Green.â I am old enough to remember not only the Beats International version, âDub Be Good to Me,â but the SOS Bandâs original, âJust Be Good to Me.â And Iâm not saying that the Professor sent me off screaming toward Beethovenâs late quartets (very good, by the way); I did, however, find myself wondering whether, when a song keeps coming round again and again and again, like a kid on a merry-go-round, there comes a point when you have to stop smiling and waving. Saint-Saëns is a new artist, as far as Iâm concerned, with a big future ahead of him.
3.A new pair of headphones, expensive ones, which seemed to me to be demanding real food, orchestras and symphonies, rather than a wispy diet of singer-songwriter.
4.Jane Campionâs beautiful film Bright Star , which turned Keats into a writer I recognized and understood.
5.During promotional work for Lonely Avenue , the project Iâve been working on with Ben Folds, the two of us were asked to trade tracks for some iTunes thing. Ben recommended an early Elton John album and the first movement of Rachmaninoffâs Third Piano Concerto. I bought the Rachmaninoff, because the enthusiasm was so unaffected and unintimidating.
6.And now, Sarah Bakewellâs biography of Montaigne, How to Live .
I had never read Montaigne before picking up Bakewellâs book. I knew only that he was a sixteenth-century essayist, and that he had therefore willfully chosen not to interest me. So I am at a loss to explain quite why I felt the need first to buy and then to devour How to Live . And it was a need, too. I have talked before in these pages about how sometimes your mind knows what it needs, just as your body knows when itâs time for some iron, or some protein, or a drink that doesnât contain caffeine or absinthe. I suspect in this case the title helped immeasurably. This book is going to tell me how to live, while at the same time filling in all kinds of gaps in my knowledge? Sold.
Well, How to Live is a superb book, original, engaging, thorough, ambitious, and wise. Itâs not just that it provides a handy guide to Hellenic philosophy, and an extremely readable account of the sixteenth-century French civil wars; you would, perhaps, expect some of that, given Montaigneâs influences and his political involvement. (He became mayor of Bordeaux, a city that had been punished for its insurrectionist tendencies.) Nor is it that it contains immediate and sympathetic portraits of several of Montaigneâs relationshipsâwith his wife, his editor, and his closest friend, La Boétie, who died in one of the frequent outbreaks of the plague, and of whom Montaigne said, famously, âIf you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.â The conventional virtues of a biography are all there, and in place, but where Bakewell really transcends the genre is in her organization of the material, and her refusal to keep Montaigne penned in his own time. In just over three hundred pages, she provides a proper biography, one that takes into account the hundreds of years he has lived since his death; that, after all, is when a lot of the important stuff happens. And the postmortem life of Montaigne has been a rich one: he troubled Descartes and Pascal, got himself banned in France (until 1854), captivated and then disappointedthe Romantics, inspired Nietzsche and Stefan Zweig, made this column possible.
He did this by inventing the medium of the personal essay, more or less single-handedly. How many other people can you think of who created an entire literary form? Indeed, how many people can you think of who created any cultural idiom? James Brown, maybe; before âPapaâs Got a Brand New Bagâ there was no funk; and then, suddenly, there it was. Well, Montaigne was the James Brown of the 1580s. In his brilliant book A Year in
3.A new pair of headphones, expensive ones, which seemed to me to be demanding real food, orchestras and symphonies, rather than a wispy diet of singer-songwriter.
4.Jane Campionâs beautiful film Bright Star , which turned Keats into a writer I recognized and understood.
5.During promotional work for Lonely Avenue , the project Iâve been working on with Ben Folds, the two of us were asked to trade tracks for some iTunes thing. Ben recommended an early Elton John album and the first movement of Rachmaninoffâs Third Piano Concerto. I bought the Rachmaninoff, because the enthusiasm was so unaffected and unintimidating.
6.And now, Sarah Bakewellâs biography of Montaigne, How to Live .
I had never read Montaigne before picking up Bakewellâs book. I knew only that he was a sixteenth-century essayist, and that he had therefore willfully chosen not to interest me. So I am at a loss to explain quite why I felt the need first to buy and then to devour How to Live . And it was a need, too. I have talked before in these pages about how sometimes your mind knows what it needs, just as your body knows when itâs time for some iron, or some protein, or a drink that doesnât contain caffeine or absinthe. I suspect in this case the title helped immeasurably. This book is going to tell me how to live, while at the same time filling in all kinds of gaps in my knowledge? Sold.
Well, How to Live is a superb book, original, engaging, thorough, ambitious, and wise. Itâs not just that it provides a handy guide to Hellenic philosophy, and an extremely readable account of the sixteenth-century French civil wars; you would, perhaps, expect some of that, given Montaigneâs influences and his political involvement. (He became mayor of Bordeaux, a city that had been punished for its insurrectionist tendencies.) Nor is it that it contains immediate and sympathetic portraits of several of Montaigneâs relationshipsâwith his wife, his editor, and his closest friend, La Boétie, who died in one of the frequent outbreaks of the plague, and of whom Montaigne said, famously, âIf you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.â The conventional virtues of a biography are all there, and in place, but where Bakewell really transcends the genre is in her organization of the material, and her refusal to keep Montaigne penned in his own time. In just over three hundred pages, she provides a proper biography, one that takes into account the hundreds of years he has lived since his death; that, after all, is when a lot of the important stuff happens. And the postmortem life of Montaigne has been a rich one: he troubled Descartes and Pascal, got himself banned in France (until 1854), captivated and then disappointedthe Romantics, inspired Nietzsche and Stefan Zweig, made this column possible.
He did this by inventing the medium of the personal essay, more or less single-handedly. How many other people can you think of who created an entire literary form? Indeed, how many people can you think of who created any cultural idiom? James Brown, maybe; before âPapaâs Got a Brand New Bagâ there was no funk; and then, suddenly, there it was. Well, Montaigne was the James Brown of the 1580s. In his brilliant book A Year in
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