditional political alignment than any sound economic rationale.

11:50:40 PM  [permalink]  comment []