My tweets

• Tue, 18:47: Been another sunny day but crap weather to come Friday, great just the day i will be at the Office and get my free haircut


• Tue, 18:47: Started the Emile Zola novel

Decisions

So i am back in the Office as i needed to print a few more surveys for this month. Now as it is very windy outside I am debating whether to do Strood today or not. if i do this visit then i have a cafe visit in Chatham which is also due this week, plus a couple of charity shops. Think i better find something in the chazzers  for Spot to cheer him up after his mix up with the dates of the Winter Olympics in Russia. He booked his week off one week too early!

Test Subject

I gave up, defeated by this inclement weather. I could not hack going anywhere fsrther than Sittingbourne. It is blowing a gale and with the rain I am just fed up with it all. Thus i have embarked myself in the library.

It looks like the same for Friday in which i have to be in the town for various reasons, the least of which is a free haircut at JC Hair. I  have become a test subject for a trainee hairdresser. , but i do not mind having a hair-do on a gratis basis.

I shall head home on the next bus and read some Zizek, Foucault or Gramsci.

Greetings

Birthday greetings to faunhaert today

Book 9 - Garrison Keillor "Lake Wobegon Days"

Garrison Keillor "Lake Wobegon Days" (Faber & Faber)



More than a few reviewers, even the complementary ones, have called this book "rambling"--and is it ever. It has no real narrative focus from what I can tell from the 50 or so pages I could make myself read. It seems more loosely connected stories and history of fictional, Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, U.S.A, a small town not far from the twin cities. In the opening chapter, "Home" it shifts without warning from a super-omniscient to first person and back, from present to past tense and back. There seems to be a narrator, because we hear about "when grandmother died" and "in 1958 when six of us boys" and how he had "turned 16" but it just didn't gel for me. I soon lost patience with the folksy voice and boy did I hate the frequent footnotes--by the time you got through them you've completely lost the thread of the main narrative. I didn't find this funny. I not only didn't laugh out loud, I didn't crack a smile.

I could see this was literate and lyrical and got an idea why some might be charmed, but I was irritated and bored out of my mind. Humor is such a personal thing. Just not for me.

Early Music

I am looking forward to travelling down with Phil next Tuesday as we both have a love of early classical music.So on our sojourn to Brighton i shall be bringing two CD's - the one by Concordia with works by Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis, William Lawes, and others and another CD I found in a charity shop by Fretwork playing  the music of Thomas Tomkins "These Distracted Times"  (Obsidian).




Tomkin's music was written during the troubling times of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell to which he wrote a pavan shortly after Charles I execution  This is a collection of his church and chamber music.

Need More Reading Time

This evening , apart from listening to some of the recent charity shop purchases, the Eternal CD (one of my guilty pleasures), i finished the first half of a Slavoj Zizek paperback, "The Metastases Of Enjoyment" . In effect, this is two books in one, or more precisely , two essays in one book; the other half is called "On Women and Causality" . I might leave it aside until i have completed the Michel Foucault book. I still have to finish reading the SJ Parris historical novel "Sacrilege" , and then some more pages from Rob Young's overview of the history of English folk music, "Electric Eden" in which i enjoyed the previous section on Cecil Sharp and other folklorists.

Phew! I need a time machine to slow down time so i can read all these fascinating subjects and books.