New acquisitions. 🙂
Seven CDs: Winterrese by Franz Schubert/Alfred Brendel/Matthias Goerne, The Stooges by The Stooges, Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson, Meet the Residents by The Residents, Merciless by Godflesh, Musick to Play in the Dark vol. 1 by Coil and Musick to Play in the Dark vol. 2 by Coil.
New acquisitions. 👍
Three CDs: Take the A Train by Duke Ellington, Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock and Selfless by Godflesh.
New acquisitions. 🙂
Three toy soldiers: A French Napoleonic era soldier, a Prussian soldier and a Napoleonic era Prussian soldier.
I've been reading some books about European history recently, so I thought that it'd be good to have some artefacts/decorations representing this interest. They are two Prussian soldiers and one French soldier. They are either made out of lead or metal.
New acquisitions. 👍
Two records: Blues in my Bottle by Lightnin' Hopkins and Just Blues by Memphis Slim.
New acquisition. 🙂
One book: Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint by Peter Sarris.
Buying this book was a terrible idea because 1) it cost a lot of money and I hardly earn anything and 2) Christmas shopping is coming up.
However, I own a book about the Byzantine empire which is only about three hundred pages and covers thousands of years. This book is about five hundred pages and covers a shorter period. It is about the emperor Justinian, who built the Hagia Sophia.
New acquisitions. 🙂
Six DVDs: Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder, Laurence of Arabia by David Lean, The Graduate by Mike Nichols, The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci, Tabu by Miguel Gomes and Embrace of the Serpent by Ciro Guerra.
New acquisitions.
A DVD box set: Alfred Hitchcock DVD box set.
Four glasses.
I received this Alfred Hitchcock box set as a present from my dad. It is comprised of six films (North by Northwest, The Wrong Man, Dial M for Murder, I Confess, Strangers on a Train and Stage Fright).
My sister came over for Christmas with her partner. She brought me these four nice glasses, which have a Chilean city/region printed on them (Atacama, Valparaíso, Santiago and Chiloe).
https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/5993530?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2dyWah3trLXx99yDkcMI6fNJHgyAq13NF86bRu1mYrStT5JUTGSG9cRBA_aem_Ae6F6Q-Go9q661y8hbCU5M9j6aOrbbuwmn2ceVBtC1CMksd-sfNOaoiysvTVY5XqW2NSMB10irkxGTQkcOsvYEDz
These are all the books that I read last year (most of them, at least - one of them is missing on here for some reason). 👍
New acquisitions
Six books: a Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Political Liberalism by John Rawls, Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick, Equality by R. H. Tawney, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes.
In this book, Wittgenstein argues that language and thought represent the world as it is. He argues that the point of philosophy is to clarify problems and that it should not speak on things without sufficient evidence. It was a big influence on the Viennese logical positivists. The book is written as a series of aphorisms. This book is quite obscure and hard to read (I often get lost just reading summaries about it), but I think that it’d be a worthy endeavour to read it even if most of it goes over my head.
Rawls here defends a liberal conception of the good life, in which he argues that government should be neutral about competing conceptions of the good life. He writes as to how people with different political and religious values can peacefully co-exist in a society.
Nozick defends a ‘minimal state’ in this book, in which ‘it is limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts.’ Each time the state does more than this, it violates rights. Any expansion of state power beyond these functions is unjustified for Nozick. He wrote it as a counterargument to Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice.’ He is a ‘libertarian’ in the American sense, but he is a lot more respected in academic circles than someone like Ayn Rand (he was a university professor, for one thing).
In this book, Tawney argues against excessive inequalities in class and wealth. He makes the case for public health and education and for the redistribution of wealth. Reading British socialists feels like being lectured by a moralising priest at times (the movement had a lot of links with methodism), but it’s still good to read a classic defence of egalitarianism.
In this classic book, Weber argued that capitalism in northern Europe arose alongside Protestantism. The Protestant work ethic, argues Weber, created the wealth and prosperity in Europe.
Robert Hughes was chiefly an art critic, but this is a history book. It is about the colonisation of Australia by Britain. It explores how convicts were transported from Britain to Australia.
I like to look at ideas from across the political spectrum and find value in all of them. If anything, I’m quite indecisive about politics and a I’m bit of an ambiguity. I prefer to be like that than to be rigidly doctrinaire.
New acquisitions. 😊
Four mugs: A mug of The Fall, a John Coltrane-themed mug, a mug Juan Rulfo-themed mug and a James Joyce-themed mug.
Two postcards: Two James Joyce-themed postcards.
I bought a lot of mugs. I bought a mug of The Fall, one of my favourite ‘rock’ groups. It has lyrics from the song ‘Totally Wired’ – ‘I drank a jar of coffee and then I took some of these…’ I bought a John Coltrane-themed mug, which has the album cover ‘Giant Steps’ on it, a marvellous album. I was surprised to find this Juan Rulfo mug online, a great Mexican writer, so I thought that I’d buy it. His novel ‘Pedro Páramo’ is one of my favourite books ever.
I went to Dublin for New Year’s Eve, so I went to two James Joyce museums. One of them was in the centre of Dublin, but the other one was in a town in the outskirts. It is located in a tower which was constructed during the Napoleonic era and used as a defence base. Joyce spent six days living there and the first chapter of ‘Ulysses’ is set there.
New acquisitions. 😊
Six books: The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt and Taking Rights Seriously by Ronald Dworkin.
This book, written in 1961, is considered to be the first scholarly account of the Holocaust. The original book is 1,388 pages long, but this is an abridged version. Hilberg considers the holocaust a unique event in history with no comparable precedent.
Orwell went to fight in Spanish civil war on the side of the republican army and this book is an account of that experience. This book helped him to define his politics, which were in favour of ‘democratic socialism’ and against ‘totalitarianism.’
Orwell here provides an account of the squalid conditions in which many ‘working class’ people lived in the north of England during the early 20th century.
Eichmann was involved in shipping Jews to concentration camps during WWII. He later fled and hid in Argentina. The Mossad, the Israeli secret police, tracked him down, took him to Jerusalem, trialled him and executed him. Arendt witnessed the trial and wrote a series of articles for The New York Times. She argued that Eichmann was not a monstruous or evil man, that he was an unremarkable bureaucrat who followed orders. She called this ‘the banality of evil,’ which was controversial at the time.
In this classic book, Arendt examines Nazism and Stalinism. She examines how these ideologies took hold in Germany and Russia and how they differed from previous forms of tyranny.
In this book, Dworkin offers a defence of the rights of the individual and how they can be protected from being crushed by a tyrannical majority.
New acquisitions. 🙂
Six CDs: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 by Charles Ives/The Ambrosian Singers/New Philharmonia Orchestra/Harold Faberman, This is the Blues by Charley Patton, Duke Ellington & John Coltrane by Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, Takin' Off by Herbie Hancock, Red by King Crimson and Diamond Dogs by David Bowie.
New acquisitions. 🙂
Three CDs: Adventures in Jazz by Stan Kenton, Trio Live: Copenhagen 1965 by Ornette Coleman and Japan 86 by Ornette Coleman.
New acquisitions. 🙂
Six CDs: Portrait in Jazz by Bill Evans, After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, Soundtrack of The Double Life of Veronique by Zbigniew Preisner, Soundtrack of Three Colours Trilogy by Zbigniew Preisner, Grand Guignol by John Zorn/Naked City and Radio by John Zorn/Naked City.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/01/paul-auster-dies-aged-77-death-american-author-new-york-trilogy
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