Category: Audio Courses/Books

I took a break in the Charlton Heston-narrated cassettes on philosophers to listen to this Teaching Company/Great Courses series on French author Voltaire. Although I had read Candide–my beautiful wife and I took turns reading aloud from it during our courtship–I was not that familiar with him. This course certainly set me a-right. Apparently, he was the biggest European author/thinker of the 18th century, although it might be a touch exaggerated since it is a course on Voltaire, and the course slant tends to be a little homer if you know what I mean.

The lectures include:

1. “The Patriarch”–An Overview
2. The Education of a Philosophe
3. Philosophical Letters, Part I
4. Philosophical Letters, Part II
5. The Years at Cirey
6. From Optimism to Humanism
7. Voltaire and the Philosophical Tale
8. Voltaire and God
9. Voltaire at Ferney
10. Voltaire and History
11. Voltaire and Toleration
12. Apotheosis

It definitely gives a pretty good survey of his writing, his life, and his times. The strongest parts are, again, the biographical stretches and the specific works in the beginning. When we get to the broad summary Voltaire and lectures on the back half, it moves away from citing individual works and more exploring themes with little support in the actual texts.

But, still, I already knew my Voltaire from my Voltron, and should I fall into any trivia nights in the near future (unlikely), I will surely remember that he wrote a long poem on the Lisbon earthquake and that he wrote the Dictionnaire Philosophique. However, as time goes by, I will likely confuse that with Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Except one is titled in French, although the obvious might not help me. Fortunately, the deadliest plague ever!!!1 has curtailed trivia nights. That, and in approximately eighteen minutes, I will misremember Voltaire’s birth name as Martin L’Aday and subsequently “remember” that Voltaire is French for meatloaf, which will be disputed the next time my beautiful and French-speaking wife serves her beloved meat casserole.

Also, when I was at Hooked on Books a week and a half ago, I mentioned looking for some Leibniz. Because this course says Voltaire started out really digging the philosophical optimism by argument Leibniz offered and then turned against it after the Lisbon earthquake and the death of Voltaire’s mortal beloved. So I’m interested in acquiring some Leibniz. Not necessarily reading it–heaven knows I have many, many fine primary texts that I’m saving for retirement–but to have just in case. As I’m going to ABC Books this morning, perhaps I will luck out.

I get a little money if you click here and buy:

I had hoped that this would be an antedote or rebuttal of Thinking Like An Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making, a Great Courses lecture series that started out explaining how free markets were good, allowing to use choose their actions to make their lives better according to their wishes but then veered into the econonmists know better and must maniuplate the “free” market so individuals make the right decisions.

Oh, but no.

Written not long after the banking crisis of 2008, this book instead takes the tack that the state did not have enough control of the economy to prevent the problems, and that the free market economists like Hayek and Friedman were the deluded puppetmasters who made the problem. Not Keynes and Krugman and their statist ilk. The problem with real socialism economism is that it’s never been tried!

I only made it a couple of chapters into it before abandoning it because I was listening to it while driving, and experiencing a Red Curtain of Blood (RCOB) and shouting Eff you, you effen mothereffer, that’s not true! until you’re hoarse while driving is dangerous.

So that’s my report. I didn’t make it deep enough to get to the enumerated ideas, but I am pretty sure that economic performance over the decade or thirteen years after the crisis would disprove the author’s beliefs (not arguments, which can be refuted, but beliefs which can only be reinforced). But I bet he loves him some Build Back Betterer thinking.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend reading it in throwable paperback rather than audiobook.

I get a little money if you click here and buy:

All right, all right, all right–it’s actually been a couple of weeks since I finished listening to this short, two-cassette overview of David Hume’s life and thought. This is from the Giants of Philosophy series as were Socrates, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and Baruch Spinoza. Needless to say I am enjoying the series.

Helpfully, the vocal talent voicing Hume (Heston narrates, but vocal talents do the voices of original sources, including Hume and his critics) is doing a high Scottish accent, so it’s not distracting, and it’s not pompous. The, what, book? Lecture? Whatever the antecedent of the following pronoun, it balances Hume’s biography with his thought and offers a basic overview of his works over time.

And what do I think about Hume’s thinking? Well, I agree that our understanding of the world comes from our sensory experience, but Hume dismisses the role of reason and the human mind in being able to project future events from past experience. He also denigrates the self/soul as a coherent thing but rather a memory of sensations (but no predictions, of course–you cannot prove their worth or even a person’s ability to do them logically). So, dare I say it, it goes a little Buddhist for my taste.

I mean, you cannot reason a lot of things out of nothing but reason, but you can apply some thinking to your perceptions and get value out of it, ainna? So I’m a fan of his beginnings and some of his premises, but not his conclusions.

He’s part and parcel of what has become philopsyche: Instead of man’s place in the world, philosophy has turned a bit to the world’s place in man, and it ends up just as speculative and untethered from the concrete reality as purely reasoned speculation. Were I more than a layman dabbling in philosophy, I suppose I could seek out the primary sources–I have one or more on my shelves–and write a well composed refutation of them, but I have a list of things to do today, and Refute Hume ain’t on it. Of course, one of the things is to complete the filing in my office and maybe clear my desk, but where would I go for Five Things On My Desk posts? But, Brian J., you haven’t done one of those in two years! That’s because the same things are on my desk, gentle reader. I really need to clean it.

You want well-reasoned refutations of Enlightment’s failures, go to Blogodidact.

All I have to say is that the deeper I get into the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy, the more I think Ayn Rand was on the right track with a lot of her thinking.

I get a little money if you click here and buy:

After listening the Charlton Heston narrating St. Augustine, I went right into this, skipping ahead 1200 years (although I did listen to St. Thomas Aquinas earlier, so I did have a medieval interlude).

With Baruch Spinoza, we’re coming into more modern modes of thought. Spinoza embraces a sort of Platonism as well, but unlike St. Augustine, his does not contain a personal God. Instead, God is distant (but present in everything) and rather inscrutible except through deep thought, as God (not a he as that is antromorphic) created everything and continues to create everything every day, but God is not responsive to mankind at all.

So working from that point, Spinoza tries to build a set of ethics with some disappointing results.

The course is about half biography and half deep thought, which is just about right for this lecture series. I had to listen carefully to the bits that explored his theory of substances, modes, and attributes, and I’m pretty sure I would have to read more detail about them before I could talk intelligently about them, but rest assured, they’re Platonism in Dutch.

The course mentions how he influenced the Romantic poets–probably in the God is in Nature lines of thought, and how he was excommunicated from his local synagogue and lived a life in relative poverty and isolation as a result. But interesting.

You know, many of the lecture series I have, I put on the shelf as trophies, but these are brief enough and interesting enough that I might want to listen to them again. So long as I have continued access to a cassette deck.

A Compensated Link, So I Must Tell You:

I listened to these lectures, er, audio books, out of order–I listened to St. Thomas Aquinas before this couple of cassettes, so I’m going out of order on the history of philosophy (sorry, Father Copleston, but I stalled out on your series years ago). I would probably have gotten more out of the Aquinas lectures reading how much his Aristotle-focus was a counterweight to Augustine’s Christian Platonism.

Which it is; I know, I just listened to the Teaching Company’s Augustine: Philosopher and Saint last February, so I remembered a bit of historical context–Augustine’s mother’s name was Monica, and he flirted with heretical thought in his youth, and the merging of Platonism with Christian thought.

You know, as I’m going through these philosophers again with Charlton Heston reading them to me, I think I’m soaking more in. The interplay between the thoughts. Of course, the Aristotle versus Plato bit. I like Augustine’s Platoism, though, amongst all the strains I’ve seen. Its World of Forms is God, and he somehow makes it a personal God as well–as I have mentioned, I need to read the primary sources more, but I’m not sure that I want to get into Professional Philosopher mode, where I spend years studying to split a hair differently than my also-publish-or-perish peers and base my argument on a particular translation which might not really capture exactly what the author meant. I prefer my high level, so that’s kind of what he was thinking approach. Where these short lecture series serve me well.

A Compensated Link, So I Must Tell You:

You know, I first heard about Bill Engvalls in the middle 1990s, when my girlfriend referred to him as the guy who says, “Here’s your sign.” The Blue Collar Comedy Tour was, what, almost twenty years ago? And this book is from fourteen years ago, so it’s not fresh and new. It’s the story of Bill Engvall’s life up until that point, from his childhood in Winslow, Arizona, and Texas to his marriage and his start and climb into comedy.

So it’s not a gag reel; it is more a wry biography. I found it kind of meh, but poignant in spots–the story of his parents’ divorce and his wife’s brush with death after a miscarriage particularly struck me. But not much of the rest of it.

At the conclusion, he says he’ll be happy if he’s almost remembered as the fourth guy in the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. But rest assured, Mr. Engvall, you’ll always be the third guy because you had a tagline, although not as good as “You might be a redneck” or “Git-r-done.” To my knowledge, the fourth guy–Ron White? Maybe?–did not.

But he seems like a nice guy, and I feel like I might be selling him short, but the book just didn’t resonate.

I get money if you click and buy this:

Charlton Heston reads this one, as he did Aristotle, so it’s the voice of Moses, Ben-Hur, and the Omega Man lending some heft to the reading. But his part is not really a dramatic reading–he’s reading the content pretty straight. And, fortunately, the dramatic readers who step in to act/read the quotes from Aquinas and his contemporaries and critics play it pretty straight, although other friars from Italy speaking with Italian accents but Aquinas speaks in American English which is inconsistent.

The two hours focuses as much on his biography as his thought, but it does show how he re-introduced Aristotle to the Western canon and interpreted him for the Christians. Which reminds me of how much I want to own a copy of Summa Theologica. It’s only a couple hundred dollars. Not like the complete works of Hemingway, which runs to the thousands for a nice matched set.

Of course, would I read it? I would aspire to read it, gentle reader. Although to be honest, I’m getting a little less aspirational these days. Why, I did not even go into the Better Books section at the recent Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale.

Well, I’ve gone afield here from talking about Aquinas, though, ainna? Dominican friar, a great teacher, one of the first Dominicans to teach at the University (and not without some scandal), participated in public lectures where he answered questions extemporaneously at length. So this is a good portal to the life and works of Aquinas. Better than studying four years at a formerly Thomist Catholic university anyway, although I dropped my theology minor impetuously one semester, and the university was far along the secularization path even then.

But I am enjoying the set of cassettes I got in the spring, and I’m pleased to see that Heston is reading more of them than Redgrave.

I actually started listening to this pair of audiocassettes pretty soon after listening to Socrates at the end of June, but I got a little bogged down because unlike Socrates which was heavy on the biography and only broadly spoke of his philosophical leanings as filtered through Plato.

I had to listen to this book a little more closely, though, as it went into greater detail into Aristotle’s work, which was probably lecture notes transcribed and arranged by his students after the fact. Still, it required more attention than I could give it on family drives in the summer, and I really didn’t go anywhere much without the family in the summer. At some point in post-trip car-cleaning, the cassettes disappeared from the console, and they only made their way back to my office but recently.

So what can I say briefly about Aristotle? The man started, well, not from the very beginning–there were philosophers before him–but his systematic approach to natural science and then onto thought, ontology, metaphysics, and ethics really marked a starting point of sorts. Well, I suppose you could say he offered a counterpoint to Plato, but, c’mon, man, we’re not idealists here, are we? So the audiobook hits the highlights, but it still quotes Aristotle at length, and that’s where you really need to pay attention.

Charlton Heston reads the book, but other vocal talent performs quoted texts, so whenever Aristotle speaks, we get someone doing Aristotle. However, the interpretation of Aristotle is a bit to learnéd, a bit to pompous, to do anything but distract. I mean, you have Charlton Heston reading the book. Why not let him read the quotes, too?

At any rate, it’s a good intro or a good refresher. In my case, it’s a good reminder that I have read too little Aristotle.

Taking a break from the audio courses, I picked up this set of CDs to listen to in the few times I’m in the car alone for any length of time these days. As it’s summer, I’m not spending half of my car time going to pick up or coming back from dropping off a boy–I generally have one or more with me. So it took me a while to get through this set of 5 CDs even though it only runs about five hours. In the other seasons, I can easily listen to five hours of lectures/audio books a week.

No, I’ve never actually seen an episode of Duck Dynasty. I mean, last year I read Si-Cology 101 by/about one of Robertson’s brothers in the company; the book mentions this book on a promotional page at the end, but I didn’t guess I’d get it a year later. I have also drinken the wine. And I used to buy Duck Dynasty-themed stuff for my aunt at Christmas. But not the television series.

This book, read by his son Al Robertson, tells Phil Robertson’s biography from his childhood through college football (he was the starting quarterback at Louisiana Tech ahead of Terry Bradshaw) through some booze-soaked years hunting, teaching, and running a rowdy bar until he becomes a Christian and straightens his life out. He becomes a commercial fisherman and then designs and builds a better duck call that he builds in his workshop and starts getting into stores in the south, eventually including Walmart (starting with individual stores, which was unheard of). Robertson also draws lessons from his stories to try to help the reader/listener learn from his experience.

So he’s got lots of hunting stories and drinking stories. He is a little older than my father would have been, so when he talks about boozing and hunting and being crazy, that kind of fits with what my father was through his discharge from the Marines and through the 1970s, except instead of coming to Jesus, my parents divorced.

So I enjoyed it a bit from that perspective just like I like to read the local columnists in the small town papers I take–they tell the kinds of stories that my father would tell.

So worth the five hours. I might even end up with some of the Duck Commander or Duck Dynasty videos if I stumble across them.

This is not a Teaching Company/The Great Courses production (or even Modern Scholar). It’s a mid-1990s Knowledge Products two cassette set that I bought this spring, so it weighs in at about two hours. Amazingly, instead of college professors holding their own lectures, though, they feature Hollywood talent. Lynn Redgrave, for example, handles the heavy duties on this particular–what, item? Set? At any rate, the two cassettes. When it comes time to quote either Socrates or other people talking about Socrates, other vocal talent comes in–often with appropriate accents and whatnot. My beautiful wife found it distracting, but I did not.

Well, as you know, gentle reader, Socrates left no writings of his own–the dialogues of Plato feature Socrates as a character in them, perhaps derived from his actual works, but probably not exactly. This, um, bit explains that the earlier Plato dialogues are probably more from Socrates real concerns and later things are Plato’s work with Socrates as a character. The book/series/audiocassettes focus as much on Socrates’ life as his work, and some contemporaries or relatively contemporaneous sources talk a bit about Socrates’ life (in appropriate Serious Classics Voices, although not so much in Greek accents).

So, you know what, it’s not a bad bit of drive time. Of course, all of you are not driving a top-of-the-line ca. Obama Elected truck that also has an audio cassette player in it, but brothers and sisters, I assure you that when I have another vehicle and upgrade the sound system, I am going to ask for a cassette deck in it just so I can continue to listen to these sub-dollar bits of lectures in them.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have listened to a couple of other lecture sets in the musical Great Masters series, most notably Brahms and Liszt earlier this year.

So, this is Beethoven, one of the three big Bs (Bach and Brahms the other, who precede and aftercede Beethoven respectively). He comes of age when piano technology is improving so that it can be thundering and not just tinkling, and Beethoven uses it to great effect. He’s a bit of an ass, though, which leads to some problems in his personal life and professional dealings. Also, he goes deaf over the course of his career.

Basically, if you saw Gary Oldman in Immortal Beloved, you get the gist of it, although Greenberg proffers a different identity for the addressee of the letter than the film did. Aw, c’mon, man, you know that Beethoven wrote but did not send a love letter addressed to his immortal beloved, and scholars have speculated to whom he had written it, ainna?

At any rate, this set of lectures does not move in chronological order; instead, it starts toward the end of his career with some reversals of fortune and then goes back to talk about his youth and early career.

The lectures include:

1. The Immortal Beloved
2. What Comes Down Must Go Up, 1813-1815
3. What Goes Up Must Come Down, 1815
4. Beethoven and His Nephew, 1815-1819
5. Beethoven the Pianist
6. Beethoven the Composer, 1792-1802
7. The Heroic Ideal
8. Two Concerts, 1808 and 1824

Beethoven’s life kind of follows the pattern of the other artists/composers: An unhappy childhood, being pushed into music, being tutored by a known musician (Haydn in Beethoven’s case), and so on. Perhaps Greenberg told the story in this disordered fashion to keep it fresh.

Which is why I am spacing these lecture series out: They kind of follow similar arcs, and as I’m not that trained in actual musicology yet, the music sounds kind of similar. Greenberg’s a great lecturer and fun to listen to, but my enthusiasm for the subject matter has its limits, especially the more I listen to these Great Masters courses.

Which means it will take me quite some time to get through the series I have in this line.

After Lost Christianities, I thought I would pick up something that I could listen to with the boys in the car. I didn’t end up doing so, though, as many of the lectures were bloody and brutal, especially when it came to succession. So it took me a while to get through the series since my time was limited in the car.

The lectures include:

1. The Shape of Roman Imperial History
2. The Roman Republic
3. Caesar and the Suicide of the Republic
4. The First Emperor–Augustus
5. The Powers of Augustus
6. Succession Woes
7. Livia Drusilla, Empress of Rome
8. The Early Years of Tiberius
9. The Would-Be Emperor, Sejanus
10. The Mad Emperor? Caligula
11. Killing Caligula, Finding Claudius
12. The Odd Couple–Claudius and Messalina
13. Power and Poison–Agrippina and Claudius
14. Artist and Assassin–Nero
15. The Trouble with Christians
16. Dynasty’s End–The Fall of Nero
17. The Long Year, A.D. 69
18. The First Flavian–Vespasian
19. The Last Flavians–Titus and Domitian
20. Pax Augusta–Nerva and Trajan
21. Trajan in Rome and the East
22. The Eccentric Emperor–Hadrian
23. Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus
24. Marcus in the North and Commodus
25. Civil War and Septimus Severus
26. Caracalla and the Severian Dynasty
27. Emperor and City
28. Emperor and Empire
29. Emperor and Elite
30. Emperor and People
31. Emperor and Soldier
32. Chaos
33. Aurelian, Diocletian, and the Tetrarchy
34. Constantine–Rise to Power
35. The Christian Emperor–Constantine
36. Reflections on The Emperors of Rome

So, briefly, I can name the Roman emperors in order from Augustus to, what, Severius? But once we get to the next round of civil wars, we get a bunch of claimants and soldier-emperors, and I lose track a bit.

So, what does one learn from this audio course? Well, some interesting trivia about Rome, some better sense of how it was governed, some of the war situations on the frontier, and some of the architectural contributions. How it went in cycles from strongman to brief dynasty to civil war to strongman. A couple of the emperors were considered crazy and a couple were considered ‘good’ or beneficial to the empire or history as a whole, but that the reigns had ups and downs and most of the impact was felt by Rome and the court. Which is somewhat consoling in this the modern world, but our panopticon internet and our incessant need to say “Look at me!” makes it easier for the would-be emperors and their hangers-on in these days. Listen to me talking about it–I am at eighteen years and running on this blog, ainna?

At any rate, an interesting listen: The lecturer describes the emperors’ reigns narratively but for a few survey lectures that explore the emperors’ changing relationships with the city, the elite, the people, the empire, and the soldiers.

So what would I tell my uncle I remember from the course? Probably passing familiarity with emperors by name and relative length of their tenures. A little about Trajan and Hadrian that I hadn’t known reinforcement of some received judgments about others like Caligula and Nero. A bit more reinforcement of early Christian history where it intersects with the Roman empire.

So it was about eighteen hours of listening over a couple of months, and it’ll probably be a while before I get through another as the school year has ended and with it my daily commute taking the youngest to school daily.

I listened to Professor Ehrman’s The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon in 2019.

This series of lectures takes a bit of a different focus: It looks at some of the variant Christian churches in the early centuries of the church, the first and second centuries AD, right after the gospels and Pauline letters were written. Many of these churches had different collections of books that they used as scripture, including some elements that made it into the New Testament canon and others relegated to apocrypha. The winnowing didn’t involve necessarily purging, inquisitions, and punishing heretics, although some of that was involved. But mostly this lecture focuses on the books themselves.

The lecture is structured a bit into introduction, identifying some large groups of churches aside from the proto-orthodox (which would eventually dominate and determine the canon), and then examining some of the apocryphoral books based on types (gospels, acts, epistles, apocalypses) and ending with a bit of how the proto-orthodox became The Church and set the canon–which might lead into the other lecture series.

The lectures include:

1. The Diversity of Early Christianity
2. Christians Who Would Be Jews
3. Christians Who Refuse To Be Jews
4. Early Gnostic Christianity–Our Sources
5. Early Christian Gnosticism–An Overview
6. The Gnostic Gospel of Truth
7. Gnostics Explain Themselves
8. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas
9. Thomas’ Gnostic Teachings
10. Infancy Gospels
11. The Gospel of Peter
12. The Secret Gospel of Mark
13. The Acts of John
14. The Acts of Thomas
15. The Acts of Paul and Thecla
16. Forgeries in the Name of Paul
17. The Epistle of Barnabas
18. The Apocalypse of Peter
19. The Rise of Early Christian Orthodoxy
20. Beginnings of the Canon
21. Formation of the New Testament Canon
22. Interpretation of Scripture
23. Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
24. Early Christian Creeds

When I listened to Buddhism, I marvelled at how disparate the strains of Buddhism were, especially in contrast to Christianity. One sees in this lecture series how disparate Christianity could have become without the centralizing influence of Rome on it. One wonders if Buddhism had arisen in one of the strong Chinese dynasties instead of India whether it would be more standard, or how Christianity might have evolved outside of the Mediterranean world of the Roman empire.

At any rate, I think I sharpened up some of my understanding of the gnostics, learned who the Ebionites were, and understand some of the source material for Medeival and Renaissance religious art lies outside of the Bible and in these, what, Further Adventures Of… Christian storybooks. However, if I were going to take a test on it, I would definitely have to study. I am learning the real limitations of listening to the audio courses–one that my uncle in Kansas City pointed out–that I don’t remember a whole lot from the lectures–just bits and pieces and cool stories therein. This set of lectures is fairly narrative and focused, so I hope I remember a bunch from it. But after I hit Publish on this report, unless I make an effort to bring it up elsewhere and in conversation, I probably will only retain about ten minutes of it including the Bradenberg Concerto fanfare that starts each lecture (this set is from before The Great Courses/Teaching Company changed the intro to a single chord).

Still, better than listening to the same Jack playlist on the radio all the time.

As I mentioned, I got bogged down listening to this audio course, one of the longer, 24-lecture series (although, yes, I know some courses go even longer yet). I mean, I think I skipped the last lecture in the first part (it comes in two binders, as two sets, as library editions do) because I was so excited to finish the first part that I stopped and ejected the CDs from my automobile when I finished the first lecture on that CD (these are 2 thirty minute lectures per CD). Then, I loaded the next set in the car, listened to the first lecture on the second set (“Buddhist Philosophy”) before pausing for something more exciting (History’s Greatest Blunders and the Lessons They Teach). Then, when I finished that course, I reloaded this set and inadvertently listened to the penultimate lecture (“Zen”) because the audio system played the sixth CD, the last one loaded, first, and I realize that I’d skipped a whole 10 lectures until he said the next lecture was the last one, at which point I listened to the 13th (“Buddhist Philosophy”) again and hoped I hadn’t listened to two or three lectures I would have to repeat to get back to where I paused.

All this is made possible by the scope of the lecture series and by Buddhism itself. This course provides a very, very high level overview not only of the history of the Buddhist traditions but also some insight into their thoughts and philosophies as well–and over the course of 2000 years or so and introduction into several different Asian cultures produced a great variety of different religions all called “Buddhism.” I mean, you go from emptying yourself to escape the cycle of rebirth in what is essentially an off-shoot of Hinduism to Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that are akin to angels to a full on there is one omniscient and omnipresent Buddha that you can pray to, and Siddhartha was his earthly avatar. You know, these are not the same, but they’re all in “Buddhism.” It’s as though you would take all the Abrahamic religions along with all their various denominations and heresies (unpunished) and call them a single thing.

The lectures include:

1. What is Buddhism?
2. India at the Time of the Buddha
3. The Doctrine of Reincarnation
4. The Story of the Buddha
5. All is Suffering
6. The Path to Nirvana
7. The Buddhist Monastic Community
8. Buddhist Art and Architecture
9. Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia
10. Mahayana Buddhism and the Bodhisattva Ideal
11. Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
12. Emptiness
13. Buddhist Philosophy
14. Buddhist Tantra
15. The Theory and Practice of the Mandala
16. The “First Diffusion of the Dharma” in Tibet
17. The Schools of Tibetan Buddhism
18. The Dalai Lama
19. The Origins of Chinese Buddhism
20. The Classical Period of Chinese Buddhism
21. The Origins of Japanese Buddhism
22. Honen, Shinran, and Nichiren
23. Zen
24. Buddhism in America

To be honest, the firehouse of information, delivered in a low-key manner, and the foreignness of the names involved (I could not visualize the name Avalokoteshvara, for example, which makes it harder to individualize the thinkers or Buddhas) means most of what I heard won’t stick with me–but it is a survey course. I have the two course books set aside for light review later, but I suppose if I wanted to really study Buddhism, I would have to pick a flavor and dive more deeply into it. But, honestly, as I mentioned, the ontology (ontologies) don’t really speak to me (although does any ontology make sense without belief?). Most people who get into it, I suspect, are looking for the calming and practical aspects of meditation and mindfulness. Zen, one of the less ontologically focused strains of Buddhism, is good for this.

At any rate, I have another two-part course on Buddhism that I picked up last September, so I can do some A/B testing comparing the two courses except I probably won’t get to the other course any time soon since I still have most of that stack of courses awaiting me, and the next book sale is coming up in less than a month, and I hope to score some more courses in diverse subjects then.

I borrowed this set of lectures from the library because I was getting bogged down in the Buddhism lecture series I popped in to break up the Great Masters of music biographies I’d been listening to (and which I’ll be listening too again, and more, as I received others in the line for Valentine’s Day and for my birthday last month).

Purportedly, the point of the lectures is to study these stories and analyze what causes great military failures, and they boil down to a couple of obvious things: Failure in planning, failure in execution, overconfidence, unclear orders, unclear chains of command, lack of cooperation between rival commanders or branches of service, failure to adapt to conditions, failure to recognize failure and to cut the losses.

But, really, come on. It’s really an excuse to talk about battles in history. The aural equivalent of coffeebook tables about war. Something to browse with one’s ears whilst driving the kids to and from school. And, to be honest, I kind of get to my boy’s school early for car line/to pick the other up from activities so I can listen to lectures like these. Lectures on Buddhism–eh, not as much.

The lectures include:

1. Petersburg: Union Digs Its Own Grave
2. Syracuse: Athens’s Second Front–413 B.C.
3. Carrhae: The Parthian Shot–53 B.C.
4. Red Cliffs: Cao Cao’s Bad Day–208 A.D.
5. Barbarian Gate: Adrianople–378, Pliska–811
6. The Fourth Crusade: Byzantium Betrayed–1204
7. Kalka River: Genghis Khan’s General–1223
8. Courtai: Knights versus Shopkeepers–1302
9. Nagashino: Taking Swords to a Gunfight–1575
10. Cartagena: High Walls, Short Ladders
11. Culloden: The Bonnie Prince Blunders–1746
12. Russia: Napoleon Retreats in the Snow–1812
13. Afghanistan: Khyber Pass Death Trap–1842
14. Crimea: Charge of the Light Brigade–1854
15. Greasy Grass: Custer’s Last Stand–1876
16. Isandlwana: 25,000 Zulus Undetected–1896
17. Adwa: Italy’s Fiasco in Ethiopia–1899
18. Colenso: The Second Boer War–1899
19. Tannenberg: Ineptitude in the East–1914
20. Gallipoli: Churchill Dooms Allied Assault–1915
21. World War II: Royal Navy Goes Down–1941-42
22. Dieppe Raid: Catastraphe on the Beach–1942
23. Operation Market Garden: A Bridge Too Far–1944
24. The Great Blunders: Four Paths to Failure

It’s a broad sampling throughout history which kind of gives one some reminders and/or insight into different epochs. I mean, I was familiar with Custer’s Last Stand and the Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, and I have a contemporaneous book about Napoleon’s incursion into Russia that I might want to dig out and read. As I mentioned, the battle of Carrhae was mentioned in The Judgment of Caesar, so I felt smart knowing it from these lectures before I read that book.

Each lecture gives a bit of the history leading up to the battle followed by the battle itself, so each is a self-contained narrative that holds together individually. One thing that struck me, though, is that each of the stories is about groups of people in conflict, but in the lectures on Americans vs. Native Americans and Europeans vs. Africans (Isandlwana and Edwa), the lecturer took time to offer judgment against the Americans or Europeans for their policies that led to the battle. I don’t know if the judgment was lighter in other lectures or if I have just turned into one of those bean counters in the 21st century. But here we are.

At any rate, a fun, informative listen that really didn’t make me a better student of military tactics or strategy. All I know is that some of those poor bastards were doomed at the outset of their maladventures due to very poor planning on the parts of their leadership. Which makes some of these stories tragic more than heroic.

But enough of the fun stuff: it’s back to the Buddhism for me.

After listening to the course on Brahms earlier in the month, I started on this one immediately as Brahms hated him. So I wanted to see if Liszt hated Brahms. Although it is mentioned, more time is focused on how Liszt helped Wagner’s career along and then came to hate him even as one of his (Liszt’s) daughters married the opera composer.

So, Liszt life does follow the pattern of many of the other composers and important musical figures of his time: A gifted child, nay, a prodigy whose family sacrifices to get him musical lessons and then take him on tour before he’s ready, like Luke leaving Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. They make some money, but something happens (Liszt’s father dies while leading Liszt on the tour) which ends that segment of his life. He then takes a few years off, goes on an extended concert tour, supports from afar a Hungarian rebellion (Liszt being a Hungarian born of German stock, he identifies as Hungarian). He settles in Weimar, builds it into a cultural center, and has a turbulent family life with two women whom he cannot marry.

The lectures include:

1. Le Concert, C’est Moi–The Concert Is Me
2. A Born Pianist
3. Revelation
4. Transcendence
5. Weimar
6. The Music at Weimar
7. Rome
8. A Life Well Lived

The lectures have a wonderful digression into the evolution of the harpsichord into the piano and then improvements in piano technology that really allowed the music of Beethoven and eventually Liszt.

So my impression of it is that Liszt was a phenomenal pianist and composer of piano pieces–whose works were often called impossible to play until someone saw Liszt himself do it–but he is not as well known for his symphonies. And later, he wrote symphonic poems, musical responses to known stories, that were not well received in his day but are heavily influential even to this day. Which probably means that they played some part in the twentieth century degradation of all arts, but I am not steeped enough in the study of music–despite listening to a couple of these lecture series–to really make a good case for it. I just hold as my default that all art veered from good to laying the ground work for bad in about 1880 or thereabouts.

Still, I like Robert Greenberg as a lecturer and look forward to the other couple of sets I have on the stack in this lecture series series. Although I have changed focus and am listening to something different now–I fear if I listened to them all at once, I would not distinguish them as well as their biographies have a lot of similarities.

As you might remember, gentle reader, the stack of Teaching Company Great Courses I bought last September includes a number of shorter biography lecture series on classical musicians and composers. I have previously listened to (but not reported on) the series on Mozart. They’re all done by Professor Robert Greenberg, who also did the series How to Listen To and Understand Great Music which I started listening to a couple years ago with my beautiful wife. He’s probably my favorite of all the lecturers, and it’s probably indicative that when the Teaching Company used to send out sample discs, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music was one of the sample lectures.

The lectures in this line, the Great Masters / His Life and Music, are more biographies than musical analyses, but they do include snippets of various works or opuses (opi? opia?) to illustrate. They do put the composers in the context of musical trends and their relationships with other composers. For example, Brahms apparently hated Liszt and often Wagner.

The lectures include:

1. J.B., We Hardly Knew You!
2. The Brothels of Hamburg
3. The Schumanns
4. The Vagabond Years
5. Maturity
6. Mastery
7. The Tramp of Giants
8. Farewells

Based on my two examples (Mozart and Brahms), I think I’ll start seeing some patterns. Both were the children of musical parents. However, instead of taking him on a European concert tour as a curiosity, Brahms’ parents made him work in brothels, where he was an object of curiosity and probably abuse which marred his relationship with women throughout his life. Later, he would become a celebrity for his music and would become a bit prickly or full of himself, and a bit of a rascal. Brahms certainly fit this mold.

I am not sure I completely grok the music as it is, though–I never did complete How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, remember–and I don’t hear the content of musical notes and structure as clearly as some in this family do. I mean, I am a words guy–I tend to think of the lyrics as the important part of a song and the music as supportive of those lyrics. However, if I steep myself in these courses, I am sure my appreciation will go up.

I have already started the course on Liszt because learning about Brahms’s enemy right after Brahms.

When I was in Kansas City last autumn, my uncle asked me what I learned from these courses (as opposed to watching documentary series on cable, which he and my aunt do). It’s generally more a sense I get than actual learning things. From this course, I will likely remember Brahms played in brothels, had unrequited relationships, sometimes on purpose, with many women, including Clara Schumann, and that he was compared early to Bach and Beethoven and that made him self-conscious, but that he eventually earned his place there. I will not likely remember the bits that Professor Greenberg flags as trivia–such as the third movement of the third symphony is the only Brahms piece using the triangle. Which is just as well. Twenty- and thirty-something people writing the questions for trivia nights don’t know that either. And quite likely might only know Brahms for his lullaby, actually called “The Cradle Song”.

I have often said that I don’t really care for the Teaching Company courses that are in my disciplines–English and Philosophy–but this one was an exception. It covers, well, the development of the novel in England and talks about its themes and whatnot from the 1700s to roughly World War II with the death of the Modernists.

The lectures include:

1. Definitions and Distinctions
2. The “Englishness” of the English Novel
3. Historical Context of Early English Fiction
4. The Rise of the Novel–Richardson and Fielding
5. After 1750–Sterne, Burney, and Radcliffe
6. Scott and the Historical Novel
7. Austen and the Comedic Tradition
8. Austen and the History of Consciousness
9. Dickens–Early Works
10. Novelists of the 1840s–Thackeray
11. Novelists of the 1840s–The Brontës
12. Dickens–Later Works
13. After 1870–Review and Preview
14. Eliot and the Multiplot Novel
15. Eliot and the Unfolding of Character
16. Hardy and the Natural World
17. James and the Art of Fiction
18. Conrad and the “Scramble for Africa”
19. Ford and Forster–Transition to Modernism
20. Lawrence and the “Bright Book of Life”
21. Joyce–Dublin and Dubliners
22. Joyce–Realism and Anti-Realism
23. Woolf and the Poetic Novel
24. The Impact of the Novel

I had read just enough of the books and authors mentioned (Jane Eyre, Barnaby Rudge, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and so on) to feel clever.

And I looked back over my list of books that I’ve read this year, and I was ashamed–I thought I had not read any classic bits of literature this year (but I was mistaken–I read Barnaby Rudge in 2020). So I immediately went to ABC Books to buy a new piece of classical literature to read. Well, not exactly, but on one of my trips up there this holiday season, I did pick up a copy of Wuthering Heights which I have already started to read. Sure, I might have a copy of it somewhere else on my to-read shelves, but they organize their books so much better up there.

At any rate, what did I learn? Well, a little of the evolution of the novel from the epistolary stories in the eighteenth century to the magazine serials to the self-conscious and self-indulgent works from the late 1900s through the work of James, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf. As you can imagine, gentle reader, I liked the talk about the earlier books the best, and although the professor did not mean to imply that Henry James ruined the novel, he (the professor) points to James as the guy who branched the novel into Art and Genre. Of course, the professor also likes the Art and the things the Modernists did–he says everyone should try to read Ulysses, for crying out loud, and that’s just foolishness (although I did buy a copy of it recently, as in 13 years ago recently just in case I ran out of other things to read).

I mean, I understand some of the developments such as floating limited omniscient narrators and unreliable narrators–so I’m glad someone invented these things, but things you have to read a second time, after you’ve read the footnotes and a couple of critical essays to interpret the “right” way–I ain’t got time for that.

So a good course, and it’s likely triggered another one of those classical literature kicks that I go on every five or ten years, where I will read a bunch of them in order and then back to genre paperbacks.

This is another one of the turn-of-the-century six hour lectures that I bought this autumn. I have been tearing through the six hour ones at a pretty good pace (see also The Search for Intelligent Life In Space, The Ethics of Aristotle and The Aeneid of Virgil). It’s the first lecture series that I have heard where two professors tag-team the lectures, each speaking in turn. One is a professor of history and the other is a professor of English, and they combine to keep the series rolling.

The course talks a bit about the historical context–twelfth century Italy, which is about to undergo its Renaissance, but which is still medieval in many ways but with a rising merchant class. In many ways, the lives of the people have not changed that much in the millennium since Christ, so the Biblical metaphors of a shepherd and whatnot are still real and concrete to the people of the time. Into this world, a son of a wealthy merchant undergoes a religious experience and sheds his wealthy background to become a poor itinerant preacher and practicer of charity who triggers a bit of a revival within the Church (now known as the Catholic Church since Luther was not so fortunate and a bit hot-headed).

So Francis gets the blessing of the Pope for his ministry and ends up founding an order that would have quite an impact even unto today. The professors begin and end the series by talking about how Francis remains in the popular culture, imagination, and ministry to this day.

The lectures include:

1. Why Francis of Assisi Is Alive Today
2. The Larger World Francis Inherited
3. The Local World Francis Inherited
4. From Worldly Knight to Knight of Christ
5. Francis and the Church
6. Humility, Poverty, Simplicity
7. Preaching and Ministries of Compassion
8. Knowing and Experiencing Christ
9. Not Francis Alone–The Order(s) Francis Founded
10. Not Men Alone–St. Clare and St. Francis
11. The Fransiscans After Francis
12. A Message For Our Time

So I learned a bunch about Francis (although I have forgotten alread his birth and death years, but it was very late 1100s and early 1200s) and a bit about only slightly pre-Renaissance Italy.

These lectures continue to remind me how much I can learn–that is, how much I do not know–and how quickly I can learn when I delve into something new.

Unfortunately, I have also just started a 36 lecture course on The English Novel, which is something I already know a bit about, and The Re-Current Unpleasantness is already limiting my time driving, so it might be some time before you see another post like this, gentle reader. Rest assured, in the interim, I will be reading pulp and genre fiction instead of the many learned tomes I own and might actually be getting dummer as we go.

Okay, now this was a fun course to listen to. I was a little concerned that it might be a bit thin on topic matter, as the SETI program itself would be a rather narrow topic–merely talking about analyzing radio signals from space would make for a long six hours.

Instead, the course runs a complete gamut of cosmology, astronomy, history of astronomy, pop culture/science fiction, xenobiology, and more. Lectures include:

1. Our Place in the Cosmos
2. Alone in the Neighborhood–Fiction and Fact
3. The Propsects for Life in the Solar System–Mars, Europa, Titan
4. Other Worlds? The Search for Habitable Planets
5. Interstellar Travel and Colonization
6. The Fermi Paradox, or Why Aren’t The Aliens Everywhere?
7. Why UFOs Are Bunk
8. What Is E.T. Made Of?
9. Alien Appearance and Motivation–Can Science Tell Us Anything?
10. Searching for E.T.–Modern Techniques
11. Estimating the Number of Civilizations (The Drake Equation)
12. If We Find E.T., What Then?

It’s all fascinating material–some of it scientific scientific, but much of it speculative scientific. The lecturer theorizes that conditions in the cosmos, or at least our galaxy, are such that they would resemble us a whole bunch. Some of the existing science, at least our understanding, would lead to this conclusion, but a lot of times, I’ve found that speculation (and politically charged science) tends to assume we have reached some sort of peak and that all things we learn from now on will confirm what we know now. Which is not very scientific at all. Also, I found a clear line in this course between science and speculation, but I find that a lot when I think about or read about (or hear about) science. The result you predict is speculation; the method to prove or disprove your speculation should be science.

I am nitpicking a bit here–it’s a fun run through these topics, and the lecturer has a pleasant voice and a great sense of humor. The course is over twenty years old (and on audiocassettes, which meant it cost me fifty cents total in September–definitely worth it). Some of the things he thinks we’ll know in the next decade–including maybe finding a signal from a distant world–have not come to pass, but we did just scoop some asteroid material for a return to Earth.

Which is a good reminder of how slow space-sorts of science moves. This lecture series, at twenty years old, is mostly fresh and contemporary, and our asteroid-scooping spacecraft was launched four years ago and won’t return to Earth for three years. When I was young and into astronomy a bunch, those sorts of timelines seemed really long. Now that I am older and with a different perspective on the passage of time, I think three years is no time at all.

Also, the lectures, in the one or two lectures on the actual SETI program techniques, mentions the then-contemporary SETI@home project. Basically, in the era of dial-up, you could download an application that would process SETI data while your computer was inactive–it ran as a screen saver, and then every couple of days you could dial into the server and upload the results and download data to process. I had this on my home computer at the time, which stems from the days I lived in my apartment and right after I got married. Somewhere along the line, with some computer change or another, I stopped installing it. I see it’s been shut down now for a while, but, geez, this is an old course, and I am old since I remember some of it from my youth.