EPTThe way this is going to go is that there are of course no hard and fast rules, but I'm going to lay out some things that I think you should give a look at. So I've compiled a small list of things for you guys to hear, things for you to see, and things for you to watch.
1x2
So for Music I have a breakdown for you guys. 1 song that I just started listening to and a song I think you guys should give a shot, and 1 song that is older and I absolutely love.
Yancey Boys - Flowers
I actually just heard this song yesterday. I find that really often mainstream rap incoporates a boring harmony with what is a tightly packed, and often intensely planned verse. What made me appreciate this song is that the harmony they used is [i]cool. It isn't the kind of old school 90's hip-hop that I also like, its a jazzy re-introduction of less commonly used chords to modern rap verse. Now don't misunderstand me, Yancey Boys is not the only group to do this, but that doesn't take away from the fact that their progression is ear catching. In fact the guy that made the progression for the song, J Dilla, has an instrumental version of Flowers - it is worth the listen.
Sam Cooke - Change Gonna Come
Admittedly I don't think many users on this forum will have heard of Sam Cooke. It isn't that he's a diamond in the rough (far from it actually), but that most people I have talked to outside of the music community at my college haven't heard his name. Cooke's style of pop is the sugary stuff from the 50's and 60's that I vibe with. I remember listening to a track of B.B. King's called "Lucille" where he described why he played blues as in part because (paraphrasing here) he can't sing the sweet stuff like Sam [Cooke] can. This song is a take off of the Southern, Black Gospel tradition of music. It's still sweet, but it isn't the Sam Cooke standard style. I've listened to several versions of this song and I can say that each one is incredible because the original song is incredible.
2x2
For the two things to look at I have two poems for you guys to mull over. I often find people don't give poetry the chance it deserves when it comes to taking the time to read it, but even more often I find people are jaded because they get the most boring stuff in secondary school. I was the same way until I took a poetry class in college and I was exposed to a whole other world of poetry.
![[image loading]](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-FzNpRxInZDQ/TYYzibTdPGI/AAAAAAAAFi4/blhj1VmSBsY/s1600/Spring_and_All.png)
I don't think that people read poetry often enough. In general I think that most people's intake of poetry now is by three different sources: some through rap; others through themselves; still others through tumblr. I'm not going to sit here and be an elitist about how you get your dose of literature - though I try to avoid tumblr poetry like the plague. William Carlos Williams is a famous poet, but what I especially love is that this poem is still relevant to this day. Whenever I read it I am reminded that hope is such a powerful catalyst for change, and losing hope means losing the catalyst for change. This remains true even when the journey's destination is not a welcoming place.
![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Guillaume_Apollinaire_-_Calligramme_-_Fleurs.png)
I love Apollinaire's work. I don't love it because its the best poetry ever written, but I love it because mixing the aesthetic side of how words sit on a page with the meanings of the words themselves is a different kind of experience. I think that calligrams aren't overlooked as much as they are just never brought out for people to look at. When I was exposed to Apollinaire by the Le Monde Top 100 Books of the Century list, I was surprised that I had never heard of him. Granted that the list has been critiqued over and over again for over-emphasizing the importance of French artists and writers, but that should not mean that the works on it are less valuable - they just need to be augmented
. This is just one of Apollinaire's pieces, and its one of my favorites to look at.3x2
This last portion is one that I was going to dedicate to philosophy. Philosophy is often thought of as an inextricably unfortunate area of study because it is so isolated from everyday people - at least that is what other students around me have expressed to me. That isn't the case, and it never has been. Philosophy is directly related to everything we do. I think that exposing more people to philosophy is the first step in getting rid of that ridiculous belief that philosophy is too up-in-the-clouds for "normal" people.
John Searle is a legend in language and in consciousness. He's put out an entire series of his lectures on philosophy of mind at UC Berkeley. He's famous for his thought experiment known as the Chinese Room along with countless other arguments that he has published. I would highly recommend taking an hour a couple times a week to listen to his class on philosophy of mind. If that is too much then having just this little video on his philosophy of mind is a good intro to his arguments concerning why we need to study consciousness more-so now than ever and what his general ideas concerning consciousness are.
Lawrence Haas isn't as well known as other thinkers in the field of philosophy, but since he is the husband of the new President of my college I thought I would give this a shoutout. His piece is on a life-long love of his, magic, and why he thinks that the art of magic can be better understood than it already is. This talk is much easier to understand than the Searle talk, but if you listen closely to it he clearly has spent a great deal of time thinking about the aesthetic properties of magic. As someone who learned a few magic card tricks in high school to impress people on bus rides what Dr. Haas does is incredible, and he is insanely talented.
Extra Stuff
Paul Kalinithi
This is a piece written about Paul Kalinithi - a surgeon at Stanford Medical School - who was diagnosed with lung cancer in his 30's. He wrote a popular op-ed in the New York Times a couple years back about confronting mortality that bridges the gap between everyday applications of areas biomedicine with ethics and the act of living life when we know our time is up. It's worth the read/watch/listen.
As a hockey player this goal was insane, and since we just past its 11 year anniversary, I think its worth bringing it back. If you watch hockey or just like watching the Coyotes lose games for ridiculous reasons, this one's for you.
