I haven't been able to stop listening to Q-Tip lately. He's got to be
one of my favourite rappers along with Murs, Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Both The Renaissance and Kamaal the Abstract are on heavy rotation on
my iPod at the moment. Check out his video for Renaissance Rap below.
I've also added another favourite of mine, Deltron 3030.
This is my favourite song off Q-tip's album, The Renaissance
so, ive always been a fan of A Tribe Called Quest, especially Q-Tip.
His last album, The Renaissance is one of my faves. he recently released Kamaal the Abstract, which i havent gotten to listen to extensively but i am liking the new vibe. much more band influence. check it out
Wilde in the Stacks by David Propson, WSJ.com
"I never travel without my diary," asserts Gwendolyn Fairfax in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." "One should always have something sensational to read on the train."
Wilde wasn't writing from experience as he never kept a diary so he would have had to take books from his collection on train trips. But it is Thomas Wright's theory that Wilde's library tells us plenty about the most sensational literary life of fin-de-siécle London.
"Wilde's library was truly his portrait," he asserts in Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde. Mr. Wright then proceeds to document in painstaking detail just what titles the library contained, tracking down many of Wilde's original volumes and poring over marginalia for clues to his character.
Wilde was a voracious and extremely rapid reader, with a near-photographic memory and catholic tastes. As befitted his dandified public image, he loved books about art and orchids, and he relished books that were themselves beautifully bound and illustrated. At the same time, he could be remarkably careless with his personal copies as he had a habit, for instance, of tearing off the upper corners of pages and chewing on them as he read.
For his own train-ride reading, Wilde would not have been averse to a bit of sensationalism, he much preferred "bad" books to sentimental novels that teemed with the sort of truisms he mercilessly mocked in his own writing.
As Mr. Wright reminds us, though, Wilde was a formidable classical scholar; he read ancient Greek as easily as he did modern French. At Oxford, Wilde aced the classical Greats course and was steeped in the poetry and philosophy of what used to be called the Western canon.
A few works, however, stand out in their formative influence. Wilde called them his "golden books." The Irish folk tales he heard as a child from his parents who collected and published them stirred a love of storytelling. Keats's lyric poems roused his near-religious devotion to beauty, while Benjamin Disraeli's novels, devoured in adolescence, sharpened his social radar and provided a model of aphoristic wit.
At Oxford, Mr. Wright tells us, reading Walter Pater's "The Renaissance" converted Wilde to the author's aestheticism, the idea that one could turn one's own life into an aesthetic statement. Following his conviction in 1895 on a "gross indecency" charge for his homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde turned to Dante's "Divine Comedy" for consolation.
He read it in the original medieval Italian, Mr. Wright reports, with the help of a prose translation and an Italian grammar and dictionary. Dante's vision of a trip through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, Mr. Wright says, helped Wilde "above all other books" to "understand the hideous world of prison."
Such observations do not run counter to standard biographies of Wilde, such as Richard Ellmann's. But Mr. Wright has many more examples where those came from. Ransacking the Wildean shelves, he discovers Cardinal John Henry Newman's "The Idea of a University" and notes that Wilde was "passionately devoted" to the sort of liberal education that Newman espoused.
Books on Japan, including one called "Art and Art Industries in Japan," Mr. Wright says, "may attest to the seriousness of Wilde's youthful intention to lecture in the land of the rising sun."
Many of the better-known works that Mr. Wright singles out, the novels of Turgenev and Balzac, for instance, could have been found, it must be said, in the library of any educated man of the age.
Mr. Wright might have used Wilde's book collection to provide a window on the entire era. But he does not. Nor, unfortunately, does he engage in much close reading of texts, including Wilde's own writings. "Built of Books" is not a traditional literary biography. It's more of a narrative bibliography.
The books pile up as the pages fly past, and 300 pages are hardly sufficient to explain the significance of works such as Madame Blavatsky's "Key to Theosophy" and a book called "The Five Talents of Woman: A Book for Girls and Women."
Mr. Wright confesses himself frankly flummoxed by some volumes. "What are we to make of the presence of a book on violin-making," he asks, or of Wilde's copy of a "history of the study of music in Germany or his guide to the art of mixing American cocktails?" They were gifts from their authors, it turns out. Maybe Wilde kept them just to be polite.
None of this, unfortunately, does much to explain how Oscar became Oscar. In fact, the Wilde that emerges from these pages is bit more pedantic and, alas, pedestrian than the figure described by his contemporaries. "Built of Books" may include fewer of Wilde's apercus than any work ever published about the man but, then, no amount of reverse engineering could ever explain the source of Wilde's legendary wit.
If Mr. Wright can't quite keep pace with the real Wilde, however, he tries diligently to retrace his footsteps, and the book's most interesting passages have a whiff of the scholarly detective story about them. Wilde's original volumes have been scattered to the four winds, making the author's quest to examine them difficult.
The dispersion of his library was prompted by Wilde's disastrous legal problems in the 1890s. The arrest that eventually sent him to jail was prompted by Wilde himself: He brought a libel suit against Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for accusing him of homosexuality, but the marquess promptly produced a parade of rent boys who attested to Wilde's predilections. Wilde dropped the lawsuit but was left with staggering lawyers' fees.
Even before he was placed in the dock on criminal charges, his library was disassembled and the books auctioned off to pay down his debts. While in prison, Wilde scrounged access to as many books as the wardens would allow, but he couldn't take them with him when he left. Many other volumes were abandoned in cafés and temporary residences all across Europe during his years of exile.
Fortunately for Mr. Wright, Wilde's entanglement with the British justice system did provide what might be called significant forensic evidence. The records of the book auctions detail the provenance of volumes now treasured by collectors. Also useful are the long lists of books that Wilde requested during his two-year prison term.
Interestingly, Mr. Wright presents Wilde's relationship with Douglas as one based less on the sharing of physical intimacy than on the sharing of embossed poetry volumes. And he take pains to trace Wilde's homosexuality primarily to the literary precedents he discovered in his classical studies at Oxford,the Greek ideal of a "paederastic" love of an older, intellectual mentor and an acolyte.
In the spectacle of his public trial, Mr. Wright says, Wilde could hardly have failed to see parallels to Socrates, convicted for "corrupting the youth" of Athens. But Mr. Wright goes too far when he suggests that Wilde semi-consciously courted exposure in order to re-create the scene he'd first read about in Plato's "Dialogues."
Similarly, Mr. Wright doesn't inspire confidence when he observes that "the way [Wilde's] life conforms to the contours of a Greek tragedy cannot be entirely coincidental." By heedlessly provoking his own fall from grace, the author suggests, Wilde must have felt that he had "achieved his ambition of turning his life into a work of art."
Really? What's truly tragic, in the Greek sense, is that Wilde strove to be an artist, boldly authoring his own life -- but discovered that he was just another character in the story.
Ultimately, Wilde himself, and not his library, is the best resource for readers in search of lessons from his life. In the remarkable work of self-reflection known as "De Profundis," written while in prison, Wilde drew deeply on the Gospels as well as on Goethe, Carlyle, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Emerson and of course the Greeks at one point reflecting on what the Delphic oracle had to say about knowledge.
"To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom," he wrote. "The ultimate mystery is oneself."
![[Wilde]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WK-AP595_BOOKS__DV_20090430233433.jpg)
Built of Books by Thomas Wright
Henry Holt, 370 pages, $27
