2014 — 18 September: Thursday
It's official: I cannot procrastinate any further.1 Well, probably not. Mind you, I did find a frozen loaf of bread in the freezer yesterday, which helps. I also fired up episode #1 of the new Bones only to discover my mood was completely unossified. I shall try again at some point, but not yet. Meanwhile, there's some sprightly Soler on BBC Radio 3, and that chap Alkan's name also came up. Spooky.
Is it just me...
... who finds stories like this, erm, toe-curling?
Not that I recall there being a school police department in leafy St. Albans back in the day. Said day being 45 years ago, of course, by the time I made my escape from the system. Things may have changed.
I'd been thinking...
... "are my eyes going?" or is it just getting dark out there. But it turns out to have started raining. I noticed, in fact, when I was transferring stuff (newly-store-bought fresh stuff, that is) into Mrs Hubbard's electrical cooling cupboard. And just got further evidence from a very near-sounding crack of thunder that actually made me jump. The next one sounded safely further away.
I read...
... Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" in the late 1960s. I also enjoyed the David Lean film, of course. Once was enough, however, in both cases. This interesting piece introduced me to several new terms. Source and snippet:
How Pasternak survived the necropolitics of the Stalin era was a mystery. "It is surprising that I remained whole during the Purges," he wrote in 1954. "You cannot imagine the liberties I allowed myself. My future was shaped in precisely the way I myself shaped it." Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose husband, Osip, became "camp dust" in 1938) put it down to a combination of sheer luck and Pasternak's "incredible charm". Others wondered whether Stalin had personally ordered him to be spared — "Leave him alone, he's a cloud dweller" — after gifting him what were called, in the political slang of the day, "madman's papers".
The formidably-talented Saunders neatly skewered a bête noire of mine in her first book "Who paid the Piper?" in her study of the CIA and the cultural Cold War.
Her next book, oddly enough, was a biographical examination of Gordon R Dickson's great hero, John Hawkwood. It was the CIA, it's now been confirmed, that played a large part in publishing Zhivago in Russian, as anti-Soviet propaganda.
Thanks, Mr Postie
I was just downloading an MP3 album of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Snow Maiden" suite2 — not a piece I know at all well — knowing that Mr Bezos had promised to apply a 'promotional credit' that he'd set aside from his taxable profits to lower my cost. (A minor-league bit of philanthropy, but ev'ry little helps.) Then suddenly there came a tapping, as of some one gently rapping...
I still recall (with a shiver) watching "Manhattan" with Christa on 2 January 1980 in a very cold cinema in Slough. She was very pregnant, having started her maternity leave just one day before. And (in sympathy) I, too, was in considerable back discomfort with what matured overnight into a full-on fever and, shortly thereafter, a classic attack of shingles around my torso. For which the only NHS treatment at the time was to paint the blisters with a solution of potassium permanganate. Gross. I still have faint scars, in fact.
It's starting to feel like time for a (late, I admit) lunch. Though my appetite is still diminished since the weekend's gastric shenanigans. Not to mention the shame of having had to look up the spelling of "philanthropy". I wanted to use an "e" where Webster's demanded an "a". It's clearly not a word I use very often. Or perhaps the onset of dear Mama's condition.
Rick Wakeman was...
... just on splendid form chatting to Radcliffe and Maconie. He claims the best lesson he ever received came from a 16-year-old Argentinian lad in Buenos Aires who asked him to sign a copy of "Six Wives of Henry VIII". Rick asked him what he liked about "this old music" and was lectured, quite irately, about the music always being new to somebody who'd not heard it before. Out of the mouths, etc etc
I was obscurely...
... pleased, on taking a break after a couple of episodes of Season #1 of this afternoon's later delivery...
... to have recognised the Shostakovich, though I didn't know (without checking) exactly which symphony (the "Leningrad", it turned out) was being performed at Edinburgh. I still feel about this composer pretty much the same way I feel about the "Culture" SF novels of Iain Banks, as indeed I even admitted on this very ¬blog quite a while ago :-)