The first is Adrian Belew's latest effort, Side Two. I picked it up at a recent stop at B-Side Records. The Dulcinea and I had gone in there because I was in pursuit of another CD by The Goose Island Ramblers but, alas, there were none to be had. The clerk said that he'd heard of them but, otherwise, had no idea who they were. And so I grabbed Belew's latest. The title refers to a planned trilogy of albums. I bought Side One a month or so ago and loved it. That album features a few songs with a power-trio while the rest is Belew alone. Regardless, the album is heavy. Lots of his trademark angular guitar bursts and late-period Beatles-inspired weirdness. Side Two is a whole different beast. I'd read previously that it was to be less heavy rock and more electronica. While not a completely bad generalization, it's a bit misleading. While there are electronic beats, a survey of the album's credits immediately clued me in that there was something not quite right about the tag of "electronica". To start, there's some violin & cello plus acoustic guitar and the "roland handsonic theremin".
I'm still getting used to Side Two and didn't have it with me up north so my appreciation of it is still very much a work in progress. But I like it so far. Belew did "Dead Dog on Asphalt" when I saw him earlier this year so it was nice to have a recording of the song. There's swashes of acoustic guitar that go in and out on a few of the songs which contrasts very nicely with the drum beats and the weirdness Adrian culls from his electric guitar. It's a really good mix of everything including the kitchen sink. The lyrics are haiku-like so the whole vocal aspect is quite minimalist. The songs are more like impressions rather than complete statements. I'll definitely be spinning this CD repeatedly in the coming days.
The other purchase I made recently was R.B. Bernstein's Thomas Jefferson.
The tome has a reputation for being probably the best short bio of Jefferson and I found such a comment as I was looking over Christopher Hitchens' latest book on the same topic while on a jaunt to the bookseller with The Dulcinea. I read the introduction and the first chapter this afternoon on the ride home from Wisconsin Rapids and it's quite good so far. I'm no Jefferson scholar but Bernstein promised an even-handed account of his topic. In the small bit of reading I've done so far, Bernstein has kept to his promise.
I know that it's verboten here in Madison to be a great fan of a dead white male who owned slaves and appear on our currency, but I can't help myself. I've admired Jefferson for quite some time and this is probably due to the fact that he was a Renaissance man and bibliophile. He was a deist and not a Christian. He loved learning so much, he made his own university. On top of it all, he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Bernstein readily admits that Jefferson was a man of many contradictions concerning slavery, race, politics, et al and I also find this aspect of his character to be quite intriguing. Whatever the contradictions of his character & actions and those of the Founding Fathers generally, the fact remains that their achievements remain remarkable today – they built a country from scratch. They created a secular government sans monarch. The Declaration of Independence is the boilerplate for people today justifying their bids for freedom.
The Founding Fathers fascinate me but it is Jefferson that really captures my attention.
Along intellectual lines, I am trying to find some time to devote to a recently-downloaded podcast. It's an episode from the BBC radio programme "In Our Time". The show concerns Pragmatism. Pragmatism is an intellectual movement that was born and bred here in the U.S.. What is it about? Let me give you a quote from William James, one of the founders of the movement:
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
Another leading figure in Pragmatism is this guy, Charles Peirce.
Peirce's ideas and writing had a great impact on this guy:
That's Charles W. Anderson. He was a professor here at the UW and I took one of his political science classes my senior year. Although I had a few professors that I liked, it is Anderson that really sticks out in my mind. Whenever I hear someone complain about academics and their supposed dislocation from everyday life, I immediately encounter with my experiences with him. Although his discipline was not my major, his class was one of my favorites and I consider him to be the best professor overall that I had in college. The class was about modern liberalism. By "liberalism" here, I don't mean having lefty politics, I mean classical liberalism – John Locke and his ilk. The class was extremely interesting and it gave me a good understanding of the intellectual ideas behind neo-conservatism. (Is it permissible for a lefty like myself to say I admire some of Friedrich Hayek's ideas?) Anderson was in his mid-60s, I think, when I took his class and had been teaching for many years. Despite enduring countless business majors whining "Is this going to be on the final?", he taught with great enthusiasm. Nearly everyday I would walk into class and he'd have a big grin on his face as he just couldn't wait to present the day's lesson. He loved the material he was presenting and, perhaps most importantly, he loved teaching and discussing it. One of the books we read was of his own hand, Pragmatic Liberalism. He explained how Peirce influenced his own thinking and gave a brief intro to the movement before launching into lectures about "communities of inquiry", "enterprises", and "best practices". One thing that appealed to me about his take on Pragmatism was that is wasn't just theoretical, it was all about practice. He also touched briefly on the notion of his political philosophy as being something that can also be transposed to the level of the individual. I was pleased a couple years ago to see that he developed this notion more fully in A Deeper Freedom. I swear I wrote about this book after having read it and perhaps I'll look through the archives to find it later. It was very refreshing to read something by a political scientist which addressed how individuals can structure their lives to make them fuller and more meaningful. I highly recommend it.
And so you can see why a podcast on a relatively unknown philosophical movement is of great interest to me.
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