Collected Essays: Volume Two

Ahoy Facebook #19

 

New acquisitions. 

Six CDs: The Real Louis Armstrong, Four Classic Albums by Gerry Mulligan, The Real Bob Dylan by Bob Dylan, Four Classic Albums by Dizzy Gillespie, The Harry Partch Collection: Volume One by Harry Partch and Songs for Drella by Lou Reed and John Cale.

New acquisitions. 

Three records: Money Jungle by Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach, Miles Smiles by Miles Davis and Tago Mago by Can.

One book: Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama.

The first record features three of the greatest jazz players playing together.

I don't think I remember hearing this record by Miles Davis before, so I thought that I'd buy it.

This is an album by a German  prog rock group from the 1970s. This album gets very weird and very wild, which is a pleasure for me as I love weird music.

After the collapse of communism, Francis Fukuyama pronounced 'the end of history.' He didn't claim that there would be no more historical events, he claimed that liberal democracy had won the battle of ideas. He published this book this year and he comments on recent events. Authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe are actively hostile to liberal democracy and there is also Brexit, Trump, Venezuela, etc. He also writes about identity politics, which he considers illiberal.

New acquisition.

One record: The Grand Wazoo by Frank Zappa.

I've been wanting to own this for a while... I was looking for it online and couldn't really find it... It's probably my favourite Zappa album, I just love the melodies, arrangements and solos on this... I found it at a record shop in Chesterfield, so I just had to buy it... 

New acquisitions.

Four books: Maus by Art Spiegelman, Palestine by Joe Sacco, The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo and My Troubles with Women.

These are all comic books. I think that it's a great medium, I first got into reading by looking at comics as a kid (superheroes, Asterix, various Chilean comics).

Maus is about Spiegelman's parents, who were both prisoners in the concentration camps. He draws the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

Joe Sacco went to Palestine and Bosnia during the 90s... He made comics out of these experiences.

Robert Crumb is not at all political, he draws about his own personal experiences. This one chronicles his experiences with women. His panels are very detail and cross-hatched.

New acquisitions.

One coaster: A Frank Zappa-themed coaster.

One book: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: Collection One by Gilbert Shelton.

I needed a drink coaster, so I thought I'd buy a Frank Zappa-themed one... This one has the album cover 'Weasels Ripped my Flesh,' which is one of his greatest and strangest album covers.

This is a collection of comics from the hippie era... It was part of the 'underground comics' movement. They're funny and subversive. 

New acquisitions. 
Five books: Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by John Eliot Gardiner, The Music and Life of Beethoven by Lewis Lockwood, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946 by Robert Skidelsky, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock and Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky.

I bought a lot of biographies.

The first two look at Bach and Beethoven, both their lives and music.

Skidelsky wrote a three volume biography of Keynes. This last volume covers the period when his ideas were becoming influential.

This biography looks at Hitler and Stalin. It is a chronological biography of both men, even though they never met.

This is a biography of Havel, a playwright and dissident in the Soviet Union. He became president of Checkoslovakia and later the Czech Republic following the rise of democracy.

New acquisitions. 

Two books: Metternich: The First European by Desmond Steward and Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through: The Surprising Story of Britain's Economy from Boom to Bust and Back Again by Duncan Weldon.

I bought a book a book about Metternich. He was chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1814 and 1848. He signed a lot of treaties and ensured that there wasn't a major continental war in Europe.

This is an economic history of the UK  over the last 200 years.

New acquisitions. 

Six CDs: Shiftwork by The Fall, Extricate by The Fall, Tilt by Scott Walker, Celestial by Isis, Four Classic Albums by Thelonious Monk and Winter Fragments by Tristan Murail.

The copies of my latest book have arrived! 

 New acquisition: A John Stuart Mill t-shirt.

I went out the other night and saw a grand total of THREE people wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.

Why would one wear a Che Guevara t-shirt? To stand out from the crowd? To signal how rebellious you are?

But why would one wear a Che Guevara t-shirt in this case? He was a rabid communist who supported Maoist China. He wanted to nuke the USA.

Anyway, small quotes aren’t always a good indicator of someone’s thought. Even though Che Guevara was not a systematic theorist or thinker, it is still reductive to pull out random quotes. Still, they do give us some inkling into his thought. These are some of Che Guevara’s pronouncements:

‘In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity.’

'The desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone.'

'The guerrilla fighter, who is general of himself, need not die in every battle. He is ready to give his life, but the positive quality of this guerrilla warfare is precisely that each one of the guerrilla fighters is ready to die, not to defend an ideal, but rather to convert it into reality.'

'Terrorism should be considered a valuable tactic when it is used to put to death some noted leader of the oppressing forces well known for his cruelty, his efficiency in repression, or other quality that makes his elimination useful.'

'The fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin.'

Now, let’s consider some quotes from John Stuart Mill. It IS definitely reductive to provide bite-sized quotes from Mill, as he WAS a systematic thinker and theorist. Anyway, here we go. All of these quotes come from his splendid book ‘On Liberty’ (chapters two and three):

‘The opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.’

‘Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.’

‘In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.’

‘Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters: and his circumstances or his character may be uncustomary. Thirdly, though the customs be both good as customs, and suitable to him, yet to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it.’

‘Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.’

Ok, so if you want to signal how you are such an edgy non-conformist, would you rather wear a Che Guevara t-shirt or a John Stuart Mill t-shirt? The one who wants you to be a cog in this dreary miserable collective or the one wants you to grow and develop? The one who wants you to die for the communist ideal or the one who wants you to distrust dogma, distrust customs and use your critical faculties? I am not buying – and wearing – a John Stuart Mill t-shirt to signal that I am an edgy-nonconformist, I am buying and wearing a John Stuart Mill t-shirt to counter all those people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts.

New acquisitions.

Ten CDs: 1927-1933: The Early Years by Blind Willie McTell, Runnin' Wild by Sidney Bechet, 1939-1951 by Benny Goodman, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus by Charles Mingus, Kinks by The Kinks, Apostrophe by Frank Zappa, Orchestral Favourites by Frank Zappa, Greatest Hits by Queen, Greatist Hits by Smashing Pumpkins and Rain Dogs by Tom Waits.

I earn a pittance, prices are soaring and my rent is high, so I probably shouldn't be splashing money on discs, but... hey ho. (Even if they're second-hand... And on offer.) 

I went to a talk with Melvyn Bragg this evening. I've never read any of his books (thus far), but I've really enjoyed his broadcasts on The South Bank Show and In Our Time for a very long time.

I really enjoyed the conversation, which is all about his memoir. He said that he has had health problems recently and that this would be his last book. It's all about his childhood and adolescence in Cumbria in the late 40s up to the late 50s. He came from a 'working class,' background, he always loved reading and later read history at Oxford. He also had a mental breakdown in his teenage years and talked about his love for the countryside.

I've met two writers before (Paul Auster and Iain Sinclair) who I found to be a bit cold and aloof, but Bragg was very warm. The first thing he asked was 'Do you write?' and I told him that I did. I told him that I had suggestions for programs on In Our Time and that they should really do one on Bach. He said that there are many topics that they haven't covered, that Bach surprisingly was one of them and that he' d try to remember that. He then said 'Good luck with the writing.' Well, coming from Melvyn Bragg that means a lot.