1 April
The lighter side of history: the 1960's:
The Book-Writing Machine: What Was the First Novel Written on a Word Processor?
2 April
see worldswidweb.com
3 April
3 April
The Guardian's Books You Can't Live Without: The Top 100 is only available online in a bare-bones form linked-to here. Those who dislike Dante's Divine Comedy or Cervantes's Don Quixote might want to take note, as neither of those works make this list. Many popular favorites do, however—not even the most inspired of choices.
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte BrontÎ
Harry Potter series - J K Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights - Emily BrontÎ
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - J R R Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - C S Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C S Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de BerniËres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - A A Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - L M Montgomery
Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie=
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - …mile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - A S Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte's Web - E B White
The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-ExupÈry
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [1950]
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les MisÈrables - Victor Hugo
4 April
4 April
The "great books" list created by the Toronto daily, the Globe and Mail, is better than the Guardian's. Unfortunately it is no longer online, though a discussion about the list is (Martin Levin on the Greatest Books Series). Levin edited the list in collaboration with Charlotte Gray, AndrÈ Alexis, A L Kennedy, and Alberto Manguel. Besides Manguel, quite a few acclaimed writers contributed articles, including Mary Beard, Colm TÛibÌn, and Jane Smiley. Access to an academic database provided me with .pdf copies of most of the articles, the two that were mysteriously missing from what's supposed to be a complete archive thankfully turning up at the Internet Archive, but only after I had found broken links to the old pages. As this project took the form of a series of short articles, they are not ranked. Note that the list as shown here has 53 entries (not 50) because the Odyssey and the Iliad were discussed together, in a single article, as were the three "Theban plays."
The two entries that seem to have incomplete titles came from the Internet Archive. I can only surmise that the online versions of the articles didn't include the complete titles as seen here for the other 48 items.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain: In This First Entry of Our New Series, Mark Levin Goes Rafting Down the Mississippi With Huck and Jim
In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust: AndrÈ Alexis Remembers Things Past
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: Michael Ruse Takes a Short Trip Through Our Long Evolution
The Divine Comedy, by Dante: It May Begin in Hell, Alberto Manguel Says, but Dante's Masterpiece Is Finally Entirely Heavenly
Strictly Platonic: The Republic, by Plato: Simon Blackburn Makes the Case
Knightly Virtue: Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes: Edith Grossman Makes the Case
ReJoyce: Ulysses, by James Joyce: Michael Groden Makes the Case
Kapital Crimes: Francis Wheen Makes the Case
Still Good for the Soul: The Confessions of St. Augustine: Randy Boyagoda Makes the Case
Prince Among Men: The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli: Michael Ignatieff Makes the Case
Gatsby? It Really Is Great: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: William Kowalski Makes the Case
Beneath the Surface: Middlemarch, by George Eliot: Keith Oatley Makes the Case
Health, Wealth and Wisdom: The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith: James Buchan Makes the Case
Perchance to Dream...: The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud: Jeffrey Moussaieff Makes the Case
Swift's Satyricon: Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift: Victoria Glendinning Makes the Case
Macondo Magic: One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia M·arquez: Ilan Stavans Makes the Cazes
Madness and Insight: King Lear, by William Shakespeare: A. L. Kennedy Makes the Case
Can and Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant: Susan Neiman Makes the Case
We're Persuaded: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen: Joan Thomas Makes the Case
Homer, Sweet Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey by 'Homer': Mary Beard Makes the Case
Grand and Inquisitive: The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Joseph Frank Makes the Case
Time Never Wasted: T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems,1909-1962: Fraser Sutherland Makes the Case
Unsweet and Lo: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov: Laura Penny Makes the Case
Words Beyond Worth: The Koran: Mona Siddiqui Makes the Case
In Darkest Dickens: Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens: John Sutherland Makes the Case
The Subject Is Itself: Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges: Dennis Duffy Makes the Case
History's Father: The Histories, by Herodotus: Tom Holland Makes the Case
Tale of a Whale Is a Whale of a Tale: Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville: Adam Sol Makes the Case
Madame Bovary, C'Est Tout le Monde: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Mark Frutkin Makes the Case
A Modernist for the Ages: The Complete Stories, by Franz Kafka: Sam Solecki Makes the Case
A (Very) Good Book: The King James Bible: Donald Harman Akenson Makes the Case.
Principia Mathematica [Dan Falk]
The Collected Poems of W B Yeats [Rex Murphy]
And the World Goes 'Round: Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, by Galileo Galilei: Dava Sobel Makes the Case
When Thebans Fall Out: The Theban Trilogy by Sophocles [Peter Stothard]
India's Epic: The Mahabharata, Attributed to Vyasa: Wendy Doniger Makes the Case
Go Read Alice, I Think She'll Know: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll: Ian Stewart Makes the Case
On Human (De)nature: The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Clifford Orwin Makes the Case
What Did He Know? Plenty: Essays, by Michel de Montaigne: Philippe Desan Makes the Case
A Devil of a Book: Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: James M. Skidmore Makes the Case
Outspoken Silence: Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson: Tim Flannery Makes the Case
A Man for All Reasons: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: Chris Scott Makes the Case
The Story-Master: Stories of Anton Chekhov: Claire Berlinski Makes the Case
Epic of Epics: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy: Donna Tussing Orwin Makes the Case
Feminism's First Manifesto: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft: Charlotte Gray Makes the Case
Sexy, Salty, Sometimes Sad: The Decameron: Konrad Eisenbichler Makes the Case
Great Play Here: No Waiting: Waiting for Godot,by Samuel Beckett: Keith Garebian Makes the Case
A Japanese Dickens: The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki: Jane Smiley Makes the Case
Most Enlightening: L'EncyclopÈdie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert: AndrÈ Alexis Makes the Case
A Lady for All Seasons: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James: Colm TÛibÌn Makes the Case
5 April
Harvard Book Store's list of the staff's "favorite books of all time" is one of the few ranked "great books" list, created much like album lists in popular music: each participant submitted a list in order of preference, then all of the books listed were transferred to a single list, their position determined by how highly they ranked in the individual lists. Presumably, a first-place finish gave a book a certain number of points, a second-place finish a slightly-smaller number, and so on; the description does not go into such detail. Nor is there a list of which staff members participated. Similar collective ranked lists were put together by Raymond Queneau, in 1950's France, and more recently by the Norwegian Book Club and by J Peder Zane. All of them are part of this project.
Since this list appears to be "born online" (like Kevin Hill's Great Books List and the anonymous World Canonical Texts site), I'm just providing a link to its home page.
Harvard Book Store Top 100 Books
6 April
Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd (and, apparently, final) edition [1990], features a list of 101 Significant Books, A Short List of Books to Read on Vacation, A Short List of Books to Read Before Entering College, and A Short List of Books to Read After Retirement. We're only interested here in the first list, and not just because I'm young enough to remember how my 18-years-old self would've reacted to being given the second list. These Good Reading books seem surprisingly rare. For example, here in Georgia three public libraries have copies of the 23rd edition, three others have copies of the 22nd [1985], and the University of Georgia has no copies of any edition. For the purposes of this project, the final version of the Significant Books list is used. According to the list introductions found in both the 22nd and 23rd editions, the list of Significant Books was included in the first edition of Good Reading, in 1934, and has been revised "several times." The list is a good one, though it's perhaps the (best) worst example of the listmakers not bothering to list actual books in a list of books and, furthermore, having non-book entries that are incredibly vague (yes, Robert Frost did write poems, thanks). The only book included in the 22nd edition not found in the 23rd edition's list below is Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Zola, Beauvoir, Borges, M·rquez, and Woolf were added in the 23rd.
[In 2014, I found a copy of the 21st edition, from which we learn of the items added to the 22nd, as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Spinoza's Ethics, Dickinson, Nietzsche's Will to Power, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Ellison's Invisible Man, Proust, and Yeats are not found in the earlier book. However, the items that appear in the 21st but not the 22nd are more numerous: Aristotle - Politics; Herodotus - History; Marcus Aurelius - Meditations; Cellini - Autobiography; Franklin - Autobiography; Pepys - Diary; Butler - The Way of All Flesh; Maupassant - Short Stories; Wordsworth; Huxley - Brave New World; Lewis - Arrowsmith; Sandburg - Lincoln; Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath; and Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class. A couple authors's selections were changed: Dickens's David Copperfield replaced Grand Expectations; while Lawrence's Women in Love replaced Sons and Lovers]
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Aesop, Fables
Aristophanes, Comedies
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The Bible
Confucius, The Analects
Euripides, Dramas
Homer, Iliad
Homer, Odyssey
Lao-Tzu, The Way and Its Power
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Plato, Republic
Plato, Symposium
Plutarch, Parallel Lives
Sophocles, The Theban Plays
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
Vergil, Aeneid
The Arabian Nights
Bacon, Essays
Boccaccio, Il Decameron
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Dante, Divine Comedy
Machiavelli, The Prince
Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur
Muhammad, Koran
Montaigne, Essays
More, Utopia
Omar Khayy·m, The Rub·iy·t
Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Shakespeare, Complete Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories
Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson
Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
Burns, Poems
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Descartes, Discourse on Method
Donne, Poems
Fielding, Tom Jones
Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Hamilton et al., Federalist Papers
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Malthus, Principle of Population
Milton, Paradise Lost
MoliËre, Comedies
Paine, The Rights of Man
Rousseau, The Social Contract
Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Spinoza, Ethics
Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Voltaire, Candide
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Balzac, EugÈnie Grandet
Browning (Robert), Poems
Byron, Poems
Chekhov, Plays
Darwin, The Origin of Species
Dickens, David Copperfield
Dickinson, Poems
Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov
Eliot, Middlemarch
Emerson, Essays
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Goethe, Faust
Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Hugo, Les MisËrables
Ibsen, Dramas
Keats, Poems
Marx, Capital
Melville, Moby Dick
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Poe, Short Stories
Shelley, Poems
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Walden
Tolstoi, War and Peace
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Wordsworth, Poems
Zola, Germinal
Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Borges, Labyrinths
Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity
Eliot, Poems and Plays
Ellison, Invisible Man
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Frazer, The New Golden Bough
Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Frost, Poems
GarcÌa M·rquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
James, The Ambassadors
Joyce, Ulysses
Lawrence, Women in Love
Mann, The Magic Mountain
O'Neill, Plays
Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Shaw, Plays
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Yeats, Poems
7 April
I've noted previously what I call the "pre-death" lists of music albums that, given their length, have been presented as books: Tom Moon's 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die [2008] and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die [2005], edited by Robert Dimery and featuring the contributions of 91 critics. Dimery's introduction to that book does not indicate at all how the list was determined. And, as noted here previously, it's marred by a few glaring problems, most of all a British bias that allows a host of mediocre albums into the list (The La's, The Auteurs - New Wave, Elastica, The Charlatans - Tellin' Stories, Ash - 1977--you get the picture) and a tendency to include commercially-successful artists that have already been forgotten by their biggest fans. The other books in the "die" series I've read or skimmed (Books and Movies) are superior. They've also done "Songs" and "Classical Recordings" books, the latter compensating partially for implicit genre restrictions at work with the "Albums" book.
Another book-as-album-list, Zagat's Music Guide: 1,000 Top Albums of All Time [2003], thankfully provides information on its compiling process. Sadly, we might prefer they hadn't. Drawing upon the contributions of "over 10,600 participants," the coordinator of this project, Pat Blashill, calculated numerical scores on a scale of 0 to 30 in the four following areas: Overall, Songwriting, Musicianship, and Production. Fair enough for a general review system. But this is a one-off gig for Zagat. Most of the albums discussed in the book of course rank highly on that 30-point scale. Without lower-ranked albums to compare high-scoring albums to, these numbers are rendered largely useless. Presumably the participants gave scores, followed by Blashill averaging those scores; but, again, we don't know for sure.
The survey provides a list of "most popular albums" without telling us how that popularity was determined. The no. 1 in that list is Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, but the no. 1 in the Overall category is Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. Indeed, it's the only album to receive a 30 score in Overall, whereas Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks receives a 30 in Songwriting, both Kind of Blue and The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Electric Ladyland receive a 30 in Musicianship, and three albums get a 29 in Production: Peter Gabriel's Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and The Beatles's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The difference between the "popular" list and the Overall list suggests that more of the participants voted for the inclusion of Born to Run than Kind of Blue, but that those Born to Run supporters gave the album scores not as high as those given to Kind of Blue by those who voted to include that album. But that's just a guess.
8 April
see worldswideweb.com
9 April
see worldswideweb.com
10 April
see worldswideweb.com
11 April
see worldswideweb.com
12 April
In 2007-2009, especially throughout 2008, Bradford Cox made available on the Deerhunter blog an extraordinary amount of music relative to proper Deerhunter and Atlas Sound releases. This music, free of charge, will eventually play a pivotal role in historical accounts of the transition in music playback from discs to online streaming, alongside the phenomenon of "sharity" blogging, Radiohead's controversial "name your own price" scheme for their album In Rainbows, and the resurgence of the music video via You Tube. This bulk of material was the perfect response to what David Lowery would later call the "free culture": give those downloading your music illicitly even more free music to listen to, thus pronounce your independence from those who claim to like an art for which they can't be bothered to spend a few dollars. A show of strength draws suckers in.
About the music, though.... In short, 2008 was Bradford Cox's year. The first Atlas Sound album intrigued those of us who found Cryptogams to be uneven and unconvincing. Microcastle/ Weird Era Continued followed later that year and defined the Deerhunter sound heard since: Cox's voice no longer hidden and distorted, but rather presented clearly, either unadorned or enlarged via reverb, double-tracking, etc.; sticking to the Rock-band set-up, though taking breaks for slower, no-drums numbers; and resorting excessively to common pop-song structures. But that Atlas Sound album, Let the Blind Lead Those Who See but Cannot Feel, presented a bolder vision: home recording for the new millennium, updating the older "low fi" model of Sebadoh and Beck. The songs made available on the blog, mostly Atlas Sound, also took this approach, eluding the divide between "noise" and songs that had hampered Cryptograms. Given the many comparisons made by critics and listeners to the Shoegazer artists of the late 1980's-early '90's, we could also say that this early era of Atlas Sound presented a confluence of the Shoegazer sound with the home-recording aesthetic.
The presentation of previously-unreleased music on the Deerhunter blog began on July 20, 2007 with a Deerhunter demo, 'Unrequited', followed the next day by a Lockett Pundt track 'These Years...', but only excerpts of both, due to difficulties with file-sharing sites (another foreshadowing of music-industry controversies to come); the full version of the former was posted on 1 August with 'Solar Ropes', the latter on 3 August. The Atlas Sound material began on July 29 and continued as such (for today's post, we go through 2007):
29 July: 'White Tea; 'Stoned'
1 August: 'Porto'; 'Monochromatic'; 'Solar Ropes'
4 August: The Brian Foote E P (consisting of 'Where I Come Home From', 'Tame All the Lions (Valet Remixed by Atlas Sound)', 'How Do I Look?', and 'Child Support')
5 August: 'Twilight at Carbon Lake' (an Atlas Sound track but noted to be a demo for what would become 'Microcastle/ Weird Era Continued')
9 August: 'So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)' [Everly Brothers cover]; 'Beginning to See the Light' [Velvet Underground cover]
13 August: 'Pure UnEvil' [Liars cover]; 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' [Neil Young cover]
21 August: 'Line Drawing' (1998 recording posted the same day as an excerpt from an Atlas Sound concert at Eyedrum in 2005, apparently broadcast on W R E K, the Georgia Institute of Technology radio station)
5 September: Three Elegies in Sound: 'Take to the Wind (For Samuel Beckett)'; 'Always Tired (For Betty Harris)'; 'Puppy in the Window (For Bo Diddley)'
21 September: 'Oliver'
14 October: 'Sunday Night in Chicago'
15 October: 'Difference BT' (two versions); 'Borrowed Nostalgia'
17 October: 'Unicorn Rainbow Odyssey' [Mark Sultan cover] (apparently a new version of an older track of unknown provenance); 'Remembered By'; 'Words From the Wall'; 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Version 2)'--"removed a lot of the reverb and atmospherics"
24 October: 'From a Youth Hostel in Prague'; 'Unrequited II'
26 October: Altitude Sickness (an E P consisting of three covers of Doo Wop songs: 'Come Softly' [the Fleetwoods]; 'You're So Fine' [the Falcons]; and 'You Belong to Me' [the Duprees])
12 November: 'A B C Glasgow'
27 November: 'Cobwebs'
29 November: 'When They Talk'
30 November: 'Malmö'
2 December: 'Walks Backward' (1997 recording)
3 December: 'Words From the Wall (Version II); 'Words From the Wall (Electric)'; 'Basement Memory' (made from samples of Talking Heads' 'This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)'); 'I'll Be Your Mirror' [Velvet Underground cover]
12 December: Holiday E P # 1 (consisting of 'Children's Choir Rehearsal', 'Requiem for All the Lonely Teenagers With Passed Out Moms', and '10th Grade Concept Map')
15 December: Weekend E P ('Friday Night We Took Acid and Laid on Matt's Bedroom Floor Staring at His Ceiling Fan While His Parents Watched T.V. Downstairs', 'Saturday Night We Went Swimming and There Was a Light in the Water', and 'Sunday Evening We Relaxed in Our Rooms and Called Each Other on the Phone'--note that this E P, more than 28 minutes long, qualifies to be an album)
17 December: 'Christian Names'
18 December: 'Ivy Belk'
30 December: 'Camcorder'; 'Disposable Camera' (first 'Virtual 7 Inch')
A second Lockett Pundt track, 'Whiteout', was posted on 1 August 2007; a track credited to Bradford and Lockett, 'Quad', was posted on 8 August 2007; a second Cox/ Pundt track, 'Urbana Library of Electronic Music', was posted on 6 October 2007. Lockett Pundt's cover of the Roy Orbison song 'Bayou Blue' was posted on 10 August 2007, and his cover of the Amps's 'Bragging Party' was posted on 15 August 2007. On 15 October 2007, Pundt began using the moniker Lotus Plaza for a track, 'Sunday Night in Atlanta', followed on 12 November by 'Hamburg' and on 4 December by 'What Grows?'.
Three Microcastle demos were posted on 15 September 2007, not credited to Atlas Sound, so presumably like 'Unrequited' they count as Deerhunter tracks: 'Calvary Scars', 'Green Jacket', and 'Activa'.
On 2 November 1997 the Atlas Sound remix of an Arthur Russell track was posted: 'Answers Me (Arthur Russell Remix)'.
13 April
The Media Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington--the kind of endeavor those interested in the history of music, cinema, television, radio, and photography should learn about. If it's broke, fix it.
14 April
The Atlas Sound tracks posted on the Deerhunter blog in 2008 and 2009, by the end of which Bradford Cox was no longer using the site to present new music regularly. The online-only Atlas Sound oeuvre reached its peak early in 2008, especially with 'Children's Hospital'. Many of the links to the tracks are now broken, but I assume you can find them via Soul Seek or similar programs.
1 January: 'New Years Day'
12 January: 'Brother (You Don't Have to Lay Down Your Guns' [recorded 1983!]; 'Children's Hospital (Screaming in the Face of Death #2)'--not sure what Screaming in the Face of Death #1 is
14 January: 'Lost and Found (For A O)'
18 January: Two Covers: 'Oh It's Such a Shame' [Jay Reatard cover]; 'Unchained Melody' [Righteous Brothers cover]
21 January: 'Without Headlights'; 'Middle School Instrumental' (Virtual 7" No. 2)
22 January: Spring Hall Convert 4-Track Demos: 'Spring Hall Sketch (October 1998)'; 'Oh Drama (Spring Hall Outro 1999)'
23 January: Healing Music: 'Dog Named Apollo'
5 February: Orange Ohms Glow E P ('Orange Ohms Glow'; 'Activation'; 'Hunting Quail'; 'Coriander'; 'Humidity'; 'Valley of the Saroos' [Joe Meek cover])
10 February: 'Cloves'
12 February: Recent Bedroom Demos ('Recent Bedroom (Jan. 2007 Version)'; 'Recent Bedroom First Sketch 2004'; 'Recent Bedroom Jul. 2006')
29 February: Winter Vacation: 'Winter Vacation (First Version)'; 'Winter Vacation (Second Version)'; 'Winter Vacation (Remix)'
27 March: 'Sea Burial'
14 April: 'April 13'
23 April: 'Bored Dub'; 'No Longer' (Virtual 7" No. 3)
24 April: Atlas Sound Covers Two Songs for My Dad E P: 'I'm So Lonesome (I Could Cry)'; 'Blue Moon
27 April: 'Tired Congregation'; 'The Time I Spent With Nico (Quiet)'; 'The Time I Spent With Nico (Loud)'
30 April: 'Cold and Golden'
5 May: Things I'll Miss E P: ('My Car'; 'My Room'; 'My Bed'; 'Recording Acoustic Demos'; 'Marietta')
23 May: 'Galaxy Cruisers (For A C)'
11 June: 'A Lullaby From the Netherlands'
12 June: 'Balcony'; 'Canal' (Amsterdam MIDI Virtual 7")
16 August: 'Holiday'; 'S S C' (Virtual 7" No. 4); Only Guitars Now: Guitar One; Guitar Two; Guitar Three
7 October: Coffin Trick
9 October: 'Maybe Logic'; 'Airedales' (Virtual 7")
23 October: Two Halloween Dances: 'Danse Infernale'; 'Danse Macabre
2009:
19 March: 'Solo, or The Square'; 'Memorial Corridor' (Virtual 7" No. 6)
22 March: 'Level 2'
21 April: 'Springtime Instrumental'; 'Time Warp' (Virtual 7" No. 7)
12 August: 'Walk a Thin Line' [Fleetwood Mac cover]
11 November: 'Doctor'; 'The Screens' (Virtual 7" No.7)--actually No. 8
10 Short Tape Experiments, an Atlas Sound/ Broadcast collaboration, was posted May 23 2008.
On January 23 2008, the Deerhunter collection of "demos and home recordings," Fluorescent Grey Demos and Out-Takes, was posted; followed on January 25 by Cryptograms Mixtape. On April 8, the Deerhunter track 'Unused Vocal Take From Microcastle Sessions' was posted. A video of 'Winter Never Stops (Acoustic)', a live performance by Deerhunter, was posted May 3. Another video, and another live track, 'Improv Session June 2 08', a collaboration between Deerhunter and Grrrnd Zero, was posted June 3. A Deerhunter track, given the confusing title 'Game of Diamonds (Atlas Sound Demo)' was posted July 10.
On January 28 2008, 'Dog Years', the first Ghetto Cross [Cole Alexander of the Black Lips and Cox] is posted.
On February 29 2008, the Lotus Plaza track 'Dot Gain' was posted, and a Lotus Plaza performance at Eyedrum on 22 September 2009 was posted the next day; another live performance at Eyedrum, on 11 December 2009, was similarly posted the next day.
15 April
Not included in the list of music e-zines found in the 7 January post because of its particular focus, nonetheless the Second Disc will definitely be of interest to anyone crazy enough to read this blog.
16 April
16 April
The Telegraph's list is closer to the Globe and Mail's in its decent coverage of Western literature, but also compares to the Guardian's in its inclusion of modern popular favorites. Some of those recent best sellers do not belong on a "great books" lists. Indeed, this list shows clearly the unfortunate side of publications getting into the business of collectively constructing lists of books: as with lists of music albums, an excess of recent entries distract from "all-time" coverage purportedly offered by the lists.
The Telegraph's 110 entries include several series, thus the expanded total number of books. Arranged into categories as seen here, the introduction and the annotations for each entry are available at the link below.
At this point in the project, two difficulties in numbering the items bear some consideration. First, if a literary work deemed to be a novella (or, more rarely, a novelette)--that is, it has been published as a book itself--was originally published in a periodical, it is numbered. Such is the case with Kafka's Metamorphosis. The same rule applies if it was originally published as part of a short-story collection, such as John Updike's Rabbit Remembered. However, that work has not been published as a monograph, so it is not numbered, as seen below. Of course, a short-story collection can be numbered if it consists entirely, or almost entirely, of previously-unpublished stories; either way, this list only includes Rabbit Remembered, not the collection, Licks of Love, in which it was published.
Second, most books in a series of novels are numbered separately; the exceptions so far have been The Lord of the Rings, which apparently was published as three works for financial reasons. The others are His Dark Materials and The Book of the New Sun; the latter usually is referred to as a tetralogy of novels, which have been published as a single work, and also are said to form a series with another novel and an essay collection, while the former is often discussed as a single work. The Chronicles of Narnia, on the other hand, though several of the novels were written simultaneously, and it is often sold as a boxed set, is more often discussed as a series of works; more important for this project, the first novel of the series (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) is often included in "great books" lists as a distinct work--or, as we've seen in one peculiar case, alongside the series as a whole.
CLASSICS
The Iliad and The Odyssey
Homer
The Barchester Chronicles
Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bront
War and Peace
Tolstoy
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch
George Eliot
POETRY
Sonnets
Shakespeare
Divine Comedy
Dante
Canterbury Tales
Chaucer
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
Odes
John Keats
The Waste Land
T S Eliot
Paradise Lost
John Milton
Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake
Collected Poems
W B Yeats
Collected Poems
Ted Hughes
LITERARY FICTION
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
¿ la Recherche du Temps Perd
Proust
Ulysses
James Joyce
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honour trilogy
Evelyn Waugh
The Ballad of Peckham RyeMuriel Spark
Rabbit series
John Updike
One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel GarcÌa M·rquez
Beloved
Toni Morrison
The Human Stain
Philip Roth
ROMANTIC FICTION
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Le Morte d'Arthur
Thomas Malory
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius
Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy
Mary Renault
Master and Commander
Patrick O'Brian
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
Dr Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
The Plantagenet Saga
Jean Plaidy
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons
Arthur Ransome
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C S Lewis
The Lord of the Rings
J R R Tolkien
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman
Babar
Jean de Brunhoff
The Railway Children
E Nesbit
Winnie-the-Pooh
A A Milne
Harry Potter
J K Rowling
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
SCI-FI
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
1984
George Orwell
The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham
Foundation
Isaac Asimov
2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer
William Gibson
CRIME
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
John le CarrÈ
Red Dragon
Thomas Harris
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
Killshot
Elmore Leonard
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Das Kapital
Karl Marx
The Rights of Man
Thomas Paine
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
On War
Carl von Clausewitz
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
On the Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
L'EncyclopÈdie
Diderot, et al
BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [1974]
Robert M. Pirsig
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf
How to Cook
Delia Smith
A Year in Provence
Peter Mayle
A Child Called 'It'
Dave Pelzer
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Lynne Truss
Schott's Original Miscellany
Ben Schott
HISTORY
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Winston Churchill
A History of the Crusades
Steven Runciman
The Histories
Herodotus
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T E Lawrence
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
A People's Tragedy
Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Simon Schama
The Origins of the Second World War
A J P Taylor
LIVES
Confessions
St. Augustine
Lives of the Caesars
Suetonius
Lives of the Artists
Giorgio Vasari
If This is a Man
Primo Levi
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Siegfried Sassoon
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey
A Life of Charlotte BrontÎ
Elizabeth Gaskell
Good-Bye to All That
Robert Graves
The Life of Dr Johnson
Boswell
Diaries
Alan Clark
110 Best Books: The Perfect Library
17 April
The post of 16 February noted the site, The Greatest Books, which includes among its lists the winners of various literature awards, such as the Costa Award or the National Book Award. While, as argued there, a list of the best book for each year of a certain period of time hardly counts as a list of the "greatest books" of that period (how do we not know that, say, a poll of individuals who regularly decide such awards would result in the "greatest" books mostly being from a few years, or even one year?) another set of similar lists that would provide deeper historical perspective is that of defunct awards. Wikipedia has a great page for one of these, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Indeed, this award's winners, if not limited to children's literature, would constitute a "great books" list because the awards granted a given year were not limited to books published that year. Though gone for more than three decades now, this award justifiably still possesses a definite allure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll_Shelf_Award
18 April
At this point we only know the numbering of the first-fourth of Neil Young's Official Release Series (the name given reissues of previously-released items reissue as part of his Archives, as compared to, so far, the Performance Series). Given the complexity of his discography, I couldn't help but devise my own numbering of his official releases to date with those four as a base, plus some wishful thinking on my part: namely, that the soundtrack for Journey Through the Past, despite not being reissued with the first-fourth albums, will finally get a digital release. The film was included in the first Archives boxed set. However, it was not released individually, which already suggests my notion of including the films in the Official Release tally is doomed to failure. Neil, there's still time to rectify this!
Neil Young
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
After the Gold Rush
Harvest*
Journey Through the Past: Original Soundtrack Recordings
Journey Through the Past [film]
Time Fades Away
On the Beach
Tonight's the Night*
Zuma
American Stars n' Bars
Comes a Time
Rust Never Sleeps [album]
Live Rust
Rust Never Sleeps [film]
Hawks and Doves
Re-ac-tor
Human Highway
Live in Berlin
Trans
Solo Trans
Everbody's Rockin'
Old Ways
Landing on Water
Life
This Note's for You
Eldorado
Freedom*
Freedom: A Live Acoustic Concert film
Ragged Glory
Arc-Weld [album]
Weld [film]
Harvest Moon
Unplugged [album]
Unplugged [film]
Sleeps With Angels
The Complex Sessions
Mirror Ball
Dead Man
Broken Arrow
Year of the Horse [album]
Year of the Horse [film]
Silver and Gold [album]
Silver and Gold [film]
Road Rock, Vol. 1: Friends and Relatives
Red Rocks Live
Are You Passionate?
Greendale [film]
Greendale [album]
Greendale [concert film]
Greendale [documentary]
Prarie Wind
Heart of Gold
Living With War
Living With War: "In the Beginning"
Chrome Dreams II
Trunk Show
Fork in the Road
Le Noise
Journeys
Americana
Psychedelic Pill
Studio albums (or albums with only one live track--marked with an asterik): 33
Concert albums that are also major albums: 3 (Time Fades Away, Rust Never Sleeps, and Life)--though both Rust Never Sleeps and Life have two studio tracks
Concert albums: 5 (Live Rust, Arc-Weld, Unplugged, Year of the Horse, Road Rock Vol. 1)
Minor albums: 3 (Journey Through the Past: Original Soundtrack Recordings, Eldorado, and Living With War: "In the Beginning")--though generally referred to as an E P, Eldorado is of L P length
Concert films: 14
Films: 4 (Journey Through the Past, Human Highway, Greendale, and the Greendale documentary); also Young, under his filmic pseudonym Bernard Shakey, directed C S N Y Déjà Vu, though that release of course goes under a different artist name (as does Long May You Run by the Stills-Young Band, but often included in Young discographies)
19 April
Another site of "great books" lists, still online though it appears to have been defunct since 2004, is the Booklist Center. It's especially useful for those seeking lists grouped by genre. If you go to its General Lists, you'll see that it has a transcription of the 100 Significant Books from the 22nd edition of Good Reading. As noted in the 6 April post, I'm going to get copies of both of those books, and perhaps earlier editions, to ensure that all the necessary details of that list are included here.
20 April
The National Great Books Curriculum Academic Community bases its resources and recommendations on the Great Books of the Western World series co-edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. Of most interest to this project is the essay, 'A Brief History of the Great Books Idea', by Tim Lacy. Similar to the W B Carnochan essay, it takes the reader farther into the Twentieth Century, especially Charles W Eliot's Harvard Classics series, Adler's work, and the pioneering "great books" curricula at Columbia, St. John's, and the University of Chicago.
21 April
The Learning Channel aired a program, Great Books, intermittently in the years, 1993-2002. More recently, that channel has turned its attention to the illiterate. But seriously.... I'm entirely indebted to the author, or authors, of the Wikipedia page for this information, though the page for this series at the Internet Movie Database, plus information about video-cassette and D V D versions of the programs available for sale, confirm that the Wikipedia list is complete.
22 April
Any Decent Music?--its title really needing that question mark in order not to seem completely depressing--is another "meta" site with a slight explanation of how it determines the numerical scores it gives. Here's the answer to their self-asked question ("What's that A D M rating all about?") on the About page:
"It's not a straight average, i e the total ratings divided by the number of reviews. We have a formula that is weighted to take into account the number of reviews an album receives, which gives an advantage to albums receiving more reviews.
So an album which receives five 8/10 reviews will have a lower rating than an album with 25 8/10 reviews, which seems right to us. And an album would need more than 30 8/10 reviews to get a straight ADM rating of 8.0 (although it could achieve that rating with a range of 10/10, 9/10, 8/10, 7/10 etc reviews). All clear? Good."
Yes, it's clearer than Album of the Year and Best Ever Albums. Though I wonder how they could justify not giving an album a score of 8.0 if it has received 20 such reviews. Nevermind.
Unfortunately, they repeat this newly-common Web-only mistake of deciding an exact numerical score (in increments of 1/10--say, a 8.0 or 7.5--pace Pitchfork, whose writers we can only hope originally took that approach as a sly self-parody, but sadly they were probably extremely serious) for reviews that did not give a numerical score. Since I'm severely rebuking the sites that engage in this practice, let's consider just how ridiculous it is. A reviewer at, say, the B B C goes to the trouble of writing a review, a few paragraphs in length: nothing special, given that he probably got the album free of charge. Nonetheless, it suggests engagement with the music, and the challenge of writing about music. Then, another non-reviewer reads the review, decides that it suggests a numerical score 6.0 or 5.8 out of 10. What inspires this non-reviewer other than anti-intellectual, money-grubbing (or perhaps just attention-seeking) arrogance? At least in the past "meta" reviewers of reviews, in order to provide a quick take for readers on the go, would say that a certain reviewer gave a positive or negative assessment. That approach is still not worthy of the original review. It works best if the reviewer uses an even-numbered system (a score out of four, as with Roger Ebert's four-star system, giving him an easy way to say which movies got a "thumb up" (3 or 4 stars) or "thumb down" (1 or 2 stars)). Either way, it's at least not offensive or dumb.
Perhaps the creators of these sites would say in their defense that most of the sites they're compiling do give numerical scores, especially those online; some sites even imitate Pitchfork's tenths nonsense. Perhaps someday an academic will study this phenomenon: for example, have newspapers and magazines switched to giving numerical scores in response to the proliferation of e zines doing so? Will documentation surface from these companies' archival records showing that editors chose to give numerical scores based on the felt need to compete with Pitchfork and others?
Ultimately, Album of the Year, Any Decent Music?, and Best Ever Albums pale in comparison to the archival behemoth Acclaimed Music, whose author, Henrik Franzon, is incredibly thorough. He's been at it much longer, is not trying to make cheap money like the other sites, and acknowledges the importance of another site, Rocklist, which as I've noted before at this blog is an excellent source of lists from a goodly variety of publications.
23 April
Susan Wise Bauer and Jesse Wise, authors of The Well-Trained Mind, a guide to "classical education" for children, have made a "great books" list for high-school students, which like the lists for college-level programs is divided into the customary four years.
Though we're not including syllabi lists in our project, they're worthy of review, especially to learn of works not otherwise found in the all-time lists.
Great Books: A Defense and the (Inevitable) List
24 April
The Great Books List [2007] and World Canonical Texts [2011] are two online-only lists of great books. Both of these lists suggest that the easy self-publishing made possible by internet technology is no threat to the quality of publishing or education. The latter list is the only "great books" list to be truly non-Western; if any bias is evident, it is toward Classical Chinese and Muslim authors. It also uses the word, canonical, in a relatively-strict sense of the word, with a strong emphasis on religious and philosophical texts. It is the fourth-longest list to used in this project, after Clifton Fadiman's, Philip Ward's, and Harold Bloom's. The former is closer to the lists we've seen so far; being fairly extensive, it offers plenty of items not found on the other lists. I've been working on the transcription of the Canonical list for some time now. The other I just recently came across.
25 April
Another site of user-generated lists, Ranker, has its list of The Greatest Albums of All Time.
26 April
The free previously-unreleased material made available via the Deerhunter/ Atlas Sound blog, having slowed down in the latter half of 2009, came to an end in 2010.
First, a lone track....
6 January 2010: Christmas Synths
Then a significant chunk of music came in the form of the Bedroom Databank series: Vol. 1 on 22 November, Vol. 2 on 23 November, Vol. 3 on 24 November, and Vol. 4 on 25 November.
The last original Atlas Sound material to be posted at the blog was a selection of versions of the song 'Artificial Snow' on 22 December: 'Artificial Snow (Notown Version)'; Artificial Snow (Bedroom Version)'; Artificial Snow (Rhythm Mix)'; 'Artificial Snow (No Drums Mix)'; and 'Artificial Snow (Campfire Metallophone Version)'.
27 April
2009: The Blog /Blob is my first blog, a year-long project like this one. On that site a list of music blogs that upload entire albums of others' music is provided, both because of the essay I wrote about "sharity," as these blogs were called, and the significant amount of music I listened to that year having been obtained through such blogs. Since 2009, though, many of those sites have disappeared, largely due to legal pressures, as discussed in the roundtable discussion at the e-zine, The Awl, The Rise and Fall of the Obscure Music Download Blog. Though I miss the ease with which I could, say, hear all 12 discs of the complete works of Bernard Parmegiani, the decline of these blogs, overall, is a positive thing. The number of sites that focused on out-of-print, obscure albums of unknown legal status has always been dwarfed by the sites run by individuals simply copying C D's and giving away the music (as with that Parmegiani set), all the while speaking of the process in euphoric tones. Notice how the title and focus of that Awl article attempts to split "obscure music" sites from the larger "sharity" realm: a premature romanticization of recent history.
A few other issues to consider: first, the assumption that, if an album was released once, but is not currently in print, a listener who happens to own a copy should make it available for others to listen--as if the denial of consumer demands is a problem needing any possible solution. Of course, the "sharity" bloggers don't speak of consumers, or buyers. It's all about the music, right?--until they complain, as in that Awl discussion, about the plight of users having stored hundreds or thousands of files at sites like Megaupload only to see them disappear. How many of these bloggers and their followers stop to think about the effect of obsessive listening, compared to making music? One of the men behind Mutant Sounds, generally considered to be the most prominent of "sharity" blogs, Eric Lumbleau, had his own label and his own band (Vas Deferens Organization) but is more known now for providing low-quality digital copies of others' music via large conglomerates like Google. More recently, having considered ending the site, the Mutant Sounds crew have decided only to post music from artists who have given their permission.
On that note.... Second, you'll notice that, at several of the sites listed below, the bloggers are quick to say that an artist only needs to request that their music not be shared. Does this not sound familiar? You need to opt out yourself, instead of it opting in? Much like the user needs to persistently check his account settings at Facebook, Google, etc., to ensure that a modicum of privacy is maintained? These blogs, justified as they are with grandiose claims of expanding the audience for obscure music, are following the practices of shady corporations everywhere.
So what sites are still active? As with any lists of blogs, this is far from definitive.
Aussie Music Blog
Awesome Tapes From Africa
The Boogieman Will Get Ya!
Buffalo Tones
The Changing Same
A Closet of Curiosities
Die or D.I.Y.?
Dr. Schluss' Garage of Psychedelic Obscurities
Down Underground
Dusty Psychic Hut
Experimental Etc.
Freedom Records
L'Invitation au Suicide
Lossless World
Love in Spurts
Meet the Music Traveler
Mesmirization
My Little Bubble...
9 Grey Chairs
No Longer Forgotten Music
Orgy in Rhythm
Prof Stoned: Rare & Deleted Vinyl
Q Records
Rest in Bits
Roots and Traces: Spurensicherung
Schwebeablaut
Stuck in the Past!
Systems of Romance
The Thing on the Doorstep
Tyme-Machine
We Fucking Love Music
Zero G Sound
In addition to the the "go legit" approach of Mutual Sounds (apparently also taken, at least partially, by Microphones in the Trees and Ongakubaka--both of these sites aided by the sad fact that many of the contemporary artists discussed there already give away their music via Bandcamp and similar sites), several other sites have switched to being reviews sites, or the creators of "sharity" blogs have started new such sites: for example, Another Sucker on the Vine birthed In a White Room; and Killed in Cars, which might still be giving away music, I can't tell, it's a mess. Several other blogs, because of the legal crackdown, have also floundered between quitting and refashioning, making a few posts here and there over the last year.
28 April
Recently having disposed of several hundred issues of the Nation while trimming my collection of magazines, I made note of articles I had neglected to read, or perhaps had read but have forgotten the gist of, and "bookmarked" them at the Nation's web site. Regardless of one's political and ideological proclivities, the 'Books and the Arts' section of the Nation is nearly always excellent in its entirety. No other North American publication compares, and beyond these borders the only publication I have experienced that surpasses the Nation consistently is the London Review of Books. Here are links to some of the articles that would are pertinent to this site's "great books" project (access to some of these might be limited to subscribers):
Jonathan Blitzer, A Reign Not of This World
Richard Byrne, Ranters and Corantos: Renaissance Journalism
Jordan Davis, A Caller of the Dove
Jochen Hellbeck, The Maximalist: On Vasily Grossman
Victor La Valle, Bierced
Thomas Meaney, Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss
Ange Mlinko, Duncan's Divagations: On Robert Duncan and H D
Corey Robin, The First Counter-Revolutionary
Ruth Scurr, To Curse and Fume
Emily Wilson, Violent Grace: Anne Carson's An Oresteia
29 April
The Internet Sacred Texts Archive features complete transcriptions of many older (read: public domain) versions of religious and philosophical works, much like those emphasized by the World Canonical Texts site, and which we'll see more of in the major "great books" lists that will be transcribed here in the coming months. For example, the I Ching, the Mahabharata, and the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam are available to read.
30 April
Continuing the links (all of which are included at The World's Wide Web) pertinent to this site's "great books" project: Old Book Illustrations.