Philosophy Discussion with my 14-Year-Old

 

At the dinner table last night could be summarized thusly:

 

DESCARTES: I think, therefore I am.

HUME: Your Mom!

 

It reminded me of this classic little bit of humor – what if Twitter existed 2,500 years ago?

The Great American Novel

 

Work on the Work keeps going on apace.

That, plus two bouts with the stomach flu (first Patch, then me), accounts for the sparsity of posts of late.

More, down the road …

The Plato Project

Lately I’ve been toying – toying! – with the idea of reading through Plato’s works at the beginning of the new year.

Now, this is not for the faint of heart. But I’ve been very discontented with the stuff I’ve been reading of late, and I’m looking for something harder and heartier to chew on. I have the series The Great Books of the Western World in two storage bins in a closet. One volume, Volume 7, is devoted exclusively to Plato. It contains 23 dialogues, 1 letter, and The Republic. It’s a hardcover gnarled with age but not use, and weighs about five pounds.

I would divide my project into two phases: The dialogues and the one letter, and The Republic. Volume 7 is roughly a thousand pages; Republic alone is 40% of that. In January and February I’d tackle either the first or second phase, take a month or two off, and then read through the other phase. It’s doable, and it would be immensely intellectually satisfying.

Way, way back in my night school college days, er, nights, I guess, if you spare me the redundancy, I had to take two philosophy classes, Intro 101 and 102. It was my first real experience with the subject, and it ignited a lifetime of dancing around the issue. I’d read and not understand, or understand but not read (called, ahem, Cliff Notes), buy books that were only skimmed, lurk online on philosophy bulletin boards. I guess I have a street education about philosophy. My knowledge of Plato and $5 would get you a cup of coffee.

But I loved the classes, and could listen to my professors for hours. The first was a young man in his mid-twenties (my age at the time) with a heavy Czech name but an American accent. The second was a mailman who moonlighted as a college philosophy professor. Go figure. For the latter’s class I had to read the last couple of dialogues known as the Trial of Socrates, which include, if I remember correctly, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. It was very, very moving. It was also very, very many years ago. It deserves another re-reading.

Along with a first reading of the rest of Plato.

That is what I am slowly trying to convince myself to do come the New Year. I dunno if I’ll do it. Yet. Probably will. Or maybe I won’t. Oh, and a lot of this has to do with keeping pace with Little One, who’s studying the classics at her college this freshman year.

So this January you might find some posts here about me dipping my toes into the waters of Forms, of Allegorical Caves and Rings of Gyges-es. Philosopher Kings and a curmudgeonly old gadfly willingly taking the cup of hemlock as opposed to modifying and mollifying his codes and ideals.

As a side note, I’ve read – don’t remember where, it was so long ago – that everyone’s either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian. After much thought, I classify myself as a Platonist in an Aristotelian cloak, which he wears out of doors when walking about amongst the citizens of the polis but discards as he enters his warm home, draws a pipe, and sits down with an old book in front of a roaring fireplace.

 

Return of the Record II

I was 20 when I landed my first full-time, Monday through Friday, 8 to 5 job, programming, of all things, pagers the company sold to various hospital staffs and business execs all over the tri-state area. I think I pulled down something like $200 a week, but only saw around $180 after taxes. I was living at home, driving a paid-for used car, and my only expenses were my girlfriend at the time, beer, cigarettes, and picks and strings for my electric guitar.

After a few months I decided to treat myself to something big. That something was a stereo. Two big speakers, a mixer-thingie, a cassette deck, and a turntable on top. All for $185.

(The US Inflation Calculator tells me that stereo would cost me $482.32 today.)

Anyway, I dutifully started a record collection. Sort of. This was about eighteen months before records mysteriously disappeared en masse across the globe, to be replaced overnight with Compact Disks, so I didn’t have much time to act.

Since this is over 30 years ago, I don’t really remember how many I had. I want to say … 20? 25? I recall the little record storage area below the mixer / cassette deck / turntable was fairly filled with LPs. I can almost visualize holding them in my hand, pulling the vinyl from the sleeves. But try as I might, I can’t recall with definite certainty their titles, except for –

The Yes Album (Yes)

Let There Be Rock (AC/DC)

Powerage (AC/DC)

Whatever Happened to Jugula (Roy Harper / Jimmy Page)

A Farewell to Kings (Rush)

Best of Mountain (Mountain)

Candy Apple Grey (Husker Du)

Still Alive and Well (Johnny Winter)

Let It Be (The Beatles)

Queen II (Queen)

 

Kind of an eclectic collection, no? A buddy gave me / lent me the Husker Du and Johnny Winter. I think I found the Beatles record in some of my mother’s stuff. But I want to say I had at least double this amount, maybe more. Neil Young?  ELO? Black Sabbath? Steely Dan? Another record by Rush – I know I had more than that one – possibly Anthem? I dunno. Fallen off the barge idly afloat the smooth and flowing waters of the river Lethe …

 

I probably played this record more than any of the others …

 

To be honest, up to this point I was probably more into cassette tapes. Been buying and getting them as gifts since I was a kid, seven or eight years before the record player purchase. Also used them for recording myself learning the guitar, band rehearsals, live performances and demo tapes on the Tascam 4-track recorder. And when CDs came out, I went on a tear. Bought 210+ CDs over the next 15 years, but they were all stolen from a box in an apartment storage unit. From ’99 to about ’03 I bought around 120 Classical music and jazz CDs. Still have those, along with about a hundred cassette tapes, sealed up in the garage. Problem is, can’t find anything to play the tapes on, and its getting harder and harder to find something to play a CD.

I’m kinda excited about my little expedition back into the long-playing album. Sunday afternoon I listened to the Prokofiev, twice, while working on my book, and it felt great. Relaxing, nostalgic, and just damn pleasant. I’m thinking of picking up an album every month. A monthly purchase. And perhaps review each one after a listen or two, and maybe fulfill a minor dream of mine of becoming a music critic!

But the most horrid thought about my record collection from years gone back, all 25 or so albums, was what I did with them. After taking up space in a closet for nearly ten years, in an urge to purge myself of unnecessary clutter, I took them to the dumpster at work sometime in the spring of ’97and tossed them in. Ah! Now when I peruse the used record stores I shake my head sullenly at the foolishness of my abrupt incidence of anti-hoarding. Just think, I could have eBay’d the entire collection for at least $482.32!

 

Return of the Record

 

Scenario A:

Last Christmas we bought our oldest daughter, Little One, age 17 at the time, a record player. As you may or may not know, vinyl has been making a slow and steady comeback over the past decade. Her music tastes lie in a “retro” direction. Although she has a varied array of musical interests, her main favorites flourished in the mid- to late-60s: Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Beatles, the Mamas and the Papas. So we thought the record player – plus some albums we picked up for her – would be right up her alley.

She played it a lot, off and on, over the winter. Then, to our surprise, she kinda dropped it. I bought her some Rolling Stones, Kinks, and Neil Young albums for her graduation. But by and large the record player stayed packed up, suitcase-like, in a corner of her room. Clothes piled atop it. We thought she might take it to college with her, but her dorm room really is tiny and cramped, so she left it here.

 

Scenario B:

My youngest daughter, Patch, currently age 14, loves to thrift shop. She’s a hustler and makes money doing a variety of chores around the house, babysitting, and refereeing soccer games. So every other week or so she asks us to drive her to a thrift shop where she can seek out hidden gems. Like her dad in a used book store. Last week, however, the thrift store came to her, in the form of our annual town-wide garage sale.

Despite her outgoing personality and oversized drive, she is a little shy at times, so she asked me to come along and help her peruse the sales. We had limited time before she had to get to the soccer fields, so we could only hit a few homes. Much to her chagrin, she scored a big zero. Even a driveway with three racks of clothes (the owner was a man who proudly stated he had three daughters and a lot of clothes to sell) failed to yield a purchasable item.

But the last house we went to, well, something unexpected jumped out at me.

 

Scenario C [Scenario A + Scenario B]:

There was a box of old records at this last garage sale. Hmm, I wondered, as some unseen force caused my legs to bend and my body to lean forward, hands not quite under my own power rummaging the way they used to decades ago through the stack of vinyl albums. To be honest, most of the records were junky throwaway 80s stuff from artists I’ve never heard of. But after riffing through the forty or so albums, I noticed three in my hands:

   Yes, 90125

   Billy Joel, An Innocent Man

   Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 in Bb

Why these three? Well, since mid-July I’ve been listening to nothing but Yes on my walks and in the late evenings on my iPhone. 70s Yes, that is. Stuff that I never heard of on radio, or on those records I had of them many, many years ago. And I thought the Billy Joel would be a nice gift for my daughter – she likes him in addition to all those 60s icons. The Tchaikovsky – well, just scroll through the “Musicalia” tag in these here electronic pages for my (dormant) love of classical music.

All three for $9 total. Not bad.

I took a pic of the albums and sent it off to Little One at university, along with a text asking her permission to test them out on her record player. “Sure! Sounds Cool!” she texted back.

Last Saturday afternoon, with about an hour of free time on my hands before having to pick up Patch at the soccer fields, I listened to the Tchaikovsky album in all its glory. There was crackling, but no skipping, and that only added to the atmosphere. I was swept up immediately. The fact that each side of the album only held 20 minutes of music was a little jarring, but no mind. I gleefully turned it over after the first movement to listen to the shorter remaining two. There may have been goose bumps running down my arms. Truth be told, it was probably the highlight of my weekend.

For my birthday last month the girls got me a $25 gift card to a local used book and record shop. Since I’ve got about fifteen or so books jostling for position in the Immediate On-Deck Circle, yep, you know where this is going: I decided to pick up some classical albums this afternoon.

Now, the Rolling Stones and Kinks albums cost me about $25 each at B&N. There was another store in the mall devoted exclusively to vinyl, but those records all went from $40 to $60 a piece. What would I be able to score at this used book / record outfit? Would they be of any quality?

Turns out, yes and yes. Er, I mean, they had a selection of about fifty or sixty used albums, each retailing for $5.99. And as I found out later, they were of good quality. Some crackling, but that’s part of the charm. But one of vacuum sealed and the others I inspected had nary a scratch upon their surfaces.

Here’s what I scored:

   Wagner, Selections from Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Tristun und Isolde, Gotterdammerung

   Rimsky-Korsakoff, Scheherazade, Flight of the Bumblebee, Song of India, Capriccio Espagnol

   Prokofiev, Alexander Nevsky

   Zubin Mehta conducting William Tell (Rossini), Leonore Overture No. 3 (Beethoven), Capriccio Italien (Tchaikovsky), Capriccio Espagnol (Rimsky-Korsakoff)

I just listened to the Rimsky-Korsakoff album. Yeah, the slow movements had an excessive glut of crackling, but once the entire orchestra kicked into overdrive that was forgotten. It brought back waves of memories. I don’t think I’ve listened to R-K in years, and his music was one of the early influences on me in the late-90s to make the musical jump back in time. Excellent stuff.

I am well pleased. I have just scratched an itch. And I am developing a nice little ritual of listening to a classical music album every Saturday afternoon once errands are done and lunch is et.

More tomorrow on records …