The cut may have nothing more to do with The Glass Bead Game than a shared title, but if it made me mellow, well there will be no argument from me.ĭefinitely interesting. I just learned of them last week and I'm already listening to third of four albums I could rustle up from the library and, well, they make me relax and smile.

We won't go down that road but we will take some time to chill to the groove of The Thievery Corporation, a dance-acid jazz-trip hop band, that knows the ins and outs of the outs and ins. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the internet itself is the glass bead game manifest. And attractive it is witness the proliferation of exercises online attempting to recreate its chief philosophical premise (& that's just a handful). The folly of such an exercise, removed as it is from 'the real world,' slowly and steadily becomes apparent, no matter how attractive the concept. Set in the 25th century, it relates the story of the intellectual province of Castalia, where the students all learn the glass bead game, a sort of interdisciplinary exercise of connections among all the great fields (literature, music, science etc.). Narrated by a fictional biographer, with introductory and supplementary material, the larger part of the book passes for a partial biography of Joseph Knecht, a great Masters of the Bead Game or Magister Ludi. There are bits of all of his great books here, if in slightly disguised forms: Siddharta, Demian, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Journey to the East, as well as many of his early student novels. It reprises all the great themes of Hesse's career, from duality through transcendence.

Largely overlooked by fans and readers in general, it is certainly one of the finest novels of the 20th century, well deserving of the Nobel Prize that it garnered for its author. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, the inspiration for today's selection, is one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors. Today's selection is courtesy of The Thievery Corporation. Today's featured song is only the second instrumental so far in this ongoing literature meets rock and roll project - the first actually did have a few words, but was largely instrumental.

The glass bead game review