15 posts tagged “books”
tonight i'm messing about with stuff and for once i don't feel guilty. i feel i'm messing with a purpose. i am... relaxing. and i don't have to feel guilty cos this morning i managed to make myself get up early, which meant i was able to compose before i went to work (for a full 4 minutes), made some small but significant progress on my dante piece - and wasn't even late into the office!
so tonight i'm actually relaxing and just messing about. one of the things i'm messing about with is goodreads.com. a friend invited me in, and as she's a rather interesting friend and most of her current reading is for her phd i thought she might have some interesting things to share (which she does), so i joined up and have been wandering about. it's been an interesting experience, especially as i have been intermittently on allconsuming for a while now, liking the concept but never really committing to it, mostly because it bugged me having to list a book or a CD or whatever as worth consuming/wishy-washy/not worth consuming. to my mind that's 1 thumbs-up and 2 thumbs-down and there are just more gradations in the arena of loving and hating literary/musical/culinary/whatever endeavour. so goodreads is catering to that nicely, with 5 star rankings to choose from (i still want half-stars, but i can handle just 5 without toooo much umming and ahhing). i like a few things about it, including:
- i can search for books from the ones that are on the site, from amazon (in an assortment of countries and it defaults to my local amazon and doesn't assume i'm american) and if it's not in a list (say, it's a 1920s novel that's decades out of print) i can add it manually!
- once i pick a book and add it to my shelves, i can still change the edition if i realise i've got the wrong one (and having books listed with the wrong covers really really bugs me)
- i can easily find books in foreign languages
one of the books i've been reading recently is jakob nielsen's prioritizing web accessibility and it's particularly interesting in relation to goodreads because i find i'm using the back button all the time. i mean, of course i use the back button regularly, but i can't remember the last time i actively shunned a site's navigation options because it all seemed like too much thinking. it's just really not clear how to get back to where you were. other grumbles:
- the popup window to add your review to a book is bigger than the height of my screen, so the checkbox (ticked by default) to add to my updates is below the fold. i guess this wouldn't be a problem once one is up and running and only adding/reviewing books one has just read, but it's a pain to always have to scroll and uncheck with every book added.
- once you've added your review, the popup window doesn't just bugger off like a good little window. it lurks there with a search box, which just makes me feel uncomfortable. i don't want to search in a floating window. i want my proper window back. i want the popup to go away and for there to be a clear path back to the list i was looking at before i added something.
- there's no facility to mark a book as something one owns, has borrowed (and if so from where - very necessary information if you're doing research and need to keep track of where you found stuff) or plans to buy. linking in to one's amazon wish lists might be a nice feature too
the job is going well, and the open source experiment is proceeding apace. i think i need to read more about python. but i've managed to get to a point where i've been able to build the app from source (although still struggling to do the same on my laptop at home), and adapt it to achieve a couple of the things i need it to. feeling rather pleased with myself. tons still to do though and the prospect of my adaptations being ultimately distributed all round the university and the future statistics or ethical knowledge of hundreds of eager business students depending on how effective it all is is just a wee bit terrifying!
back from paris now. and next weekend we go to switzerland skiing for a week with some friends. djeli is dying to go skiing, but it's looking like i won't be able to ski at all because while we were in paris my leg and foot started to swell again and the whole left leg has been uncomfortable (to the point of needing the heat pack again) all week. i blame the paris metro. all those stairs. grr :-) but at any rate, i doubt very much that i'll be skiing while lopsided, so i need to make a plan that involves accompanying djeli on his drive to troistorrents (nearish lausanne) and then playing hermit for a few days to do some work while avoiding the 2-year-old that apparently populates the place where we'll be staying, and maybe fitting in a day-trip or two to lausanne and/or berne as well.
paris was pretty good though. my french is getting better and better and i was quite shocked to discover that i had better french than anyone else who was there (we went with two of djeli's sisters and their families). i've now got to the point where i can natter a bit with shopkeepers and don't feel so flustered about asking them to repeat themselves if i don't understand because i feel now that if they repeat, i have a chance of working it out, and sometimes they simplify the vocab too, which makes it easier. we did a bunch of touristy stuff because none of the kids had been to paris before, so there was notre dame, with attempts made on the saint-chapelle (closed), the conciergerie (closed), a view from a particular department store that susie (older sister) had been told was great (closed for refurbishment) and djeli's and my absolute favourite-ever patisserie and home of the chocolate-encrusted brioche (closed down); then the next day to the science museum (always very cool and my translation skills much improved over the last time we were there, thank heavens), then the eiffel tower and our favourite posh supermarché out at porte maillot which spared us from the tedium of a fourth trip up the arc de triomphe in three years. and then a little required shopping at sephora and the galleries lafayettes food hall on the last day. i'm looking forward to going back again soon. i really really want to go to the (i think) palais de tokyo where they keep all their early-mid twentieth century art - matisse and so forth, and also thinking that i should make a concerted effort on the louvre sometime - maybe a three-day midweek trip on my own, sketchbook in paw. might try catching the bus across. i adore the eurostar, but if i can stand the bus then it's likely to be a lot cheaper, and it was quite bearable from brussels to london. must start trying to cut back on the 5-star travel...
i took delivery of two new books between copenhagen, sussex (where we went for new year) and paris - the last of my gift voucher bonus from PwC (which I have to say has been the best bonus ever) - both of them excellent. The first is a tiny little book by an advertising guru called paul arden and is called it's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be which is an excellent summary of all sorts of things i need to keep reminding myself of with my work and i'd recommend it to anyone who needs a pocket-sized kick in the artistic pants every now and then.
the second one is a book called inspired which is a series of interviews with assorted creative folk, looking at where they find inspiration, what their working environment is like and so on, with a ton of photos of creative journals, collections of this and that, and brilliant workspaces. i find the creative process and the different ways people approach it to be absolutely fascinating and this book in itself is amazing and has inspired me to be a bit more creative with my own creative (mainly composition) journal. i always thought i must be a bit mad to keep the ton of bits of paper that i do simply because they have an image that intrigues me on it - i like the texture or the colour or the shape, or it makes me smile and i can't throw it out - but reading this book one thing i found was that about 80% at least of the people interviewed confessed to collecting something - from adidas shoes to fabric swatches and packaging - so now i don't feel quite so weird and i'm starting to stick these random bits and pieces into my composition journal so they (a) don't clutter up the place and gather dust and (b) can be got at when a little spare inspiration is required. i'd much rather store a bunch of composition journals than a box full of little pieces of paper i'm not looking at. anyway, it's an excellent book and so many ideas to play with! now i want to do EVERYTHING - i want to paint and collage and draw, and write music, and write lists, and dance and walk and tidy and bake - all sorts of stuff.
just a quick post today - we're back from denmark, had an awesome awesome time, saw a ton of stuff (photos will follow on flickr) and had a most marvellous christmas, one of the results of which is that djeli and i are now both podpeople - 8gb ipod nanos for both of us - his black, mine red, as it should be :-) this evening we've been having a ton of fun filling them up and synching contacts and calendars and so on - i had no idea they could do soooo much. i do love being able to set up multiple clocks. now i need never ever get confused about what time it is in australia - or lose my auntie madge's address when i want to send her a postcard from foreign places. and i can't believe how much room 8gb has turned out to be. i thought i might get about 30 albums on there (i don't do anything less than 320bit) but it's looking like it'll be more like 45!!! so between us that'll give about 90 albums for roadtrips. yay! tomorrow we test-drive the fm transmitter and see if it works...
other lovely treats: how to be a domestic goddess from my friend chris, a bunch of marvellous books, ranging from the sublime (a book on the santiago pilgrim trail) to the ridiculous (jilly cooper's appassionata) and an assortment of other delights. as a surprise souvenir of our danish christmas, as well as to give us a decoration in our hotel room, djeli bought me this year's christmas mobile from georg jensen, being ever so surreptitious about it.
tomorrow we have our house inspection that we were supposed to have the morning we left except that the owner got stuck in traffic and we had a plane to catch, then off into town to buy the last presents for the relations we're going to see over new year and ipod cases so our new little darlings don't get all scratched up. then off to sussex for new year!
have a great new year, everyone - see you in 2008!
i've been silent a while, eh? well, that's what accidental employment will do for you. i must say, i'm really enjoying the job. it's exhausting and takes every waking hour i have, and the three-hours-commuting-daily isn't exactly what i was hoping for, but the work's interesting and the people are lovely, and then, of course, there's the toast. and i'm learning an absolute ton of useful stuff. i've also learnt that i hate bill gates with a passion - as if ie6 wasn't bad enough he has to go and inflict ie7 on us. with its non-functioning zoom and assorted oddities both new and old. but i won't go into details over that because if i did you'd all run away and that would be no fun at all, now would it?
i finished reading julia cameron's walking in this world a few weeks ago and felt at a bit of a loose end, still feeling a need for some general creative encouragement but not wanting to embark upon another of cameron's books just yet - they're great books, don't get me wrong, but i felt it was time to try something else. so tchatchke very kindly recommended make your creative dreams real by sark which i duly ordered from amazon with the remnant gift vouchers from my bonus last year. i confess i was a little nervous. all those watercoloured borders and random-looking handwriting, i was rather concerned it was going to turn out a bit girly for me, tomboy that i am, but i have to say that it's coming through with flying colours. ok, there's a slight girly element, but it's more a feminine whimsy than true girly-girl girliness, and the content is great. i've read the first two chapters and while quite a few of the concepts expressed i'd read in cameron's books, sark has a really fresh take on them and i'm learning plenty of new stuff and coming to fresh realisations too. in particular, this week's chapter, "the land of no" has been excellent - she details a bunch of strategies and character traits which can hold us back - from simple procrastination through to bitterness, jealousy, anger, and feelings of not being understood. i like the approach she takes with some of these difficult emotions and tendencies - not that they're out and out wrong, but that we shouldn't dwell on them - we should recognise them for what they are and then she provides keys for dealing with them so we can move on. some of them really struck a chord with me - i'm a terminal procrastinator and perfectionist, but i'm proud to say that i'm becoming more aware of both and yesterday evening overcame both to do something that will really benefit me - i received an email from spnm, the society for the promotion (we used to say "prevention" back in australia. *giggle*) of new music, announcing a web composition workshop being held online on sunday evening this week - send your scores in to be included, first come, first served. this is exactly the sort of thing i'd have procrastinated on, and sure enough i came very close to just plonking it on my rememberthemilk list which would have been a sure step towards it being forgotten until it was too late (not everything falls into this hole - most of my RTM to-dos do actually get done, but this sort of thing i just have a resistance too and then i regret it later) when i realised that if i did that then, no, i wouldn't get my piece looked at, wouldn't get any feedback and would have missed a great opportunity. so i pulled myself together, decided on the piece to send and started pulling out bits. the the perfectionism kicked in - the mp3 was a bit dodgy cos finale is a little unsubtle in its rendering of dynamic changes - maybe i should pull the dynamics out so it's a bit more even. maybe i should move this or that in the score so it looks better. maybe i shouldn't send this piece because i know it has problems and perhaps i should send one that's closer to being complete. maybe maybe maybe. but i know that there's pretty much nothing i've written that i feel is really ready to face the world. and it's a workshop, which means it's going to be pulled apart a bit anyway, and if that's going to happen, surely better to ease into it with something that i know i need to pull apart anyway (it has genuine problems of register and i have booked a harpist to help me with them once i'm not working again) and then i can incorporate any recommended tweaks at the same time. it took a lot of mental pulling-together, but i'm proud to say that within an hour of receiving the email, i'd sent off my submission. haven't heard back yet about whether it's going to be looked at, but at least i submitted it!
i've been working through a real variety of creative things lately and am keeping up with one creative thing. i'm finding this really helps - i'm being made more aware of the creative and creativity-supporting things i'm doing and keeping an eye out for what i can do rather than just drifting along not feeling like i'm achieving anything at all. there's only been one day in the (exactly!) one month since i started that i haven't managed to do anything creative at all, so i'm pretty pleased with that.
alas, now it is a quarter to eleven, which is a quarter of an hour past my required-bedtime-if-i'm-to-get-up-in-time-to-not-be-late-for-work-tomorrow, so i bid you a fond farewell with the word of the day: ARRRRRR!
my parents left to go back to australia this afternoon, and in spite of all my grumbling over the past three weeks i'm really sorry to see them go. things were just starting to get fun, and the sun had come out, and all in all, it was starting to be a really good time. i guess the whole thing just got messed by bad weather and illness and all the plans being messed up by same, which was a real pity, cos i suspect they didn't have as fun a time as they ought to have had all round, but it was lovely to see them, and to be able to show them where we live and do some cool stuff together like we never have time to do properly on our visits to australia. and cornwall was lovely, and this week we've visited some great grand houses - kenwood, marble hill and then today, osterley park - plus i finally got to the design museum too (if you're considering it, the jonathan barnbrook exhibition is well worth seeing - really impressive, i felt).
we also visited the osterley bookshop while we were en route to osterley park today - djelibeybi's current project is walking the length of all the tube lines, and in doing so has become anorakedly interested in abandoned tube stations, one of which contains the osterley second-hand bookshop, and it was actually really interesting to see. you could see where the old corner shop had been and the main ticket hall, and all in all i was glad to have seen it. even gladder to have made the acquaintance of the bookshop, which is quite a find - a proper second-hand bookshop - AND they were having a sale. i picked up a lovely old king james bible, pocket-sized, for £1 with the inscription on the flyleaf "Given to Sybil by her Father on her Birthday March 24th 1905. Read, Mark, Learn and inwardly digest." "Digest" is double-underlined. It's a lovely little volume, leather-bound, with the leather folding over the edges of the book to protect them. marvellous too to have a copy of the king james psalm translations - this will definitely come in handy. sybil doesn't seem to have marked anything in it, but i hope she at least inwardly digested :-)
even more exciting, in the music section i found a FIRST EDITION (!) of nancy perloff's art and the everyday: popular entertainment and the circle of erik satie which is a very important book in satie scholarship, and a very thrilling find. i wavered a bit because £22 was rather steep for my unemployed pocket, but the marvellous parentals made me see reason - i.e. "remember what happened last time with the orledge book" (robert orledge's satie the composer which was $90 when i found it in sydney when i was at uni and i didn't buy it - now it's out of print and cannot be had for love nor money) and foisted £15 on me to buy it. aren't they lovely? so i took the plunge, and i think it's going to be very useful for my dada article. looking forward to reading it. addendum: in trying to find it on amazon i've just realised i've had an amazing bargain - near-mint condition, first edition hardcover for £22? dear lord, on amazon, the cheapest one is £82.82 and doesn't mention anything about being a first edition! crumbs, dm!
anyway, so i am now parentless, which is making me feel rather sad, but on the flip side, it'll be nice to have my life back too! tomorrow i start work on my CV and vaguely commence the jobhunt, plant the new strawberry plant my mother gave me, scatter slug pellets around my sprouting lettuce seeds and so on. must continue to work on my photos from their visit too so they've something to look at in return for their own photos which no doubt will start springing up on flickr soon.
why'd he have to go and write such thoroughly addictive books? i sailed through northern lights then absolutely had to go and get the subtle knife on thursday so i didn't have to stop, and now i've just about finished that so i have to go back to the library today to get the amber spyglass. grr. i'll be through that too in a few days, i guess, but that's the end of the trilogy so there won't be any more. damn. and then i can't let myself start another book until i head to paris next wednesday. but i have a good book lined up for that - the last book of philip reeve's 'hungry cities chronicles', a darkling plain. hopefully that will last me a full week. it's quite thick...
i guess i should report on the other book i've been working my way through which is julia cameron's walking in this world. i found the first couple of chapters very overwritten and quite fluffy (although still with a couple of useful points, but her editor really should have slashed and burned, especially with the extended metaphors) but the third and fourth chapters are much more controlled, and i'm finding it useful. yes, she reiterates quite a bit from the artist's way, but in a way that's also kind of what i needed - a reminder in a different form, and there are new points made too, so overall i think it's doing me good.
the diet is getting me down a bit - having a hell of a time trying to shift any of the weight (not helped by offputting exercise weather - wet, grey and damn chilly out there) and while on wednesday i was back down to 76.9 (where i was the first sunday before i started to go up again) by yesterday i hadn't shifted so much as a 100th of a kilo. nicht so gut. but i'm persevering, and today i realised that all the times i've ever managed significant weight loss have been when i've been travelling - so basically i need to be walking 5-8 hours every day and eating bugger-all. this isn't exactly a practical long-term plan, though, so i'm going to try to go out on a reasonably long walk each week, and i have hatched a plan for djeli and i to walk across luxembourg one weekend (although a luxembourger friend says this only takes half a day, so perhaps we need to walk across, have lunch, go back, and then the next day traverse it top to bottom and back again!). today i am going to brave the weather and walk from knightsbridge to victoria which will get me to the library for my pullman fix.
i have a guilty secret. yes, i do. and i must steal myself to reveal it to you now. today i made a brown-paper-bag book purchase. unfortunately they didn't actually give me a brown paper bag, even though i felt it was warranted.
before i explain my buying adventure, perhaps i should give you a little background. for most of the time i read at least semi-sensible literature. i do have a weakness for children's books, because in general i find the stories more interesting, more imaginative and more effective escapism than adult fiction, but mostly the books i read could generally be classed as literature.
the exception is when i'm sick. for many years now, there has been a progression which shows that i'm getting better. when suffering from a nasty bout of flu (which i used to succumb to every year), i would at first feel incapable of reading anything at all. then gradually i would start to feel that maybe i could try to read a little, but something with a relatively easy-to-follow plot, with clear-cut characters, no psychological insight, perhaps faintly ludicrous, and definitely something that requires no brain engagement whatsoever. the next step, once the first book is finished (generally a couple of days) is jeffrey archer's not a penny more, not a penny less. i'm no big fan of lord archer, but this one is actually pretty good. following jeffrey archer come ian fleming's james bond novels, usually about two or three of them, and by the end of that i'm generally well enough to come back to real literature. jeffrey archer is the turning point.
the book i bought today is of the sort that comes before jeffrey archer. while i'm still in the throes of fever and cruddiness and therefore not in my right mind.
today i bought a jilly cooper novel.
in my defence, it was half-price. but the clincher? it's a signed copy. oh yes. for the princely sum of £3.99 i am now the proud owner of a signed copy of a jilly cooper novel. how many of you can match that, eh?
i met duckworth at the minimax festival held in brisbane in 2002. he and the equally awesome kyle gann had been invited over from america for special performances of their music. i had been invited as an erik satie specialist to take part in a panel discussion on satie and john cage and my pieces of eight was also being performed. this festival was one of the best experiences of my life - it started with a complete performance of satie's vexations and followed on with a week of fantastic concerts and discussions of minimalist, pre-minimalist and post-minimalist music. awesome. mere words cannot describe. i heard a heap of amazing new music and met so many interesting people. it's a real shame they couldn't get the funding to do another one because it was the most interesting music festival seen in australia in a very long time.
anyway, one of the best things i did during that week was to go along to a seminar held by duckworth and media artist nora farrell on cathedral where they discussed not only the work, but taught us how to play the online instruments they had developed. my cousin and i ended up staying on, with our laptops, and playing these instruments in that night's performance. i've never been much of a one for improvised music - my jazz tastes are strictly trad, and as an instrumentalist trained 100% in a score-based tradition, it's very uncomfortable for me to let go and improvise. but playing with the online instruments and gradually getting to learn how to work them was an awesome experience. and there was no fear of ruining the performance with my amateur attempts because all the online-instrument impro, whether by those of us in the auditorium with our laptops, or the performers playing along online from the us, was fed through to a mixer where it was selectively mixed in with the sounds made by the performers onstage. it was a real blast though when something i'd just worked through on my laptop came out through the speakers!
i've been thinking for a little while now that i should use this vox blog to highlight some of the music i love, most of which has a very small audience because the general public seems to think that modern classical (or "post-classical" as kyle gann calls it) music has to be either dull or too hard. so i'm going to pull together some mp3s over the next few days to illustrate some of the stuff i've talked about here. you never know. some of you may like it :-)
Books, movies, music; what's in your top 5 right now?
golly. choices to be made on a friday morning. that's a bit cruel, what? unfortunately, much as i love and identify with high fidelity (yes, i have in the past arranged all my recordings in chronological order. i found it surprisingly easy to find stuff too!), i've never been much good at committing myself to any given top 5 - too indecisive - but i'll give it a go, for the sake of qotd. as always, i find it too hard to compare classical music and popular music, so i've just done two lists for 'music'.
books
- cs lewis: cosmic trilogy
i really want to re-read this (for about the 8th time), but it's in storage in sydney *sniff*. might have to investigate library copies - jk rowling: harry potter series
- willans & searle: the compleet molesworth
one of the funniest books i have ever read. guaranteed to cheer you up, whatever your mood - julia cameron: the artist's way
- dmitri shostakovich/solomon volkov: testimony
movies
- rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead
- pleasantville
- lord of the rings trilogy
- amelie
- la dolce vita
music - popular
- the go team: thunder, lightning, strike
- romeo & juliet soundtrack (baz luhrmann)
- best of the smiths
- pulp: common people
- elo: time
music - classical
- everything erik satie ever wrote
- rachmaninov: vespers
- shostakovich: the execution of stepan razin
- steve reich: the desert music
- bohuslav martinu: symphonies
What do you collect?
uh... ok... one last qotd before i drag myself back to my packing (yes, i'm a big-time procrastinator). I sort of fell into my collecting habit by accident, but now i'm addicted and i look for these everywhere. what, i hear you ask? um... i collect old books on modern music, e.g. "composers of today" from 1922 or "music now" from 1930. for someone like me who is particularly fascinated by music of the early twentieth century they're really quite fascinating - proper primary sources for finding out what a composer's contemporaries thought of him, or how a new style was viewed as it emerged. i got into this through picking up a 1911 edition of petit larousse illustré many years ago because it was such a lovely looking book and only cost about a dollar. i ended up using three short biographies from it as the text for my set of songs remembrances of half-forgotten dead people. i was particularly struck by how the artists in those biographies (one a painter, one a composer, one a writer) were either totally forgotten, known just as a name, or known for something totally unconnected to their work (more detailed notes on this in the scores list on my site), and then i just had to delve didn't i? i'm hooked now. there's no going back. just a future of more and more bookshelves, probably with glass doors or huge sliding ladders.
