Abhi V > Recent Status Updates

This is what it must have been like to read Strauss or Feuerbach for the first time... orget Nietzsche: this is philosophizing w/ a hammer... how often are you impressed, scandalized, dazzled by a work of analytic philosophy? As good as it gets... I liked his YT series but had no idea he was this good...

So far extremely disappointing, like Larkin if you took out much of what was good and distinctive & replaced them with a some sophomorically aping their idea of a wild poet... almost nothing interesting, striking, or memorable — let's just hope it's only my current state of mind.....

I WILL FINISH THIS BOOK BEFORE HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the sections where he talks about specific composers are much better and I am loving now the book.....

So far extremely badly written, overwritten, woolly, French in a bad way... of course I will finish it for Shostakovich & Schoenberg but — bad!

Writing plain, professional, unliterary in a way which I guess makes sense... the promise that it would be more about the pre-election Trump is at least oversold... some interesting facts, it puts things together....

At this point repetitive, again Ehrman comes across as underwhelming as I've said elsewhere, believable but disappointingly deconstructionist... & I keep falling asleep....

sections on existentialism/American fiction and Trilling were fantastic; on Claude-Levy Strauss and the structuralists, informative; but the treatment of Pollock and John Cage as artists I find irritating, actually revolting: they are undeserving, call me hierarchical or European I guess. (I begrude to admit taste for Schoenberg.) My thoughts on the Beats and Kerouac I reserve for if Kenzie will ever talk to me again

Honestly, extremely well-written, engaging, surprisingly literary, damning yet non-hysterical... I was expecting much less and got something that would've been good even w/o low standards.... Will see how the rest goes....

Everything I have read by Gould makes me more and more suspicious, although I have seen some interviews that he has done and so I reserve . But the first sections of this book are maddening.

Good!

I liked The Importance of Being Earnest a lot

I was listening to it from an mp3 from the library... and then it expired, and now the mp3 file is... "not available"... :{