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The Rochester Recombination
Mar. 10th, 2012 10:22 amThis morning I almost achieved ataraxy , only to be awoken by the cries of one cat, Jasper, with her piercing plaintive demeanour.
The Peter Ackroyd hardback arrived this morning “The History of England Vol. One” (Macmillan) and a CD by Miles Davis “Nefertiti” thanks to sales on Play.
Yesterday I did a trip to Chatham and Rochester. Sheerness can wait till another day now.
In Chatham I visited the Dockyard area for a coffee and a ciabatta at Boomers, an Australian outlet, and afterwards, popped into The Works and bought two paperbacks for a quid.
They are “Rock Me Amadeus” by Seb Hunter (Penguin) and Adam Phillips “Promises Promises” (Faber).
Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (edition 2002)
by Adam Phillips
As an essayist, Adam Phillips combines the best of two worlds: the mastery of psychotherapy as a practitioner and a theorist-and a reputation as one of the best literary writers around. In this collection of essays, he brings the two gifts to bear upon each other, reaching far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, novels, poetry, and history to speculate on the relative merits of psychoanalysis and literature. In his quirky, epigrammatic style, Phillips shows us how psychoanalysis and literature at their best share the goal of shedding light on human character, the most fascinating of disorders.
Rock Me Amadeus: When Ignorance Meets High Art, Things Can Get Messy (edition 2007)
by Seb Hunter
An amusing and engaging book that is sometimes laugh out loud funny. It also manages the difficult trick of engaging and educating the reader. I hope it also persuades some people to become engaged with so called 'serious' music. But the book is primarily an enjoyable account of one young man's deliberate engagement with a wider range of music. The experience of listening to a large, highly trained, and disciplined group of players performing a symphony can be extraordinary. The human voice, when it is similarly experienced within the operatic tradition, is most extraordinary of all. When all these forces combine to perform a work, such as Tristan und Isolde, you have - in my opinion - something transcendent.
I then took the bus to Rochester and had a meal at The Golden Lion, a Wetherspoons outlet, having their beef and burger offer. The ale was a pint of Yeovil Brewery Star Gazer (4.0% ABV). An appropriate name for what I am reading most.
From a charity shop there, I picked up a copy of the Umberto Eco novel “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (Picador).for a quid. A beautifully illustrated novel.
Bizarre and compelling, Umberto Eco has written a wonderful book. Yambo, a 60 year old antiquarian bookseller, wakes from a coma unable to remember his life. Characters, plots and quotes from the books he has read free-wheel through his brain but he doesn't know his wife and children, or what has shaped his life. In an attempt to reconnect with his past he returns to the house where he spent part of his childhood — his grandfather's home where he spent holidays and was evacuated during the war. What follows is a trip through the culture of 1930's/1940's Italy. A feast of comic books, music, books and propaganda.
Lavishly illustrated with memorabilia; nostalgic and descriptive of a childhood, this is a book that feeds the senses. Surreal chain of consciousness prose flows effortlessly; building to a culminating dream like sequence.
The post these days can be very slow, even with first class items. I had a chat with a postman in the Evening Star, last time I was in Brighton, and found out why this is happening. Apparently it's new rules put in by the people running the Royal Mail. There's restrictions as to how many hours a postman can work meaning certain people aren't even getting a delivery on certain days because it's not feasible. Also junk mail is prioritorized over everything else including First Class post. So if your postie has to leave some letters behind it'll be proper mail rather than some crap that's going straight in the bin.
The Peter Ackroyd hardback arrived this morning “The History of England Vol. One” (Macmillan) and a CD by Miles Davis “Nefertiti” thanks to sales on Play.
Yesterday I did a trip to Chatham and Rochester. Sheerness can wait till another day now.
In Chatham I visited the Dockyard area for a coffee and a ciabatta at Boomers, an Australian outlet, and afterwards, popped into The Works and bought two paperbacks for a quid.
They are “Rock Me Amadeus” by Seb Hunter (Penguin) and Adam Phillips “Promises Promises” (Faber).
Promises, Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis (edition 2002)
by Adam Phillips
As an essayist, Adam Phillips combines the best of two worlds: the mastery of psychotherapy as a practitioner and a theorist-and a reputation as one of the best literary writers around. In this collection of essays, he brings the two gifts to bear upon each other, reaching far beyond the borders of psychoanalytic discourse into art, novels, poetry, and history to speculate on the relative merits of psychoanalysis and literature. In his quirky, epigrammatic style, Phillips shows us how psychoanalysis and literature at their best share the goal of shedding light on human character, the most fascinating of disorders.
Rock Me Amadeus: When Ignorance Meets High Art, Things Can Get Messy (edition 2007)
by Seb Hunter
An amusing and engaging book that is sometimes laugh out loud funny. It also manages the difficult trick of engaging and educating the reader. I hope it also persuades some people to become engaged with so called 'serious' music. But the book is primarily an enjoyable account of one young man's deliberate engagement with a wider range of music. The experience of listening to a large, highly trained, and disciplined group of players performing a symphony can be extraordinary. The human voice, when it is similarly experienced within the operatic tradition, is most extraordinary of all. When all these forces combine to perform a work, such as Tristan und Isolde, you have - in my opinion - something transcendent.
I then took the bus to Rochester and had a meal at The Golden Lion, a Wetherspoons outlet, having their beef and burger offer. The ale was a pint of Yeovil Brewery Star Gazer (4.0% ABV). An appropriate name for what I am reading most.
From a charity shop there, I picked up a copy of the Umberto Eco novel “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (Picador).for a quid. A beautifully illustrated novel.
Bizarre and compelling, Umberto Eco has written a wonderful book. Yambo, a 60 year old antiquarian bookseller, wakes from a coma unable to remember his life. Characters, plots and quotes from the books he has read free-wheel through his brain but he doesn't know his wife and children, or what has shaped his life. In an attempt to reconnect with his past he returns to the house where he spent part of his childhood — his grandfather's home where he spent holidays and was evacuated during the war. What follows is a trip through the culture of 1930's/1940's Italy. A feast of comic books, music, books and propaganda.
Lavishly illustrated with memorabilia; nostalgic and descriptive of a childhood, this is a book that feeds the senses. Surreal chain of consciousness prose flows effortlessly; building to a culminating dream like sequence.
The post these days can be very slow, even with first class items. I had a chat with a postman in the Evening Star, last time I was in Brighton, and found out why this is happening. Apparently it's new rules put in by the people running the Royal Mail. There's restrictions as to how many hours a postman can work meaning certain people aren't even getting a delivery on certain days because it's not feasible. Also junk mail is prioritorized over everything else including First Class post. So if your postie has to leave some letters behind it'll be proper mail rather than some crap that's going straight in the bin.
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