Took a break from my regularly scheduled Beethoven biography (right now I'm about halfway through Jan Swafford's thousand page tome Beethoven: AnguishTook a break from my regularly scheduled Beethoven biography (right now I'm about halfway through Jan Swafford's thousand page tome Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph to plow through this meditation on Beethoven by Romain Rolland. I definitely needed those 500 pages of Swafford to help me make sense of this book. Apparently when Rolland was writing in the early 20th century he could assume that his readers knew quite a lot about Beethoven already and he could just rhapsodize about his genius. Did everyone used to know that Beethoven had a dark night of the soul in 1802 and wrote a letter called the Heiligenstadt Testament where he bemoans his worsening hearing and his dumb brothers? Also, I cannot really tell, but I don't think this is the English translation of Rolland's 1903 biography of Beethoven, but another book he wrote later in the late 1920s.
I read this book out of an interest in Rolland, who is mostly forgotten now in the Anglophone world but who was a tremendously influential figure across the globe in the early 20th century. Rolland was a true believer in the power of the individual genius, a dedicated pacifist unswayed even during the nationalistic fervors of the First World War, and a follower of Swami Vivekananda. There are plenty of other books to read now if you are interested in Beethoven, but none of them will suggest Beethoven blew out his own ears because his intense powers of concentration created swells of powerful Kundalini energy that his body could not handle. (So far Swafford seems to be sticking with the lead poisoning hypothesis.) Rolland goes pretty far out, but it's fun and thought-provoking, and also I really enjoyed listening along as his dissects the Eroica, the Appassionata, and the overtures for Fidelio. ...more
I was recently at a panel of some Marxist men talking about Marxism, and one of them would not stop talking in a kind of scornful way about biography.I was recently at a panel of some Marxist men talking about Marxism, and one of them would not stop talking in a kind of scornful way about biography. He sat with his hands interlocked upon his belly and tapped his index fingers together as he pontificated how biography, in its messiness, its particularity, its use of emotion and narrative, gets in the way of the purity of theory, of which we need lots of, apparently, pure clear geometric theory, in order to understand the structures of capitalism. Perhaps then, after we have nicely graphed capitalism on the Cartesian plane, can we locate a little gap in the system where we can go in and blow it all up. I'm not totally adverse to this sort of Death Star approach to understanding capitalism- re-creating the schematics in minute detail to ostensibly find the fatal flaw- but how effectively do we fight the system when we forever ignore the people it destroys? What is a Marxism that requires several advanced degrees to parse?
Anyways, I wanted to throw this book at the guy. Both because it is large, and because I think that, while everyone should read it, it is that good, Marxist Men in permanently stuck in AbstractionLand really especially need to read it. In this biography of Tussy, her messiness, her particularity, her emotion, and her commitment, we find the living breathing heart of anti-capitalism- concern for the well-being of all the people we share the world with. I was in tears at the end.
Superlative book. If anyone knows where Freddie Demuth is buried, please comment, I will go to England to bring flowers to his grave. ...more
This book is more a meta-biography of Gandhi as a political figure than a straight-forward account of his life, but a recent-ish viewing of the AttenbThis book is more a meta-biography of Gandhi as a political figure than a straight-forward account of his life, but a recent-ish viewing of the Attenborough film and a thorough reading of his Wikipedia page should be enough to keep less knowledgeable readers such as myself from feeling too lost in the woods.
Since there are something like 400 biographies of Gandhi to choose from, I would recommend this one to people already reasonably knowledgeable about the arc of his life, and looking for a compact volume of critical analysis about Gandhi....more
