2014 — 23 May: Friday
I can tell it's sufficiently windy1 this morning as to necessitate a woolly should I venture out on an expotition for enough fresh food to see me through the long Bank Holiday weekend. Scudding clouds, but no rain... yet. It is, after all, only 06:40 or so. The cuppa helps compensate for that.
The three books...
... I've collected2 so far by Elaine Showalter could — I suppose — have led me to expect her blithe dismissal of one aspect of my gender. After all, "everybody knows" that female brains are wired differently from the small objects housed within masculine skulls:
Most shelfies are by women, for whom reading fiction is a primal scene, profoundly personal and formative. Some are by men, although generally men write more about book collecting and its related masculine pleasures of arranging books alphabetically, thematically, by the Dewey decimal system, or some other arcane method.
But the burning question, I suppose, is does this ¬blog itself constitute a "shelfie"? I think I should be told. After all, I'm a simple chap. I do my reading strictly for pleasure and information. And I tend not to analyse it. Except in my own head.
This is amusing (and tangentially related to the Showalter, at a stretch):
In these days of falling advances and general publishing crisis, how many writers would not welcome the arrival of a major injection of liquidity? And how nice, frankly, to be shot of those yellowing manuscripts gathering dust in the attic. "The Jim Crace Papers," warns the Harry Ransom Center website, "include a small amount of material that was exposed to moisture and suffered minor mold damage... Patrons may consider wearing gloves and a dust/mist respirator while handling this material." I remember the last time I moved my boxes of unpublished manuscripts they were full of silverfish. Turning insect-ridden papers into cash has to be a good idea.
It's difficult to contemplate the contents of my attic with equanimity.
Frankly, I'm amazed...
... if the BBC has been able to avoid rating its staff for so long. HR and bean-counting staff are generally only too happy to introduce these inane "rank and yank" systems in their endless futile attempts to quantify the unquantifiable. Those in IBM certainly were. In latter years, even before going through all that tedious business of an annual appraisal "chat" first in my own case. So much tidier and more efficient. "Fire, aim, ready!" (Link.)
Having just heard...
... and, for the very first time managed to catch the name of, Malcolm Arnold's "The Padstow Lifeboat" I surfed over to Amazon MP3 downloads and promptly found myself in possession of this good-value little gem:
It's presumably my rough Northern upbringing (in Wilmslow and Alderley Edge!?) during my formative years that endears the occasional dose of this sort of music to me. Or the fact that you get 76 "tunes" for £5-49 perhaps? Including another version of "David of the White Rock".
I've been taking...
... an open source media player called MPC-HC out for a test drive. Looks good so far.
Identify, if you can, the...
... topic under discussion before you reach the end of this little transcript:
One day, he learned to his horror, that all the tapes recorded after 1983 had simply been thrown away. 'Sort of hit the roof... I then spent a couple of weeks opening every door in Maida Vale saying "Where would these tapes have gone? What was the process by which these tapes were skipped?" And they said 'Well, we'd get a guy in. He'd move the tapes out, and then he'd order the skip.' "OK. Where would he put the tapes before they were moved out?" 'Oh, in an anteroom somewhere.' Well they weren't in an anteroom... Eventually, I found a room that was actually a band store; the BBC Symphony Orchestra band store. And there were all these tapes, in piles and piles. And it was a brilliant piece of BBC inefficiency. Because they'd thrown all these tapes out... but nobody had ordered the skip!
Oh my!
This is just brilliant! (Easier link.)