2009 — 29 November: Sunday

I followed up Breakfast at Tiffany's with a burst of long-unheard Ed Alleyne-Johnson but the big hand and the little hand are both nearly vertical so I'm going to call it a day. Odd day: if I hadn't stepped outside to ask my Pakistani doctor neighbour for his assessment of the local state of swine 'flu I wouldn't have talked to anyone all day. But emails aplenty. No matter.

Let's hope the intermittent rain eases off. G'night.

No such luck

In fact I was woken by the sound of heavy rain not all that long ago. Now I'm listening to NPR reporting the American view of the Iraq war inquiry in London. As for "Black Friday", they report a 0.5% uptick on last year. Is this good? Still to come: "Cyber Monday". I shall retreat to the more reliable haven that is BBC Radio 3.

"They" are to re-issue The Group¹ are "they"? The copy currently on my groaning shelves (and currently separating my one remaining £10 note from my ditto £5 note) ...

... was bought by Christa in July 1966, possibly in Bad Kreuznach (which had a bookshop with one or two shelves of "foreign" books, as well as a more than half decent music shop and a wonderfully indecent sex shop) but more likely in Saarbrücken, while she was on her first university course there. If it helped form her views on marriage I can only be grateful! :-)

The rain has stopped, though the heavy grey clouds look as if they could resume at short notice. I shall content myself with a spot of breakfast. It's 10:02 and the day is yet young. Time for the (next) cuppa that refreshes, too.

If I forget to listen to "Desert Island Discs" (which features Morrissey today) it's now a podcast. What's a podcast?! Seriously, the sooner the BBC makes its audio archive available, the sooner I can stop sending out "Sorry, I don't distribute copyright material" emails to the small but steady flow of random requests I receive for copies of some of my older and more obscure audio items.

Take a letter, Henrietta...

Just found this in a book review:

It is impossible to resist the New York gems of the newly arrived William Faulkner, recovering, for example, from his first subway ride: "The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice."
And, later in that paragraph...
On his own behalf and Zelda's, F. Scott Fitzgerald offers their daughter some impeccable advice: "Just do everything we didn't do and you will be perfectly safe."

Stacy Schiff reviewing Thomas Mallon's "Yours Ever" in the NYT

Lovely stuff!

But all I did...

... was switch on my external sound card. Why the blue screen of death from XP? "Windows has stopped your machine to prevent damage." What utter b*ll*cks! Cheer me up, Mr Morrissey. "Brahms or nothing!" Great stuff.

Now that I've heard the programme (and, of course, now retuned to hear Bill Bailey's "Private Passions") I can safely conclude that for me to choose between these two gentlemen would be every bit as difficult as choosing between, say, Posy Simmonds and Shary Flenniken, or Ron Cobb and Robert Crumb, or Alan Plater and Jack Rosenthal, or... or... (You get the idea).

Is it the weather...

... or is it just turning into one of "those" days?

While this may be marginally preferable to another BSOD it doesn't exactly inspire confidence, does it? So, having backed up data, eaten, dished, laundered, and confirmed I can resume cyber life on one of my spare systems, what's next, Mrs Landingham? It's 14:13 and our decision not to walk today has been thoroughly vindicated.

And, for the evening...

... well, it's started with a profile of Ted Ray (who remembers him?). Judging by the hollow feeling in the tum, there's going to need to be some more culinary activity soon. I've spent quite a lot of the afternoon tussling gently with a database or two, and hopping around the radio channels in search of something as good as the Morrissey programme — no chance. It's 17:21, dark, wet, rather cool... must be nearly winter, I guess.

Not absolutely sure what to make of this, but it's an amiable use of Mr Blessed. I popped downstairs a while ago to load a DVD as I couldn't find its running time or aspect ratio. Ended up watching the whole film. Tut! "Antonia's Line" is the Dutch language DVD I mentioned last Thursday, and it's masterly. Whatever next?

Footnote

¹ McCarthy began work on it as a story as far back as 1954. According to Elizabeth Benedict, "In her celebrated novel The Group, Mary McCarthy, who wrote scorchingly about women's sex lives long before birth control pills were a gleam in anyone's eye, presented a group of Vassar graduates in the 1930s." It almost goes without saying, therefore, that some of the powers-that-be took a dislike to the book. It was banned in Ireland in January 1964, placed on New Zealand's restricted list in March of that year, and was also turned away by the Italians and the Australians as an offence to public morals. Letters to McCarthy's American publisher included such gems as "What kind of filthy perverted mind do you have to write such a novel?" and "How could you look your college son in the face after he had read that book?"
Surely a more telling question would have been "How could you have written such an honest book and not given it to your son?"