You’ve adjusted to the strangeness of names like Ascalaphus and Phidippus. You’ve more or less figured out who’s on which side in the ancient war between Greece and Troy. But as literary epics will do—from the ancient Greeks and Indians to the 19th century Russians—Homer’s Iliad also presents you with several logistical puzzles you must either ignore or spend countless hours trying to solve: you are given the names of major and minor characters’ hometowns, ranging all over the Adriatic, Ionian, Cretan, and Aegean Seas. Doubtless you have no idea where most of these places were.
Again and again, place names occur in rapid succession, and you’re told not only who hails from where, but who commands and conquers which city. Just a smattering of examples from Book II (in Samuel Butler’s translation):
Ulysses led the brave Cephallenians, who held Ithaca, Neritum with its forests, Crocylea, rugged Aegilips, Samos and Zacynthus, with the mainland also that was over against the islands.
Thoas, son of Andraemon, commanded the Aetolians, who dwelt in Pleuron, Olenus, Pylene, Chalcis by the sea, and rocky Calydon,
And those that held Pherae by the Boebean lake, with Boebe, Glaphyrae, and the populous city of Iolcus
“Huh,” you say, “Okay, Homer, I’ll take your word for it.” Questions of historicity aside, we can at least say that the hundreds of cities and towns mentioned in this culturally formative text did exist, or continue to do so, though it’s debatable, as Jason Kottke writes, whether “that level of mobility was accurate for the time [somewhere in the 11th or 12th century BC] or if Homer simply populated his poem with folks from all over Greece as a way of making listeners from many areas feel connected to the story.”
In any case, you need not despair of ever making sense of Homer’s bewildering geographical lists. The map above (click here to see it in a larger format) handily illustrates the world of the Iliad, showing the places of origins of a few dozen characters, with Greeks in green and Trojans in yellow. Kottke notes in an addendum to his post that “not every character is represented… (particularly the women) and… some of the locations and hometowns are incorrect.” We would welcome corrections—as would Wikipedia—if an enterprising classics scholar has the time and energy to devote to such an effort.
But for the lay reader of Homer’s epic, the map more than suffices as helpful visual context for a very complicated narrative. One defining feature of a war epic well-told, most critics would say, is that the human drama does not get lost in the scale and scope of the action. More than any other form, the epic illustrates what Tolstoy described in War and Peace as the “historical sense” that our conflicts are “bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.” But against this kind of determinism, the great poets particularize, making their characters seem not like props in a cosmic drama but like actual people from actual places on earth. Seeing the Iliad mapped above reinforces our sense of the Greek epics as genuine—if fantastical—accounts of meaningful human action in the world.
You can find free versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
Nice guys, so they say, finish last. Many of us might instinctively label such a worldview “Machiavellian,” partially for good reason and partially not. It stands as a testament to the insights of the Renaissance-era Florentine political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, expressed with great clarity and succinctness in his books The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, not just that his name became an adjective, but that it became one that remains in wide use nearly 500 years after his death. But like other such terms — “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” come to mind — its modern usage tends to come detached from its namesake writer’s original ideas.
So what did Machiavelli actually have to say to humanity? “Machiavelli’s Advice for Nice Guys,” a new animated video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life, highlights the core insight of his work: “that the wicked tend to win. And they do so because they have a huge advantage over the good: they are willing to act with the darkest ingenuity and cunning to further their cause. They are not held back by those rigid opponents of change: principles.
They will be prepared to outright lie, twist facts, threaten or get violent. They will also – when the situation demands it – know how to seductively deceive, use charm and honeyed words, bedazzle and distract. And in this way, they conquer the world.”
This line of thinking, put in such stark terms, can make Machiavelli seem like an offputtingly harsh (if quite intelligent) character. But his writing is more nuanced: he advocates not using flat-out lies and violence to achieve one’s ends, but indeed to be nice — just “never to be overly devoted to acting nicely,” an attitude he thought the West’s popular readings of the story of Jesus of Nazareth too often advocated — while always knowing “how to borrow – when need be – every single trick employed by the most cynical, dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.” Nice guys, in short, have no choice but to learn from their enemies.
You can learn more about the sometimes harrowing experiences that taught Machiavelli all this in the School of Life’s introduction to his political theory just above. He reckoned, more memorably than any other, “the price of dealing with the world as it is, and not as we feel it should be. The world has continued to love and hate Machiavelli in equal measure for insisting on this uncomfortable truth.” Machiavelli, as Salman Rushdie put it in a clip we featured a few years ago, lived in a time when Italy’s ruling families behaved “in the most ruthless way, and he wrote this little treatise about not what he would like things to be like, but how power actually works, which he observed.” Rushdie calls the negative associations with the philosopher’s name “a classic case of shooting the messenger” — something, alas, even the most good-intentioned ruler may find himself forced to do once in a while.
Standing only 4′11″ and weighing only 98 pounds, Little began playing a double bass in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1945, at the age of 16. And she continued playing that bass for the orchestra for the next 71 years, giving her the longest professional tenure with the same orchestra. Fittingly, she died onstage, collapsing during an encore performance of ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’
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It’s no secret that we love electronic music here, especially that made with the earliest instruments to hit concert stages and recording studios. The most prominent of these two, respectively, would be the Theremin and the Moog synthesizer, two devices invented by engineers who were not themselves musicians. Ironically, these have remained two electronic instruments with the most harmoniously musical voices—simulating the warmth and quavery vibrato of the human voice while also lending everything they touch an eerie, otherworldly air.
What often goes unremarked is the close, nearly direct influence of one upon the other, as David McNamee at The Guardian notes. Often thought of now as a novelty, the Theremin in its day received serious treatment in the hands of classical performer Clara Rockmore, who inspired Robert Moog, then only 14 years old, to build his own version of Leo Theremin’s device in 1948. “Godfather of electronic music” Raymond Scott took Moog’s instrument and wired it “into a keyboard-controlled contraption Scott called the Clavivox, which had a profound influence on Moog.”
Moog continued to build Theremins (a version of one went on tour with the Beach Boys to play “Good Vibrations”). But he is most famous for his synthesizers. Initially, he had “no interest in replicating existing instruments. They were machines for creating sound that sounded electronic.” Moog first designed a cumbersome studio-only apparatus, debuting in 1964, and his company’s “massive, fragile and impossible to tune” modular synthesizers had little popular appeal, or affordability. “Few of Dr. Moog’s early customers,” McNamee points out, including “sound artists, choreographers, and studios” were “interested in playing conventional melody on the instruments.”
This makes all the more impressive the achievements of Wendy Carlos, who showed the Moog’s capability for dynamic range and musical precision with her hugely popular adaptations of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven on the Moog synthesizer in 1968 and subsequent years. But by 1970, the Minimoog, the inventor’s first portable keyboard, had made analog synthesizers accessible to musicians worldwide—even though later consumer-grade instruments retained some of the odd properties of the original, like the “shonky” pitch control that sends Moogs quavering off key. (In its earliest incarnations, “making the things stay in tune seemed a low priority.”)
There’s no overstatement in saying that the Moog’s move out of the hands of elite engineers and onto the stage and rock studio changed music history forever in the 70s and 80s. Comprehensive accounts of the Moog revolution fill books and feature-length documentaries. The most direct experience comes from the music itself, of course, and to that end, The Guardian compiled the playlist above of “Moog heroes”—featuring reliable electro-stars like Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Rick Wakeman, and Herbie Hancock, as well as more esoteric Moog composers like Italian horror-film masters Goblin. Giorgio Morodor’s Moog grooves with Donna Summer are prominent, as are more recent dance hits from Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand, and LCD Soundsystem. Surprises come in the form of little heard tunes from classic rock artists, like Neil Young’s “Computer Age” (further up).
We’ll all find bones to pick with this list. Astute music nerds will notice right away that not all of these songs feature Moog synthesizers, and at least one, the Rolling Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home,” actually uses an instrument that predates Moogs, the Mellotron. One might then reasonably refer to the playlist as in some degree “Moog-inspired.” Missing here are essential contributions from Bob Marley and the Wailers and the recently-departed Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic, from the eternal grooves of African pioneers like William Onybear (top), and arguably, from Suicide and electro-psych rockers Silver Apples (who built their own synthesizer). These and other perhaps crucial omissions aside, The Guardian’s “Moog heroes” playlist more than makes its case for the historical significance and utterly distinctive character of the Moog and its imitators and musical children.
A couple of years back, we introduced you to what was considered the oldest known beer recipe–an Ancient Sumerian recipe dating back to 1800 BC. It turns out, however, that the Chinese had the Sumerians beat.
Above, you can watch Stanford students recreate a 5,000-year-old beer recipe which Professor Li Liu revealed to the world last spring. According to Stanford News,Liu and a team of researchers recently found the recipe while “studying the residue on the inner walls of pottery vessels found in an excavated site in northeast China.” As part of the course Archaeology of Food: Production, Consumption and Ritual, Professor Liu’s students recreated the discovered concoction, following this general process:
The students first covered their grain with water and let it sprout, in a process called malting. After the grain sprouted, the students crushed the seeds and put them in water again. The container with the mixture was then placed in the oven and heated to 65 degrees Celsius (149 F) for an hour, in a process called mashing. Afterward, the students sealed the container with plastic and let it stand at room temperature for about a week to ferment.
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When Federico Fellini died in 1993, New York Times obituary writer Bruce Weber made a confession: “I never cared for his movies.” In a declaration of “raging middlebrow-ism” echoed by Dan Kois’ 2011 admission of his lack of interest in “eating my cultural vegetables,” Weber writes that “Last Year at Marienbad was such a bafflement years ago that I gave up on it and fell asleep in the theater, and chances are I’ll never go back and see it again. Among windy American novels I still prefer Lonesome Dove to Gravity’s Rainbow and, to extend the argument to non-narrative forms, as innovative as John Cage and Andy Warhol were, I still hear noise and see a soup can.”
This drew a response from no less accomplished a filmmaker — and no less omnivorous a film-lover – than Martin Scorsese. The director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas found distressing less Weber’s opinion than “the underlying attitude toward artistic expression that is different, difficult or demanding,” likening it to that of a then-recent Budweiser commercial associating “foreign films” (of which we’ve previously featured Scorsese’s list of 39 essentials) with “weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?”
The issue goes well beyond cinema and Scorsese knows it, framing it not just as a matter of “film theory” but as one of “cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding.” By the end of his response, Scorsese argues not against Weber but against the very mindset that “celebrates ignorance” (and “unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European filmmakers”) by, like that beer spot, asking questions such as “Why are foreign movies… so foreign?” only to conclude, “Why ask why?”
Scorsese, in turn, closes with a few questions of of his own:
Is this closed-mindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?
If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:
Why don’t they make movies like ours?
Why don’t they tell stories as we do?
Why don’t they dress as we do?
Why don’t they eat as we do?
Why don’t they talk as we do?
Why don’t they think as we do?
Why don’t they worship as we do?
Why don’t they look like us?
The meaning of the word “library” has never been more ambiguous. When we can virtually carry library-sized collections of images, music, literature and reference data in our pockets, what are physical libraries but museums of a sort? Of course, from the point of view of librarians especially, this isn’t true in the least. Libraries are fortresses of free speech, public education, and “information literacy” at the community level. Rather than obsolete or secondary, they may be more necessary than ever.
On a larger view both of these things are true. For millions of people, physical libraries have become secondary and will remain so, but they also remain community resources of paramount importance. As Ted Mills posted here in the summer of 2015, Talking Heads frontman, “polymath and all-around swell person David Byrne” affirmed that latter status of the physical library when he leant out 250 books on music from his personal library to themselves be leant out at a library hosted by the 22nd annual Meltdown Festival and London’s Poetry Library.
“I love a library,” wrote Byre in his own Guardian essay announcing the project.
I grew up in suburban Baltimore and the suburbs were not a particularly cosmopolitan place. We were desperate to know what was going on in the cool places, and, given some suggestions and direction, the library was one place where that wider exciting world became available. In my little town, the library also had vinyl that one could check out and I discovered avant-garde composers such as Xenakis and Messiaen, folk music from various parts of the world and even some pop records that weren’t getting much radio play in Baltimore. It was truly a formative place.
Having grown up in the DC suburbs in the years before the internet, I can relate, and would add the importance of local music stores and affordable all-age venues. But Byrne has never stayed tied to the media of his youth. During his several decades as a cultural critic and arts educator, he has made ecumenical use of mundane new technologies to interrogate the status of other older forms. One recent project, for example, consisted of a 96-page book and 20-minute DVD about his experiments in PowerPoint art. One of the questions raised by the project, writes Veronique Vienne, is whether the book is “an antiquated cultural artifact” in an age of hypervisualization.
Clearly for Byrne himself, the answer is no, and that answer is closely connected to the question of commodification verses open access, whether through libraries or free online archives. “The idea of reading books for free,” he writes, “didn’t kill the publishing business, on the contrary, it created nations of literate and passionate readers. Shared interests and the impulse to create.” Byrne’s library reflects a lifetime of shared interests and creative inspiration. He himself has spent his life writing about music in spite of the clever maxim that such a venture is like “dancing about architecture.” It is, he writes, “stimulating and inspiring nonetheless.”
1. 40 Watts from Nowhere: A Journey into Pirate Radioby Sue Carpenter
2. A divina comedia dos Mutantes by Carlos Calado
3. A Photographic Record: 1969–1980 by Mick Rock
4. A Thelonious Monk: Study Albumby Lionel Grigson
5. A Whole Room for Music: A Short Guide to the Balfour Building Music Makers’ Gallery by Helene La Rue
6.Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life by Brandon Labelle
7. Acoustics for Radio and Television Studios by Christopher Gilford
8. Africa Dances by Geoffrey Gorer
9. African Music: A People’s Art by Francis Bebey
10. African Rhythm and African Sensibility by John Miller Chernoff
11. Afro-American Folk Songs by H.E. Krehbiel
12.AfroPop! An Illustrated Guide to Contemporary African Music by Sean Barlow & Banning Eyre
13. All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald S. Passman
14. Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafè by Miguel Algarin & Bob Holman
15. An Illustrated Treasury of Songs by National Gallery of Art
16. And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey by Studs Terkel
17. Arranged Marriageby Wallace Berman & Robert Watts
18. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Cristoph Cox & Daniel Warner
19. Austin City Limits: 35 Years in Photographs by Scott Newton & Terry Lickona
20. Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music by Deborah Pacini Hernandez
21. Bandalism: The Rock Group Survival Guideby Julian Ridgway
22. Beats of the Heart: Popular Music of the World by Jeremy Marre & Hannah Charlton
23. Best Music Writing 2001by Nick Hornby & Ben Schafer
24. Best Music Writing 2002 by Jonathan Lethem & Paul Bresnick
25. Best Music Writing 2003 by Matt Groening & Paul Bresnick
26. Best Music Writing 2006 by Mary Gaitskill & Daphne Carr
27. Best Music Writing 2007by Robert Christgau & Daphne Carr
28. Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
29. Black Music of Two Worlds by John Storm Roberts
30. Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific by Heidi Carolyn Feidman
31. Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music by Jas Obrecht
32. Bossa Nova: The Story of the Brazilian Music that Seduced the Worldby Ruy Castro
33. Botsford Collection of Folk Songs Volume 1by Florence Hudson Botsford
34. Botsford Collection of Folk Songs Volume 2 by Florence Hudson Botsford
35. Bound for Gloryby Woody Guthrie
36. Bourbon Street Black: The New Orleans Black Jazzman by Jack V Buerkle & Danny Barker
37. Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship by Idelber Avelar & Christopher Dunn
38. Brutality Garden: Tropicalla and the Emergence of a Brazilian Countercultureby Christopher Dunn
39. Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise by David Rothenberg
40. But Beautiful: A Book About Jazzby Geoff Dyer
41. Cancioneiro Vinicius De Moraes by Orfeu
42. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music by Mark Katz
43. Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley by Timothy White
44. Chambers by Alvin Lucier & Douglas Simon
45. Chinaberry Sidewalks: A Memoir by Rodney Crowell
46. Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk by Deborah Harry, Glenn O’Brien & Shepard Fairey
47. Clandestino: In Search of Manu Chao by Peter Culshaw
48. Clothes Music Boys by Viv Albertine
49. Cocinando! Fifty Years of Latin Cover Art by Pablo Yglesias
50. Conjunto by John Dyer
51. Conversations with Glenn Gould by Jonathan Cott
52. Conversing with Cage by Richard Kostelanetz
53. Copyrights & Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity by Siva Vaidhyanathan
54. Dancing in Your Head: Jazz, Blues, Rock and Beyond by Gene Santoro
55. Desert Plants: Conversations with Twenty-Three American Musicians by Walter Zimmerman
56. Diccionario de Jazz Latino by Nat Chediak
57. Diccionario del Rock Latino by Nat Chediak
58. Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution by Carlo Gebler
59. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussionby Mickey Hart & Jay Stevens
60. Essays on Music by Theodor W. Adorno
61. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman
62. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland
63. Fela Fela: This Bitch of a Life by Carlos Moore
64. Fetish & Fame: The 1997 MTV Video Music Awards by David Felton
65. Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim
66. Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents by Bruno Nettl
67. Folk Song Style and Culture by Alan Lomax
68. Folk: The Essential Album Guide by Neal Walers & Brian Mansfield
69. Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition by Iannis Xenakis
70. Fotografie in Musica by Guido Harari
71. Genesis of a Music by Harry Partch
72. Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman by B.H. Friedman
73. Gravikords, Whirlies, & Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments by Bart Hopkin
74. Guia Esencial De La Salsa by Jose Manuel Gomez
75. Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning by Gary Marcus
77. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity by Veit Erlmann
78. Here Come the Regulars: How to Run a Record Label on a Shoestring Budget by Ian Anderson
79. He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time by Jack Isenhour
80. Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti by Steven Hager
81. Hit Men by Frederic Dannen
82. Hitsville: The 100 Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazines 1954–1968 by Alan Betrock
83. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why by Ellen Dissanayake
84. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols
85. How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond by John Powell
86. Hungry for Heaven: Rock and Roll and the Search for Redemption by Steve Turner
87. I Have Seen the End of the World and it Looks Like This by Bob Schneider
88. I’ll Take You There Mavis Staples: The Staple Songers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway by Greg Kot
89. In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik
90. Indian Music by B. Chaitanya Deva
91. It Ain’t Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues by Paul Myers
92. Japanese Music and Musical Instruments by William P. Malm
93. Javanese Gamelan by Jennifer Lindsay
94. Jazz by William Claxton
95. Knitting Music by Michael Dorf
96. La Traviata: In Full Score by Giuseppe Verdi
97. Laurie Anderson by John Howell
98. Leon Geico: Cronica de un Sueno by Oscar Finkelstein
99. Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicolas Slonimsky
101. Light Strings: Impressions of the Guitar by Ralph Gibson & Andy Summers
102. Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music by Eric Weisbard
103. Listening Through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music by Joanna Demers
104. Listen to This by Alex Ross
105. Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany by Stephen Sondheim
106. Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Music Made New in New York City in the ’70s by Will Hermes
107. Love in Vain: The Life and Legend of Robert Johnson by Allen Greenberg
108. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture by Tim Lawrence
109. Low by Hugo Wilcken
110. Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-dirty in Seventies New York by James Wolcott
111. Macumba: The Teachings of Maria-Jose, Mother of the Gods by Serge Bramly
112. Mango Mambo by Adal
113. Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965–1985 by Charles Perrone
114. Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll by Steven Kasher
115. Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James and the Shondells by Tommy James
116. Miles: The Autobiography by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe
117. Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an imaginary Soul Superstar by Dori Hadar
118. Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” by Alan Lomax
119. Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture by Thurston Moore
120. Music by Paul Bowles
121. Music and Communication by Terence McLaughlin
122. Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters by Bob W. White
123. Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music by MacDonald Critchley & R. A. Henson
124. Music and the Mind by Anthony Storr
125. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession by Gilbert Rouget
126. Music Cultures of the Pacific, The Near East, and Asia by William P. Malm
128. Music in Cuba by Alejo Carpentier
129. Music, Language and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel
130. Musica Cubana Del Areyto a la Nueva Trova by Dr. Cristobal Diaz Ayala
131. Musical Instruments of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia with More than 4,000 Original Drawings by Ruth Midgely
132. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
133. My Music by Susan D Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi & Charles Keil
134. New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978–88 by Stuart Baker
135. Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening by David Hendy
136. Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali
137. Notations by John Cage
138. Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds by David Toop
139. On Sonic Art by Trevor Wishart
140. Opera 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Opera by Fred Plotkin
141. Patronizing The Arts by Marjorie Garber
142. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner
143. Pet Shop Boys: Literally by Chris Heath
144. Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey by Peter Manuel
145. The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the Science of Song by Elena Mannes
146. Presenting Celia Cruz by Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte
147. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs
148. Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba’s First All-Girl Dance Band by Alicia Castro
149. Recordando a Tito Puente: El Rey del Timbal by Steven Loza
150. Reflections on Macedonian Music: Past and Future by Dimitrije Buzarovski
151. Remembering the Future by Luciano Berio
152. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording Music and Its Effect on Music by Michael Chanan
153. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties by Ian Macdonald
154. Rhythm & Blues in New Orleans by John Broven
155. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: The History of Politics in the Music Industry by Steve Shapple & Reebee Garofalo
156. Rock Archives by Michael Ochs
157. Rock Images: 1970–1990 by Claude Gassian
158. Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews by Timothy White
159. Salsa Guidebook for Piano & Ensemble by Rebeca Mauleon
160. Salsa: The Rhythm of Latin Music by Gerard Sheller
161. Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City by Vernon W. Boggs
162. Samba by Alma Guillermoprieto
163. Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music by Cole Gagne
164. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman
165. Souled American: How Black Music Transformed White Culture by Kevin Phinney
166. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture by Frances Dyson
167. Soundings by Neuberger Museum
168. South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous by John Broven
169. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening: Experiencing Aural Architecture by Barry Blesser & Linda-Ruth Salter
170. Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music by Angelique Kidjo
171. Starmaking Machinery: The Odyssey of an Album by Geoffrey Stokes
172. Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer by Jonathan Cott
173. Stolen Moments: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians by Tom Schnabel
174. Stomping the Blues by Albert Murray
175. Tango: The Art History of Love by Robert Farris Thompson
176. Text-Sound Texts by Richard Kostelanetz
177. The ABCs of Rock by Melissa Duke Mooney
178. The Agony of Modern Music by Henry Pleasants
179. The Anthropology of Music by Alan P. Merriam
180. The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help by Amanda Palmer
181. The Beatles: Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn
182. The Book of Drugs: A Memoir by Mike Dougherty
183. The Brazilian Sounds: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil by Chris McGowan & Ricardo Pessanha
184. The Faber Book of Pop by Hanif Kureishi & Jon Savage
185. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places by Bernie Krause
186. The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau
187. The Kachamba Brothers’ Band: A Study of Neo-Traditional Music in Malawi by Gerhard Kubik
188. The Last Holiday: A Memoir by Gil Scott-Heron
189. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States by John Storm Roberts
190. The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock by Charles White
191. The Merge Records Companion: A Visual Discography of the First Twenty Years by Merge Records
192. The Music Instinct by Philip Ball
193. The Music of Brazil by David P. Appleby
194. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and the National Identity in Brazil by Hermano Vianna
195. The New Woman Poems: A Tribute to Mercedes Sosa by Nestor Rodriguez Lacoren
196. The Performer Prepares by Robert Caldwell
197. The Rational and Social Foundations of Music by Max Weber
198. The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl by Trevor Schoonmake
199. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa by Evan Eisenberg
200. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
201. The Rolling Stone Interviews: The 1980s by Various
202. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus
203. The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World by Trevor Cox
204. The Sun and the Drum: African Roots in Jamaican Folk Tradition by Leonard Barrett
205. The Thinking Ear by R. Murray Schafer
206. The Traditional Music of Japan by Kishibe Shigeo
207. The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art by Tim Blanning
208. The Veil of Silence by Djura
209. The Wilco Book by Dan Nadel
210. This Business of Music: The Definitive Guide to the Music Industry by M. William Krasilovsky & Sidney Shemel
211. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
212. Through Music to Self by Peter Michael Hamel
213. West African Rhythms for Drumset by Royal Hartigan
214. What Good are the Arts? by John Carey
215. White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960’s by Joe Boyd
216. Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955–Present by Gail Buckland
218. Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages by John Shepard, Phil Virden, Graham Vulliamy, Trevor Wishart
219. Why is This Country Dancing: A One-Man Samba to the Beat of Brazil by John Krich
220. Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein
221. The Rough Guide to World Music: Latin and North America, Caribbean, India, Asia, and Pacific: An A‑Z of the Music, Musicians and Discs by Simon Broughton & Mark Ellingham
222. The Rough Guide to World Music: Salsa to Soukous, Cajun to Calypso by Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, David Muddyman & Richard Trillo
223. World: The Essential Album Guide by Adam McGovern
224. Yakety Yak: The Midnight Confessions and Revelations of Thirty-Seven Rock Stars and Legends by Scott Cohen
On most issues, I’m clear about where I stand and why, and I used to find it enlightening to debate informed people who felt strongly about opposing positions. Sometimes we would get each other to budge a little bit, or—at the very least—sharpen the articulation of our views. These days, I often find myself in echo chambers, preaching to choirs, and other clichés about epistemic closure. It’s a situation that alarms me, and yet I find even more alarming the levels of cynicism, invective, bad faith, threats, and misinformation that pervade so much partisan debate.
I know I’m not alone in this lament. What we’ve lost—among other humanist virtues—is what philosophers and rhetoricians call the “principle of charity,” generally defined as making the clearest, most intellectually honest interpretation we can of an opponent’s views and arguing against them on those merits. The principle of charity allows us to have civil disagreements with people whose ethics we may dislike, and it thereby furthers discussion rather than stifles it.
We may all have our own story about who is to blame for the breakdown of the discourse, but before we start yelling at each other all over again, we could perhaps take some time to learn from examples of political debate done well. One long-running example involves a figure whose views I’ve usually found abhorrent (and some of which he himself later called “reprehensible”), but whose ability to defend them in charitable sparring matches with people from every possible place on the spectrum (or horseshoe), I’ve found very compelling.
I write here of William F. Buckley, the well-heeled, Ivy League-educated (many have said elitist) founder of the National Review. Whatever personal strengths or flaws we wish to ascribe to Buckley, we should agree on a few facts: During his tenure as the host of Firing Line—an often oppositional interview program in which Buckley chatted up conservative fellow travelers and sparred with leftist intellectuals, artists, and activists—we see over and over again that he made an effort to actually read his opponents’ views firsthand; to clarify his understanding of them; and to base his disagreement on the the arguments rather than the real or imagined motivations of the messenger.
Buckley didn’t always engage in reasoned debate: he issued many ugly personal and racial attacks in print. He threatened to punch both Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky (jokingly, perhaps). But Firing Line wasn’t only about its host: its success depended also on the format, the audience, and the quality of the discussion and the guests. Take the few examples here. At the top of the post, Buckley discusses the Vietnam War with Chomsky. The latter may be incapable of raising his voice, but notice also Buckley’s cool exterior. While his genteel mannerisms rubbed many the wrong way, whether or not we like his demeanor, he consistently employs methods of clarification and argumentation rather than personal attack (stray threats of punching aside).
Nowhere in evidence is the current style of screaming over guests with whom the host disagrees. We find similar receptiveness in Buckley’s interview with Allen Ginsberg, and even with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, whom Buckley obvious finds distasteful, and whose violent rhetoric and violent past may warrant the reaction in many people’s estimation. Nevertheless, even in this extreme case, we see how the discussion tracks along in such a way that viewers actually learn something about the views on offer. Some may be unable to countenance either participant’s ideas, and yet may come still away from the exchange examining the basis of their own position.
Buckley didn’t only debate politics. As in his interview with Ginsberg, many of his foils were literary figures, and many of them primarily discussed writing. Firing Line brought us great television like the discussions further up with Jorge Luis Borges, with Eudora Welty and Walker Percy above, and, below, with Norman Mailer. The show ran from 1966 to 1999 and owed much of its prestige to the two public television stations—from New Jersey and South Carolina, respectively—who hosted it and allowed for its rarified audience.
Though it may not have been widely viewed, Firing Line’s influence resonated widely in its impact on other cultural figures and venues. Granted, we see Buckley’s biases on display. Make what you will of the fact that—although the period of the show’s airing saw at least two waves of feminism—Buckley rarely interviewed women unless they already agreed with him. On the whole, however, throughout the show’s 33-year run its host listened to, engaged honestly with, and attempted to understand other points of view.
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by Lionel Grigson
