The first part of this post is long, and explains how bad mathematics can lead to bad music. The second part is short, and uses the first part to explain something that I think Beethoven did right in his Moonlight Sonata, and that Faulkner and Momaday did poorly in As I Lay Dying and House of Dawn.

But first, a word about our sponsors.

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The most significant fact about 20th-century English literature is that it was dominated by cliques and entangled with politics, from the very beginning of the century.  As I explained in "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did", this process began in France in the 1850s, when, in response to the overcrowding of the Paris Salons

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This makes me think of flying. I'm going to listen to it next time I fly

briuck

I'm hoping it'll all get better, but it keeps on getting worse, time and time again.
People running as the earth shakes, just another Earthquake, coming in to break my faith in this.
Wind blowing off the rooftop, water in the basement, looking like lightning strikes again.
Story ends and another begins, and they will keep on coming, they will keep on coming.

Every single flame,
Burns bright,
Then fades,
But that's okay.

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