Post Midnight Grooves - All Sorts

Time to unwind - and you know what that means (unless it's sex) - music.

Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink

( More music here )

In Canterbury

Well folks, i arrived back in Whitstable this morning just after nine and when i arrived at the said charity shop in absentia they had already sold the Dr.Who box set. The woman who was there yesterday whom i incidentally gave the wrong bag ws not here this morning , and i think t was the manager, and i was furious - i laid it into her metaphorically speaking. I noticed the bag in the back room and asked her to have a look for the box set but to no avail, she gave me the empty bag and ny receipt for the purchase of the box set was still in there - okay i only paid £2.60 as the rest of the seven quid was done in an exchange.

I went to the Canterbury lost property department at the bus station but nobody had given in the tin of pipe tobacco so that is another three quid down the drain too! I bought some loose stuff later in Faversham to compensate - my fave coconut flavour tobacco.

In Canterbury i did two visits , an outdoor clothing store pretending to look for a rucksack and a pharmacy visit about hay fever remedies.

I found the following CD's for a quid each on a charity shop whilst walking around Canterbury.



You could call this ambient jazz.




Another cool jazz album



Plus this classical collection of songs and arias.


Best weather yet. Rellay nice and warm and i spent a good hour and a half in Faversham sunbathing at my favourite spot before going home. Now listening to that Jon Hassell CD.

Birthday Greetings

Happy birthday to jantojones today. May you have a great day.

Doctor Who Day

Snagged from a_phoenixdragon

Trumped

"The Republican voting base has devolved into an ignorant hoard of blue collar idiots.

Trump brilliantly realized that he'd have a better shot running as a Republican (because educated Liberals are a tougher crowd to manipulate) and so he spews nativist invective, peddles the fantasy that business men make great political leaders... And now the dying demographic of mediocre middle aged white trash has a new champion."

"And, amazingly, favorite of the "value voters." Eight years of heaping abuse on the most intelligent, principled man to hold the office in decades, now they're falling over themselves to get behind this vile example of everything that's worst about capitalism"

Book 38 - Elif Batuman "The Possessed"

Elif Batuman "The Possessed : Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar Straus Giroux)








This is less a book about Russian literature and more a memoir of Batuman's college and grad school years. She did end up studying Russian literature and linguistics in those years, and talks lovingly and amusingly of the authors she read, but over half the book is about her summer in Uzbekistan, in which she only talks about the country's Turkish roots (Batuman is the child of Turkish immigrants to the US). It's an amusing travelogue, but sarcastic translations of Turkish poetry is not what this book purports to be about.

Batuman also jumps around chronologically - one chapter will be about her sophomore year in college, the next about her return to grad school after two years off, and in the third we're at her first year in grad school. I found this quite confusing, and again, I wasn't reading as closely as perhaps I should have been, but the book comes across as a light memoir and I didn't like that suddenly I was expected to be deducing, from very small hints, how old Batuman was at any given moment. And this is rather important given that she encountered different authors at different times.

The last chapter was, unfortunately, almost pointless. She starts off discussing Dostoyevsky's The Demons (also translated as The Possessed) but then segues, clumsily, into a long saga of a gorgeous charismatic grad student in her social circle, and how, despite the fact that every woman in the state of California was in love with him, Elif Batuman was the only one who made it into his bed (this following the reveal that he had taken a vow of celibacy). Batuman's charming humor and refusal to take herself seriously disappear in this chapter, which reads like nothing so much as bragging / wish-fulfillment written by someone who just read The Secret History. It isn't like anything else in the book, and I hated ending with it.

The rest of the book, timeline problems aside, is smart without being pretentious, funny without being cutesy, and infectiously infatuated with Russian literature, to the extent that I am going to re-read Anna Karenina as soon as I can, and will probably pick up Eugene Onegin, in which I'd never before had any interest. If it weren't for that last chapter, I would have thoroughly enjoyed it, and I almost did anyway. I can recommend it. Just feel free to skip the end.

The 5th Amendment

Sniggers.

Failed Experiments

Just watched the latest episode of Agents of SHIELD ,with just two episodes to go before the season's two hour finale. Will Daisy actually sacrifice herself with the Kree blood running through her to finalize Hive's plan too turn the world into Inhumans?