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“The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well. George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then.”
― The Meaning of Human Existence
― The Meaning of Human Existence
“The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.”
― Words Without Music: A Memoir
― Words Without Music: A Memoir
“The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”
― Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
― Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
“Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.”
― Low
― Low
“No, no – you don’t understand!” he sputtered, his face growing red not just with anger but with embarrassment, which seemed to make him angrier still. “Space is empty; it is a void in which the atoms move freely. There is no ‘notbeing;’ everything is in process of becoming. Everything is composed of atoms which are mobile and invisible, whirling in the void.” “Then the void is a place within which this takes place, where all these invisible atoms are in – what did you say? – constant motion.” “Yes, precisely,” he replied, relieved to discover that I was not quite the dunce he had begun to fear I was. “The atoms move inside space, inside the void, creating through their combination everything that is.” “Space, or void, then is not made up of atoms?” “No, because then there would be no place for them to move, as you yourself just pointed out.” “I’m still not quite sure what you mean. Everything is in process of becoming – doesn’t that mean that nothing is, that there is no being?” “No, because everything is always changing; everything that comes into being passes away.” “But how can anything ‘come into being,’ if ‘being’ does not exist?” “We define things, put them in categories, but nothing is exactly what the definition says it is.”
― Helen
― Helen
Stuart’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Stuart’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,168 books
|
413 friends
2,292 books
|
152 friends
262 books
|
30 friends
217 books
|
458 friends
961 books
|
87 friends
439 books
|
123 friends
251 books
|
47 friends
1,060 books
|
95 friends
More friends…
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