YEAR ONE HCJ - treasures of You Tube

Some englightened spirit has uploaded the whole of Kenneth Clark's Civilization series to You Tube. I am trying to re-watch it all again - it is really superb. I would strongly recommend that for Year One HCJ you try and watch episodes 11 through to 13. It fills in all the pieces of music and works of art, and architecture that goes along with the reading and lectures set for HCJ. It comes from a Conservative point of view and he keeps making all these little digs against Marxism and especially his great bete noirs Rousseau and Neitzsche.

If you could blog the contents then that would be fantastic and would get you off to a brilliant start in terms of getting top marks forthe courwe and - also - traffic to your blogs. Just try and clear an evening or two and watch Civilization, it is hard work and there are boring bits, especially compared with modern telly. What obviously happened back there in the 70s was that the BBC decided just to put out the entire Cambridge University first year Arts faculty main lecture series on TV pretty much as it would be delivered in the lecture theatre. What a brilliant opportunity.

My note on Civilization episode 11 are here.

Episode 11:

> Rousseau, nature worship in art and poetry, naturalism, romanticism
> 18th century atheism, deism, pantheism and moderated rationalism
> The end of Christianity in 18th England (it is revived again by missionaries in C19)
> Neo-paganism, gardens, naturalism in fashion, interior decoration and female dress
> The English country garden and the reaction against French formalism.. authenticity
> Revival of idea of courtly love, and worship of women as chaste, ethereal creatures
> Good taste and against the bawdy and cynical drama and novels of say Addison
> Pope - the essay on man. Melancholy
> Rousseau in detail - his love of nature (not so much his politics)
> Nature as subject in music - a long excerpt from what I think is Schubert + mountains
> Mountains - KC says Descartes hated mountainhe mannered formal gardens of Versailes
> Even artists start painting mountains - unthinkable in Renaissance Florence.
> Lots more stuff about mountains (but no daffodils yet)
> Rousseau in detail - he was persecuted and he was a refugee (kids go into care)
> Rousseau had a breakdown on a lake - couldn't handle the beauty of it all
> Tasteful images of ducks on a lake - "I feel therefore I am" - passion is all
> The cult of sensation ('sensibility' as Jane Austen put it)
> Marquis de Sade - cruelty and pain as sensation and sensibility
> Rousseau says men are naturally virtuous - discourse on inequality
> Voltaire is witty - and satarises Rousseau . Voltaire is old school, enlightenment
> Captain Cook and Tahiti - the noble savage. Better than 18th C euro corruption
> Dr Johnson (old school enlightenment man) savages are animals - urban life is best
> To be fair, Tahiti doesn't produce anything like Leonard Da Vinci or Plato
> Nature worship is like a 'new religion' - it has female goddess
> Goethe - romantic poetry. KC does say so, but Goether sets up Hegel's teleology
> Goethe drew plants - clearing the way for Darwin (KC analysis is Hegelian I think)
> Goethe is a very big deal - gloomy German, all about flowers growing in the shaddows
> Goethe thinks nature has a mind of its own. He's a eco-nut basically.
> Goethe wrote love poems to lumps of rock (not very enlightenment)
> Coleridge the poet is the English Goethe. He also write love letters to trees.
> Wordsworth - he gets a long profile. Messed about with the French revolution.
> Wordsworth only talked to tramps. Didn't like people. People are vile.
> Wordsworth and his rotten nature poems - o'er the mountains, and o'er the streams
> Lots of musty mountains. KC goes to Lake District to do Piece to Camera.
> Robert Burns - Romantics in politics are revolutionary, hate hierarchy
> Romantics - surprisingly - based their morals on the behaviour of mice
> Dorothy Wordsworth - she inspired his poems. Its the Victorian worship women thing
> There was an element of incest about Wordsworth's sex life.
> Byron also loved his sister (when he wasn't doing terrorism in Greece)
> Wordsworth - and the artists Constable and Turner
> Lots about Turner. Painting motion, change, ambiguity, moods, emotions.
> Turner was very strange at the time (taken for a nutter). But it is mainstream now
> Turner pictures over classical music - definately Beethoven. Ah Beethoven!
> The religion of nature - palaces are out; tumble doen cottages are in. Wordsworth
> Walking is a big part of it. Wordsworth walked 180,000 miles. 'Going for a walk'.
> Shock news to KC that 'the afternoon walk in the quad' has been abolished at uni
> Lack of 'going for a walk' at uni is a scandal KC things. Deary, deary me.
> More on Turner (with Beethoven in background). Lots more Turner pictures.
> Turner is by far the greatest painter Englans has ever produced.
> Turner has a way of seeing - he paints change itself (this is all Hegelian stuff)
> Turner does this by converting everything into pure colour (abstraction)
> Objects are not solid. Old school are was solid - firm outline - Turner is fuzzy
> Fuzzy is way more true than solid when it comes to objects and stuff
> Turner is like Rousseau - subjectivity, feelings, emotions... not rational, defined
> Turner liked Goethe - nature is a process, not an object. Naturalism, Naturism
> things have moved on. Clouds are now the thing, not just the mountains.
> Clouds, clouds, clouds are brilliant. can't get enough of clouds.
> Poems about clouds... Constable does hundreds of painting of clouds.
> Ruskin tried to bottle clouds by walking through them on mountains. Didn't work out.
> Lots of cloud pictures - the music is Debussy (KC is wrong! Debussy is much later)
> Turner decides that the sea (especially breakers) is even better than clouds
> KC leaps forward by many decades to talk about Monet and impressionism.
> Hume's philiosophy is the same as impressionism in art
> Good saying by Monet - 'light is the principle character in the painting'.
> Proust gets a mention.
> Impressionism - a big talk about Impressionism. End of is tragedy for civilization
> Monet - tried to paint just light itself. KC v.much likes Monet (I agree)
> Big thing about Monet's water lillies - like a symphonic poem
> Big homage to Monet... it is a monument of Eurocivilization. (CH agrees)
> Monet is like a priest of the religion of nature - I feel therefore I am.
[I have to say that when I saw this painting myself I experienced a type of drunken sensation - a perceptible change in state of being. It was a Kantian type experience. Or was it a materialist hormonal reaction or something induced by particular combination of colour. Anyway tehre's ;ots of shots of this painting here, but too blurry to get the effect. You have to see it close up and go to Paris to do that.

That's it for episode 11

Can anyone blog episode 12 and 13?