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 Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 11:44 am Post subject: |
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A Murder Is Announced
Hardcover
By Agatha Christie
| Quote: | She paused triumphantly. Colonel Easterbrook looked at her indulgently but without much interest.
"Murder Game," he said.
"Oh."
"That's all it is. Mind you," he unbent a little, "it can be very good fun if it's well done. But it needs good organizing by someone who knows the ropes. You draw lots. One person's the murderer, nobody knows who. Lights out. Murderer chooses his victim. The victim has to count twenty before he screams. Then the person who's chosen to be the detective takes charge. Questions everybody. Where they were, what they were doing, tries to trip the real fellow up. Yes, it's a good game - if the detective - er - knows something about police work."
"Like you, Archie. You had all those interesting cases to try in your district."
Colonel Easterbrook smiled indulgently and gave his mustache a complacent twirl.
"Yes, Laura," he said. "I daresay I could give them a hint or two." (-- pgs. 14-15) |
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| Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:25 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Free Radicals
Short Story by Frostback legend, Alice Munro, who carefully selects
a bad day, then skillfully, enviably makes it much worse.
Feb. 11 & 18 /08
| Quote: | "I baked two tarts. One had the poison in it and one didn't. I drove down to the university and got two cups of coffee and went to her office. There was nobody there but her. I told her I'd had to come to into town, and as I was passing the campus I'd seen this nice little bakery that my husband was always talking about, so I dropped in and bought a couple of tarts and two cups of coffee. I'd been thinking of her all alone when the rest of them got to go on their holidays, and of me all alone with my husband in Minneapolis. She was sweet and grateful. She said that it was very boring for her at the office, and the cafeterial was closed, so she had to go over to the science building for coffee and they put hydrochloric acid in it. Ha-ha. So we had our little party."
"I hate rhubarb," he said. "It wouldn't have worked with me."
"It did with her. I had to take a chance that it would work fast, before she realized what was wrong and had her stomach pumped. But not so fast that she would associate it with me. I had to be out of the way and so I was. The building was deserted, and as far as I know to this day nobody saw me arrive or leave. Of course, I knew some back ways."
"You think you're smart. You got away scot-free."
"But so have you."
"What I done wasn't so underhanded as what you done."
"It was necessary to you."
"You bet it was."
"Mine was necessary to me. I kept my marriage. He came to see that she wouldn't have been good for him, anyway. She'd have got sick on him, almost certainly. She was just the type. She'd have been nothing but a burden to him. He saw that."
"You better not have put nothing in them eggs," he said. "You did, you'll be sorry."
"Of course I didn't. It's not something you'd go around doing regularly. I don't actually know anything about poison. It was just by chance that I had that one little piece of information."
He stood up so suddenly that he knocked over his chair. She noticed that there was not much wine left in the bottle.
"I need the keys to the car."
(-- p. 142) |
The New Yorker on Audio CD:
Wonderful Town
Stories from the New Yorker narrated
by some of America's best actors[ - the
ones who can read AND talk
Life Stories
A few of the New Yorker's favorite character studies of
the famous narrated by more of America's best actors -
the ones who can read AND talk
Both collections are among our favorites!
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editor
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| Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 8:18 am Post subject: |
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Screams from the Balcony
Selected Letters 1960-1970
Paperback
By an old friend, Charles Bukowski
Edited by Seamus Cooney
Sergiu Celibidache Rehearses Bruckner's Ninth
at YouTube.com
| Quote: | god, enough of that. this is a short letter to explain that I did not mean to call you a girl. [****}
I am still listening to Bruckner 9th. do you think I am cultured, little girl? I like this stuff. If I weren't so poor I'd make a beautiful snob. even now I think I could be a music critic for the New York Times if they'd let me. but they wouldn't. before I was finished they'd burn the Times down or some music lover would assassinate me. let's get the pawnshop owners first. then, me, yes, I'd make a terrible snob. I just don't like most people's faces or the way they walk or the sound of their voices or anything they say. the people make me physically ill. shut me in a room with 5 people for 40 minutes and then ask me if I had a chance whether I'd save them or burn them. Dostoevsky wouldn't agree. (From letter [To Carl Weissner] [January 28, 1967] the next day following earlier letter (1967), p. 291) |
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| Posted: Fri May 30, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
Practicing Patients
PatientsLikeMe, an Internet start-up, creates information-rich
communities for the chronically ill. Is it the next step forward
in medical science - or just a MySpace for the afflicted?
By Thomas Goetz
March 23/08
| Quote: | ... Creating a PatientsLikeMe mental-health community — or as they call it, a “mood community” — requires a new strategy for measuring mental health. The challenge is in part semantic. Where the argot around A.L.S. or M.S. is largely clinical, the vernacular around mental health is more subjective. The official diagnostic criteria for major depression, for example, include “feelings of worthlessness” and “indecisiveness.” So PatientsLikeMe faces an input problem: how to convert the ambiguities of mental illness into metrics? Whatever its ultimate worth, the site’s answer is elegantly straightforward. Members can update their mood status every hour on a scale of 1 to 4, from very bad to very good. How they feel may be subjective, but the resulting data can be mapped across time. The site treats sessions of therapy as if they were a dose of Prozac; the type of therapy (say, group or individual) stands as the treatment, and the length of a session (say, 50 minutes a week) as the dosage.
Such efforts at precise measurement and comparison are not the norm in evaluating mental-health treatment. Americans spend about $12 billion a year on antidepressants, but we still have little understanding of how or whether they work. In 2006, the National Institute of Mental Healthreleased the results of the largest and longest depression study ever undertaken, the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression Study, or Star-D. Star-D rejected typical clinical study design and aimed to create a real-world representation of how patients actually experience and treat depression: through trial and error, taking one drug after another, searching for one that helps. The results were mixed. Star-D found that if you’re depressed and spent three months on a potent psychotropic drug, you had a one-third chance of achieving remission. After almost six months on drugs, your chances bump up to about fifty-fifty — a coin flip — and you still risk side effects like sexual dysfunction, insomnia and weight gain. Those may be good odds for the industry, but it seems a poor bet for a patient.
At PatientsLikeMe, Ben Heywood sees pure opportunity in such statistics. “Those odds just aren’t good enough,” he says. “So you try Wellbutrin, and after six weeks it doesn’t work. Then Prozac. Doesn’t work. Now what? Where do you go next?” Plugged in to a community of patients sharing their depression histories and treatments, Ben argues, patients could readily find someone with symptomatology close to their own, compare drug regimens and go straight to the drug that may be more likely to work for them. This, for patients, is the promise of a mental-health community: better tailoring of treatments. It is also the promise of the site as a business. The pharmaceutical industry should be eager to improve the accuracy and efficacy of its treatments. After all, sometimes side effects can turn into blockbusters, most famously when Pfizer scientists learned that their hypertension treatment was causing erections in men, leading the way to Viagra. Since PatientsLikeMe forgoes advertising, selling its data to pharmaceutical companies is its best apparent way to make money. But so far, it seems, the drug industry has balked at the prospect of knowing so precisely what happens to their products after they reach the market. (-- pgs. 33-37) |
| Quote: | | Note: We note with interest two readers' letters published in the issue April 8/08, criticizing the site first, for encouraging tedious, self-absorbed symptom tracking - 'a hypochondriac's virtual theme park' - and second, for its failure to vet information, which may make visitors vulnerable to spurious claims by individuals or oganizations with selfish motives. The letters appear on p. 8. |
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| Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 5:32 pm Post subject: |
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Young Stalin
Hardcover
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
| Quote: | Stalin's pre-Revolutionary achievements and crimes were much greater than we knew. For the first time, we can document his role in the bank-robberies, protection-rackets, extortion, arson, piracy murder - the political gangsterism - that impressed Lenin and trained Stalin the very skills that would prove invaluable in the political jungle of the Soviet Union. But we can also show that he was much more than a gangster godfather: he was also a political organizer, enforcer, and master at infiltrating the Tsarist security services. In contrast to Zinoviev, Kamenev or Bukharin, whose reputations as great politicans are ironically founded on their destruction in the Terror, he was not afraid to take physical risks. But he also impressed Lenin as an independent and thoughtful politician, and as a vigorous editor and journalist, who was never afraid to confront and contradict the older man. Stalin's success was at least partly due to his unusal combination of education (thanks to the Seminary) and stree violence; he was that rare combination: both 'intellectual' and killer. No wonder in 1917 Lenin turned to Stalin as the ideal lieutenant for his violent, beleaguered Revolution.
This book is the result of almost ten years of research on Stalin in twenty-three cities and nine countries, mainly in the newly opened archives of Moscow, Tbilisi and Batumi, but also in St Petersburg, Baku, Vologda, Siberia, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Tampere, Helsinki, Cracaw, Vienna and Stanford, California. (From the Introduction, pgs. xix-xx) |
| Quote: | 'Little Stalin boxed and wrestled with a certain success, agrees Davrichewy. (footnote omitted) His singing teacher observed him setting up wrestling matches, but once he hurt *his already fragile arm. 'It started as a wrestling match then turned into real boxing,' recounts the master, 'and they beat each other up.' ...
The boys' real energies were reserved for gang-warfare. 'The girls of our hometown were organized into gangs based on the streets or quarter where they lived,. These bands were in constant warfare' - though they were melting-pots too. 'Gori's kids were educated together in the street without distinction of religion, nationality or fortune.' A ragamuffin like Stalin played in the streets with the son of Prince Amilakhvari - a famous general - who tried to teach him to swim. The children, armed with knives, bows and arrows, or catapults, led a blissfully free if wild existence: they swam in the river, they sang their favourite songs, pillaged apples from Prince Amilakhvari's orchard, mischevously ranging across the countryside. Once Stalin set the Prince's orchards alight. ...
The streetfighting was legitimate not just because Goreli parents joined in the annual brawls and bet on the wrestling-bouts but because the boys were playing the Georgian bandit-heroes who fought the Russians in the nearby mountains. But now the schoolboys found themselves persecuted by the Russian Empire even at school. (From Brawlers, Wrestlers and Choirboys, pgs. 32-34) |
| Quote: | | *Note: This damaged left arm is variously blamed on a sledge accident, a birth defect, a childhood infection, a restling injury, a fight over a woman in Chiatura, a carriage accident and a beating from his father, all (except for the birth defect) suggested by Stalin himself. There is much confusion about Stalin's probably because there were in fact two accidents: there was this, less serious accident when he had just started school (according to Keke)(hit by a phaeton maybe while playing a popular game of 'chicken,' in which boys would grab the axle of galloping carriages) or aged six (according to later health reports) which probably damaged the arm, an injury that became more noticeable in old age. Then, not long afterwards, there was a much graver accident in which he was seriously hurt and for which he needed treatment in Tiflis: this dmaged his legs. In her memoirs Keke, aged eithy, seems to merge them together. (From Crazy Beso, p. 28) |
| Quote: | When the new prisoner arrived in Baku's Bailov Prison wearing a blue-satin smock and a dashing Caucasian hood, the other political prisoners passed the word to be careful. 'This is secret,' they whispered. 'That is Koba!' They feared Stalin 'more than the police.'
The bogeyman did not disappoint. He had the 'ability quietly to incite others while he himself remained on the sidelines. The sly schemer did not spurn any means necessary but managed to avoid public responsibility.' In his seven months at the famous Bailovka, set amid the oilfields, Stalin dominated its power structures. He read, studied Esperanto, which he regarded as the language of the future,' and stirred up a series of witchhunts for traitors that often ended in death. His reign at the Bailovka was a microcosm of his dictatorship of Russia. ...
Stalin still preferred rogues to revolutionaries. He was 'always seen in the company of cutthroats, blackmailers, robbers and the gunslingers - the Mauserists.' Sometimes the criminal prisoners raided the politicals, but the Georgian criminals, probably organized by Stalin, served as their bodyguards. In power, he shocked his comrades by promoting criminals in the NKVD, but he had used criminals all his life.
These two species came together to bet on prison games such as wrestling competitions and louse-racing. Stalin did not like chess but 'He and Sergo Ordzhonikidze often played backgammon all night.' The cruellest game was 'Madness' in which a young prisoner was placed in the criminals' cell to be driven mad. Bets were taken on how long it would take for the youngster to crack up. Sometimes the victim really did go crazy. (From Louse-Racing, Murder and Madness - Prison Games, pgs. 173-175) |
| Quote: | On 24 September, Kamo and Tsintsadze, with Kupriashvili and about eighteen gunmen, ambushed the mail coach three miles outside Tiflis. The highwaymen tossed bombs at the poolice and Cossacks: three policemen and a postilion were killed. A fourth policeman was wounded but opened fire on the bank-robbers. The hold-up escalated into a brutal firefight. The gunmen failed to grab the money; the Cossacks rallied. When the Outfit eventually retreated, the Cossacks gave chase but Tsintsadze and Kupriashvili, both crack shots, covered their retreat, picking off seven Cossacks in a galloping battle down the Kadzhorskoe Highway.
It was the last bow of the Outfit. Kamo was tracked down to his hideout with eighteen of his gangsters. They were arrested. Kamo received four death sentences.
'I'm resigned to death," Kamo wrote to Tsintsadze, 'I'm absolutely calm. On my grave there should already be grass growing six feet high. One can't escape death for ever. One must die one day. But I'll try my luck once more and perhaps one day, we'll laugh at our enemies again... This seemed highly unlikely. ...
Once again, Kamo cheated the noose, benefiting from the brad amnesty of Nicholas II on the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Kamo remained in jail for five years but lived to meet up again with Stalin and play out the ultimate insane violence after the Revolution. ... (From The Escapist: Kamo's Leap and the Last Bank-Robbery, pgs. 216-217) |
| Quote: | | Petrograd in October 1917 seemed calm, but beneath the glossy surface the city danced in a trance of last pleasures. 'Gambling clubs functioned hectically from dusk till dawn,' reported John Reed, 'with champagne flowing and stakes of 20,000 roubles. In the centre of the city at night, prostitutes in jewels and expensive furs walked up and down and crowded the cafes...Hold-ups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk the streets.' Russia wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, later one of Stalin's favoured writers, 'lived as if on a railway platform, waiting for the guard's whistle.' Aristocrats sold priceless treasures on the streets, the food shortages worsened, queues lengthened, while the rich still dined at Donon's and Constant's, the two smartest restaurants, and the bourgeois vied for tickets to hear Chaliapin sing. (From 1917 Winter: The Countdown, p. 288) |
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 9:35 am Post subject: |
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Full Moon
Hardcover
By Rum Uncle Plum Wodehouse
| Quote: | The great drawback to choosing a doctor at random out of the telephone directory just because you like his middle name - Tipton had once been engaged to a girl called Doris Jimpson - is that until you are in his consulting room and it is too late to back out, you don't know what you are going to get. It may be a kindred soul, or it may be someone utterly alien and unsympathetic. You are taking a leap in the dark.
The moment Tipton set eyes on E. Jimpson Murgatroyd he knew that he had picked a lemon in the garden of medicine. What he had hoped for was a sunny practitioner who would prod him in the ribs with his stethoscope, compliment him on his amazing health, tell him an anecdote about a couple of Irishmen named Pat and Mike, give him some sort of ointment for the spots, and send him away in a whirl of good-fellowship. And E. Jimpson proved to be a gloomy man with side whiskers, who smelled of iodorform and had obviously been looking on the black side of things since he was a slip of a boy.
Seeming not in the least impressed by Tipton's extraordinary fitness, he had asked him in a low, despondent voice to take a seat and show him the spots. And when had seen them he shook his head and said he didn't like those spots. Tipton said he didn't like them either - which was fine, he pointed out, because if he was anti-spot and E.J. Murgatroyd was anti-spot, they could get together and do something about them. What brought home the bacon on these occasions, said Tipton, was team spirit and that shoulder-to-shoulder stuff. There was a song, he added, about the Boys of the Old Brigade, which illustrated what he had in mind.
Sighing rather heavily, E.J. Murgatroyd then fastened a sort of rubber contrivance about Tipton's biceps and started tightening it, keeping his eye the while upon what appeared to be some kind of score sheet on his desk. Releasing him from this, he said he didn't like Tipton's blood pressure. Tipton, surprised, for this was the first time he had heard of it, said had he a blood pressure? And E.J. Murgatroyd said yes, and a very high one, and Tipton said that was good, wasn't it, and E.J. Murgatroyd said no, not so good, and began to tap him a good deal. Then, having asked some rather personal and tactless questions concerning Tipton's general scheme of life, he delivered his verdict. (From Chapter 3, pgs. 41-42) |
| Quote: | Full Moon
Audio Cassette
No experience with this one yet, I'm afraid. There are a number of new Wodehouse audio releases of late but they must be travelling to the colonies by way of tramp steamer still rounding the Horn. Please check back soon for updates. |
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| Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:30 am Post subject: |
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Will the Circle Be Unbroken - The Trilogy
Audio CD
Featuring the Tennessee Stud sung by legendary
guitar picker Doc Watson
| Quote: | Tennessee Stud
By celebrated Arkansan Jimmie Driftwood
Along about eighteen twenty-five,
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never would have got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee Stud.
I had some trouble with my sweetheart's pa,
And one of her brothers was a bad outlaw.
I sent her a letter by my Uncle Bud,
And I rode away on the Tennessee Stud.
The Tennessee Stud was long and lean,
The color of the sun, and his eyes were green.
He had the nerve and he had the blood,
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee Stud.
One day I was riding in a beautiful land
I run smack into an Indian band
They jumped their nags with a whoop and a yell
And away we rode like a bat out of hell.
I circled their camp for a time or two,
Just to show what a Tennessee horse can do.
The redskin boys couldn't get my blood,
'Cause I was a-riding on the Tennessee Stud.
We drifted on down into no man's land,
We crossed that river called the Rio Grande.
I raced my horse with the Spaniard's foal
'Til I got me a skin full of silver and gold.
Me and a gambler, we couldn't agree,
We got in a fight over Tennessee.
We jerked our guns, and he fell with a thud,
And I got away on the Tennessee Stud.
I got just as lonesome as a man can be,
Dreamin' of my girl in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Stud's green eyes turned blue
'Cause he was a-dreamin' of a sweetheart, too,
We loped right back across Arkansas;
I whupped her brother and I whupped her pa.
I found that girl with the golden hair,
And she was a-riding on the Tennessee Mare.
Stirrup to stirrup and side by side,
We crossed the mountains and the valleys wide.
We came to Big Muddy, then we forded the flood
On the Tennessee Mare and the Tennessee Stud.
A pretty little baby on the cabin floor,
A little horse colt playing 'round the door,
I love that girl with the golden hair,
And the Tennessee Stud loves the Tennessee Mare. |
Anyone remember parties filled with competent musicians like the ones featured on these classic albums? Anyone still hosting those parties? If so, move it on over to Canada's Left Coast. Look us up. Play us a couple train songs and we'll take you deep inside the Blue Mountain and show you all the best fishing holes.
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2008 10:12 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
| Quote: | | 'If you are wondering what happened to us all, you might consult the poems of Irving Layton.' -- Leonard Cohen (From the front page of Globe Review in the Globe and Mail Jan. 5/06) |
Selected Poems
Paperback
By Irving Layton
Preface by Wynne Francis
| Quote: | On Being Bitten by a Dog
A doctor for mere lucre
performed an unnecessary operation
making my nose nearly
as crooked as himself
Another for a similar reason
almost blinded me
A poet famous
for his lyrics of love
and renunciation
toils at the seduction of my wife
And the humans who would like to kill me
are legion
Only once have I been bitten by a dog.
(--p. 54) |
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| Posted: Thu Oct 16, 2008 7:42 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Believe me, it's torture
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist - not inflict - it
By Christopher Hitchens
August, 2008
| Quote: | It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:
“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.” (-- p. 71) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 10:26 am Post subject: |
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From China Gambles:
China Syndrome
The True Story of the 21st Century's
First Great Epidemic
Hardcover
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
| Quote: | CHAPTER 58
. April 14, 2004
. Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, China
. 3,750 infected, 369 dead
There were sixty-one new cases in Hong Kong on the eleventh and two more deaths, forty-nine newly infected on the twelfth, forty-two on the thirteenth, forty on the fourteenth, and forty-two the next day, with nine fatalities. That day, Ka-Kui Kwok, one of our production staffers won about two hundred dollars in the office pool by predicting that there would be forty-one newly infected - the office infection pool was structured like The Price Is Right: you had to be under the number; one over and you would be out of the money. I was always optimistic and tended to lowball the guess, choosing in the twenties. We never established an office pool on the number of fatalities. The WHO would later report, "the case fatality ratio of SARS ranges from 0% to 50% depending on the group affected, with an overall estimate of case fatality of 14% to 15%." (-- pg. 316) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2008 10:08 am Post subject: |
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Zone 22
Paperback
By former Garban-Icap derivatives broker Tig Hague
| Quote: | | Gambling of any sort was strictly prohibited in the Zone on the grounds that it encouraged violence, so we all understood the importance of keeping our private syndicate a secret within the altrad. We didn't even let on to the other altrads, and for all we knew they might have been running their own book. Dang wrote down all the names of the gamblers and the amount that we'd bet in a small exercise book, which he kept hidden under a floorboard. (-- p. 297) |
Later on ...
| Quote: | At first I went the route of total denial, giving him the 'What me, ref?' look, total disbelief etched across my face, but that too was a mistake because from under his desk he pulled out the exercise book and, turning one page at a time, read out my name, the match and the bet placed. ...
With each match my heart sank that little bit further, and by the time he'd finished and snapped the book shut I knew he was going to hit me with some form of punishment, perhaps a spell in solitary, or extra duties around the Zone. I'd built up a relationship with Zanpolit, and with Regime to some extent, but I'd barely come across this character. His main job in the Zone was to censor incoming and outgoing mail, and the only time we'd crossed paths was when I went to collect or deliver a letter. I had no influence over him at all, and as he rubbed his chin, mulling what to do with me, I closed my eyes and stared at the dull red linoleum floor, praying. When he spoke he did so quietly and gravely, and I could barely hear what he was saying at the beginning when he was spelling out the gravity of error, but then he paused and I looked up.
'Hague, Tig ... nyet udo.'
'What?' I blurted at him.
'Hague, Tig ... nyet udo.'
It took me several seconds for me to understand that he was giving me a black mark, scrubbing my parole date.
'No! No! No! Please, no!' I pleaded, rushing towards his desk. 'You can't take six months of my life away for having a bet on a fucking football match. Please ... You can't do this! ... Not six more months!' (-- pgs. 298-299) |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 11:26 am Post subject: |
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Essays in English Architectural History
Hardcover
By Howard Colvin, brilliant writer and story-teller who is HUGELY missed
| Quote: | | The demolition in 1791 of the house at Horseheath in Cambridgeshire designed by Sir Roger Pratt for the first Lord Alington was the consequence of financial, though not political, recklessness by its later owners, the 1st and 2nd Lords Montfort. The 1st Lord Montfort, overwhelmed by debt, committed suicide on New Year's Day, 1755. Horace Walpole tells how, after playing cards until one in the morning, he summoned a lawyer 'and executed his will, which he made them read twice over, paragraph by paragraph; and then asking the lawyer if that would stand good, though a man were to shoot himself? and being assured it would, he said, "Pray stay while I step into the next room"; went into next room and shot himself. ... (From XVII, LEASE OR DEMOLISH? THE PROBLEM OF THE REDUNDANT COUNTRY HOUSE IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND, p. 278) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 7:04 pm Post subject: |
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The Economist
Magazine Subscription
Playing the French horn
Blowhard
Nov. 29-Dec. 5/08
| Quote: | ABOUT to turn 40 and bruised by the end of his marriage, Jasper Rees, a British journalist, climbed up to his attic and found a misshapen case containing his childhood nemesis: a French horn. Quite where the insane idea of playing a concerto before the annual gathering of most of the greatest living horn players came from is hard to tell, but the result is a marvellous memoir of a year’s obsession that should be read by anyone gripped by illogical compulsion.
What sets the horn apart? First and foremost, it is the sound—“a call of nature, an atavistic summons”—directly descended from the clamour that brought down the walls of Jericho. Then there is the astonishing difficulty of consistently hitting the right notes, let alone making music.
Mr Rees, whose book came out in Britain in January and is now being published in America (and turned into a stage show in London), introduces the greatest players. First comes Giovanni Punto, an 18th-century Bohemian who became the subject of an aristocratic fatwa requiring the removal of his front teeth when he had the temerity to leave his boss Count Joseph von Thun’s employment without permission. Then there was Mozart’s friend Joseph Leutgeb (to whom Mozart dedicated his horn concerto, K417, calling him “ass, ox and simpleton”). There are three generations of Brains, a British horn-playing dynasty; Helen Kotas, the first woman to be principal horn player for a major American orchestra; Herman Baumann and the Anglo-Australian, Barry Tuckwell.
What they all share is an absolute certainty that the horn is an instrument like no other. Richard Strauss called for “lots of horns, which are always a yardstick for heroism”. Sir Simon Rattle puts it differently: “You never eyeball a horn player. You just don’t. They’re stuntmen. You don’t eyeball stuntmen when they’re about to dice with death.” (-- p. 85) |
| Quote: | A Devil to Play
One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master t
he Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument
Paperback
By Jasper Rees
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What the critics said about the performance:
| Quote: | | Journalist Jasper Rees's assault on a Mozart concerto provided entertaining light relief (he rediscovered horn playing at the 2004 BHS Festival). This was his first (and possibly last) public solo performance. (From the cutline under Rees's photo at the British Horn Society |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 1:48 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God - an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin - at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can't do the same with death. Death can't be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn't have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint or condescension. 'Death is not an artist': no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celbrity called Dr Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn't get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious bookmaker either. Oddly, she did death's work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death. (-- pgs. 69-70) |
| Quote: | | ... We are indeed all going to die, and death is absolute and God a delusion, but even so, that makes us the lucky ones. Most 'people' - the vast majority of potential people - don't even get born, and their numbers are greater than all the grains of sand in all the deserts of Araby. 'The set of possible people allowed by our DNA ... massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.' Why do I find this such thin consolation? No, worse than that, such a disconsolation? Because look at all the evolutionary work, all the unrecorded pieces of cosmic luck, all the decision-making, all the generations of family care, all the thissing-and-thatting which have ended up producing me and my uniqueness. My ordinariness, too, and yours, and that of Richard Dawkins, yet a unique ordinariness, a staggeringly against-the-odds ordinariness. This makes it harder, not easier, to give a shrug and say philosophically, Oh well, might never have been here anyway, so may as well get on enjoying this little window of opportunity not granted to others. But then it's also hard, unless you're a biologist, to think of those trillions of unborn, genetically hypothetical others as 'potential people.' I have no difficulty imagining a stillborn or aborted baby as a potential person, but all those possible combinations that never came to pass? My human sympathy can only go so far, I'm afraid - the sands of Araby are beyond me. (-- p. 116) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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The Earth After Us
What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?
Hardcover
By Jan Zalasiewicz
| Quote: | | It is not safe simply to assume, because we are familiar with finding fossils from hundreds of millions ago, that we as a species will leave a viable long-term fossil record. It is a little sobering that, despite the many active professional paleontologists of the last century and plenty of interested amateurs, we have found representatives of only a tiny fraction (some 0.01 per cent, at a rough but reasonable estimate) of all species that have ever existed. Statistically, then, the odds are stacked against us. Fossilization is a game of chance, and the odds are not good. But fossilization is poker, not roulette. There are things that a species can 'do' to improve its chances of immortality. So, let us examine whether or not the deck is stacked in our favour. (From the chapter entitled, Body of Evidence, p. 192) |
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