Murmuring About All Sorts Of Jibba-Jabba
In spite of myself, I'm starting to develop a fondness for R.E.M.
My listening habits over the last week have been dominated mostly by early Roxy Music (in particular their first record and "Country Life"), Wire, and Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures". In the middle of all this 1970's arty goodness, R.E.M. has managed to sneak in ninja style into my ear-drums. I used to outright hate them, with the same knee-jerk reflexive hate that many of my close friends display towards The Smiths. I started to come around when I picked up a copy of "Document". I liked half of the record, but the rest of it just didn't penetrate. I tried downloading a lot of their "hits", and promptly wanted to stab myself in the face. Nothing short of a bag full of crisp, brand-new American greenbacks, an envelope full of even crisper Euros, and an enthuaistic blowjob will convince me to give "Stand" another listen. I did buy "Murmur" used, and that has been the record that I've kept coming back to over the last few days. Plus: I've managed to sneak "Life's Rich Pageant" on the disc changer at work a couple of times, and few things are as enjoyable as shelving books to the sound of "Fall On Me" (I must admit that a part of me started having paranoid day dreams about getting crushed underneath a toppled-over bookcase whenever the pleading "faaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll on meeeeeeee" chorus came up). The odds of me ever declaring them the best American indie band of the 80's (something I've heard/read from many otherwise sensible people) is still next to nil, but I'm starting to hear the appeal of their older records.
In other news:
Reading message boards on the Net can wreak havoc on one's mental self-esteem. After perusing a lot of the older threads in some of the sites I visit, I've come to the conclusion that I need to start hitting the books with a vengeance, because my brain right now is the puny guy on the beach and I've read the writing of a lot of people who are the electronic equivalent of Charles Atlas kicking sand in my face.
A part of this is due to the fact that I miss going to school. I don't miss the busy work, the research papers, the MLA formatting, or the teachers with absolutely no discernable personalities. I do miss, however, the intellectual reality checks that interacting with other students brings. Whenever I used to enter classes that revolved around subjects I'm interested in (be it philosophy, creative writing, religious studies, etc), I always walked into the first day with a hot shit attitude, convinced that I was the homo superior sitting in a room full of well-meaning Cro Magnons. The first month of all those classes basically involved my ass being wiped into shape, as I would be shown up over and over again as not being nearly as smart as I had previously imagined. By the time I left those classes, however, I had often learned enough to justify my arrogance. It's a terrible character trait in many regards, that cockiness, and I am happy to say that I've mellowed slightly over the last couple of years. Unfortunately, without the sink-or-swim immediacy of a class room environment to motivate me, I haven't pursued certain subjects (i.e. philosophy) rigorously enough. It pains me now to realize how ignorant I am in those subjects.
I noticed that our store has a large selection of the "Introducing..." primer philosophy books from Icon. With my employee discount factored in, they're insanely cheap. The last real philosophy book I've read in the last two years was Foucault's "History Of Sexuality" Vol. 3; since then, I've come up with innumerable excuses to not continue studying philosophy. I still read up on current events, political theory, occultism and metaphysics, but anything that had words like "dialectical" and "post-Hegelian" or "Derrida whatever" I avoided like the plague. As much as I like big words, the dense academic jargon of a lot of philosophical works was too much for me; I often felt that the language got in the way of the ideas, which was what I was interested in in the first place (for me, reading some philosophical texts is as frustrating as trying to crack open a walnut that has a steel shell, or licking an infinitely lickable Tootsie Pop, never to taste the chewy goodness of its center). I figured that I would give the Icon books a shot. As much as I hate primers and Cliff Notes and the like, the thoughts of cracking open Kant or reading up on semiotics without a map and a flashlight gives me the heebie-jeebies. So I grabbed a copy of every "Introducing" title we have in store, and I have them stashed away in my hold-cube for pay-day. Right now I have the following on hold: Rousseau, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Cultural Studies, Descartes, Kant, Postmodernism, Plato, Romanticism, Sartre, and Nietzsche. I bought Introducing Philosophy, Ethics, and Sociology before leaving the store. I'm going to try and go through all of them within the next few weeks. Hopefully, the intros will spark my interest enough to take the plunge and get the words straight from the horse's mouth. At the very least, I hope that they will at least give me enough of an understanding of their subjects that I don't feel as ignorant about philosophy as I do right now.
And that, monsieurs + madames, is that.
My listening habits over the last week have been dominated mostly by early Roxy Music (in particular their first record and "Country Life"), Wire, and Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures". In the middle of all this 1970's arty goodness, R.E.M. has managed to sneak in ninja style into my ear-drums. I used to outright hate them, with the same knee-jerk reflexive hate that many of my close friends display towards The Smiths. I started to come around when I picked up a copy of "Document". I liked half of the record, but the rest of it just didn't penetrate. I tried downloading a lot of their "hits", and promptly wanted to stab myself in the face. Nothing short of a bag full of crisp, brand-new American greenbacks, an envelope full of even crisper Euros, and an enthuaistic blowjob will convince me to give "Stand" another listen. I did buy "Murmur" used, and that has been the record that I've kept coming back to over the last few days. Plus: I've managed to sneak "Life's Rich Pageant" on the disc changer at work a couple of times, and few things are as enjoyable as shelving books to the sound of "Fall On Me" (I must admit that a part of me started having paranoid day dreams about getting crushed underneath a toppled-over bookcase whenever the pleading "faaaaaaaaaaalllllllllll on meeeeeeee" chorus came up). The odds of me ever declaring them the best American indie band of the 80's (something I've heard/read from many otherwise sensible people) is still next to nil, but I'm starting to hear the appeal of their older records.
In other news:
Reading message boards on the Net can wreak havoc on one's mental self-esteem. After perusing a lot of the older threads in some of the sites I visit, I've come to the conclusion that I need to start hitting the books with a vengeance, because my brain right now is the puny guy on the beach and I've read the writing of a lot of people who are the electronic equivalent of Charles Atlas kicking sand in my face.
A part of this is due to the fact that I miss going to school. I don't miss the busy work, the research papers, the MLA formatting, or the teachers with absolutely no discernable personalities. I do miss, however, the intellectual reality checks that interacting with other students brings. Whenever I used to enter classes that revolved around subjects I'm interested in (be it philosophy, creative writing, religious studies, etc), I always walked into the first day with a hot shit attitude, convinced that I was the homo superior sitting in a room full of well-meaning Cro Magnons. The first month of all those classes basically involved my ass being wiped into shape, as I would be shown up over and over again as not being nearly as smart as I had previously imagined. By the time I left those classes, however, I had often learned enough to justify my arrogance. It's a terrible character trait in many regards, that cockiness, and I am happy to say that I've mellowed slightly over the last couple of years. Unfortunately, without the sink-or-swim immediacy of a class room environment to motivate me, I haven't pursued certain subjects (i.e. philosophy) rigorously enough. It pains me now to realize how ignorant I am in those subjects.
I noticed that our store has a large selection of the "Introducing..." primer philosophy books from Icon. With my employee discount factored in, they're insanely cheap. The last real philosophy book I've read in the last two years was Foucault's "History Of Sexuality" Vol. 3; since then, I've come up with innumerable excuses to not continue studying philosophy. I still read up on current events, political theory, occultism and metaphysics, but anything that had words like "dialectical" and "post-Hegelian" or "Derrida whatever" I avoided like the plague. As much as I like big words, the dense academic jargon of a lot of philosophical works was too much for me; I often felt that the language got in the way of the ideas, which was what I was interested in in the first place (for me, reading some philosophical texts is as frustrating as trying to crack open a walnut that has a steel shell, or licking an infinitely lickable Tootsie Pop, never to taste the chewy goodness of its center). I figured that I would give the Icon books a shot. As much as I hate primers and Cliff Notes and the like, the thoughts of cracking open Kant or reading up on semiotics without a map and a flashlight gives me the heebie-jeebies. So I grabbed a copy of every "Introducing" title we have in store, and I have them stashed away in my hold-cube for pay-day. Right now I have the following on hold: Rousseau, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Cultural Studies, Descartes, Kant, Postmodernism, Plato, Romanticism, Sartre, and Nietzsche. I bought Introducing Philosophy, Ethics, and Sociology before leaving the store. I'm going to try and go through all of them within the next few weeks. Hopefully, the intros will spark my interest enough to take the plunge and get the words straight from the horse's mouth. At the very least, I hope that they will at least give me enough of an understanding of their subjects that I don't feel as ignorant about philosophy as I do right now.
And that, monsieurs + madames, is that.