Ted Gioiaing the blog stream

Ted Gioia has succeeded in becoming perhaps the most prominent music blogger and more power to him. He is amazingly prolific, turning out a thousand or more word essay every few days and he comes up with a myriad of topics. I tend to think that when he does music history he goes wildly astray, but hey, that's just my opinion. He certainly puts all his efforts into his work.

But I find two things: one, I almost never find his essays worth reading: tl;dr to use the common abbreviation for "too long; didn't read." Yes, they are too long and what's more, they always overpromise and underdeliver, the ubiquitous failing of these hyper-promotional times. It is the YouTubeization of the world: in every discussion someone "destroys" or "obliterates" or "hammers" their opponent when really it was just a discussion. Everything is in the "top ten" of something and, my favorite, AI just wrote 100 million new songs. Uh-huh.

The other thing is that I am occasionally goaded into doing something to diverge from all this. So here it is, a little parenthetical discussion of things. That's it, no hype!

Here is what I have been reading lately, and why:

A hugely influential collection of essays by Richard Taruskin--the first, in fact. Just as valuable now as they were twenty-some years ago. They delve deeply into our modern obsessions with the sacredness of the text, i.e. the notation, and how we pretend to be historically "authentic" when we probably are not.

I've been reading Chinese poetry, mostly in the little Penguin anthologies, for many years, but have missed doing so recently. So I thought it was time. This is the longest continuous poetic tradition of any culture, extending from the Book of Songs of c. 600 BC (some of which were set for voice and guitar by Benjamin Britten) right up to the poetry of Mao Zedong, who turns out to be a surprisingly good poet. Amazed he found the time... The peak was during the Tang Dynasty (618 AD - 907 AD). One remarkable thing is how, century after century, poets write lyrics to be sung to ancient folk songs--all the music of which has been lost! Here is an example by Sun Daoxuan, an early Song Dynasty woman poet:

To the Tune of "As in a Dream"

Jumbled shadows of green banana leaves,

a moon halfway up the red railing.

Wind arrives from the turquoise sky,

blowing down like a string of singing pearls.

Invisible,

Invisible,

my lover is hidden by an emerald curtain.

Here is a very important book of ethics that I am starting to re-read:

The conventional wisdom about ethics or moral philosophy is that there are two main varieties: utilitarian ethics, based on the theories of English philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who saw the goal of ethics as the production of the greatest amount of human well-being; and deontological ethics coming from the theories of Immanuel Kant, which based everything on duty and obligation to obey the laws of rationality. But in 1958 along came Elizabeth Anscombe who pointed out that this is all bunk. She claims that there is nothing worth having in life except the exercise of the virtues. This comes, of course, from the writings of Aristotle. Oh, and this also solves the problem of how to live a moral life even if you are not following the commandments of a deity.

Finally, I am about three-quarters through this challenging novel which I first read about forty years ago--with very little comprehension! And just a bit more now. But it is very exciting to be inside the mind of a 19th century Russian murderer.

As for listening, I am still working my way through the big box of 15th century music. Here is disc 10:

The point of all this is that, if you don't challenge yourself with these kinds of cultural artifacts, you end up being the passive recipient of a welter of misinformation, propaganda, hype, "influence," and politicized crap. This turns your brain into a spongy toadstool.

In my day job I visit a lot of people's houses and I always take a moment to look over their bookshelves (if there are any!). It is frankly shocking how few books most people have. They tend to contain popular novels, books on Mexico, the occasional art book, even more occasional book of opinion and so on. What they don't often contain are what I would call "perennial classics," i.e. books that you should read and re-read throughout your life. You could put some CDs and DVDs on that list as well.

Sometimes the Internet feels to me to be a vast conspiracy to prevent us from reading anything of any importance whatsoever in favor of whatever political tidbit is likely to prove advantageous to someone.