by Christopher Fulkerson

I have made four categories of the books most important to me. Firstly, there are books I fully believe that by reading them I have saved my life, or helped in crucial ways to give it meaning, purpose, and perhaps skill; secondly, books which brought knowledge and enlightenment; thirdly, books which I have found helpful in developing some skill at one of my the main projects in my life, perhaps what the fabric of my life actually is, which is personal resurrection; fourthly those which helped me determine how to part company with received ideas, how to "think outside the box," or at least be better able to stand apart from others when I think it right. Of course, there is much overlap of these uses of these books, and sometimes it was not easy to decide which category the books belonged in; Homer, especially, belongs in every category. But I have felt that some prioritization would be helpful to give an idea of how I use books. The category of books that have been part of my self-resurrection effort is especially important, because during the 1990s I developed a conscious scheme to resurrect myself through reading. There are many books part of this particular project that are not listed here. Please understand that this is certainly not a list of "all the 'best' books I have ever read;" some of this is Grade B material, and many a masterpiece have I read that had less apparent, or perhaps I mean less dramatic, effect on my mind than the ones I have detailed here.

BOOKS THAT HAVE SAVED MY LIFE

David Hume A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE
This is probably the single most important book in my life. Prior to reading it I had read what I thought were some fairly challenging things, but I had St. Thomas's attitude, that I had (more or less) understood every page I had ever read, silly me (I plead greater naivete than arrogance). Before reading Hume, a "difficult book" meant to me a book that involved knowledges that for me were incomplete, making the references difficult to catch; or one which was obviously poorly written. This was the first book which though obviously clearly written, by a man who really cared about being understood, I nevertheless had to admit to myself I was never going to understand it unless I reread things frequently, sometimes line by line. It was a genuine challenge to my ability to think. Before reading Hume I had not known there really was anybody out there who had taken the trouble to clarify what the thoughts are, that you have to be capable of thinking, if you want to be free of dogma. Hume's method helped me trendously to sort out my own perceptions during the 1980s at a time of personal crisis, when I was not really sufficiently aware of my problems. What I only vaguely realized at the time was that by reading philosophy in this way, I was actually doing philosophy. The greatest straightforward gratitude I feel to any writer is to David Hume. It was a lagniappe to me when I later learned that such a decent and humane person as Hume eventually decided Rousseau was unsalvagable; I detest Rousseau.

Jacon Bronowski and Bruce Mazlich THE WESTERN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
I read this book while at Berkeley, and treasured every page. This is probably the second most important book in my personal, intellectual, and artistic formation; after this, in fact, ranking is probably dependant upon when I read a book or what I was trying to, or able to, get from it. The leap I was able to make with this book's help was from an increased objectification of culture into actual composition. Since this method of proceeding is one that fascinates me the most with my creative work, this book is very important to me. Here were some authors really spelling out a "tradition" of thought in the West; I was relieved to discover this and read it carefully. It was from reading this book and delving into other texts to which it directed me that got me interested in Leonardo da Vinci, and this eventually resulted in my composing SCRITTI DI LEONARDO. Occasionally before, but certainly ever since, most of my pieces have represented, in one way or another, a "scientific" aspect of composition. Then Liberal Arts mentality of integration of the arts and sciences is preached more often than any methods for achieving it are taught. Bronowski and Mazlich helped me construct the "tradition" of the West for myself in a productive way that my teachers had seldom tried to do.

Curt von Westernhagen WAGNER
Wagner remains the principal encounter for any composer; he was the first and greatest "master of all trades" in a profession that had previously only demanded mastery of music. After Wagner, a composer must either accept the project of the composer as synthsizer and creator of all aspects of culture as cultural and intellectual leader, or fall to the wayside. I had always loved Wagner, had gone to Bayreuth as an undergraduate, and I rather feared I would never write anything as powerful as some of his pieces. While at Berkeley I began reading this fine biography, and did so in spite of the fact that my first wife hated Wagner. As an undergraduate I had begun to realize the actual opposition that exists to contemporary music, since there was so little encouragement - even less than later, though that seems considerable compared to nowadays, when some of the remarks against contemporary music at, say, Amazon.com are psychopathic. Wagner faced so much opposition that, learning about his life, I found it more possible to find and stand my ground as an artist. To this day I view composers who do not know Wagner's music reasonably well as amateurs or technicians flailing about, and looking back I find that this book was very important to my developing sense of identity as an artist. Though I scarcely realized it at the time, one serendipity of reading this book was to help me draw the line between myself and my spouse on a number of issues.

Edgar Rice Burroughs THE MARS SERIES
Most kids have a favorite author, and as a kid mine was Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the creator of Tarzan. One day my sixth grade teacher Mr. Arnold gave me a copy of the Burroughs Mars novel LLANA OF GATHOL. I quickly became hooked on Burroughs, and read all his Mars books, and a few of his others, which I didn't always like. It was clear to me, at least some of the time, that this was not the best literature, but it was a really "other" kind of world than any I had previously viewed, and I loved it. (I have still not read a Tarzan novel, though I enjoyed Philip Jose Farmer's "biography" of Tarzan. I couldn't stand anything that popular.) The Mars stories were of course thrilling to me and I got my first ideas about ethics and chivalry from them, and my first ideas about valor, integrity, what it is that is worth fighting for, and all that good stuff that everybody needs to know. It was useful to me to get exposure to an epic multi-volume effort to create an entire world; creating, and consuming, these has remained my favorite pastime. There was no Burroughs in my home town; I had to learn to buy money orders and make mail orders for my books, a big deal for a sixth grader. I began to piece my world together much better about the time I started writing to the Avenue of the Americas in New York for books based in the Martian city of Helium, with its Avenue of Ancestors.

Charles Rosen THE CLASSICAL STYLE
As I was aware at the time, reading this book when it was brand new, had just won the National Book Award, and I was still an undergraduate, resulted in the first perceptible step forward in my ability to compose music. The release of this book was the first major event in writing on music to occur during my awareness, and getting to read it I felt as though I was really on the forefront of proper study of music. I was thrilled when I saw it is dedicated to Helen and Elliott Carter; though I only speak so simplistically as a joke, I had already more or less decided Carter was the "GLC," the acronym Frank Zappa coined for the "Greatest Living Composer," an opinion I have never changed. (Zappa, of course, felt the GLC was Varese.) I knew enough of the music of the "Classical Era" to get the point at least most of the time. This book has had more positive effect on my compositional abilities than any other, and the very fact that it was not a book about musical technique that advanced my compositional skills was another major lesson for me, and helped me develop a more guenuine interest in things outside the realm of composition.

Halsey Stevens THE MUSIC OF BELA BARTOK
This is a decent enough survey of Bartok's music, though it was written in the era before Erno Lendvai's revelations about mathematics in Bartok's compositions, and so it has been out of date for some time. However, Lendvai was available by the time I took a survey course in Bartok's music and read Stevens, the same idyllic summer I took a course in the String Quartets of Beethoven. With Lendvai to compete with, Stevens could not really impress me, but the period of intensive study of Beethoven and Bartok meant a major leap in my musical understanding, and my confidence in my ability to do basic formal and material analysis. As a part of a major step along the way the Stevens study was more indespensible than many another book, though it was probably more because the professor played so very much Bartok in class, than the dedication I showed to reading it.

Allen Edwards FLAWED WORDS AND STUBBORN SOUNDS
This of course remains the standing orders of Modernist composers, and I bought and devoured it within days of learning about it. Though I prefer the music he was writing before he simplified his vocabulary about twenty years ago, everything Carter does is good and everything he says is wise... though I have never learned to hear the "irony" he has said is in his music, and find much greater evidence of that in the music of Shostakovitch. Reading this book made me feel some solidarity with the Masters, Carter and the colleagues about whom, and for whose benefit, he spoke. Immediately upon reading this book I wondered why there was so little written about contemporary composers. Despite the fact that more is now published, little of that is an important as these conversations with Elliott Carter.

Xenakis FORMALIZED MUSIC
This was one of those books we used to check out from the library and never read. I would get a lot out of looking at the pictures but never got more than the remotest gist of the mathematics. Then I would get an overdue notice and have to return it, and check it out again. When in the 1990s it was reissued I bought what I was told was the very last copy in the new cloth edition. I then gave it the best reading I could. With greater attention came I suppose greater understanding, maybe as much as thirty percent of the actual text, seventy percent of the ideas, if these can be separated out. I have forgiven myself for such a low comprehension rate, because I have decided it is execrably written, and I am harder to browbeat nowadays about things I am ignorant of. All that being said, without this book I would never have invented some of my own precompositional methods, which, though their detail resembles the polymetrical planning of what we might call Second and Third Period Carter (proposing that there are some four periods in his enormous career), my thinking about the planning of contrasts would have been even more difficult. Something about Xenakis's invitation to think in terms of contrasts of material in space was unique to his precompositional methods, and to this book, and the idea of sonic architecture has become part of the way I think about composition.

Edmund Wilson TO THE FINLAND STATION
During the 1980s this was one of the books I used to try to determine a path to, or through, the Left, and now I realize that reading it during the Reagan era was an admirably unorthodox thing to do, even for a Berkeley grad. Wilson is of course one of the most important writers of all time and during the 1980s I read as much of him as I could. This particular book gave some degree of focus to my mostly unconsciously left-oriented thinking while I was directing my vocal ensemble Ariel, which I only later learned is the name of the Angel of the Left-Hand Path. I have never been comfortable with ideas of "left" versus "right;" anyone who thinks one is so much better than the other can volunteer to go a whole doing without using the other one of his arms, legs, eyes, or ears... Wilson's seemed to me a rational approach to the "left," one that dealt with facts and gave depth to the historical developments that led to the late great experiment with Socialism, which I still say might have failed only because of corruption, which is not a problem of which we in the West are innocent.

William James THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
One Sunday I went to hear Mass at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco, to which I then made application and became Music Director. Before this happened, immediately after that first Mass, for the first time in my life, I was impressed by what I thought the clearly Christian behavior of one part of the Mass - the "Prayers of the People." When I came home I remember telling my wife Marcia that these people were really Christian. It was not like me to be affected in this way. It was about this time, during the 1980s, that I began wider reading into religion, and the William James seemed a right proper way to set up the categories of study. What was notable to me about this masterpiece is the lack of negative judgement it shows.

Maurice Cranston JOHN LOCKE: A BIOGRAPHY
This was part of my effort in the 1980s to acquaint myself with mainstream philosophy. Since Locke's ideas about the supposed reality of everyday life are so similar to our present everyday lives, I'm not sure I always knew the distinction between when Locke's "new ideas" were being presented and when his personality was being discussed. I came away able to form a slogan about his ideas, which is crude and not very philosophical but perhaps a practical understanding of his thought, to wit that "everything is tolerable except intolerance." I wouldn't want to have to enforce this slogan as a law.

Healy and McComas, Editors ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE

This collection of Science Fiction was available to me as a kid and I read about half of it. There was a more wholesome dose of "Hard Sci Fi" than Burroughs usually provided. I did not read fantasy at all as a youth; only in my forties did I eventually get around to Tolkien, and then only to trace his thefts from Wagner. Stories like "Black Destroyer;" "Seeds of Dusk;" "Heavy Planet;" and "He Who Shrank" gave me a lot to think about. Certainly, as part of my self-resurrection program, "Fairwell to the Master;" and "By His Bootstraps" are part of my daily mental routine; indeed I think of these stries as prototypes of Evolutionary Robotics, one of my central intellectual concerns (though at the time of this writing I have written almost nothing about this). Another book certainly indispensible to my development. During the 1990s, when I finally realized the simple fact that my two greatest loves are atonal music and Science Fiction, and that a dense but clear intellectual texture of high inventiveness is basic to my preferences pretty much at all times, it was partly this book I had in mind.

Noel Stock EZRA POUND
This book taught me what it is like to maintain a hard-headed minority opinion and keep your art beautiful. The exceptions to the beauty in his poetry are clear and therefore did not interfere with my admiration for the rest of it. I did not think of this at the time, and the comparison would not have pleased Pound, but his was one of the first artist's lives after Wagner's that impressed me as, as least literarily, comparable to Wagner's in erudition, and thus my idea as the composer as being called to be a "Master of All Trades" was indirectly confirmed. Imagism and Vorticism were much to my liking. However I did not realize until much later the compatibility of Imagism and Wagnerian Leitmotives, which I don't actually use, though A MIRACLE OF RARE DEVICE comes close to Wagner's practice.

Ronald Clarke EINSTEIN
I learned about "Thought Experiments" from this book, and therefore it is of huge importance to me, since all my "science" is in real terms limited to this sort of thought, my mathematics and science being rudimentary... though don't cross swords with me too carelessly, I would hope to surprise you, and I can always point to my Collected Works and this web site as part of my ongoing project in Evolutionary Robotics. Reading this book I came away with a greater impression of Einstein as a patient man than as the lady killer he had been in Europe before coming to America, apparently a major part of his real life. There have been other Einstein biographies that have treated more about his love life, I'd like to read one of them soon.

Joseph Kerman OPERA AS DRAMA

This was part of my undergraduate curriculum, though I made sure to read the whole thing when my peers read only the required bits. This was partly because my undergraduate opera teacher thought Wozzeck was too modern, while I of course that berg is only the bare minimum of modernity, seldom to this day even met. So I think I was protecting myself from a dubious undergraduate mentor when I made sure to read this book. Of course this is the banner treatise, the torch song of the high dudgeon of artistic and intellectual integrity in opera, and I was somewhat, just somewhat thrilled to later study with Kerman at Berkeley. His "no problem" attitude towards a sharp cutting Puccini I have always thought basic to real understanding of the art of music drama.

Shakespeare ALL WRITINGS
The Bard is basic to me because he and no one else has really tried to make sure I knew it was all right if I stumbled and fell in the art of love or got off course in life, that being human is what really matters. This aspect of his work is one of the reasons I feel sure he was a Catholic, and in my reading of history I noticed that the Jesuits were keen on theater everywhere in Europe from about the time Shakespeare was developed in England, which was of course about the same time opera was developed in Italy. I measure all drama according to what I believe I learned on my own about Skakespeare's dramaturgical use of death: no matter how bloody things ever get, there is never, not ever, in Shakespeare a death that is and remains truly senseless (someone please draw my attention to any true exception!), and I consider every death any dramatist calls for must be accounted fully in his drama, and always on as many levels as possible; a poor accounting, meaning poor structure and too little necessity to the events in the death of any character whatsoever, is for me one of the cardinal sins of art. The theater means by definition that which is "larger than life," and no event in theater should genuinely overwhelm a reasonable and intelligent audience (though it is quite desirable to createthe impression of doing so), or provide an example which, if "acted out" by neurotics, would provide an example for genuine tragedy in everyday life. I don't like all of Shakespeare; Titus Andonicus is beastly, and comes close to breaking the rule against pointless death. I have read all of Shakespeare's poetry and about half the plays, always out loud, and I have begun reading him in the German translation by Schlegel and Tieck. At first my reason for doing this was that I have considered a couple of his plays as opera texts, and I know that Shakespeare is popular in Germany, and a modern opera on Shakespeare might do well there, so I have thought about setting him in two or more languages simultaneously. But then I discovered when actually reading him in German that there are a lot of places where the everyday sounds are perhaps even better in German, certainly that the German informs the English at the level of feeling. Tracing the linguistic associations polylingually can be a real thrill. There is a Masonry amoung certain great artists, just as there is one amoung scientists, and it begins to become clear when you cross the linguistic divides.

Homer ALL WRITINGS
Until around 2005 I thought no author would ever exceed Shakespeare in venerableness, but getting to know Homer, I find that Bard to stand head and shoulders above Shakespeare. This of course is not entirely to Homer's doing, since as we know his work was not written by only one person. You may read more about this in my essay WHO, AND WHAT, "HOMER" IS. So comparing the two is not fair to Shakespeare, though there are reasons to believe that Shakepseare too was in a different way the "compiler" of his plays in what we could today call a large-production environment. This is outlined in the book SHAKESPEARE'S PROFESSIONAL CAREER mentioned below on this page. Anyway discovering Homer, once I began developing my unorthodox view that many of the key works ancient authors, certainly Homer and Plato, contain an important element of what the Tibetans call "Secret teachings," and this strain in the ancient authors is what I chiefly read them for. My essay OPERATION "TROJAN HORSE TAMER", especially its first section dealing with Plato's essay ION, and my remarks below about ION, gives the essence of my view. I have come to believe that "Homer" is another large culture-controlling project similar to Shakespeare, opera, or, for that matter, "Star Wars," in Homer's case compiled by Greek and Egyptian scholars with a view to keeping alive the culture and essence of Ptolemaic Greek-Egyptian culture (naturally the comparison between Shakespeare and "Star Wars" is not original to me). I have read the Iliad about four times, including out loud in Greek, and the Odyssey a couple of times, and am at the time of this writing about three-fourths the way through it in Greek too. Perhaps the chief thing about reading the ancient classics is that it gives me a real feeling of participating in a gigantic scheme of elevating humanity, with or without its cooperation. I make no secret of being one of the real tough guys, who would prefer people put their fluff aside, and yes, I am qualified to say what is fluff, to be put aside.

BOOKS THAT HAVE BROUGHT KNOWLEDGE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
THE NEW GROVES DICTIONARY OF MUSIC AND MUSICIANS (Both Editions)

Will and Ariel Durant's THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION has a seperate page.

THE BIBLE
I have read the Bible in the original Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT) once each, and in English twice, and bits of it in quite a few other languages, and I refer to it regularly. Everyone should read the Bible, it doesn't matter what their orientation or preferences. It's just too universal. One very good reason to read the Bible is to get fundamentalists to shut up when they insist on talking about it, since they NEVER know what they're talking about, though it must be admitted that getting an ignorant person to develop a critical mind must be one of the most difficult projects in the universe. It is noteworthy that not even the Christians think God Himself has tried to do this himself for 2000 years. In any case it is not clear that this or any of the other major religious treatises are sufficient "owner's guides," but again, too many great minds have read it, and refer to it, so I did, and you should too. I do prefer Zecharaih Sitchin's take on it to that of any priest or rabbi I have heard or read. By the light of Sitchin's analysis, it is abundantly clear that all translations without exception are insane, and the typical understanding that Hebrew speakers have of the Bible is more or less equally crank.

Bryan Magee PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD
Karl Popper UNENDED QUEST
I discovered Bryan Magee during the 1980s through reading Popper, whom Magee's helpful book is about, and have continued to read him. I am embarrassed to confess that I used to wax loquatious about the Magee to a girlfriend, what was I thinking, accountants don't care about philosophy. In retrospect I have come to understand that Popper is not as completely decisive a philosopher as he seemed to me and many others for the longest time, and I am eager to reread him on Plato and Marx now that I know these writers better. The turning point for me came when I read Popper's remarks about music in his autobiography. I found his taunted logic to be embarassingly shallow when it came to music. He has almost no suppleness of mind concerning music and indeed his views on music are disturbingly close to being Fascist. The great philosopher of science has no clue that music is a science; he has only the most typical amateur understanding of applied musical aesthetics. I guess I should conclude that he is all about the literal meanings of words only, and this is a grave disappointment for me. He intransigently believes that only relatively simplistic musical idioms are good to listen to, is only a little bit embarrassed about "deliberately" choosing to go to a choir college, the most arriere garde type of musical experience, and he inveighs against composers for not being as great as he thinks they should be, in just the ways he thinks are proper. In short he is a typical example of the higher Viennese musically pedestrian audience member. For example, he asks rhetorically what Strauss could have been thinking to write DER ROSENKAVALIER when we already have Mozart. I was shocked with the crudeness of this kind of remark, of which there are many, from one of my former heroes. But now I know that I can understand a lot of stuff at least as well as he does, maybe better. But certainly he explains scientific method the best. Too bad he doesn't allow for that work of his to be extended to the pure contraption that is music. Ultimately he is too "hard science," and has not the advantage of having seeing High Capitalism gouge whole oceans and atmospheres.

Edmund Wilson ALL WRITINGS - Note: An index of his bio helped me get ideas of what to put here

Frances Yates GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION
Maynard Solomon BEETHOVEN
Joan Peyser BOULEZ Composer, Conductor, Enigma
Herodotus THE HISTORIES
Thucydides THE PELOPPENESIAN WA

Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot SONIC DESIGN

Vladimir Nabokov LOLITA
I read this book as an undergraduate. I read the first half and set it down for awhile, then picked it up and brought it to Bayreuth in my Junior year, where I finished reading it. I was pleased to be able to catch many of the allusions to other works of literature woven into Nabakov's beautifully textured prose. Basically, I was devastated by the story of Humbert Humbert and Lolita, and even wept at the end, because it is clear that he really loves the girl, and she really is the nymphet he descibes her to be. But of course theirs is an impossible love, not because the fictional society in the book does not approve, but because in reality she cannot exist. I felt the end was the weakest part, and ultimately I feel that a moralistic ending of that kind, in which the lovers are punished for their love, is really not a sufficient departure from the preachy moralistic literature of the past. Just as Mozart's Don Giovanni is punished in the end, so too is our hero, and especially our heroine, which is downright cruel. So my complaint about the book is the opposite of the moralistic complainers - I do not feel Nabakov takes the story far enough. He dooms his lovers, and one wonders why a writer in the Twentieth Century would do that. At the end there is a last-ditch effort to recover conventional morality, similar to that in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, who is even more sadistically betrayed and punished by her creator, and forced to commit suicide. At least Nabakov was not as crude as Tolstoy. But Anna was plausible, whereas Lolita is not. This book is my preferred example of an emotional situation that can only exist in fiction; having worked in a girls' school, I have seen more developing girls than many another, yet in America the possibility of exactly the Lolita type of girl seems non-existent. Yes, there are plenty of sexually precocious girls, but their precocity is at best nubile, usually merely naughty if it is found at all, and does not possess the aura of decision to sexuality that surrounds Lolita. And such decision to sexuality is unlikely ever to exist among girls in our society, where it has been centuries since there was any of the urgency to early marriage that existed in societies in the past, and girls Lolita's age are still very much under their parents' oversight, in a far more complete way than Lolita was. And when they are not, Lolita's other attributes of consciousness and decision are absent. A story about the daughter of a porn star would go further. Such a girl could be believed to exist, could be believed to have grown up in a millieu in which a model for sexuality, real sexuality, is available. So it is a pity, but trash is still more plausible than a masterpiece like Lolita. She can break your heart, but you know she can never be real. No sense going to look for her, unless you live in Scotsdale Arizona, or some other housing district of the porn industry. And then what are the chances of a steady texture of literary allusion in everyday life? From any approach you attempt, Lolita cannot exist.

Anthony Burgess A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and the film by Stanley Kubrick
Burgess does not betray his iconoclastic hero the way Nabakov does Lolita, so the message in this story is complete and clear, in this case, that society cannot fully justify compromising the designs of a genuinely unrepentant scoundrel, not least that it cannot do so at the cost of wholly ruining for the lawbreaker any real chance to participate even passively, specifically by listening to music, in the best civilization has to offer. If you want to lock him up, that is one thing, and may be the price society demands of someone who disobeys its laws. But if you perform torturous experiments on his mind that is another, is not allowed, and the question remains: if someone is a murderer, do we do well to allow their consciousness to remain in existence? To feed and clothe them for the balance of their lives? The "Death of Personality" that Michael Straczinski posits in his Science Fiction series Babylon Five would seem to be appropriate. But lacking such a thing, can we demand greater repentance than a criminal can make through reasonable self-recovery? For as we learn, the consciousness of our Alex is a world unto itself. Kubrick's movie disturbed me greatly, even though it is always exhilarating to see, too brief though it is, a naked girl with such incredible tits as in the rape scene; for once a director was letting us see a violation that met worthy levels of fantasy. I wasn't attracted by any of the other crimes Alex commits (not that I was "attracted" by the rape either), they did not even have glamor for me. The image of the cartoon that flashed across the screen at the moment Alex kills the old woman was somehow more psychotic than any actual image of a murder that I could imagine, the cartoon was an effectively crazy way to indicate the moment of the complete break from sanity of such an act. The moral of the story is also in part that a mind like Alex's can be criminal, yet still have the idea of the excellence of a Beethoven, and that to deprive a person of the excellence of civilization at the same time we condition him to go along with civilization is morally an unconscionable demand to make. As to the plausibility of the character, the genre is Science Fiction, so the parameters are different than with Lolita, which is Realist. Alex's world can be imagined, since it is depicted, and the only departure from typical strata of possibility is that Alex likes Beethoven, instead of Rock and Roll. That seems far more likely than a fourteen-year-old who genuinely invites sex. I was physically ill for two weeks after the first time I saw this film, while I was in High School. Since I felt physically bad, I could really wonder whether it was a good idea to have seen it. I did not altogether try to hide my experience from my peers but I found they did not understand and I didn't talk a lot about it. But it was powerful medicine. The temptations I was supposed to find in the movie, that one pair of tits aside, were not there; instead there was revulsion only. It was perhaps a first encounter for me with moral feeling. The talents of a very good author and a great director allowed for me the vicarious experience of a greater moral lesson than all the sermons I have ever heard, put together. Lessons like that are one of the reasons I believe more in art than any conventional religion.

Thomas Pynchon GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Dante Aleghieri THE DIVINE COMEDY

Heinrich Schenker HARMONY; Writings
Hans Stuckenschmidt SCHOENBERG
Charles Rosen SCHOENBERG
W.Y. Evans-Wentz FOUR BOOKS ABOUT TIBETAN BUDDHISM - Milarepa - The Great Liberation - Tibetan Yoga and Secret Docrines - The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Gustav Reese MUSIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES and MUSIC IN THE RENAISSANCE
Hans Moldenhauer WEBERN for its sheer monumental coverage of a single subject
McNally A LONG STRANGE TRIP for connections between the Beat and the Hippie generations
Thomas Mann JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
Leo Tolstoy WAR AND PEACE and ANNA KARENINA
William Faulkner ABSOLOM, ABSOLOM
Saul Bellow HUMBOLDT'S GIFT
Frank Herbert DUNE
Ayn Rand ATLAS SHRUGGED
A Children's Encyclopaedia

BOOKS THAT HAVE AIDED MY "PERSONAL RESURRECTION"

Philip Jose Farmer THE RIVERWORLD SERIES
Peter Thomson SHAKESPEARE'S PROFESSIONAL CAREER

Gunther Schuller EARLY JAZZ
There isn't anything in this book per se that is "resurrective" for me, it was merely one of the first books I had read during college and graduate school that I then reread, this time in greater detail, trying to hear the examples. During the 1990s, to save myself from despair at my ignominious life, I began huge listening and reading projects, including listening to the complete works of numerous composers, including modern ones, and reading large publications, such as the whole of Shakespeare, Will Durant, or Homer (I am now measuring Plato, Aristotle, and Livy up to size). Reading EARLY JAZZ was part of my project of attempting to systematically acquainting myself with Jazz, with the help of Mr. Schuller, who was one of the first living American composers of whom I was aware, already in High School, due to his television broadcasts. I was delighted when his study of the Swing Era came out, and I watch with bated breath for its successor.

Peter Hill, Editor THE MESSIAEN COMPANION

John Passmore A HUNDRED YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY
Ezra Pound PERSONAE
Frank Harris MY LIFE AND LOVES

Howard Hubbard MICHELANGELO
Jim Samson MUSIC IN TRANSITION
Tenzin Gyatso UNIVERSAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE GOOD HEART
A.R. Ammons COLLECTED POEMS 1951-1971

William Gaddis THE RECOGNITIONS
H.P Lovecraft TALES
Anonymous "Walter" MY SECRET LIFE
Fyodor Dostoyevsky STORIES

BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME "THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX"

Plato ION
Without a doubt the essential confrontation with the principal of Secret Teachings in everyday life. The real message here can be described as something like this: if you learn something from books, be careful whom you talk to about what you learn. You may read more of my view on this in the first section of my essay OPERATION "TROJAN HORSE TAMER". If I had to recommend one single text that I thought more important than any other ever written for a person to understand, I would probably recommend this dialogue. When somebody tells me Plato is about Idealism or some such, I say, pish tush, the whole point of ION is summarized in the punch line at the very end. You either "get it," or you don't. And I am pretty sure that all of Plato works this way. Of course there must be those who get it, and keep it quiet. But the distance between creators and performers (as employed in ION and described in my essay) has become too great; there is now a real danger that the facts will be lost, and that propaganda alone will function to disseminate "ideas" in the future. The Dalai Lama has said as much; it is the dilemna of the Rabbi in the Zohar, "Woe to me if I tell it, woe to me if I do not tell it!" Plato sets out the situation, and lets you figure it out, if you can be plain enough in your understanding. He could not say it directly; he had seen Socrates murdered for coming too close to doing so.

Zecharaih Sitchin ALL WRITINGS
William Gaddis THE RECOGNITIONS
Timoth Good ABOVE TOP SECRET
Bertrand Russell THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WAR - for thoughts about the Druids' beliefs.
Isaiah Berlin MARX
Edmund Wilson ISRAEL and THE DEAD SEA SCROLLs
Elkins, Rueckert, and McCarty THE RA MATERIAL

Aryeh Kaplan SEFER YEZIRAH The Book of Creation
Xenophon ANABASIS - for thoughts about politics based upon "augury of the City"
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain UNSEEN WARFARE, Revised by Theophan the Recluse
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders XXX THIRTY PORN-STAR PORTRAITS
Steven Levy CRYPTO
The Incident of the Purchase of UNGAR'S BIBLE DICTIONARY

A BOOK THAT GOT AWAY

There was one book that should have had the chance to make a difference for me but which was denied the chance. I don't know the book's title; it was the science textbook used in my seventh grade science class. The summer before between sixth and seventh grade, I had had the unusual opportunity to actually own a copy of the book to be used in a future class. I was tremendously excited about this and took advantage of the opportunity to the best of my ability. Since I had time to go over its chapters and there was no stress about learning the material, I found it no less interesting than the children's encyclopaedia I owned and was already used to reading. During the months before the class began, I learned about different kinds of scientists. I made up my mind that when I grew up I would be an archaeologist, a paleontologist, or a chemist. These were very clear in my mind, and my mother was very proud of me for having made up my mind about my future, and for being able to describe what paleontologists do. It became a family routine for her to get me to repeat my little career-list catechism, and say briefly what these scientists did. Alas, when I got to science class, the teacher told us we would not be reading the text. Instead he improvised lectures in the usual way, and I lost the advantage I had had, and the sense that I could succeed. I did not do any better than usual in science, which remained my weakest subject. Never before or after, during my public school days, was there not only a build-up and indeed preparation for a school class, but a sense that I could master the material.

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Copyright c 2010 by Christopher Fulkerson

First Posted July 25, 2010. Updated 10/12/2010.

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