Starting on the Merzbox - reading histories of the enlightenment

After "warming up" for the past couple of days by listening to the Merzbow / Boris collaborations, I feel ready to start on the imfamous Merzbox - the 50cd Merzbow box set that I acquired a little while back. I only know two things about it - the someone wrote a really great review of it a few years back in Wire magazine and that John Peel opened an exhibition at Ipswich Arts Centre which played the entire 50 cds over the course of a weekend. So I have started with CD1 - "OM Electrique" - and the 31'17" of part 1 is currently playing.

I was surprised to find several videos of Merzbow on Youtube - including two great clips from the 2008 ULU shows (were these with Boris?). And also an odd clip called "Merzbow scares me" - a student's video diary discussing how she has been able to play loud music all night as her roommates are away on Spring Break and how Merzbow is just one of the things she has been playing.

The postman has made it through the snow for the first time in a few days and I have some new books purchases, reflecting the very high cd sales I have had over the last week. Someone bought my really rare PJ Harvey cd of her first album "Dry" combined with the demo versions. They paid £75 for it - I wonder if it will turn out that I have sold it far too cheaply? So the new arrivals are Lyon's The House of Wisdom (a book on Islamic science), Israel's Enlightenment Contested (which I currently have out of LSE library and which looks superb) and Phillip Ball's Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind, the sort of odd book that I occasionally buy.

Reading today has been mainly an outline history of the Enlightenment and a couple of articles - Stump's History of Science Through Koyre's Lenses and Daston's History of Science in an Elegiac Mode: E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Revisited. More stuff to reflect on for my dissertation.