Entry #196
- Listening to:
- Elgar, Falstaff - symphonic study. I haven't read
or seen any of the Shakespeare plays in which Falstaff features,
but I do get this sense that he's supposed to be an archetypal
character that everyone in the Western world knows all about,
even if only at some sort of subliminal level.
- Still reading:
- Jack Kerouac, On the road. This has been rather
slow going, in part because the only character with any depth
seems to be the narrator (and his depth is only being revealed
quite slowly). The other characters just act in an apparently
motive-less way, and we get no real insight into what might be
making them tick.
- Now nibbling:
- A white-fleshed nectarine. Very nice, juicy and tasty. I just
wish the flesh didn't have its pale colour. I yearn for the
golden ripeness of colour that you get with a peach, or with the
more typical nectarines. I don't expect my apples to be golden,
so it must just be conditioning that has left me in this strange
psychological state.
I went into
Cambridge's new
Borders bookshop yesterday. Incidentally, Borders
international
"store locator" page has little outline maps of three of the
countries where they have overseas shops. (I'd never recognise
Singapore from its outline.) The fourth country where they have a
non-US shop is New Zealand, but there's no outline map! It must be a
conspiracy.
Anyway, they have this neat system for their CDs (I'm still far too
far behind with my reading list to even contemplate buying
books in a book-shop, so I focus on the music). There are
listening posts dotted around, and underneath the peg where the
headphones hang, each has a little bar-code reader. You can put a CD
under this reader, and the listening post can then play you that CD.
Neat! Not all of the shop's CDs are accessible in this way, some CDs
only have some tracks available, and there is only about 2 minutes of
each track available. Surely disk-space is cheap enough these days
that they could store their entire stock completely without having to
pay too much. I wonder if the CD publishers stopped them from doing
this out of some copyright owner control-freakery.
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