2012 — 26 February: Sunday
As I worked my way1 along some of the less accessible nooks and dusty crannies yesterday evening I picked out my choice of reading:
Not remotely depressing, as it happens, but in the case of the (few) songs I actually know... wildly off-target in every case. However, the illustrations are indeed "wonderfully dreary". Someone (Stacey Earley) seems to have been studying Edward Gorey.
I have breakfast to munch and a lunch to pack. Since it's only 07:49 both tasks can wait a little. The morning sun is bright and the frost seems relatively soft.
Ever-growing ignorance
Now this, too, I did not know. Indeed, I confessed to Iris during our last meeting how nowadays I seem to know less and less about more and more:
It is quite astonishing, for instance, that Turing, who was more or less an outcast, except among a small group of fellow logicians, during the two years he spent in Princeton, was recently voted the second-most influential alumnus of Princeton University (and this from a field going back to 1746!).
I was also unaware of the "Do Not Track" privacy option in Firefox, which is set to "off" by default. Not any more. And hearing Nemone play a song from the soundtrack of the Wim Wenders documentary about Pina Bausch suggests it's time I popped that DVD into my input hopper. (The soundtrack to his earlier "Bis ans Ende der Welt" was wonderful.)
Proof, of a sort:
Worryingly, however, I have failed to track down my CD of David Byrne's "The Catherine Wheel". Many years ago I had a LaserDisc of that Twyla Tharp dance project, and I've obviously managed to rip my CD to mp3 at some point. I need a better system. Or a life. [Pause] Time to clear the cobwebs. Brrr.
Back again...
... after six miles or so around one of our "ducks" routes in and around Alresford. It was actually quite mild and generally sunny. The next batch of laundry is whirling around and I think it's time (14:33) for the next cuppa, too.
Minor obsessions
I've long been fascinated by the process by which a novel metamorphoses into a film; not least, because the process invariably seems to omit a certain je ne sais quoi in the end product. Being a retired (semi-)gentleman of leisure, I can occasionally indulge my fascination. For example, consider the case of one of my (many!) favourite films — "The Ghost and Mrs Muir".
My battered little multi-hand paperback of the original novel by RA Dick (actually a pseudonym for Josephine Aimée Campbell Leslie whose first novel it was, in 1945, at the age of 47) cost me all of 5p in 1974, from the 'secondhand' bookshop in Penn, near High Wycombe. The NTSC DVD cost rather more,2 of course. And film critic and translator Frieda Grafe's 1995 BFI Film Classics essay about this lovely Joseph Mankiewicz film (released in 1947) fell out of my April 2000 edition of Sight and Sound magazine, but — despite being less than 60 pages — then languished unread until earlier this afternoon. Here's the back cover "blurb":
Now (inevitably) I have to watch the film again to see to what extent (if any) my appreciation of it is coloured by an occasionally opaque piece of semi-academic writing. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. [Pause] Well, it may be sentimental tosh, but it's my kind of sentimental tosh... Tea, Mrs Landingham?
"Pina" has some fairly weird dance moves, but the music is grand.