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:
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:
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.
I heard somewhere the inspector from Crime & Punishment was the inspiration for Columbo (i.e. the Peter Falk character). I loved C&P and quite a few of Dostoevsky's other works.
ReplyDeleteI've been tempted to write a piece called "On Bad Faith and The Honest Broker" this year but I'm trying to resist temptation. Part of the temptation is that a title like may just telegraph how much Richard Taruskin I've read, it seems like an almost Taruskin-esque title. But I'm trying to get to Matiegka' Op. 17 and that score is pretty big and will take some work to analyze. The Matiegka 2023 project may wade into 2024 it gets as involved and time-consuming as I now suspect it will.
I've noticed that people that say very forthright things like "I am an honest person" or "I never tell any lies" or "there is no risk in this investment" should not necessarily be taken at their word!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking more about how self-given titles should be taken with grains of salt. For the "i never tell lies" there's a great line from Dostoevsky about how once a man has lied to himself he can't tell others the truth no matter honest he still wishes to be, since you mentioned Dostoevsky this week. I forget where the observation is but it was something I came across in my Dostoevsky binge in my 20s and it's stuck with me.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Wenatchee. Dostoevsky does come out with interesting observations like that--and in the most unexpected places.
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