Links oder Rechts

Perhaps the clearest indication that I'm a bad blogger is that I never do the whole linking thing. I read a lot of blogs, but I never let them, or you, dear reader, know what I've enjoyed! So here goes...

1) Chris Foley at the The Collaborative Piano Blog has a great post on the virtues of learning Christmas Music for the piano.

I am perhaps the most isolated musician on earth (self-imposed), but I've long harboured a dream where someone asks me if I play the piano, and I reply, oh, I know a couple of things, and proceed to do my best Brahms in a brothel bar (actually, I should learn some Brahms for this very reason...)

That being said, I usually sit down and play Beethoven, not always the most social of music.. Christmas music on the other hand, is an easy score. Chris, I'm going to go pick up some of the music you've mentioned this weekend! And watch out friends!

2) Adam Kotsko at The Weblog has a wonderful analysis of something I was all too familiar with growing up in Alberta- the young, hard-core evangelical Christian who doesn't appear to come out of a fire and brimstone family. It's a thoroughly argued post, and I have nothing to add to it except a link.

3) Waste, one of those blogs that I only recently subscribed to, and yet I had read often simply through googling some philosophical concept. And it turns out the author, Ben Wolfson, is a germanist as well, which, given my own graduate studies, makes it a must read for me.

Anyway, he has a great post around whether or not Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes as Shaggy-dog story, putting it against Kafka's Ein Hungerkünstler. The post's brilliance lies in the fact that he seems to have found the hermeneutic key to one of the most intractable works of German Idealism, and that's saying something...

4) Last but not least, Conrad Roth at the Varieties of Unreligious Experience takes the Benjaminian turn and starts to talk politics, but through the lens of aesthetics. My suspicion, which he has pretty much confirmed, that within that analytical breast beats the heart of a Romantic is pretty much sewn up by this post.