2015 — 28 November: Saturday

I must have been exhausted1 as I've slept completely through all those customary "Sounds of the Sixties" and am only now, having greeted a curious feline in the back garden, supping my equally customary 'wake me up' cuppa while wondering if it's already too late to start the vegetable dicing and slicing for my next crockpot...

Yesterday's...

... tantalising but unfulfilled promise of a meeting with Mr Logistics has now turned into two such promises — one a repeat, of course. Meanwhile, there's a certain irony in the thought of chopping down countless trees to turn them into the paper that's currently being wasted on a book about Norwegian wood chopping and log stacking. I read that witty Canadian dismissal of it by Peter Kavanaugh in "Walrus" exactly a week ago, then spotted a stack of the things in Soton while book-browsing on Tuesday, and have just switched away from an irritating BBC Radio 4 'session' with the author :-)

Alas, I've never attended...

... a creative-writing workshop. (It probably shows!)

Sponsored by foundations dedicated to defeating Communism, creative-­writing programs during the postwar period taught aspiring authors certain rules of propriety. Good literature, students learned, contains "sensations, not doctrines; ­experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies." The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual.

Timothy Aubry, reviewing Eric Bennett's "Workshops of Empire" in NYT


An early attempt at fostering the sort of constrained thought processes desired by Orwell's Newspeak, in other words. I prefer the sound of this darker matter:

Randall calls the force driving that fraction "dark light" — an appropriately paradoxical term confuting the haughty human assumption that the world we see is all there is. Her hypothesis that dark matter might interact with itself through its own unique form of invisible light calls to mind the poetic title of a 2003 paper by the physicist Brian Josephson about Einstein's famous conversation with the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore: "We Think That We Think Clearly, but That's Only Because We Don't Think Clearly."

Maria Popova, reviewing Lisa Randall's "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs" in NYT


Much as I adore...

... Stravinsky's music, I hesitate to contemplate the idea of acquiring two box sets of a total of 86 CDs, and then trying somehow to find the time needed to try to tease out the miniscule variations in the recordings being so avidly discussed in "CD Review" right now. Instead, I shall leaf through the only slightly-foxed copy of "The Best of Pogo" that has finally arrived (via Switzerland, oddly) this morning:

The Best of Pogo

It replaces the original copy that Carol gave me in February 1990, but that has mysteriously disappeared since then. (And, yes, I even checked Junior's shelves. Though only minutes ago.)

Brain Pickings?

And now I need still more time for this! But if I don't eat breakfast soon I'll miss lunch...

My respite...

... on Thursday evening from this frankly tedious (and entirely self-imposed!) Kodi DB prep was to re-watch (and re-enjoy) the Marc Lawrence film "Music & Lyrics" that was one of the very last I'd watched with Christa. Lawrence has written several screenplays, but has only directed four films — three of which I've now seen and enjoyed. So I decided to fill in the missing 25% (as it were). That explains the Blu-ray:

Book and BD

The (very [decidedly {extremely}] fat2) book is all Brian's fault.3 Foster has been at various points a data systems analyst, a poet, a Russian linguist, a semi-pro photographer, and an ICBM launch crew manager. Perhaps that's why he's flown completely under my radar since 1977?

After quite a pleasantly-meandering search...

... I've now read the (fascinating) eight-page Brian Josephson paper — entirely new to me — recalled by Maria "Brain Pickings" Popova in her review above. I was amused to learn from it that, presumably during his flight from Heathrow on the way to give his lecture (in Connecticut, in September 1998), Josephson had incorporated ideas and arguments picked up from the airport's bookshop copy of the 1980 book by Davis and Hersh on the left here:

Davis and Hersh

Its 1986 companion is equally fine, by the way, where "fine" means (in my case) "having the attribute of inducing brain-ache", as evidenced by my dismissive comment "Skimmed" against both these titles in my Books DB. But, in my defence, there was usually too much else jostling for my limited time and even more limited attention span back in the 1980s. Though, when wasn't there, I wonder? Definitely time for another cuppa... Or, indeed, anything to delay my next batch of Kodi DB prep.

The (non-audio) game's afoot...

I found a sound clip of an interview between Simon Mayo and Sofia Helin from a BBC Radio 2 Drive Time programme. Click to play in Firefox... Silence, plus a pop-up saying "You need Flash Player". Fire up Chrome, paste in the same URL, clip starts playing perfectly... but through the tinny speakers of my Dell screen, and not through my hi-fi via the SP/DIF optical digital output of my Creative X-Fi soundblaster. It's again castors-up.

However, last time it was working I captured the reported status from both the PCI hardware and the audio system, so by re-capturing those states now I can see that (lspci) shows the X-Fi is still known to Linux. And (aplay -l) shows only the "Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio" that's baked into the motherboard. The audio subsystem, somewhere, has fallen in a heap but (I hope) without disabling my ability to start it up again without the wholesale Linux reboot that I also know works. But which isn't always convenient, obviously. So I tried:

pulseaudio -k && sudo alsa force-reload

to kill off and reload just the audio subsystem. It "almost" worked. Grrr. Time to restart. Then to reselect the (once more visible) X-Fi card. That worked. It will have to do for now. Looking back, I cannot recall a Linux system since 2007 that wasn't a PITA with one aspect or another of its (digital) audio. Still, when it all works it sounds grand. I blame those pesky users.

  

Footnotes

1  Doubtless by the successful efforts to dodge all this "Black Friday" stupidity.
2  Contenders for my imaginary Hugo award for best fat SF novel include "Dune" and "Stand on Zanzibar". Contenders for consignment to dustbin include "Dhalgren".
3  Though Len has confirmed separately his high opinion of the main novel — "The Gameplayers of Zan" — in this trilogy should I need to share any blame around in due course.