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[Harpo]

Musicophilia:Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks

Amazon description:   Legendary R&B icon Ray Charles claimed that he was "born with music inside me," and neurologist Oliver Sacks believes Ray may have been right. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain examines the extreme effects of music on the human brain and how lives can be utterly transformed by the simplest of harmonies. With clinical studies covering the tragic (individuals afflicted by an inability to connect with any melody) and triumphant (Alzheimer's patients who find order and comfort through music), Sacks provides an erudite look at the notion that humans are truly a "musical species." 

[Renfield]

So, "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" is only 78 pages? Well, when I do decide to read Kant, that sounds like something good to start with! 

Well, the author himself wrote it as an introduction to his later thought (and published it first; and with that title), so you can't go wrong.


As for reading a cartload of philosophers before Kant: Kant is very demanding.

However, I wouldn't read philosophers after his time as preparation. As long as you have a firm grasp of what it is he's concerned with at all (viz. 'pure reason', for instance, and what that's all about - and for this you need Descartes and Hume, and for them you need Aristotle; and for both them and Kant's own thought, you absolutely need Plato), the rest of it is sheer reading skill: you need to be able to penetrate the text, and see the framework of his ideas, or you're never going to get anywhere near his (very many) points, and it will look like verbose nonsense.

That, I'd say, is why so many people find his writing hard to read; they're doing it wrong. You do not need a PhD in the history of Western philosophy to read Kant. You (or anyone) might need (more than) a lifetime to understand him (fully). But no books are going to help with that!


P.S.: Re "Kant is demanding", let me clarify that by 'demanding' I do not mean 'obtuse'. I mean demanding, as in 'makes you use your brain'.

[bwv 1080]

William T Vollmann: Fathers & Crows, so far one of his best efforts

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review--scalpers-from-sheffield-fathers-and-crows--william-t-vollmann-andre-deutsch-1799-pounds-1559267.html

THERE ARE no noble savages in Fathers and Crows. The second part of Seven Dreams, William Vollmann's 'symbolic history' of North America, may be set in an early 17th-century arcadia, but the Huron and Iroquois who live there are noted for cruelty rather than nobility. They take pleasure in subjecting their captured foes to prolonged and appalling torture before eating them.

However, these are not the demonised Indians of the 19th-century dime novels. Although it is little comfort to the victims, the cruelty and cannibalism has a religious motive. The Indians are warlike, it is true, but they are also doting parents who never strike their children. In other words, they are exactly the kind of characters Vollmann likes, at once victimisers and victims.

Fathers and Crows is the story of the Jesuit Black Gowns who come to save the souls of the Huron Indians. They bring with them epidemics and the destruction of the Huron at the hands of the Iroquois, the Huron's mortal enemies. It is a dark story, dealt with some years ago by Brian Moore in his lean, tense novel, Black Robe, which focused on the experiences of a single Jesuit.

Like Moore, Vollmann has done prodigious research in, among other sources, the 73 volumes of The Jesuit Relations, the collection of letters sent back by Jesuit missionaries from America to their superiors in France.

However, Vollmann has chosen to make his canvas much broader. He is, in essence, writing his own volume of the Jesuit Revelations, but in his own way. In a 900-page narrative, it is 470 pages before Father Jean de Brebeuf, ostensibly his main protagonist, makes an appearance.

Until de Brebeuf's appearance, the main character is Robert Champlain, map-maker and first Governor of Quebec. Champlain comes to Canada looking for a route to China and the gold and silver mines he expects to find there. He is the nearest thing to a heroic figure because, sneered at by his compatriots, he maintains through obstinacy and courage his position with the Indians, who both ridicule and admire him.

Bathetically, he has come in search of China and stays to establish a trade in beaver tails. The tails were used to make felt hats for European gentlemen. It was a trade of considerable importance to France until the middle of the 18th century, when felt hats were superseded by top hats made from Oriental silk.

By then, the Indians who had survived the coming of the Europeans were dependent on European goods for survival. Champlain traded iron hatchets and cooking pots with the - essentially Stone Age - Indians. By the 1820s, when James Fenimore Cooper was writing about the same tribes in The Last of The Mohicans, North American Indians were using scalping knives from Sheffield, blankets from the Cotswolds, calicoes from Marseilles, steel traps from Manchester, clay pipes from Hanover and muskets from London and Liege.

The uneasy co-existence of the French and Indian cultures in Vollmann's book is based on a fundamental and ultimately fatal misunderstanding. The Indians regard their French 'nephews' as guests they have invited to stay. The French think the Indians have accepted the rule of the crown.

Fathers and Crows is a brilliant work, but not at first an easy read. Vollmann writes as a chronicler, jokingly called William the Blind, and he is in no hurry. The book starts with a historical note which turns into an erotic enconium to the Iroquois saint, Catherine Tekakwitha (who inspired a similar panegyric from Leonard Cohen, Canadian poet and purveyor of musical gloom, in his novel Beautiful Losers).

Thereafter, Vollmann's narrative, written in very short sections, goes off at tangents and jumps backwards and forwards in time. The Spiritual Exercises of Loyola provide a perverse structure for the efforts of the French to explore the Saint Laurent waterway - which becomes, in a complex metaphor, the Stream of Time. He refers to the same Indian nations by many different names (the Iroquois have seven), justifying this in a droll footnote by saying that all the spellings are in the primary sources and he does not wish to be totalitarian.

Characters who seem central to the narrative often abruptly disappear. The fate of Champlain's adopted Indian daughters, left at the mercy of a lustful English captain when the British force the French to quit Quebec, is settled in a terse footnote.

Despite this playful post-modern disregard for narrative conventions, Fathers and Crows is gripping. In a note at the end, Vollmann explains: 'My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a Symbolic History - that is to say an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue, based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth.' His narrative occasionally invokes a magical realism, accepting the fantastical without explanation. By writing myth as history - and history as myth - he sidesteps the major problem of historical novels: establishing the consciousness of a period different to our own.

Vollmann encountered great difficulties on both sides of the Atlantic getting this book published, presumably because he is regarded as uncommercial and the book is inordinately long. All credit, then, to Andre Deutsch, for printing it without cuts. For it is an astonishing work - powerful, witty and imaginative. On its own it is impressive enough. As part of Seven Dreams, it raises hopes that Vollmann's ambitious enterprise will prove itself to be one of the major accomplishments of late 20th-century literature.

[Solitary Wanderer]

Had this on loan from the library for the past month.

It's quite an excellent overview 

[SonicMan46]

 

Had this on loan from the library for the past month.

It's quite an excellent overview 

Hello Chris - I bought and am currently reading the 8th edition of this 'college' text - probably my third purchase of this book (two of the authors listed are now deceased!) - enjoying the read, and like the format change (as is typical of more modern texts) - there are a lot of scores reproduced which I cannot appreciate (just not my field or strength); a musical anthology would be helpful, but one that I do not own - although if I 'search' my collection, I likely have much of the music discussed; as suggested, I would recommend a 'library borrowing' since the purchase price is rather steep for this publisher; but, a recommendation!  Dave 

[Lilas Pastia]

William T Vollmann: Fathers & Crows, so far one of his best efforts

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review--scalpers-from-sheffield-fathers-and-crows--william-t-vollmann-andre-deutsch-1799-pounds-1559267.html

I don't know about "prodigious research" that ends up in misnaming Champlain. It's Samuel, not Robert (I mean, it's like naming Lincoln 'Jeremiah' instead of Abraham ).

Not to mention some plain bad spelling and syntax. But I guess that's The Independent's reviewer, not the book.

[Bu]

Like any Thompson novel or story I've read, disturbing, twisted, practically insane but one hell of a read--the kind of book you devour and somehow come to terms with at the end, despite the darkness.

Just starting:

[bwv 1080]

I don't know about "prodigious research" that ends up in misnaming Champlain. It's Samuel, not Robert (I mean, it's like naming Lincoln 'Jeremiah' instead of Abraham ).

Not to mention some plain bad spelling and syntax. But I guess that's The Independent's reviewer, not the book.

ha just saw that, yes its the reviewer's mistake

[Bogey]

My second book from this author.

[greg]

Well, the author himself wrote it as an introduction to his later thought (and published it first; and with that title), so you can't go wrong.


As for reading a cartload of philosophers before Kant: Kant is very demanding.

However, I wouldn't read philosophers after his time as preparation. As long as you have a firm grasp of what it is he's concerned with at all (viz. 'pure reason', for instance, and what that's all about - and for this you need Descartes and Hume, and for them you need Aristotle; and for both them and Kant's own thought, you absolutely need Plato), the rest of it is sheer reading skill: you need to be able to penetrate the text, and see the framework of his ideas, or you're never going to get anywhere near his (very many) points, and it will look like verbose nonsense.

That, I'd say, is why so many people find his writing hard to read; they're doing it wrong. You do not need a PhD in the history of Western philosophy to read Kant. You (or anyone) might need (more than) a lifetime to understand him (fully). But no books are going to help with that!


P.S.: Re "Kant is demanding", let me clarify that by 'demanding' I do not mean 'obtuse'. I mean demanding, as in 'makes you use your brain'.

Ah, good to know... 
(and a nice, detailed explanation, btw)

[Solitary Wanderer]

Hello Chris - I bought and am currently reading the 8th edition of this 'college' text - probably my third purchase of this book (two of the authors listed are now deceased!) - enjoying the read, and like the format change (as is typical of more modern texts) - there are a lot of scores reproduced which I cannot appreciate (just not my field or strength); a musical anthology would be helpful, but one that I do not own - although if I 'search' my collection, I likely have much of the music discussed; as suggested, I would recommend a 'library borrowing' since the purchase price is rather steep for this publisher; but, a recommendation!  Dave 

Hi Dave: I haven't seen that newer edition but I do like the layout in the version I have so I'd been interested to see the improved new version. Yes, although I'm familiar with alot of the information on some of my favourite composers, there's still some great stories and the 'source boxes' have some worthwhile info. 

[Valentino]

Just finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Shattered my belief in Indian democracy, it did.

It is any good, yes.

[Opus106]

Just finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Shattered my belief in Indian democracy, it did.

It is any good, yes.

But not Booker-prize-winning good, IMHO.

[Dr. Dread]

Hardcore crime fiction readers already know this guy is good.

[Valentino]

But not Booker-prize-winning good, IMHO.

Maybe not. I couldn't say.

I've just started another Anna Gavalda novel, her first actually: Je l'aimais (Someone I Loved), or Eg elska ho in Norwegian. I don't understand much French, regrettably. My vocabulary is restricted to pneu, derallieur, peloton, pavé...

[pjme]

Started it last week. Well written ! But will take some time ...



Ida Rubinstein
Quite fascinating ...a very rich woman, obsessed by Art...She was Saint Sébastien, Jeanne d'Arc and danced Boléro for the first time.
Pascal Lécroart

Une utopie de la synthèse des arts à l'épreuve de la scène

Annales littéraires de l'université de Franche-Comté n° 832

Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté

[Josquin des Prez]

It's quite an excellent overview 

Yeah, i particularly liked the political correctness. Seeing Barbara Strozzi being listed among the major composers was entertaining.

[Brian]

Just finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Shattered my belief in Indian democracy, it did.

It is any good, yes.

One of my favorite books from last year. Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Catch-22, it had an emotional impact that just about punched me in the gut, and caught me completely by surprise. Moreover the narrative voice is superb. Really loved it.

[Diletante]

Musicophilia:Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks

How does it read so far? I'd be interested in knowing your opinion once you're done with it, because I might want to buy it.

[SonicMan46]

Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008) by Patrick Huber - just getting started w/ this book from the University of North Carolina Press - a revisionist (although not novel) discussion of the origins of 'hillbilly' or 'country' music as known today - if interested, checkout the the summary and reviews on Amazon HERE; since I live in this VERY area & enjoy country music, this should be a good read!