We live in an age of information which permits us to find out almost anything we want to know about a very broad range of subjects with only a click of a mouse button.

And we have become spoiled.

There is a kind of instant gratification that all of us want, because we have gotten it indirectly through our computers. Instead of going to a library to research something, we google it. Most of us seldom use a real dictionary. Instead, we go to dictionary.com, look up a word, and usually have a truncated definition of us which gives us a partial meaning of the word. We learn things out of context.

We read reviewlets of books on Amazon.com and think we know what a book is really about. Many times, more often than not, these quasi-reviews are written by someone who doesn't really know enough about a subject to say anything authoritative about what they have read.

Apparently, a goodly portion of the population thinks that googling a term is tantamount to doing research. It isn't. It's a hollow shell of real research. You can't research a subject in 45 seconds on google. All you can do is see what has been posted on the internet. And the internet is a large repository of information -- some true and some false. It's a kind of bogus, foundationless, instant learning.

And this kind of instant learning shows up often in posts on internet forums. Someone who has been involved in one art form or another will post about why his or her particular art form is mired in the past, nothing new has been done and the future of it is bleak -- unless people do what he has outlined in some online essay. I see this very often in another forum I am involved with that concerns the banjo. I see people who know nothing about the way our musical scales are constructed and tempered trying to make their instruments play more in tune. There is as much misinformation on this subject as there is on magic theory.

Many of the posts I have read recently on the theory of magic seem to be based on an argument much like this:

All the other art forms have progressed, either in technique, adoption of technology, psychological application or theatrical interpretation. Magic has not. I study (one or more of the above), so I have the answer. Then they post the answer, and there is nothing really new in what they post.

Why is this? First, most of us judge magicians by those around us. We see guys performing at the local club or in a local restaurant. We expect David Copperfield, but we don't get him. We see the same things that we learn from the latest DVD. We don't see the real practitioners of the art, because they don't perform where we get to watch them.

Or, if we don't particularly like David Copperfield or David Blaine or Criss Angel, we decide that they are stuck in the 19th century. We ignore some of the things they have done that are actually pretty amazing and, in some cases, quite artistic. Copperfield's Dancing Hank sequence comes to mind. Excellent work. Very artistic. Criss Angel's penetration of the shop window. That was stunning! Even Blaine's CTW was pretty strong. But you don't see some of the best acts on television...ever.

Jean Marat's statue is one of the most amazing pieces I have ever seen. And Topaz has an act that combines some of the cleverest ideas that have come across the footlights.

And none of them performs in a character that one would call archaic.

This lament about magic not being up to date has gone on for centuries. Robert-Houdin brought magicians out of wizard's robes, and brought magic into what was basically a theatrical version of his living room. Hofzinser did something similar in Vienna. Maskelyne and Devant modernized illusions. And it's still going on.

It's just not going on everywhere.

Only about 5% of magicians are going to ever do anything artistic. The rest will copy. Some will stylize. Others will create. And there is a place for all of them in the mix. Consider concert keyboardists. Igor Kipnis was a great artist. He didn't write a thing. But he could interpret written music better than almost anyone else, especially Baroque music. Chopin on the other hand was very creative and wrote scads of excellent music. Who was greater? From one aspect, Chopin. From another, maybe Kipnis. I'm glad that I don't have to judge a competition that never took place.

So what is a young magician with big ideas to do? Well, first, get a grounding in magic theory from the earliest works on it until the latest. Read Robert-Houdin. Read Maskelyne and Devant. Read Ponsin. Read Sharpe. Read Brown, Shiels, Fitzkee, Tamariz. Klause and Osterlind. Each of these has his own theories about why and how magic works. Each is valid in his own right. And there are others, as well.

Some of these can be gotten quite cheaply by downloading them from the Learned Pig or Lybrary.com. The more recent ones will require that you visit a library or purchase them from a magic shop. But the expense and effort will be well worth it, because you will know more about magic when you get through reading them.

But don't start providing solutions until you have a firm grasp of the problem...especially if your solutions have been previously explored.

The Pierian Spring is very, very deep.

For those of you who have asked (and the others who were to embarrassed to do so) the last sentence refers to the often misquoted line from Alexander Pope:
A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.

So, what's the point?

Well, when you start working out theories about anything, it really helps to know what has gone before. It's like being an inventor. There's an expression -- "reinventing the wheel." When you promulgate a theory that apparently solves all the problems that you have deteced in an art form, perhaps you need to understand how other people have approached the same problem, because the chances are that you are not the first to have become aware of the problem.

Back when I was teaching music, I would run across young players who had a natural gift for learning repetitive motions. Sometimes they had excellent "hand - ear" coordination, and they would confuse this with a gift for music. They would approach playing the piano from a composer's perspective, without knowing anything about what had gone before. This doesn't work, for a number of reasons. One is that the depth of theoretical material exists because it reflects ways of eliminating wasted energy. Each style of music has its own theory and its own vocabulary. Without these two things, there is chaos. Occasionally, one of these fellows would actually make it to a television show or even Carnegie Hall. If you think my analysis of their efforts is unkind, imagine how the music critics of New York City attacked them -- it was lunchtime.

A fellow who was teaching music at a local university came to me once at a trade show, and, trying to impress me with the depth of his knowledge of music, said, "It's true that..." (beware the Ph.D. who starts a sentence with "it's true that..." This is Ph.D. shorthand for "I have some B.S. I'm going to lay on you that has no real support." "It's true that...everything that can be done with the tempered chromatic scale has been done, so the only way to go now is microtonal."

Without getting into technical details -- "microtonal music" does not mean chaos. You have to define a vocabulary first. You have to set out what tones will and will not be used in a particular work. Some early baroque music could be considered microtonal, because it was not played on equally tempered instruments. That's a stretch, of course, but it's valid.

So I suggested to him that he try to associate with people who were a bit more creative, and really learn what "microtonal" meant before polluting his students with B.S.

Jonathan Townsend, whose opinions I respect greatly, suggested that I might want to post a link to the source of the quote I mentioned previously. This is from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism. It is particularly applicable to the Magic Café.

I had forgotten how great a piece this was. Some of the references will be obscure to most of us. But it is very thought-provoking.

http://eserver.org/poetry/essay-on-criticism.html