The blog is open for three days.
Last night I began my short session of listening to iTunes by listening to Bob Dylan.
Listening to Bob Dylan puts me in a great mood; I am transported to a different time and place.
I sat there listening to the meager assortment of iTunes on this laptop (not my primary computer for iTunes) and it seems one could pretty much “know” 20th century music by having only the following: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Leonard Cohen, and Patsy Cline. If allowed one super-group, it would be the Traveling Wilburys. If allowed one more individual, it would be Roy Orbison.
Those five had an incredible influence on music after the 1950s. It is incredible how much influence a very small group can have.
The same can be said for the Bloomsbury Group. But instead of music, the Bloomsbury Group affected almost every other aspect of western culture. The economist Keynes was part of their group. Virginia Woolf is synonymous with literary modernism. Lytton Strachey completely changed the style of biographies with
Eminent Victorians. In the background I am listening to Patsy Cline’s “True Love.” “The whole of Freud’s work was translated into English by James Strachey (Lytton’s brother), and was published in conjunction with the Hogarth Press, owned and run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf; for this reason, among others, the Freudian revolution was felt early, and strongly, among London intelligentsia.” (
British Literature: The Longman Anthology, Volume 2C, Third Edition, c. 2006, p. 2115.) Roger Fry introduced 20th century art to the same people.
I think it was Harold Bloom who said "reading is a very solitary affair."
When I mention that (that reading is a very solitary affair) I think of Linda Fisher, no longer with us, who taught me much but had so much more to teach had I been mature enough to accept all she had to offer. Much later in life, the tables were reversed when I wanted so much to share with another but who was unable to accept my terms. Those terms were never spelled out as such, but friendship is an interesting word. Linda would have understood.
Above I mentioned five candidates to represent 20th century music. Five candidates to represent 20th century British literature would have to include: Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, and Graham Greene.
Now, Patsy Cline is singing “Why Can’t He Be You?” It is the kind of song I can imagine Linda and I, in our sixth decade, listening to while sitting in the great room reading silently in some walk-up brownstone in Boston in a parallel universe. Every now and then she would look at me and the telepathic memories of those halcyon days in 1973 would pass.
The BBC thirty (30) years later was uncannily and eerily similar. It ended as abruptly.
And now I need to close, while listening to Patsy Cline’s “Faded Love.”
By the way, after several years of looking, I did find a copy of
Eminent Victorians and thoroughly enjoyed it. I found it at one of the best community libraries in America, the Huntington Beach Community Library and Cultural Center.
Until next month, love.
