2015 — 24 January: Saturday
As I sup my initial (not terribly early) cuppa it occurs to me that some, perhaps many, of the lyrics to the bouncy pop stuff usually played by Brian Matthew are actually less often "approaching poetry" and more often approaching simply stunning banality — not to mention repetition. As I mentioned, I never really paid much attention to them in earlier times.
Physiology...
... beats epistemology every time. You have only to stub your toe in the dark to get a brutal reminder of that. Yesterday's piece (by Oliver Burkeman on consciousness) touched briefly on the puzzle and purpose1 of pain. And in the film "Lucy" pain was one of the first sensory inputs to be discarded / over-ridden by her activating brain, making it easy for her to remove a bullet embedded in her shoulder (though I don't actually remember her getting shot).
Having now switched...
... over to the "Building a library" section of "CD Review" I'm also learning that some people (not me) pay a great deal too much attention to the nuances of various CD recordings of Bartok's wonderful "Music for strings, percussion and celesta". I have three variants of this on CD, but couldn't say which (if any) exhibits any of the tiny flaws the amiable wafflers are describing in what sound like a dozen or so alternative performances. I enjoy my three pretty much equally. But then I'm also reacting calmly to the realisation that despite the physical presence of all three on my rotating rack only one of these variants has actually been noted in my classical music database. O me miserum.
Nor have I updated my web list since 5 April 2009. That is generated, of course, from the database. Oops. Meanwhile, Iván Fischer's version with the Budapest Festival Orchestra (due for re-issue later this year — what is the point of the BBC describing and reviewing a version that is not actually currently available?) has just been declared "the winner". These winners are played on the following Monday's "Essential Classics"...
I've long admired...
... much (though not all) that Ursula Le Guin writes. I somehow missed this piece last November. Source and snippet:
Her novels, like Ray Bradbury's short story about cultural assimilation, "Dark They Were and Golden Eyed", and Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land were among the dog-eared paperbacks that passed hand to hand in squats and communes across the US, as SF became one of the unacknowledged intellectual drivers of the counterculture. As she writes in her 1997 translation of the Tao Te Ching "true leaders/ are hardly known to their followers ... when the work's done right/ with no fuss or boasting/ ordinary people say/ Oh, we did it."
We seem to be missing out on true leadership!
I ran out...
... of enough of that slippery stuff — Time — yesterday to note these two arrivals. "Get Shorty" is an amusing Elmore Leonard romp; this BD replaces my French DVD I bought in Calais many years ago...
Somehow I did find enough Time last night to enjoy the first two episodes of "Suits", though.
Oh good grief
Written by a professor of economics, of course.
While the idea of measuring influence through newspaper mentions will elicit howls of protest from tweed-clad boffins sprawled across faculty lounges around the country, the results are fascinating. And not only because they fit my preconceived biases.
(Link.)
Although Uncle ERNIE...
... sadly failed in what I regard as his bounden duty to send me one of his little checkies this month Madame Fortune smiled on me nonetheless. She granted me a perfect excuse to attach the following image...
... to a recent email. Came the reply: "I don't think she looks quite as agonised as I do". Points are available for identifying my source.
I have both...
... visual and textual deliveries to report today. Amusing to see an eventual Canadian DVD of an Australian film from 1990, and puzzling to have to go to Austria to get hold of a much more recent British film:
For "Gefährliche Begierde" read "Suspension of Disbelief" (made in 2012 by Mike Figgis).
To decipher the textual material you may find it helpful to click the pic:
I was introduced to Tintin (starting with "The Crab with the Golden Claws") at the end of the 1950s by the French wife of a doctor (possibly a surgeon, actually — memory fades) in Wilmslow who also bequeathed me a copy of "The Wind in the Willows" and those two classics of river-exploring gnomes by "BB". She could scarcely have done me a greater kindness.