2015 — 12 December: Saturday
Yesterday evening's round tuit? Just under three hours of the glorious 1994 restoration of "My Fair Lady" on the Dutch Blu-ray I finally snaffled four months ago.1 I had a bit of a "thing" for Audrey Hepburn. Bite me.
I've long liked the music, of course... first heard on Dad's vinyl LP of the 1959 Broadway stage version. That fell victim to dear Mama's "Oh, chuck it out" philosophy after Dad's death in 1975. But 35 years later I found a 4xCD Julie Andrews compilation with it:
I also have a bit of a thing for Julie Andrews.
I've been back on...
... my habitual Saturday BBC Radio 2 morning music on which Brian Matthew has just told me that "Ride your pony" was written by the late Allen Toussaint under the pseudonym Naomi Neville :-)
Having read...
... yet another scare story in El Reg about Windows security, contrast and compare the little gem I stumbled across after first struggling through the thickets of prose by which Palle Yourgrau sought to explicate Gödel's two incompleteness theorems in a way I could follow and kid myself I could even half-understand:
There simply was no such thing as a magic shield that would resolve all a mathematician's fears of an assault from some unsuspected inconsistency. (Similarly, as a direct consequence of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, there can never be a foolproof antivirus computer program that we can be certain will not alter the program being protected but that will detect the presence of any other program that is attempting to alter the protected program.)
My emphasis. (He did kindly suggest that the preceding prose in question could have been skipped. I took that as a challenge.)
I was pleased...
... to learn that you can submit suggestions to "AmazonCrossing" on books that you feel should be translated into English. Not that I feel any urgent need for more reading material. (More here). And here's a snippet that tickled me:
So I decided, why limit the hate? This could be part of that weekly book column that you never write because you're too busy doing favors for other publishers and translators! There are so many awful things in this world — books, commercials, publishers, pretentious coffee
places — that deserve to be ridiculed a bit...
When Stephen Sparks and I were polling people for our "100 Best Translations of the Century (So Far)" — a book project that most editors think we should just write for free and put online, which is proof that people are exploitative idiots with no self-awareness of the
things they say and crap they publish — this book was recommended at least a half-dozen times...
I won't deny...
... that hunger is the best appetiser, pace Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung...
To the starving, a blow from a skewer of meat is more acceptable than a caress from the hand of a maiden
... but the pomegranate molasses that lives on the door-shelf of my fridge does indeed make a tasty condiment when drooled over my late lunch of chicken salad.
Rhizome? When did that evolve?
Used to be, 'rhizome' was just an aspect of plant and tree root systems. But as I neared the end of David Auerbach's very worthwhile piece "The Stupidity of Computers" (which I first noted2 over three years ago) it became embarrassingly clear that I hadn't initially read it right to the end — today I stumbled over "Anti-Rhizome" (I would have remembered that, trust me) where "Rhizome" is apparently...
an acentered, nonhierarchical nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states
Yep. I was back in the weird left-wing world of French Po-Mo philosophers (such as Deleuze and Guattari) whom I first stubbed my toe against last month. Happily, we have a right-wing Brit on hand to demolish them and their ilk. Source and snippet:
Take Deleuze's book, A Thousand Plateaus — the English translation has only been out a few years, but it's already gone through 11 printings. A huge, totally unreadable tome by somebody who can't write French.
Yet this is core curriculum throughout the humanities in American and English universities. Why? The one sole reason is it's on the left. There is nothing that anybody can translate into lucid prose, but for that very reason, it seems like a suit of armour around the age-old prejudices
against power and authority, the old unshaped and unshapeable agenda.
It vaguely worries me to find myself agreeing with so much of what he had to say in this Spiked interview. I may have to resign my non-existent membership of the [insert name of radical political party here].
Yikes!
Must remember to watch the next two lumps of "The Bridge" tonight. And eat something, too.
When I re-sat...
... my English Lit "O"-level after my initial abject failure3 I gained a far greater appreciation of the genius of George Bernard Shaw. I was already convinced about Dickens. I fear I remain unconvinced about Shakespeare.
I've just re-watched the 1938 film version of "Pygmalion". And dug out both the battered anthology of Eng Lit that Christa returned to Germany with after her year in an American High School (despite the stamp clearly stating "Property of Gothenburg City Schools"!) and the similar anthology (also American, as it happens) that I bought as a remaindered item in Staines in July 1979:
So what? So they both contain full texts of "Pygmalion" but each varies the ending and my (later) "Quarto" goes on to reveal who Eliza married, and why. A textual addition by GBS himself, I hasten to add.