Perhaps not of interest to you personally, but this speaks to the importance of Louisiana as the birthplace of Homer Flynn of The Residents (and perhaps, in part, their nonsense lyrics and savage mockery of the Beatles).
This is indeed Capek, and indeed “On Literature”--I encountered it in the Karl Capek reader this summer. A charming volume but a tragic one, ending with his resolute defense of liberalism and humanism on the eve of appeasement
Bravo. I hope the book you're writing is a Morley-toppling work on popular music, and that you took the tip I gave you a few comments back.
For me, Chuck Berry is the devil in rock'nroll even if he is the one who handed it to the Beatles and onto Rock. He mashed up the genres - jump and latin jazz, country and blues - to create something new and fluid - he worked out a formula, but also the formula for varying it so it never sounded repetitive. For the first 28 sides - then he destroyed it with a thoroughness few artists have achieved, when he died you had to dig deep to find it again.
"the art-form began to degrade at the moment certain artists, notably British ones, started getting the peculiar idea that rock lyrics must be meaningful"
Recommend the book - How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, by Elijah Wald. Only the last chapter deals with the Beatles destroying R&R (I think Bob Dylan gets some blame too), most of the book is a good history of American pop.
Thank you for bringing up Karel Čapek. I loved your mentioning Hrabal (it took me back to a book I loved, "Too Loud a Solitude") I also believe that music structures our world before we learn how to talk. Music, kind of a mother. And I share your yawn at that "sweet and redemptive" group. It´s always great reading you.
I absolutely adore Latour - just a few days before I heard of his death I was thinking of reading "We Have Never Been Modern" and I thought, well, I can read that later?
What is your opinion on "French theory"? I mean like Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, Badiou, Latour. It seems to me as an Anglophone (who wants to learn French) that these authors have been misinterpreted and distorted for American academia, and distorted even more and misunderstood by their critics - so Derrida becomes a relativist, etc. But I wonder what you think of them. (Personally I like Deleuze, and he's been a great stimulation for me to go deeper into both art/literature and mathematics)
Perhaps not of interest to you personally, but this speaks to the importance of Louisiana as the birthplace of Homer Flynn of The Residents (and perhaps, in part, their nonsense lyrics and savage mockery of the Beatles).
This is indeed Capek, and indeed “On Literature”--I encountered it in the Karl Capek reader this summer. A charming volume but a tragic one, ending with his resolute defense of liberalism and humanism on the eve of appeasement
The position that we can seperate the art from the artist, entered the critical
discourse via T. S. Eliot and the New Critics. Paraphrasing Eliot he said when evaluating
a text we should seperate the man who suffers from the words of the text. Tall order.
However, the New Critics did bequeath to us a useful tool with which to read literature, namely close reading.
Thank you as always for an enthralling essay. If you do decide to take a deep dive on " Sussudio" let us know the results.
Bravo. I hope the book you're writing is a Morley-toppling work on popular music, and that you took the tip I gave you a few comments back.
For me, Chuck Berry is the devil in rock'nroll even if he is the one who handed it to the Beatles and onto Rock. He mashed up the genres - jump and latin jazz, country and blues - to create something new and fluid - he worked out a formula, but also the formula for varying it so it never sounded repetitive. For the first 28 sides - then he destroyed it with a thoroughness few artists have achieved, when he died you had to dig deep to find it again.
https://witchdoctor.co.nz/index.php/2022/05/64363/
"the art-form began to degrade at the moment certain artists, notably British ones, started getting the peculiar idea that rock lyrics must be meaningful"
Recommend the book - How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, by Elijah Wald. Only the last chapter deals with the Beatles destroying R&R (I think Bob Dylan gets some blame too), most of the book is a good history of American pop.
Thank you for bringing up Karel Čapek. I loved your mentioning Hrabal (it took me back to a book I loved, "Too Loud a Solitude") I also believe that music structures our world before we learn how to talk. Music, kind of a mother. And I share your yawn at that "sweet and redemptive" group. It´s always great reading you.
I absolutely adore Latour - just a few days before I heard of his death I was thinking of reading "We Have Never Been Modern" and I thought, well, I can read that later?
What is your opinion on "French theory"? I mean like Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, Badiou, Latour. It seems to me as an Anglophone (who wants to learn French) that these authors have been misinterpreted and distorted for American academia, and distorted even more and misunderstood by their critics - so Derrida becomes a relativist, etc. But I wonder what you think of them. (Personally I like Deleuze, and he's been a great stimulation for me to go deeper into both art/literature and mathematics)