Thousands, millions of new ideas

 

From John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie P143

McCartney, at this time [1966], was a man with his mind on fire. He consumed cultural and intellectual stimulation like a jet plane guzzling fuel. His London circle included the Ashers, the countercultural entrepreneur Barry Miles, the art dealer Robert Fraser, John Dunbar and his wife, Marianne Faithfull, and Tara Browne, a twenty-year-old aristocrat who threw extravagant parties. In the London Life interview, Paul refers to Dylan and the Who but also to Handel, the painter Francis Bacon, the playwrights John Osborne and Eugene O'Neill, the actors Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney, and the poet Robert Graves. He said he identified with what Graves said about the imperative of creativity: "I write poems because I damn well must."

Paul in an interview:

I've got thousands, millions of new ideas myself. What I really want to do now is to see whether I could write all the music for a film.  I want to read a lot more than I do. It annoys me that so many millions of books came out last year and I only read twenty of them.

He talked about how much he liked modern classical composers:

Then I play them to John and he says "What a drag! All these millions of records coming out all the time and we've not been getting on to them." Then we rush out and buy loads of modern compo-sitions. The only thing is to listen to everything and then make up your mind about it.

On This Day (10/29):

• 2025-10-29: Thousands, millions of new ideas
• 2024-10-29: Additional advice for haiku writing project
• 2022-10-29: Letting it Happen
• 2021-10-29: The Work that Awe Requires
• 2020-10-29: On ""a bellyful of words""
• 2015-10-29: What is formative assessment?
• 2015-10-29: Shirley Clarke's ""Formative Assessment in the Secondary Classroom"" (2005)