Exotica
Bless Spotify, it helps me to find relics I never would have sought out on my own. It leads me from one style of old music to another style of old music.
These last weeks, I’ve been subjecting the household to heavy doses of mid-century exotica.
Yesterday’s find was Yma Sumac’s “Chuncho.” It caught my attention when I was several hours into Ritual of the Savage Album Radio.
This music is best listened to very, very late at night.
Much cover art in this genre is, shall we say, insensitive, in the manner of the Peter Pan song “What Makes the Red Man Red?”; but the music is without words. How un-PC is it to listen?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Where are you going for your holiday?” asked one of my grad school professors one summer.
“I’m going home, to Ecuador,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “I heard that you were from somewhere, er, exotic.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The review of this book stirs up other memories. Sixteen years ago, I took the author’s seminar on the topic (ancient epistemology). I read some of these chapters, along with related primary and secondary sources.
The sessions were grueling for this Greekless first-year student. Much time was spent staring at Greek words on the board and sometimes listening to, sometimes tuning out discussions of how to translate these words. (The classicists surely benefited more than did the philosophers who were taking the course to satisfy their distribution requirement.)
The procedure was necessary for covering the topic, and it was salutory for me to see it covered in this way. But I wish the professor had begun with a bald statement of her distinctive (“well-known”) interpretive approach and its problems, roughly what the review’s first paragraphs provide.
Graduate study is hard. There are ways to make it easier.
Or maybe the professor did give a bald statement of her approach, and I just don’t remember it or it went over my head. That’s certainly possible.
I remember our director of graduate studies – an epistemologist – telling me that the course would be easy because “it’s all just epistemology.” Yes, it’s all just epistemology, but that’s little comfort when it’s so complicated to maintain that ancient and 21st-century writers are trying to answer the same questions.
These last weeks, I’ve been subjecting the household to heavy doses of mid-century exotica.
Yesterday’s find was Yma Sumac’s “Chuncho.” It caught my attention when I was several hours into Ritual of the Savage Album Radio.
This music is best listened to very, very late at night.
Much cover art in this genre is, shall we say, insensitive, in the manner of the Peter Pan song “What Makes the Red Man Red?”; but the music is without words. How un-PC is it to listen?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
“Where are you going for your holiday?” asked one of my grad school professors one summer.
“I’m going home, to Ecuador,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said. “I heard that you were from somewhere, er, exotic.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The review of this book stirs up other memories. Sixteen years ago, I took the author’s seminar on the topic (ancient epistemology). I read some of these chapters, along with related primary and secondary sources.
The sessions were grueling for this Greekless first-year student. Much time was spent staring at Greek words on the board and sometimes listening to, sometimes tuning out discussions of how to translate these words. (The classicists surely benefited more than did the philosophers who were taking the course to satisfy their distribution requirement.)
The procedure was necessary for covering the topic, and it was salutory for me to see it covered in this way. But I wish the professor had begun with a bald statement of her distinctive (“well-known”) interpretive approach and its problems, roughly what the review’s first paragraphs provide.
Graduate study is hard. There are ways to make it easier.
Or maybe the professor did give a bald statement of her approach, and I just don’t remember it or it went over my head. That’s certainly possible.
I remember our director of graduate studies – an epistemologist – telling me that the course would be easy because “it’s all just epistemology.” Yes, it’s all just epistemology, but that’s little comfort when it’s so complicated to maintain that ancient and 21st-century writers are trying to answer the same questions.