Loscil - “Zephyr”
Plume
This hypnotizing album is Loscil’s third, far more rich than the muted Submers or the barely-there Triple Point. It’s full of tracks like this, repetitive but enveloping, and deceptively full of detail at every tone level. Beauty, but hovering on the border of threatening depths. (insound)
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
He was twice witty, first with his own wit, then with the wit which was attributed to him.
Black Forest/Black Sea - “Sevastopol”
Black Forest/Black Sea
An album of freaky chamber folk, before the band went a bit more digital. The cello/guitar combo makes it sound like an Espers backing track, but the off-kilter melody and confidently atonal background noise set it apart. An unpredictable band, for good and ill.
Old books? The devil take them!” Goby said.“Fresh every day must be my books and bread.”
Nature herself approves the Goby rule
And gives us every moment a fresh fool.
Death on a Pale Horse, J.M.W. Turner (1830)
Tim Parks in the NYRB suggests that finishing a book may not be necessary to the aesthetic experience. I don’t agree with this line of thinking, that the concept of the art in question lies entirely with the reader or viewer. If a piece of art (i.e. a book or painting) is conceived as a whole and executed as a whole, then finishing it is necessary to understanding and appreciating that piece of art.
If you are not enjoying a book, feel free to put it down. I have many times. But I don’t pretend that I have formed a complete and valid judgment. I forfeit that when I fail to comprehend the work as a whole.
As for whether endings are “necessary” when you have enjoyed a book, it depends on how necessary the author intended it to be, not on whether (as the author was rightly, in my opinion, angered by) the reader felt they were “done.” It’s a bit like knocking the wings off a statue because you think it looks better that way. What you think looks better isn’t the point. The statue was created that way because that’s the way the creator conceived it.
Personally, I think it is critical to read every word as the author intended. Otherwise you are appointing yourself as editor over their artistic imagination. You are in charge of your own time and enjoyment, but not the structure and content of their work.
For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopea from us, how deep the sea, etc.? We are neither wiser, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. What is astrology but vain elections, predictions? all magic, but a troublesome error, a pernicious foppery? physic, but intricate rules and prescriptions? philology, but vain criticisms? logic, needless sophisms? metaphysics themselves, but intricate subtleties and fruitless abstractions? alchemy, but a bundle of errors? To what end are such great tomes? why do we spend so many years in their studies? Much better to know nothing at all, as those barbarous Indians are wholly ignorant, than, as some of us, to be so sore vexed about unprofitable toys: stultus labor est ineptiatrum [it is foolish to labor at trifles], to build a house without pins, make a rope of sand, to what end? cui bono?
Shadow guide for Doric column and arcade (Canon of the five orders of architecture, Vignola, 1562)
It is difficult for us to conceive of, having grown up with reference works, and more difficult still for a new generation raised with the Internet and its promise of instant access to virtually any work or knowledge. So it is likewise strange to attempt to put in context the fact that 2010′s Encyclopaedia Britannica will be the last one printed. Some will stroke their chins, some will wail and tear their hair, some will shout for joy. But most, perhaps most tellingly, won’t care – indeed won’t ever notice. »
A passage from Les Misérables, with some minor aesthetic changes to form it into a shorter, more cohesive essay.
Napoleon’s army has just been scattered.
A few squares of the guard, immovable in the flow of the rout as rocks in running water, held out until night. Night approaching, and death also, they awaited this double shadow, and yielded unfaltering to its embrace. Each regiment, isolated from the others, and having no further communication with the army, which was broken in all directions, was dying alone. They had taken position, for this last struggle, some upon the heights of Rossomme, others in the plain of Mont Saint Jean. There, abandoned, conquered, terrible, these sombre squares suffered formidable martyrdom.
All art, music, words © their original authors.
