2013 — 2 October: Wednesday
After a good night's sleep, even if it's a tad drizzly out there, the world always manages to seem a little brighter. Even after listening to a couple of minutes of gabble from NPR. I discovered the tad of drizzlyness while tending to this morning's latest memory lapse1 — somebody around here (probably me) had once again forgotten to put out the green recycling bin.
Meanwhile, just one program refresh to contend with: another spin of the recently-released Copernic desktop search tool. I await the even more recent Xara graphics program refresh...
The extremely depressing...
... article I've just read serves only to remind me that I do not read nearly widely enough. Source and snippet:
And it would be untenable to deny that there are diverse reckonings with issues of class, race, religion and gender, and a bracingly ambivalent relationship with nationalism and global capitalism, in the work of Nadeem Aslam, Teju Cole, Hisham Matar, Tash Aw, Tan Twan Eng, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif, Damon Galgut, Tahmima Anam, Zoë Wicomb, Laila Lalami, Helon Habila, Aminatta Forna and Pettina Gappah. From his first novel The Circle of Reason (1986), which is set among the Middle East's immigrant communities, to his most recent River of Smoke (2011), Amitav Ghosh's work has excavated a suppressed emotional history of the vast networks of labour and capital that made the modern world.
Fifteen authors completely unknown to me in a mere two sentences. Good god!
Not just St. Trinian's
I rewatched a portrait of the late Ronald Searle last night. (It was first shown in 2005 when he was a mere 85 and, indeed, I'd captured it to DVD-R when I watched it at the time [but had naturally forgotten I'd done so!]). So when I spotted his name against a video file on a chum's PC on Monday I cheekily requested a "borrow" in case it turned out to be a new production. The book review here of Ian Buruma's "Year Zero: a history of 1945" (due out tomorrow) resonates strongly with the glimpses of the social and physical devastation of the post war world revealed in that Searle programme. Horrible and horribly gripping.
[Longish pause]
The needful shopping having been, erm, needfully shopped and the 20kg of salt safely salted away, I shall make some delayed 'lemonses' and declare the rest of today, if not the whole world, my oyster.
There's never...
... seemed to me to be the least smidgen of dignity in death:
Third Uncle
An excellent track from Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy). In fact, it's just been played on BBC 6Music this evening, and hearing it again raises one, simple, question: how can it possibly be 39 years (give or take a month) since that album's release? 39 years!
I'm getting old, Christa :-)