If you have nightmares where you are pursued along the wharf with calliope music fluting your doom in the background, this album probably isn’t for you. If you like the idea of Danny Elfman collaborating with The Clientele, however, listen up. Misophone is a production of two guys from Bristol who are apparently cranking out songs left and right. This is supposedly their thirteenth (or fourteenth?) album, though its only the second I find evidence of. Whatever. These guys have a flair for the tune, and could probably hang out with the Elephant Six crowd if they ever came out of their attic. It rides the line between happy and very dark–sorta like a bad clown. I have to say, the melodies are very simple and can get cloying after a while (especially with the oom-pah, oom-pah-pah on the bass clef) but they are incredibly entertaining in smaller doses. For some, it will be essential listening. For me, they’ll make their way into lots of mix tapes and will probably be played at the funerals of household pets.
Spisska nove ves.mp3
I, for one, am not at all surprised that Shadow Country by Peter Mathiessen has won the National Book Award. It is one of the grandest pieces of fiction published in this country in the last decade. Like another book on that short list, Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Country is a true American novel. It centers around the life, death and legacy of Edgar Watson who is the sort of morally compromised pioneer that has no doubt always been at the edge of new frontiers. The novel is at once a detailed portrait of the post-reconstruction South, turning the corner into the twentieth century, and a deep character study of a man of questionable character. It constitutes, in my mind, a clear addition to the American canon and should be on every serious reader’s list.
Shadow Country is really a reworking of three previously published novels by Mathiessen, which themselves were a re-working of one gargantuan novel he began years before. The books are now pared down into this three-part novel which offers a multi-perspectival take, Rashomon-style, on the life of Edgar Watson, portraying him variously as a misunderstood hero and as a bloodthirsty rogue. Book One tells of the circumstances of Watson’s murder–which is implicit in the book’s first few pages–from the perspective of his neighbors living on the southwestern edge of the Florida Everglades. The second book is from the perspective of his son Lucius, who tries to write an “objective” history of his father’s life, all the while dealing with the complications of his legacy. The third and final book is from the perspective of Watson himself, from earliest childhood until the time of his death. Though the book cranks in at over 900 pages, there are no lulls, no time at which I was tempted to set the book aside for a while. The three books make an unassailable whole of an astonishingly consistant quality. I left the book feeling like I knew the land and the people on it, the times and their moral deficiencies, and the flawed nation that was, which grew into the flawed nation that is, the United States.
This book is up there with the greats. It deserves every award they can heap upon it.
Between illness, an emergency trip to Nashville, and a tenure case, I’ve gotten completely backed up on work. I’ll hopefully have my head above water soon.
Meanwhile, Texans, vote early…vote Obama.
Paris Hilton saw McCain’s attack ad where he uses her image and calls Obama a celebrity so she decided to make a video of her own. See you at the debate, bitches.
read more | digg story
Saw this at The Huffington Post and had to post it myself.
This is very cool. Play this, then play it again, and again as many times as you want, and the same sequence of notes will sound to you as if it is a scale with an ever ascending pitch. I have yet to read a very good explanation of this effect, but my guess is that there are multiple harmonics in each tone, and which one your ear attends to depends on context. Regardless,it’s neat.
A cognitive scientist wants to employ M.C. Escher’s bag of optical tricks to get your eyes to solve logic problems.
More specifically, Mark Changizi, a former Caltech fellow and current cognitive science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that human beings can use their brain’s visual-processing abilities to solve LSAT-style logic puzzles, simply by staring at images designed to get their eyes to compute. Because this form of visual processing feels so effortless, such problems might be much easier to solve than their written counterparts.
Read the rest at Wired.
It might be true that we learn something new everyday, but most of those things are boring and trivial. Not so for me today. Lanie and I finally have a contract on our house, and today was the day for inspections. Turns out that we had to get the cats out of the house for this process because they were bringing termite sniffing dogs into the house! I knew about dogs and drugs, but dogs and bugs—no idea. Turns out those little wood eating bastards produce a terrific amount of methane. (Apparently the methane is produced by micro-organisms in their digestive tracts, but whose counting?) The dogs can detect this scent through concrete, drywalls, and floorboards with 97% accuracy. I’m pretty impressed. I’m also a little worried. We rid ourselves of termites several years ago, but our Terminex contract just expired…
Turns out dogs can smell landmines and truffles as well. Check it out.
The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry, has got to be on a very short list for the best novels published this year. I will be shocked if it doesn’t receive several awards, and justice will have failed if it doesn’t bring its author a very large new audience. There are some books that favor a particular taste, but the appeal of some books is—or should be—universal. This is one of the latter.
Barry’s book follows two diaries: one written by a very old woman in an Irish mental institution and the other written by the institution’s chief psychiatrist. Their motives for writing dovetail: the patient, Roseanne, wishes to document her life before she passes on, and Dr. Grene wishes to discover why, exactly, Roseanne—who seems astonishingly sane and even uplifting—had been in an institution for most of her life. As Dr. Grene pursues his mystery, therefore, it is slowly revealed by his patient’s diary. This is an intriguing enough literary gambit, but as the doctor’s investigations develop, the reader is confronted with various conflicting accounts which make him an active decoder of the mystery. This is a delicate balancing act, but let’s set the stakes even higher. Roseanne’s story shows a particular corner of Ireland during its difficult twentieth century, shedding light on how internal factions had devastating and unpredictable repercussions within the private lives of the citizens. What’s more, Dr. Grene has his own travails with a wife who is herself mentally ill, and he winds up turning more and more to the inspiring Roseanne during his dark hours. And, there’s a satisfying twist to the story that I won’t spoil.
Needless to say, it is very difficult to pull this much off, especially in a relatively short book. Barry does it expertly, and with language that rewards rereading. Roseanne’s Irishisms are not overdone, instead they flower on the page, and the doctor’s more distanced poetry is no less compelling.
This book has everything. It’s a simple as that.