It's just been made official (unless the actual 'official' status requires one or two more rubber stamps (but you get the idea)) that I'll be off down to Southampton for my Ph.D. in September, to work further on Collingwood's philosophy of art. Aaron Ridley will be my supervisor. You, anosognosia, are probably the most likely to've heard of him: he works on the philosophy of art, but is also a scholar of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. I've read some of his aesthetics. I like and respect him a lot. He's written a lot on Collingwood, and seems to me similar in his philosophical approach and sympathies to (apart from Nietzsche and Collingwood) Roger Scruton, Iris Murdoch and, importantly, myself (not that I'm attributing to myself any approach as subtle and mature as these philosophers').

Southampton's department has a very strong showing in the areas that I'm hoping to work in: Genia Schoenbaumsfeld is a scholar of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, Christopher Janaway is a Nietzsche and Schopenhauer scholar, David Pugmire works on an aspect of the philosophy of emotion that I find really interesting, and of course Ray Monk is there. I don't know if Wittgenstein has any particular relevance to Collingwood, but I've always been curious about him, so I'm excited about the possibility of finally learning about him.

I'll be off in September.

1. Would you see yourself as less passionate than most people, or more so?

I guess I think this is pretty hard to judge. People can jump around more or less than others - I probably jump and laugh and so on much more than average - but whether it is a show, or excitability, or whatever, is hard to tell. In writing music or prose, I think I tend to the clear and unexaggerated and steady, and I like to think of myself that I'm moderate in many respects (e.g., politics). Certainly I suspect that my intellectualist or academic dispositions make me tend toward the understated: in life and in the music I write. But I don't know if I am any of these things. It's again hard to tell: I don't know if the academics I know are any less silly or ebullient than anyone else. I am prone to occasionally get my self-concept phenomenally wrong, and whether I am passionate or not is probably an area where I'm prone to this.

If I was to say something general and committed, I'd say something like: We all have a similar capacity to be passionate about something. Different people will be less or more obviously passionate, but that's no more than a surface difference.

2. Do you ever feel frustrated with the path you have chosen for yourself, and if so, how do you express that frustration?

Well, the word on the academic street is that only the insanely good have any hope of getting a job as an academic, and so I do occasionally feel that I'm mad to be pursuing this: I'm undoubtedly not good enough to get a good job, and probably not good enough to get any job. (It's pretty unlikely I'll even get a funded Ph.D. place.) And so I wonder if I'd've been better off devoting all my energies to music. But I don't really believe this. Whatever about the future, I certainly value my time with philosophy so far. As well as a general outlook that's wiser than it was, my understanding of art and music is much better, and I think this is really important to my relationship to music. So even if I change path, my time in philosophy will have been a good investment.

If I imagine myself in the future as a full-time philosophy who no longer has any time for music, or a full-time music teacher who no longer has any time for philosophy... Then I can imagine myself feeling incomplete or unfulfilled or something. It will be sad if it turns out that it's only because I'm young and partially supported by my parents that I can maintain a life with both, and this may end up the case. But I've not abandoned half my life yet. I think I'm a bit uncommitted yet to regret the path I've taken.

3. For you, are philosophy and music two sides of the same coin?

As I've said before, for many people philosophy is a very scientific affair, and has little connection with the deep questions of life and so on that music can have. If philosophy is that when it's at its best, then, for me, that will be very sad, because I don't know how I can do philosophy like that. But many people think it can also be a way of looking at issues of importance directly. This is what it is for me: a way of looking at the question, "What is so important about art?", say, and getting an answer to it, or showing that it doesn't need an answer, or whatever. Then I can with a clear head go about the business of creating art. So philosophy sort of makes music possible, and in that sense they're very closely related, and insofar as music gives philosophy its point, they're as necessary to each other as the two sides of a coin.

But it's more complicated than this, of course: I have other philosophical interests, and more interest in music than in writing art. But this captures a large part of my attraction to philosophy, and certainly to the philosophy of art.

4. What do you think of the idea of attachment to home and property in general?

I've actually just read a really good book by Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, which deals with issues of exile and homesickness and the peculiar feeling of hating one's home while acknowledging that it is part of who you are and so feeling that love for it in the same emotion. And this has made me think about my relation to Ireland (and to certain people in Ireland, e.g., my family) again. I don't know what to think about it now, except that I'm more aware than I was of the importance of one's home, and of the impossibility of renouncing it to any great extent.

Of property in general: it seems to me a totally different question. But anyway, I don't have much time for mine-and-thine: it strikes me as petty and mean. I think an attitude of reciprocal generosity is much more beautiful. I understand that it's not always possible, given how distant we are from each other, and given the problem of free riders, and given that different people have different needs that others might not appreciate, and so on. But in my own life I try to be generous, and I know I have a tendency to presume that I can use others' property.

5. What would you like to be remembered for?

I'm not sure I would like to be remembered particularly! If I were to be remembered as a philosopher, I'd like to be remembered for sorting out the sorry state of the discipline of aesthetics, perhaps by making everyone read their Collingwood again. (How often I have read articles riddled with stupid conceptual confusions and philistine attitudes that were thoroughly dealt with 75 years ago by that man.) But I don't think I have the capacity to do that, and in any case I think the problems of aesthetics as it stands are deeper than can be fixed by argument.

If remembered as a man by grandchildren or whoever at a funeral service, I think I would like to be known as friendly, honest, a talented composer, a good listener... uh, I guess I'd like to be thought of as intelligent too... to have had fine and delicate taste in non-art things. Dunno. A mixed bag of things. None of them are especially important.

These guys are brilliant!



This is a great version of this piece somehow: so full of life! It doesn't feel at all like the musicians are out of their depth. (Think of Fripp's attempts at playing Bach on guitar.) And then there's this!



I'm currently checking out other music by these guys, who are bizarrely comfortable playing Bach, Radiohead or bluegrass.

I've spent the last few months applying to PhDs; on the side I've been taking a holiday to Germany, being at home for Christmas playing too much Gran Turismo 5, working in Taste, and playing piano. The PhD application stuff being largely over now, I'm looking forward to having a bit more time to do other things. Perhaps I'll be on LJ more! Probably not. Although I don't miss anything on my Friends-List.

I'm loving to bits these Romantic-piano-virtuoso versions of traditional Irish, Scottish and English folk tunes.





Now I'm off to play piano myself. (Nothing like this, of course. I'm working on Debussy's 'Minstrels', the C minor prelude from Bach WTC I, Shostakovich's prelude and fugue in C, the second movement of the Moonlight sonata, and the first movement of the Italian Concerto. I've glanced at Debussy's 'Danseuses des delphes' too, and poked a bit at Joanna Newsom's '"En Gallop"', but I've had lots of trouble making the piano sound as delicate as Newsom makes her harp sound, so I'm not really looking at this any more.)

There's a pretty good album being included in Q tomorrow: various artists, including Nine Inch Nails, Damien Rice, Jack White, Patti Smith... covering the U2 album Achtung Baby, which is actually, I'm more and more confidently thinking, is a hell of an album. Some of the covers are great; more are poor; some are all right; but more importantly, they're all very interesting. You can stream all of them on the weblog Cover Me. The streaming widgits (or whatever they are) are spread over a number of posts:

The Killers do 'Ultraviolet (Light My Way)', Nine Inch Nails do 'Zoo Station', Depeche Mode do 'So Cruel'.

Damien Rice doing 'One'.

Jack White doing 'Love is Blindness'.

Garbage do 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?'

Patti Smith does 'Until the End of the World', Gavin Friday does 'The Fly', Snow Patrol do 'Mysterious Ways', The Fray do 'Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World', Glasvegas do(es?) 'Acrobat'.

I'll be in Chicago from tomorrow for a week or so. I'm unusually excited. I don't think any of you guys live there, right? If so, though, let me know if you want to meet up? Also, if you happen to know of anything especially worth doing there, then let me know about it, so that I might do it!

I've just gotten an e-mail from the internal examiner of my M.Phil., John Haldane, informing me that I've passed it. This ends a period of uninterestingly mild but still unpleasant nervousness on my part, and also makes me quite happy. Anyway, I think I can say something about what I've learned from the small amount of reflection I've given it thus far.

The two things I've learned that I feel the impression of most strongly at this point are the incredibly difficulty and vastness of philosophy, and my own mediocrity (which is not a bad thing, in someone as naturally arrogant as me).

I felt when writing everything I'd ever previously written that I didn't have the time to make it as good as I wanted, but that, had I the time, I could do the job without error. These, after all, were typically <4,000-word essays done under mild pressure. I would mentally or literally footnote essays' points with a disclaimer that I needed to defend it against certain objections, or clarify it, but that I couldn't because of the limited space and time allotted me; but I did always believe that I could do that work if I had that time. But I was given fourteen months to write the 40,000 words of my M.Phil., which is a massive amount of time to do that much work. I still managed not to have the time to make my dissertation ship-shape; but I also realised that I was nowhere near having the time to do this. Even the one chapter which was very slow and technical was, I realised later, touching on massive issues in the philosophy of language, resolutions to which would depend on massive issues in other massive areas of the philosophy of language, and so on. For the first time, I glimpsed just how big the space between seemingly naturally-following propositions can be, especially in aesthetics. For the first time, I really saw the truth of the maxim (cliché?), "In philosophy, if you're not moving at a snail's pace, you're not moving at all".

And relatedly, I became aware of just how far away I am from being able to do this in philosophy. I imagined myself, emotionally even after I knew intellectually that I was not up for this, tidying up whole philosophical debates with a single beautiful paper, in which none of the claims were substantially problematic, whatever about clarification of expression or strict logical undeniability. I felt this to be more possible by the mistakes I saw in so many philosophers' works: mistakes so blindingly obvious that even I, a mere Master's student, could pick them out. But my own M.Phil. has plenty more mistakes for its length than any of the philosophers' work whom I previously criticised. So they can't be all that stupid: because surely they see the mistakes in their work, just as I see the mistakes in mine. And they must leave them in for the same reason I did: you just have to stop somewhere, and send your unfinished and inadequate work out into the community, in order, I guess, that others might nonetheless build on it.

So anyway, I guess I'm gaining an appreciation of myself as a mere cog in a massive enterprise. I think this is a healthier self-conception.

My dissertation is finished and submitted, and I'm spending a few days or weeks taking it easy before starting on the next thing that I am doing, namely, working just enough hours in Taste (St. Andrews coffee shop) to support my playing a few hours of piano a day. Next year, if I get funding somewhere and don't change my mind again or start making money from music (however that could arise), I'll start a Ph.D., perhaps in moral philosophy or the intersection of moral philosophy and aesthetics.

But anyway, I'm spending most of this short break I'm giving myself reading (and relaxing and spending time with friends); especially, I've started reading a lot of current-events analysis. Notably, I've started reading, on onawintersday's (inadvertent?) recommendation, Glenn Greenwald's blog on Salon.com. I am - so far at any rate - absolutely loving it; and I recommend it. This is primarily what this post is doing, recommending it. Greenwald makes the same sort of erudite and furious far-left critique as Chomsky, so if you like that sort of thing, then it's especially recommended.

Relatedly, onawintersday, and also i_am_lane, you might enjoy this other blog post, from Crooked Timber.

This is probably an old thought, but for some reason it resonates with me now. Perhaps because I've felt pretty happy about the Tea Party's rise, because it seems to make it easier for Obama to get re-elected (the Democrats have more unity, more time to organise themselves, etc.), and so this is a corrective to me. But in any case, I'm wondering what people think about this. How strong is the analogy? Is there really a danger that the Tea Party could turn into something murderous?

...I am genuinely frightened by what has happened in the Republican Party. I know what happened in Germany in the mid-thirties. The rise of a large, noisy, angry, bigoted, crazy rightwing political movement may be good electoral politics for the Democrats in the short run, but it is genuinely dangerous. If [John] Huntsman's [reasonable centre-right] statements can start to change the public discourse, that is all to the good. We really do not need a rise of fascism in this country. We have gone far enough down that road already, and the weakness of the underlying economy will create the material conditions for a fascist party for some time to come.

- from Robert Paul Wolff's latest blog post

So I've got a very final draft now of my M.Phil., and I'm wondering if any of you guys would like to read it? It's 40,000 words (as many as I'm allowed), which is quite a lot, and I'll need it back by, say, the 20th of August (which'll give me a week to incorporate whatever you suggest), so you'll have less than three weeks; and, most importantly, it's not terribly good, and fails to be so because of the fairly deep reason that I'm just not that hot a philosopher, which means you might have a hard time making suggestions that will really help it. The other thing is that it's a bit technical in points, and quite deeply steeped in certain boring philosophers' debates, and perhaps not for non-philosophers. (Although some of it is.)

If you do want to look at it, then you might want to know: I'll send it to you in .docx format, double-spaced, unless you prefer otherwise (e.g., .pdf single-spaced). Ch. 2 (13,000 words), the most technical chapter, has been looked over by a handful of professional philosophers and can be skipped. I'll briefly credit you in the preface, which is no reward worth talking about, but more importantly, I'll return the favour if you want another pair of eyes looking over your, e.g., Ph.D., novel, symphony.

So if you're interested, e-mail me at jamescamien at gmail. Or leave a comment with your e-mail address. Or whatever.

This is an excellent and timely news report from the tirelessly amusing folk at the BBC. Bless 'em.

I was eating some marmalade on toast at home just now, and looked out the kitchen window, and saw that it was both sunny and raining, and thought, 'oh! that's cool!' and wandered around the house with my toast because marmalade and toast is best eaten while wandering around one's house, and I came after a few seconds to the sitting room window, which is on the opposite side of the house to the kitchen window, and saw that it was sunny but not raining! I figured the rain must've stopped, but I went back to the kitchen and saw that yes, there was still rain falling outside - so I went back to the sitting room window again (maybe it's showering?), and saw that it was still dry there! I looked out a window on a third wall in case there was some problem with the shadow of the house making the rain invisible, but the conclusion was the same. For about a minute, my house was half in rain (and by the way it was pretty heavy!), and half dry; and on both sides the sun was shining.

The weather has been totally nuts this year in St. Andrews. First there was the unprecedentedly heavy snowfall in winter; then there was the beautiful sun in April; then the unprecedented winds and general confusion in May (once - and this really deserves to not be stuffed into parentheses - it was simultaneously hailing and sunny!); then the miserable June. This is fitting in nicely to this pattern.

So, there's masses of work to be done (definitely enough to keep me occupied up to the Auguest 31st deadline): improving of extant passages as well as the addition of new passages and removal of poor ones, front-matter to be written, cross-references to be filled in, musical examples and other images to be added in, and making of the thesis into a coherent entity rather than three relatively disparate chapters, but... it somehow has enough of completion and coherence and continuity about it that I think I'm going to call it a first draft.

I'm currently experiencing this phenomenon that I experience periodically, probably because I've had two naps today and haven't slept well the last few nights. I remember getting it more when I was young, but very possibly this is because when I was young the phenomenon used to absolutely terrify me, which means I remember these episodes - which last about an hour, maybe less - very strongly. Now I know what to make of the phenomenon, so it's just uncomfortable.

The phenomenon is incredibly hard to describe. In fact, I experienced it while sitting on the couch reading, and before coming here to write about it in the hope that I would have more success describing it while still experiencing it, went to boil the kettle for a cup of tea; but it seems that the moving about has ended the phenomenon. But let me try describe it anyway.

It amounts to just this, I think: the spaces between things increases. Or, put otherwise, things that are background seem more distant and greater in size. So in reading, the page margins seemed larger relative to the size of the blocks of text they surround. Or, in looking at the sugar bowl, its shadow seemed larger relative to it, and its height seemed greater relative to its circumference (I was looking at it from almost directly above). But the nature of the sense of increase is hard to describe. Of course, if you were to somehow capture my visual field while I'm experiencing this on a camera, it would be a picture identical to the one taken in normal circumstances. I don't lose focus, nor would my estimation of the size of things change. It's probably best captured the way I captured it above: although things seem bigger, they also seem more distant, so the amount of space they occupy in my perception is not required to change for me to see them differently.

The terror of the experience I felt before is just about thus explainable: first, everything seems different; second, everything seems more distant, and so I seem to be less connected to the world than normal - some sort of chasm or crack opens up between the world and me - ; third, things' sizes in relation to each other makes less sense. Fourth, things seem to be moving and changing sizes and this dynamic effect is also unpleasant.

But this isn't a complete explanation of the emotion. The experience is accompanied by an altered sense of how my body is moving or not moving: I seem to be somehow floating aimlessly, even when very firmly attached to my couch. When things begin to seem distant, it is partly an experience of me going backwards, as well as of the objects moving backwards (relative to me); but this is not the only way in which my sense of my body's movement changes: there is also a general floating experience. 'Floating' is a very poor word to capture the experience, but I can't think of anything better.

So anyway: have you experienced anything like this? Do you know why it's happening?

I don't listen to Joanna Newsom's most recent album, Have One on Me, enough, these days. When I want to listen to Newsom I typically go to her first two albums. Ys is more perfect, and Milk-Eyed Mender has more magic. But I forget that although Have One on Me is not quite to the level of these albums, and does ramble a bit, and does have a few dodgy chord progressions, it is still an absolutely sublime album, and some of the songs are my very favourite (not just my favourite of Newsom's): 'You and Me, Bess' being the which inspired me to write this post (I'm listening to the album now). It is an absolutely perfect song.

There is of course some controversy about the rightness of international intervention in the Libyan revolution. I think Wolff has captured it pretty well in the below paragraph, taken from his most recent weblog entry.

[I]t seems wrong to leave the Libyan rebels to be slaughtered by Ghadafi, and wrong to launch yet another war. My own belief, suggested several times on this blog, is that the United States should not have an enormous imperial military establishment in the first place. It ought to have a force only large enough to protect the United States from the -- at this point minuscule -- threat of invasion. Once we build a military establishment that dwarfs that of the entire rest of the world, it is inevitable that we will find all manner of excuses for using it. The Libyan case is actually one of the very rare instances in which the United States can be said to have entered a foreign conflict on the right side, but it would be far better if we had a military force quite incapable of playing that role on the world stage. Sixty-five years of experience since World War II demonstrates that this nation is quite incapable of using its enormous military force wisely or well.

But I'm not sure; and moreover, I'm not in a position to adjudicate. And neither, according to his own admission, is Wolff. Thoughts? (There are comments on this paragraph in Wolff's own weblog, by the way.)

I have acquired my copy of Ana Gog's debut album. It is really special: great, not in the way, primarily, that a rollercoaster or rock song or whiskey is great; but in the way that meeting a new person with piercing curious eyes, who has things about which she really cares and about which she wants to tell you in such a way that you will see that they matter like she thinks they do, and who has a cute laugh, is special.

So here's the thing. You can buy the album from anagogmusic at gmail dot com. I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it's €10 excluding delivery. Something like that.

OR

You can e-mail me at jamescamien at gmail dot com, and I will (with blessing from the frontman ("Burn it to hell", he said)) burn a copy and post it to you, and I'll pay the postage (so you won't be anything out of pocket). I do this partly because all you people are pretty cool, and probably more or less deserve to hear good music; but mainly because the music is great, and should be heard by as many people as possible; and because I love the frontman, and want that people know his music.

So yeah. E-mail me.

I guess the thing about this is that it's incredibly similar to Vai's 'Tender Surrender' solo, in the sense, at least, that there's absolutely nothing going on but the totally raw outpouring of the guitarist's heart. So maybe if you don't believe that that's what's going on in Vai, you'll believe it for this. Or maybe, if you didn't know what I meant about the Vai, you'll get this, and then try to see if Vai can be seen as doing the same thing. Anyway, I have so much time for this sort of thing. It's probably sublime or something.



I sort of discovered it today, actually (although I did know it before); and I immediately waxed like this to the friend at whose house I was having dinner. She was entirely unimpressed. My musical tastes line up with my friends' here so slightly and accidentally.

This is partly for Anosognosia's insomnia, who wants guitar solos. But also partly because I'm curious about all yer opinions about this track - which is basically one big guitar solo.



My opinion is that calling it a guitar solo is missing the point. To me, it's more of an emotional outpouring, which happens to involve very fast guitar playing. I would compare it to the finale of Beethoven's Fifth sooner than to Metallica's Fade To Black's solo. I would probably compare it to Mahler if I knew any Mahler.

This talk by David Harvey about the financial crisis and what it indicates about capitalism is massively interesting, and also entertaing; and the accompanying cartoon is massively entertaining, and also interesting. (Watch full-screen!)



I understand that this is one of a series of thirteen lectures; but I don't know if this is true, and whether, if it is true, this is the first. Any help on this count will be appreciated.

A bit silly, perhaps, this idea of mine; but it is a fabulous story, and seems a nice way to mark the resignation of Mubarak, being as it is brought about by popular revolt.

( Here is the tale of the most knowing man of the most knowing race in the world. )

Perhaps you remember a while ago that I posted a video of Ana Gog's debut video, 'Doves and Fishes.' Well, they're releasing their debut album in a few days, and they've released some new songs on YouTube and MySpace to mark it.

They are superb, really superb. Check these two songs out.



'Before the Evening Comes'. (MySpace link (embedding doesn't work?).)

They're also playing a tour to promote the album. I recommend this a lot; I've seen them once or twice, and they have a great stage presence. They're playing in Galway's Róisin Dubh on Tuesday 15th, and Dublin's Crawdaddy the following night (the 16th). This means you, Ideealisme. (They're also playing Cork and somewhere else, but I don't think anyone who reads this lives near those places.)

So as either inebriation or the time of night loosens my tongue - I come home every day, as I've said here before, via the Lade Braes forest path. It is always incredibly beautiful, and I always see new things to be delighted by. When walking home at night, as I did just now, the walk, especially when, as tonight, there is little moon and little cloud, is a very dark one; I tonight found my way through the light of, so far as I could work out, the stars. The path was often lit up by a faint silveriness, or I knew I was on track because I was walking parallel to the river which reflects light very strongly, or I glimpsed a bit of a path-side bench and so knew I was on track, or I just felt that I was in the right place.

What the lack of light means, apart from this difficulty in navigation, is that very subtle images, or scenes, become visible. At one point tonight, I looked across the small river-made valley along which Lade Braes runs to some trees on the top of the other side, and saw the dark blue sky, with a hint of silver rising up from the horizon, shine through them; and it was very beautiful, these almost-black stalks alternating with the navy star-speckled light. I wished I could share the sight. And I wished I could share it with one person in particular. But because of what would be on my mind if I was walking home with her, I don't know if I could ever share with her simply the patient, comfortable appreciation of that sight.

And I think of how I could share it with other people; but I always think that, if I was with him, or her, or them, my thoughts would be of this, or that, or the other; and never of just how beautiful that sight is. And so I guess it has to stay private. I wish this wasn't so. But I don't know what I could do to make it otherwise.

The new blogthing Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science (APPS), which is very good, has finally decided to post something about art, and I've been listening to the radio station Radio Paradise today, which is also very good! The music tends to be, probably, indie, with a tendency toward indie rock, if that's a genre people use. There're no ads, and the quality of the music is very good. Of course, if indie rock isn't your thing, this won't be either. But the DJ clearly cares about the music, and has good taste. So check it out.

I've just been assigned my secondary supervisor for my M.Phil.

Roger Scruton.

So some of you might be interested in a new downloadable album of covers of Joanna Newsom songs, Versions of Joanna, which is available for a $10 donation to Oxfam's Pakistan flood relief efforts on the site behind the link above. I bought it today and I've listened to sixteen of the twenty-two songs on the album, and so far, it's well worth your money if you're interested in Newsom, introducing yourself to new musicians, or giving $10 to Oxfam. Some of the songs are a bit dud, but most are very interesting, and some are really special. I'm quite excited for another reason: I'm definitely going to look into some of the artists on the album, and I expect I will find my First New Music of 2011 by doing so.

In other news, I've finished Collingwood's The Principles of Art, and am now going to undertake the exciting task of proving it wrong enough that I can say something that's the same in a way but that sounds different enough that it appears to merit my writing 40,000 words. But seriously, I cannot recommend this book highly enough to those of you who read this and who are deeply interested in art. It really nails the question of what's so special about art. And it does so in such an undramatic and clear way. It's extraordinary.

(In yet other news, I'm still trying to work out whether to ditch philosophy for music. I think I'm somewhere between 90% sure that I do and 90% sure that I don't. (This really isn't news, I guess: this is how I think I've felt for most of my adult life (what little of it there has been).))

I'm reading R. G. Collingwood's The Principles of Art for college. It's one of the best works of philosophy I've read in a long time, and may well be the best work on aesthetics I've ever read. It is softly spoken genius, and often extremely witty, in its gentle, dry English way. One of the passages that made me laugh aloud is this part of a footnote (p. 145 of my edition):

The man in the street thinks that [traditional use of perspective, etc., has been abandoned in Cézanne et al] because these modern fellows can't draw; which is like thinking that young men of the Royal Air Force career about in the sky because they can't walk.

This is the second (and final) movement of Beethoven's 32nd piano sonata, Op. 111. It's his last piano sonata. It seems a good farewell to the medium, and is one of my favourite pieces. The whole thing is incredible, but especially listen out for the bit that foreshadows jazz by 180 years. (But don't look out for it too carefully; it doesn't come out as strong as possible in this recording, and it's superb however you interpret the bit that I'm interpreting as a foreshadowing of jazz.)



Glenn Gould is on piano.

Behind the cut are pictures of Taste, the coffee shop where, last year, I visited probably every single day, sometimes for hours on end, and where, this year, I work as a barista. This is one of the best jobs there could be; partly because evening shifts (6pm-10pm) are often extremely quiet, with no-one there but someone quietly working on a Mac in the corner and a friend leaning against the counter chatting with me; but in large part also because I get to pick the music. I love my music immensely, and so the ability to share it with people gives me great joy. And people do listen: I often get enquiries and compliments. I even met (well, I slightly knew her before) a girl who, when she heard me playing an album of Chick Corea and Hiromi, asked whether it was Chick she was hearing. And I thought - only shop speakers, and him playing with another pianist, and over ambient sounds, and she can still discern Chick's playing! - what a wonderful person! (For all the astounding wondrousness of the people in St. Andrews, finding people competent in classical music or jazz (or Tolstoy, with which she later indicated familiarity) has so far proved impossible. I don't think I know more than three other people - and I mean know pretty minimally here - who would even recognise his name. So I really rather want to get to know her better.)

( Read more... )