Someone Stop The Ludwig Van
...I wanna get out.
Mikey is working hard today on the discussion section of his dissertation, and therefore needs a relief pitcher1 to come in and help him keep you well entertained. Or perhaps, well, entertained. Regardless of punctuation issues, I am sadly low on content of late (although I have plenty of ideas bouncing about in me head meats, most of them just aren't Mom friendly - hi Mike's mom!), so I'll need some help from England's The Guardian newspaper.
That is, I am enlisting the help of Dr. Dylan Evans, a senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England, and general fuddy-duddy killjoy, to explain why it is when Mikey plays Beethoven in the background while he writes his productivity declines and he descends into a pit of personal despair and inutility.
You see, apparently Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan:
The point is, Mike, turn off the Beethoven and let Bach's "exuberant commitment to the Enlightenment values of clarity, reason, optimism and wit" wash over you and write you magnificent bastard, WRITE LIKE THE WIND!
I am mindful that I feel: sullenly adolescent, dark and frenzied
On the iPod: Nurse with Wound - Soliloquy for Lilith
1 This and "end run" are the only sports metaphors I can use or understand with any accuracy or comprehension. Before you think less of me as a man, understand that I am great with war metaphors and double entendre.
Mikey is working hard today on the discussion section of his dissertation, and therefore needs a relief pitcher1 to come in and help him keep you well entertained. Or perhaps, well, entertained. Regardless of punctuation issues, I am sadly low on content of late (although I have plenty of ideas bouncing about in me head meats, most of them just aren't Mom friendly - hi Mike's mom!), so I'll need some help from England's The Guardian newspaper.
That is, I am enlisting the help of Dr. Dylan Evans, a senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous systems at the University of the West of England, and general fuddy-duddy killjoy, to explain why it is when Mikey plays Beethoven in the background while he writes his productivity declines and he descends into a pit of personal despair and inutility.
You see, apparently Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan:
Beethoven certainly changed the way that people thought about music... for the worse. From the speculations of Pythagoras about the "music of the spheres" in ancient Greece onwards, most Western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.Dr. Evans continues on and claims that it is Beethoven's morbid self-obsessive "darkness" that has spoiled music, wrought untold figurative and literal violence upon the world, and done more to destroy the culture of life than any other human effort ever. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration of Evans' thesis, but I'm not too far off the mark.
This was a ghastly inversion that led slowly but inevitably to the awful atonal music of Schoenberg and Webern. In other words, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven's fault. Schoenberg was simply taking Beethoven's original mistake to its ultimate, monstrous, logical conclusion. [Emphasis added]
The point is, Mike, turn off the Beethoven and let Bach's "exuberant commitment to the Enlightenment values of clarity, reason, optimism and wit" wash over you and write you magnificent bastard, WRITE LIKE THE WIND!
I am mindful that I feel: sullenly adolescent, dark and frenzied
On the iPod: Nurse with Wound - Soliloquy for Lilith
1 This and "end run" are the only sports metaphors I can use or understand with any accuracy or comprehension. Before you think less of me as a man, understand that I am great with war metaphors and double entendre.
posted by An Adversary at 9:28 AM
8 Comments:
Interesting. I was wondering why Beethoven wasn't helping. And here I thought that any and all classical music would have created an environment in which my writing would have been at its most efficient. Unfortunately, I have no J.S. Bach to add to my music library. I will have to search for some other thesis writing-happy form of music.
KoRn has actually been rather conducive to the creative process. Anyone who has heard "A.D.I.D.A.S." realizes that this musical group definitely is in tune with the 'culture of life.'
Thanks for the info.
You've got to see the video for A.D.I.D.A.S. to fully grasp the far-reaching implications of KoRn's pro-life stance.
I find Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to be very conducive to thesis writing, myself..........
Bismillah! no/we will not let you go/let him go!
I highly recommend the Glenn Gould recording of The Goldberg Variations. I realize these were written to help some rich guy deal with his insomnia, but for me they help me focus on what I'm supposed to be doing, rather than on all the things I could be doing while I procrastinate.
-Jocelyn
I can't hear the Glenn Gould recording of the Goldberg Variations without thinking of the scene in Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lecter beats the two police officers to death (it's not a nonsequitur, it was playing in the background). But I'm positive that Mikey won't have any similarly intrusive mental disturbances.
Right, Mike?
Dude, you're disturbed.
.
.
.
Why am I so hungry, all of a sudden?
Craving lamb chops, extra rare? Maybe with a side of chemical mace and billyclub?
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