Short and to the Point

This is a small book, 127 pages including notes, rather less of text. Yet it expresses big thoughts, so I have put the cover image at maximum size. I prefer short and small books. ‘Short’ is obvious and is defined by the number of pages. ‘Small’ is actually rare.  I possess only two print books that are true pocket books. That is, they will fit easily into any of my pockets including a shirt pocket. But ‘small’ can also mean a book that is light and easily carried. Charles Taylor expanded this book into his  A Secular Age, which is long and large: 851 pages including notes and hardcover.

I have tried many times to find time to read  A Secular Age, but have never managed to get much beyond a grad student read (the introduction, conclusion and skimming chapter headings). The little book pictured above, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited presents his basic thoughts on the situation of religion today which were later expanded fully in the large book. I was able to read this whole book and to think about it, going back over some sections in some cases. Large and long books I have read become mostly reference works for which purpose they need a good index.  A Secular Age has a small font 27 page index. Varieties of Religion Today has no index and needs none because it is short. Maybe all large, long academic tomes should have a 100 page summary of the main points, as after all, readers read them to understand, not to memorize all the research and detailed thinking on each point found in the encyclopedic long version.

I read a very long poem the other day – well actually I skimmed parts of it, despite my intention to read the  whole 7 page thing. It is a very good poem, but to my mind is actually many poems on a theme strung together. I recall having to read long poems in High School, but even then I much preferred pithy poems. As for myself, I decided years ago to write poems that fit on one page, or screen. I have written a very few two page poems but that’s it. I don’t claim this is better (or worse for that matter), it is how my imagination and mind work.

Short and to the point.

on the cutting board

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I have had this little book for many years. I don’t know how long the picture above, taken with my iPhone 6 on my kitchen cutting board, will appear here. There are one of those vile and silly copyright warnings inside forbidding reproduction by any means. I wonder if that would include me doing a bad drawing?  (I’ll try in a minute).

I have listened to various types of classical music since my childhood. My first clear memory was of my father taking the family to hear the Windsor (Ontario) Symphony play at the old Cleary Auditorium there. Probably about 1959 or 60. I loved the orchestral music. Especially the pieces that banged and crashed – heavy metal, classical style. My Dad would lean over and whisper to me….’imagine horses with their Riders heading into battle…. or imagine waves roaring against shoreline rocks…..

And I did. Since that time, whenever I hear classical music in a setting which allows me peace, I slip into an imaginary  world of pure sensation and leave this place we normally inhabit where logic is employed in the defence of illogic. Come to think of it, this passionate technique was likely the most important thing my father taught me. You see, my father was a strange man. More of a boy, about 12  years old until the day he died age 82, precocious intellectually but with stunted emotions, temper tantrums when he could not get some ‘thing’ to do its thing in the way that thing was engineered. But he was also a romantic. The shelves of books in our living room were filled with art volumes, poetry, and classic works of imagination. My father read bedtime stories to myself and my two younger sisters also. He loved to read Grimms fairy tales or The Hobbit. My mother read often too, but she always preferred a book called Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories. These were schmaltzy (which might explain why I cry in a most un-male fashion when I see a romantic movie). But my Dad loved stürm und drang and he had a speaking voice to do it – musical, ranging over tones and volume to suit the scene.

My Dad had some stock classical albums at home, to play on our Clairtone stereo with the Garrard changer, but he didn’t really like music. He wanted to like music, but had no sense of it. At one time he owned an accordian, which he would pump with no rhythmic difference among songs. Later he bought an electronic organ. He would play it daily, feet pumping at the petals and fingers hitting all the right notes. But somehow, every song sounded like every other song.

So, at some point, I acquired this Naxos encylopedia of classical music. I have no pretence to being able to produce music (other than on a kazoo, but that is a story for another time). I went through a long period in my life where I was determined to learn things, which meant memorizing names and categories, but not really learning. True learning is done at an instinctive, inner level where it becomes part of you, rather than something you do.

Here is the reference, in a vain attempt to avoid having to remove the picture above:

Keith Anderson. The A to Z of Classical Music, The Great Composers and Their Great Works. Naxos. (first published by HNH International Ltd. 1996)

Oh, and I hope to get at drawing, with stick figures, the cover as promised.