Re: [xmca] G. Gould

Who told you that you "have to make a choice" between the two Gould's? Who am I
to be a arbiter of taste? G was a gifted pianoplayer, S. J. was a gifted
rhetoric. In both cases there's obviously a lot of noise.

As Kent Blaser remarked in an article on S. J. Gould: ”Postmodernists will
think of him [as?] a hopeless traditionalist, while defenders of hard core
legend science accuse him of relativism for undermining the objectivity of
science. Perhaps this just means that Gould is as confused as the rest of us,
and that looking to him for enlightenment is misguided.”

E.

On 2007-11-15, at 17:04, Mike Cole wrote:
> We have to make a choice between the two gould's? What a
> shame. I so admired them both.
> mike
>
> On Nov 15, 2007 2:32 AM, E. Knutsson <eikn6681@student.su.se> wrote:
>
>> For those who think that Glenn Gould is more interesting than S.J.Gould:
>>
>> "Glenn Gould was a quintessential 'McLuhanesque' figure, living as though
>> technology was an 'extension' of himself. [...] Gould claimed that at
>> night the
>> hourly news sometimes provided the material for his dreams. Gould was also
>> able
>> to make use of his radio environment, to put it to work for him. His
>> constant
>> audio input, sometimes provided by more than one audio source, supplied
>> Gould
>> with a means of dividing his areas of concentration. 'Quite mysteriously,
>> I
>> discovered that I could better learn Schoenberg's difficult piano score,
>> Opus
>> 23, if I listened to them both at once, the FM to hear music and the AM to
>> hear
>> the news.' On another occasion Gould described how he began to master a
>> particularly difficult passage in a Beethoven sonata by placing a radio
>> and a
>> television next to his piano and turning them up 'full blast.' 'The fact
>> that
>> you couldn't hear yourself, that there wasn't audible evidence of your
>> failure
>> was already a step in the right direction.' Gould's ability to divide his
>> various levels of consciousness through the manipulation of his audio
>> environment resembles the type of simultaneous awareness that McLuhan
>> spoke of
>> in relation to the 'field' experience of the 'oral-aural' person. ...
>> Gould's
>> notorious irrepressible habit of singing while playing the piano, which is
>> clearly audible in many of his recordings, is perhaps another indication
>> that,
>> more than most musicians, Gould was indeed McLuhan's 'oral-audial' man -
>> incapable of remaining silent, totally involved in an activity that
>> required 'the participation of the whole body and the whole mind.'"
>>
>> (Paul Théberge, "Counterpoint: Glenn Gould & Marshall McLuhan"; Genosko,
>> G.
>> (ed.).Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Vol. II.
>> London & New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 49-50).
>>
>>
>>
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Received on Thu Nov 15 10:51 PST 2007