Bound to cover just a little more ground. Looking forward to that Gen-X essay. I'm just finishing edits on my memoir - Underground Jungle: A Psychedelic Gen-X Memoir. Lots of em dashes. ❤️
It's always great to read your work. I'm wondering if you've read Charles Taylor? I finished Cosmic Connections, very good mostly about Poetry and our search for the cosmic, which Ted Gioia recommends as a book in the revivalist slow down cannon he calls "New Romanticism." Now reading Taylor's The Secular Age--thought you might like his discussion on disenchantment. I know you've explored elsewhere that magical thinking hasn't gone away and crops up in Qanon etc for shitsake. On music, I'm reading an amazing book by Joe Boyd called And The Roots of Rhythm Remain--I'm thru over half this sweeping tale about the history of music and how rhythms all across the globe evolve and revolve culture. As someone long into world music, highly recommend it and it's spurring on more of my own non AI encyclopedic Spotify Playlisting. The chapters on Afro-Cuban, Jamaican, Roma-Gypsy world music are fantastic. I just got to him discussing the history of the Bulgarian Slavic record the same day I read your notes--synchronicity :) Hope to catch your Dharma Dead talk, but I'll be camping. Maybe I can pay for the zoom and still be able to catch it...
I remember I got Cosmic Connections from the library right when it came out, so finishing it in two weeks didn't happen. I've been looking to return to it.Glad you reminded me of it. Smart to connect him to Gioia, which I've also been meaning to read. Do you have a Gioia book you'd recommend starting with?
I've also recently turned to the classics as an antidote to the hectic pace of contemporary media. I've recently reread Karamazov (very different on second reading but still impressive and wonderful. Now reading Musil's man without qualities whose exquisite style I find to stand in quite a perfect contrast to our current reality, while also being quite relevant
I’m just wrapping up The Brothers Karamazov. I finally got to it after teaching Megan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. She helped me feel situated in the concerns, those grand narratives old and new. I want to float through the criticism of TBK a bit. I found some older volumes from the library. One has DH Lawrence and a few others offering their take.
I found the scenes early on, when Zosima advises many, including Fyodor Pavlovich, about lying to themselves or others resonated deeply with me. Stated here out of context the advice feels sort of obvious, but situated within the consciousness of those characters his advice about self deception struck me as quite profound.
Bound to cover just a little more ground. Looking forward to that Gen-X essay. I'm just finishing edits on my memoir - Underground Jungle: A Psychedelic Gen-X Memoir. Lots of em dashes. ❤️
It's always great to read your work. I'm wondering if you've read Charles Taylor? I finished Cosmic Connections, very good mostly about Poetry and our search for the cosmic, which Ted Gioia recommends as a book in the revivalist slow down cannon he calls "New Romanticism." Now reading Taylor's The Secular Age--thought you might like his discussion on disenchantment. I know you've explored elsewhere that magical thinking hasn't gone away and crops up in Qanon etc for shitsake. On music, I'm reading an amazing book by Joe Boyd called And The Roots of Rhythm Remain--I'm thru over half this sweeping tale about the history of music and how rhythms all across the globe evolve and revolve culture. As someone long into world music, highly recommend it and it's spurring on more of my own non AI encyclopedic Spotify Playlisting. The chapters on Afro-Cuban, Jamaican, Roma-Gypsy world music are fantastic. I just got to him discussing the history of the Bulgarian Slavic record the same day I read your notes--synchronicity :) Hope to catch your Dharma Dead talk, but I'll be camping. Maybe I can pay for the zoom and still be able to catch it...
I remember I got Cosmic Connections from the library right when it came out, so finishing it in two weeks didn't happen. I've been looking to return to it.Glad you reminded me of it. Smart to connect him to Gioia, which I've also been meaning to read. Do you have a Gioia book you'd recommend starting with?
Cool. Ted Gioia's substack is great. And reading his History of Jazz, read his book on Music a Subversive History, and Healing Songs.
I've also recently turned to the classics as an antidote to the hectic pace of contemporary media. I've recently reread Karamazov (very different on second reading but still impressive and wonderful. Now reading Musil's man without qualities whose exquisite style I find to stand in quite a perfect contrast to our current reality, while also being quite relevant
The dharma and the dead talk sounds fantastic!
Thanks, Erik! Great stuff as always…
I’m just wrapping up The Brothers Karamazov. I finally got to it after teaching Megan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. She helped me feel situated in the concerns, those grand narratives old and new. I want to float through the criticism of TBK a bit. I found some older volumes from the library. One has DH Lawrence and a few others offering their take.
I found the scenes early on, when Zosima advises many, including Fyodor Pavlovich, about lying to themselves or others resonated deeply with me. Stated here out of context the advice feels sort of obvious, but situated within the consciousness of those characters his advice about self deception struck me as quite profound.
High Weirdness is my brisket right now.