2011 Reading and Listening

Listening highlights:

Pulse Emitter; Black to Comm; Leyland Kirby; Moritz Von Oswald Trio; Beethoven (string quartets, especially 12; piano sonatas, especially 30 played by Mitsuko Uchida); Chris Whitehead; BJ Nilsen & Stiluppsteypa; Ben Frost; Sun Araw; Jimmy Giuffre Trio; Keith Fullerton Whitman; Tim Hecker; Cordell Klier, I Believe; Tirath Singh Nirmala; Matthew Shipp (solo and in various groups); Christopher McFall & David Velez, Credence; Daniel Menche & Anla Courtis, Yagua Ovy; Twells & Christensen, Coasts; Luis Antero; Aethenor; Cleared; Birchville Cat Motel (solo/with Anla Courtis/with Matthew Bower); Mountains, Air Museum; more Beethoven (piano concertos 4 & 5; symphonies in Bernard Haitink’s recording); Stephan Mathieu; Daniel Menche, Feral; solo saxophone by David S. Ware, Peter Brotzmann, Anthony Braxton; John Fahey; Golden Retriever; Hive Mind; Sibelius (‘Finlandia’ & ‘Karelia Suite’); John Handy, Live at Monterey.

The two things that stand out in the year are, first, listening to a lot more orchestral classical music than I have before. That’s partly because I’ve had Classic FM and Radio 3 on a lot for my son, partly because I became somewhat obsessed with Beethoven. Second, I moved gradually away from my 2009-10 high-water mark of extreme noise (Daniel Menche, Lasse Marhaug, John Wiese, Yellow Swans) towards equally non-melodic and experimental but much less harsh music, often involving field recordings and often as free downloads from various netlabels. I still enjoy full-on noise (two records by Menche are on the list above, and I currently have records by Jazkamer and Skullflower on my iPod), but I’m not as focussed on it as I was.

Album of the year: 

Mitsuko Uchida, Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 30, 31, & 32—pure joy in being human. If I understand rightly, Uchida’s playing is at the ‘late Baroque’ as against the ‘full-blown Romantic’ end of the scale of Beethoven interpretation; I certainly like her lucid, conversational approach.

Reading highlights: 

Francis Spufford, Red Plenty; William Morris, News From Nowhere; Michael Jackson, Life Within Limits; Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye; John Fowles, The Magus; Robert Bates, Prosperity & Violence; Sebastian Junger, War; John Stuart Mill, Autobiography; Matthew Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands; John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs; Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence; Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild & Into Thin Air; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Joe Simpson, Touching the Void; Maurice Herzog, Annapurna; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Martha Nussbaum, essays on The Golden Bowl in Love’s Knowledge; Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’; James Joyce, Dubliners;  Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba.

The main thing that stands out here is how few of my highlights are in my own discipline. I did read a fair amount of recently published professional philosophy for work and for interest this year, but none of it really grabbed me that much.

Book of the year: 

Henry James, The Golden Bowl—a huge reading project on which I almost gave up several times, but an astonishing novel. The best account I have ever read of what it’s like to be a self-attentive self moment to moment. Has ruined me for a lot of other fiction: it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.

John Fowles, The Magus

This is an easy book to bounce off: the first-person main character, Nicholas Urfe, is intensely dislikable, and there's a lot of portentous speechifying about freedom, love, and truth. But it's compellingly written, I kept coming back to it, and I'm glad I stuck it out. In defence: first, Fowles makes Urfe a self-absorbed little shit on purpose; the point is that he is a self-absorbed little shit, and that we need to understand how and why, and to recognise a bit of ourselves in him. Second, The Magus is an attempt at an ethics of self-development, and that needs an ethically-backward character to start with. The game played on Urfe, as I read it, is an attempt to make him better: both to heal what's wrong with him, and to remake him as less selfish, cowardly, and ignorant about people, especially himself. The means used in that remaking bring up a problem I've also written about*: what if the best way to cultivate free people is violation of their freedom? What if the childhood which reliably makes self-motivated and self-commanding adults is one of parental tyranny, as for John Stuart Mill or Edmund Gosse?


Shorter me: I can see why lots of people find this and other Fowles novels annoying, but it might have been written specially for me.


* Samuel Clark, 'Kicking Against the Pricks: Anarchist Perfectionism & the Conditions of Independence' in Benjamin Franks & Matthew Wilson eds, Anarchism & Moral Philosophy (Palgrave 2010).

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: the one-sentence version

Thomas Cromwell as Tony Soprano.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

For the first couple of hundred pages, I thought this might be something special, to put beside The Name of the Rose: compelling fiction which is also valuable history, an attempt to re-enact medieval thought [1]. It isn’t. It’s wonderfully written at the sentence level, it has set-pieces both funny and bleak, and Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is a great character – appealing, frightening, sympathetic and dreadful. But Wolf Hall, finally, is high-class soap opera. It’s excellent entertainment, but it’s not more than that.

[1] See R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography, chapter X.