2013 — 22 May: Wednesday
A chum's cheery overnight email Wettergespräche reminds me that my traditional New Year visit to sniff the sea air is way overdue1 for 2013. I shall pack a lunch, screw the car's radio aerial back in, and, as it were, hit the road.
Toot, toot :-)
It struck me, by the way, that the basic premise of my latest TV series "Person of Interest" is rather undermined by a piece Cory Doctorow wrote that I noted five years ago. It's still online here. Still valid, too.
If only...
... Wagner had known when to stop, I'd probably like his music rather more. No matter. It was — as usual — 68.7 miles from door to shore and back. As I strolled slowly past the live jazz coming from the bandstand I felt like an extra in one of the Beiderbecke stories. There were the usual squirrels doing their usual squirrelly things and, best of all, the craven council has finally demolished the waterfront eyesore that was that dreadful Imax cinema. Excellent.
And (of course!) it would be a strange day out that wasn't marked by a new book or two:
- Going to the Dogs
Until today, I only knew Kästner's "Emil and the Detectives". And there's my second umlaut of the day :-) - People
Bennett's new play which, as he says in his introduction, is "just an excuse for the introductions with which they are generally accompanied" - Boneland
Garner has certainly kept us waiting plenty long enough for this conclusion to the story begun in 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' and continued in 'The Moon of Gomrath'
Or even — perish the thought! — three or four:
- an intimate life
Cohen Greene's memoir of a distinctly extraordinary life. One of her cases was the poet whose short essay "On seeing a sex surrogate" ultimately became a film called "The Sessions" that Amazon now keeps suggesting I buy - simon
Masters's earlier book "Stuart" tempted me to try this odd-form biography of an odd-ball math 'genius' - vanished years
Everett is a reliably entertaining writer with a wickedly observant eye - The Psychopath Test
Ronson passed my "Does a random paragraph make me laugh aloud?" test
Rather to my...
... surprise, I find myself turning into a bit of a Kindle convert. I've accumulated a dozen or so titles that, until an hour or so ago, I'd been reading at BlackBeast on one of the Dell 24" screens courtesy of Amazon's "Kindle for PC" application. But there's a pre-loaded Android Kindle App on my Tablet PC that I'd never even investigated, partly because the Asus ebook reader was already loaded (with a free copy of "P&P" as it happens). Firing up the Kindle App, and logging in to my Amazon account, promptly fetched a copy of my little library, and cleverly managed to open the book I'd been reading at the very page I'd reached.
That is way too cool.
It had been...
... bugging me (a little) that I knew, and somewhere had a print of, the painting used for the front cover of the Erich Kästner paperback. It was in the third book I searched — I'm obviously slipping:
It's Selbstbildnis mit Modell, 1927, by Christian Schad. And that's a nasty scar on the lady's cheek.