With a harbor view, a teataster samples from cups spread upon a table in Baltimore, Maryland, September 1964.
Photograph by Bates Littlehales, National Geographic
This is my backup career in case philosophy doesn’t work out.
I'm Daniel Harris and this is my personal blog. You can also visit my home page, send me email, or find me on twitter.
Suppose I ask ‘What is the point of doing so-and-so?’ For example, suppose that I ask Old Father William ‘What is the point of standing on one’s head?’ He replies in the way that we know. Then I follow this up with ‘What is the point of balancing an eel on the end of one’s nose?’ And he explains. Now suppose I ask my third question ‘What is the point of doing anything—not anything in particular, but just anything?’ Old Father William would no doubt kick me downstairs without the option. But lesser men, raising this same question and finding no answer, would very likely commit suicide or join the Church. (Luckily, in the case of ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ the effects are less serious, amounting only to the writing of books.)
— J.L. Austin, ‘The Meaning of a Word’
Party talk. (The New Yorker, 4/8/1961. Barney Tobey, 1906-1989)
Colin Stetson: The Stars in His Head (Dark Lights Remix)
Check out how he makes this beautiful music:
A friend of mine bought me a copy of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving from the used book store in our home town. As I remember it, the book had been placed in the Self Help section, probably due to some combination of its gaudy pink cover, its title, and the hilarious subtitle that the publisher had no-doubt appended specifically to cash in on the self-help craze at the time:
The world-famous psychoanalyst’s daring prescription for love.
Here is a particularly brilliant sample of what’s inside:
Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl — and for the woman an attractive man — are the prizes they are after. “Attractive” usually means a nice package of qualities hich are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious — today he has to be social and tolerant — in order to be an attractive “package”. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they gave found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and labor market.
Every time I think about the book, I become giddy from imagining people over America picking up the book in order to get over a messy divorce or whatever and unwittingly being radicalized by its contents.
Oliver Messiaen and Jonny Greenwood
Here’s Oliver Messiaen’s ‘Louange a L’Eternité de Jesus’, which is part of his 1941 Quartet for the End of Time:
And here’s Jonny Greenwood’s ‘Moon Trills’, which is part of his soundtrack to Bodysong.
Greenwood has sometimes cited Messiaen as an influence (also here), but this goes beyond that and into homage. Both are very beautiful.
(This guy seems to be the only other person to notice the similarity publicly.)
