Musica, Dein Kannst Lieblich Kunst

No, I don't speak German. (My younger son does, kind of. At least he took it for five years in school.) But my high school Madrigal group -- did I ever mention I was in a madrigal group in high school? I wasn't very good, and am retroactively surprised that they kept me around -- did that song, and it's been stuck in my head ever since.

It emerges randomly for no good reason, and I can't even sing the thing because I 1) don't remember the German well enough b) can't pronounce the German even if I did know the right words, and III) I can't now sing even as well as I did in high school, which (as I noted above) was not that good to begin with.

For instance, right now, when I'm trying to introduce a Spotify playlist of some of my favorite songs of the past decade, instead I'm rambling about a german choral piece that has nothing to do with any of it. One might think I'm doing this deliberately.

One might even be right....

A lot of people do lists like this at the end of a year, but I don't really listen to enough new music in any one year to make a decent list. However, I saw that the estimable John Scalzi (of whom you may have heard) recently did one for the last decade.

And I thought: "Aha, that's a trick worth stealing." And so I did.

Since the calendar is turning over two digits instead of one in about a week, suddenly any list covering 10 years is just as good -- maybe better -- than one covering this current year. (And, frankly, it wouldn't be hard for anything to be better than this current year.) So here I am.

I'm shamelessly stealing Scalzi's shtick: only one song per performer, that being my favorite for the past decade (but standing in for a lot of other stuff, obviously), and even using Spotify as my widget of choice, since it's free. My list however, is longer than his, because I'm lazier: my initial list had 56 songs, and after a first cut I had exactly fifty, which was such a nice round number I stopped.

The widget seems to default to the order I put them in, which isn't definitive by any means. And I have no way of knowing if you will share any of my musical tastes: I go for either talky stuff or noisy instrumentals, across a few musical subgenres.

I hope you enjoy this; I was just reminded I wanted to do it by seeing webcomics genius John Allison do his list of forty albums for this year alone. And if you don't enjoy it...oh weell.

After the widget: three songs I would have added, but Spotify didn't have them.



The sadly missing:

Empty Space Orchestra, "Exit Strategy"

Yellow Ostrich, "'Til I Disappear" (the album version is longer, but this is the version I like better)


Harvey Danger, "The Show Must Not Go On" (their break-up song, released online something like a year after they actually broke up)

Book-A-Day 2018 #375: Five Rings, Six Crises, Seven Dwarfs, and 38 Ways to Win an Argument by John Boswell and Dan Starer

A lot of supposedly new things have been around for a while. For example: that quintessential piece of Internet content, the listicle.

Those used to appear all of the time in magazines -- some still do. And people would actually pay money for large collections of listicles in book form. This right here is one of them.

Five Rings, Six Crises, Seven Dwarfs, and 38 Ways to Win an Argument is a 1990 book, late in the flourishing of listicle books that followed the great modern originator, 1977's The Book of Lists. This particular version was compiled by John Boswell and Dan Starer, who have no biographies in the book itself, and organized into the usual thematic chapters.

Those chapters are organized in a lazy alphabetical list, from American Culture to Sports and Games with stops at Christianity, Eastern Religions, European History, Literature, Military, New Age, Philosophy, Politics, and Psychology along the way (along with more than a dozen others). Each chapter is arranged in ascending order, so, for example, Judaism begins with "The Four Questions" and runs up to "The Thirteen Articles of Faith."

Much of this book is still applicable and true. Some sections, though -- particularly those dealing with the then-current world -- are now outdated or superseded or just counting things no one cares about anymore. (In one of my areas of knowledge, they list the Big Eight accounting firms, which is now down to a Big Four.) Almost all of it is trivial, obviously.

One piece which is not trivial is called out in the title: Schopenhauer's Thirty-Eight Stratagems, excerpted from the 1896 English translation of his Art of Controversy. It's a depressing list for several reasons, primarily because it shows people have always tried to bamboozle others; these are all end-runs around logic and clear argumentation, and all will be very familiar to anyone who has followed the politics of any nation in any era. It's eye-opening to see them all laid out, one by one, as options to the unscrupulous arguer -- many of us could provide contemporary examples of most of the stratagems. And being able to identify them by number could definitely be useful in life: it's one way to point out bad-faith arguments. Luckily, you don't need to dig up a long-out-of-print minor book of lists: Schopenhauer is well out of copyright, so I can just link to an online version of the list. (You're welcome.)

Other than that, this is solid book of lists: full of minor quirky facts that the reader might remember for a little while or that might accidentally lodge deep in the brain to come out at some random time later. That is the joy of random facts, so this definitely does its job.

Incoming Books: End of August

I'm on vacation this week, so the usual frivolous activities are going on (shopping at IKEA for bookcases, for example). And one of my favorite frivolous activities is shopping for books, so of course I've been indulging that. I've gotten books from a bunch of directions this last week: from the library (both the you-have-to-bring-them-back kind and one unlikely book from the selling-donated-paperbacks table), from an online retailer, from a hospital-organized "book barn" (only 20 minutes away, though I'd never been there before), and from a good used book store in Harrisburg, PA, close to the site of our most intense recent frivolities. (The latter is particularly good for scholarly books; they've got a metric fuckton of art and art history, for example. But they also have a decent little graphics novel section in the very back of the basement, metaphorically behind the "beware of the leopard" sign.

So I got a lot of new books -- mostly from that book barn, since prices there topped out at two bucks. And I enjoy making lists of books, so here's what's come into the house this week:

Matter, the 2008 Culture novel by Iain M. Banks that I actually reviewed here at the time. As I type these words, I have the disconcerting feeling that I already have a slightly nicer copy of this in hardcover and may be out a whole two dollars!

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger -- I had a copy of this for years (pre-flood) and didn't manage to read it then, but now I have another chance.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black -- the first of the Quirke thrillers, by John Banville under a pseudonym. I haven't quite managed to keep up with all of Banville's novels, but I've read a lot of them -- and I've never gone backwards to read his earliest books, from before I discovered him. But the Black novels look a lot like my kind of thing, and I mostly liked what Black/Banville did with the Philip Marlowe novel The Black-Eyed Blonde.

Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll -- there was a time when I was a big Carroll fan, but I hit the point where all of his novels felt the same to me, and so I've missed his last few books. But this is one of his best, and it's a Vintage Contemporary -- and I am building a shelf of those, with a vague idea of collecting the first year or three of that series and reading them straight through.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion -- it's a modern classic, and I find myself drawn to both strong writing and nonfiction these days (and those are often hard to find together).

Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier -- one of the great collections of short humor ever written (along with Frazier's Dating Your Mom). Another post-flood repurchase, though I expect to re-read this before it hits the regular shelves.

On the Rez by Ian Frazier -- the other side of Frazier's work; this one is a serious book of reportage about modern-day Native Americans. I probably won't get to it until after his Great Plains (which I already have), but I like Frazier, and this was dirt-cheap.

Casanova Was a Book Lover by John Maxwell Hamilton -- a breezy book about books with a historical theme. I know I had a copy of this before the flood -- this very edition, in fact -- and I'm pretty sure that I didn't manage to read it before. I look vaguely askance at myself for buying the same thing twice without reading it, but a flood is certain extenuating circumstances, isn't it?

Now and Then by Joseph Heller -- a late memoir, which I have here in a UK edition for some odd reason. Catch-22 is a masterpiece, and I periodically think I need to read more Heller -- maybe this, maybe Something Happened.

The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones -- she wrote another couple of Chrestomanci novels after the first batch were collected (and I read and did them in the SFBC), which means I missed them. This is one of those; I need to fill in the holes in my DWJ reading.

Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel -- a 1997 time-travel screwball comedy. I had a copy of this for a long time, and I can't quite remember if I read it or not.

The British Museum Is Falling Down by David Lodge -- I seem to recall hearing good things about Lodge, particularly about this early-sixties comic novel about academics.

Ransom by Jay McInerney -- Another Vintage Contemporary, and this one is early enough that it's got a list of prior books in the series on the card page. It's also the mostly-forgotten second novel by the author of Bright Lights, Big City, which is interesting to me.

Emily, Alone by Stewart O'Nan -- I've read a bunch of O'Nan books, but I tend to have to space them out: they each pack a serious emotional punch, and tend not to end well for any of the main characters. (O'Nan has the writing chops of a literary writer and the cold-bloodedness of a horror writer.) I've already got this in hardcover, but I prefer trade paperbacks, so this counts as an upgrade.

Holidays in Hell, Parliament of Whores, and All the Trouble in the World by P.J. O'Rourke -- I've grumped over the last few years about the grump that O'Rourke has become over the last few years (search this blog for "P.J. O'Rourke" for the details), but he's an incisive, bitterly funny and observant reporter when he takes his ideological blinders off. These are probably his three best books, from his best period right after the end of the Cold War (when, I think, he didn't have as all-encompassing a central ideology to organize his writing around), and the ones I'd be most likely to re-read. So it's nice to have them back after the flood.

Family Resemblances by Lowry Pei -- a Vintage Contemporary from 1988, from a writer I've never even heard of. Assuming I do collect a big clump and read them, that will be the point: to read things I otherwise would never have thought about.

Last Call by Tim Powers -- one of the best modern fantasy novels by one of our very best writers. It later became the first book of a very loose trilogy -- there was a second, unrelated book, and then a third that was a sequel to both of them (though mostly the second) -- but you can ignore that (and those two books, until you've read all of the better Powers, like Declare and The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard).

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie -- his memoir of the decade-plus that he spent under fatwa. Some people think it's brilliant; some think it's self-indulgent. (My copy has a long message from the first owner on the half-title to the latter point.) I had a copy of The Satanic Verses that was in the running for my longest-held unread book: I got it when joining Book-of-the-Month Club early in my college career (around 1987), and it was still on my shelves, unopened, at the time of the flood in 2011. I miss having books like that: it's comforting to have books you still haven't read after two decades.

The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders -- essays by a current critical darling for his short stories. I've only read a couple of Saunders pieces, but I seem to prefer nonfiction these days, so this looked like the best way to sample his work. Plus: cheap!

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg -- I thought my next reading project in 2011 was going to be Silverberg's classic period (the rough decade from Thorns to Shadrach in the Furnace); I had all but one or two of those books and was figuring out when to do it. But the flood killed all of them, and I'm only now starting to re-buy those books (there are twenty-three of them) for another month like last year's Starktober. This one is the 1971 novel about a far-future society where the word "I" is outlawed.


The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux -- I'm slowly finding and reading Theroux's great travel books, and I haven't gotten to this one yet.

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn -- More humorous novels from the UK; this series has gotten a lot of critical attention, and I like funny stuff.

Get Real by Donald E. Westlake -- another potential reading project; since I did Stark's Parker novels, I feel like the next natural step would be his alter ego Westlake's Dortmunder books. But I need to track down about a dozen of them first.

Build a Better Life By Stealing Office Supplies and Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Moronsby Scott Adams -- two of the very earliest and best Dilbert books, and two of the few I kept when I cleaned out my comics-collections shelves (ironically, less than a year before the flood made the exercise moot).

Do Not Disturb Any Further by John Callahan -- I think this was the first collection of his cartoons, and it's great stuff: Callahan was the master of the tasteless joke, with every single one of his cartoons guaranteed to offend someone.

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1 by Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky -- I reviewed this a couple of weeks back, from a copy I got through NetGalley. I expect to keep reading and buying the series, so I wanted the first one in a copy I could keep.

The Trouble With Girls, Vol. 2 by Jacobs, Jones, Hamilton, and Garcia -- One of the great forgotten comic books of the 1980s (and one of my wife's unlikely favorites from when I was getting her to read some of my comics), from the pretty-darn-early days.

Chew, Vol. 2 by John Layman and Rob Guillory -- Just read the first one and liked it, so I'm moving forward.

Finder: Talisman by Carla Speed McNeil -- a standalone graphic novel in a long-running SFnal series that I keep thinking I need to read more of. (I also have one of the thick collections also on the to-be-read shelf.)

Saga, Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples -- Again, I recently read and was really impressed with the first volume, so I'm going to try to catch up.