However, this year (and with a publishing angle) I did like the Penguin Now! story: to enhance the energy and excitement of reading for younger people used to smartphones and Netflix, certain Penguin Classics would be re-punctuated with exclamation marks instead of full stops, reminding the reader "of the urgency of the story at the end of every sentence".
Some examples:
The Stranger, Albert Camus "Mother died today! Or yesterday, I don't know!"
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky "Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart! The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth!"
with the extra news -
"The Penguin Now! list is also set to be supplemented by a range of corresponding audiobooks, read by Brian Blessed."
]]>Very occasionally a book and some music gets irrevocably linked in my mind, the main example for me being The Lord of the Rings and The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed, an orchestro-rock album about the progress of a working day (ending in "Nights in White Satin"). They have little in common except that when I first read LOTR in 1973 I was listening to that album pretty much on repeat, I suppose (well, turning the tape over on my Sony TC 66 Cassette-Corder), so whenever I hear the music I think of LOTR.
The same connection doesn't occur when I happen to hear Bo Hanssen's Music Inspired by The Lord of the Rings.
]]>Probably "not listening"... I like having music on while writing but it does have to be non-intrusive, so not a lot of singing-based stuff and I am indeed not actually listening to it, but it is providing a moderately tuneful white noise. Rather late to the party I recently discovered post-rock, people like 65daysofstatic, Mogwai, Sleepmakeswaves, Wecollectskies. I know next to nothing about the bands and some of it can be quite noisy, but it, along with the likes of Philip Glass, I find works pretty well and it blocks out other random noises.
]]>Here's a worked out example (with maps and photos) by someone called Keith Ledgerwood of how that might have worked, with a specific flight in mind: Singapore Airlines SIA68 from Singapore to Barcelona, which he figures MH370 could have shadowed for a long while and then departed from later.
"It became apparent as I inspected SIA68’s flight path history that MH370 had maneuvered itself directly behind SIA68 at approximately 18:00UTC and over the next 15 minutes had been following SIA68. [...] "It is my belief that MH370 likely flew in the shadow of SIA68 through India and Afghanistan airspace. As MH370 was flying “dark” without transponder / ADS-B output, SIA68 would have had no knowledge that MH370 was anywhere around and as it entered Indian airspace, it would have shown up as one single blip on the radar with only the transponder information of SIA68 lighting up ATC and military radar screens."
]]>Aaa bb dd eeeee h iii j lll n o rr ss t v ww z -().
]]>My grandfather survived WW1 (apart from anything else, he was a Quaker and a conscientious objector and spent some time in Wormwood Scrubs); he would have been 31 in 1918. Obviously he had kids, as he wouldn't be my grandfather.
But he had four sisters, none of whom married or had children, I assume mainly due to a dearth of men in their age bracket.
]]>You're at cross purposes with strummist and the BBC; you're talking about the exclusively WWI Thankfuls, they're talking about the Doubly-Thankfuls who lost no-one in WW2 either.
The current Wiki figures are 53 Thankful parishes (all from England and Wales) and 13 Doubly-Thankful. An oddly disproportionate nine thankful and two doubly thankful are from Somerset, where I live. A couple of them a just a few miles (five and seven) from me; one is Shapwick, which has a long settlement history - it's sited where one end of the 39thC BC Sweet Track was.
]]>"From Charles Stross, Neptune's Brood. It's 7000 AD, and Krina Alizond-114 has this to say about a not-very-helpful piece of interactive software:
"'[T]hese things bore only a thin veneer of intelligence: Once you crack the ice and tumble into the howling void of thoughtlessness beneath, the illusion ceases to be comforting and becomes a major source of irritation.'
"The Siri vs. Siri conversations on YouTube illustrate this idea nicely, e.g.[.....]"
One commenter says:
"'The howling void of thoughtlessness beneath' – As this is Language Log and not AI log, I just thought I'd voice my admiration of the iambic pentameter."
]]>I find it is possible to come adrift by a decade - every now and then I assume 1988 is 15 years ago until I think about it.
]]>I've heard of it! And I still have some issues sitting around somewhere, too. Alastair Reynolds' "The Great Wall of Mars" was in one issue, for instance.
]]>I first read Iain Banks not long after The Wasp Factory came out. Oddly, as I mentioned elsewhere, I felt at the time it reminded me of my own youth and that I could have written something like it, something that seems utterly bizarre when I went to Wikipedia to remind myself of actual plot elements, which is nothing like my teenage years.
I have several ancient Interzones in my filing cabinet going back to no.1 and including no.20, which has Iain M. Banks's first sf short story (he didn't do many) and including a review of his first sf novel. He's been a major part of furnishing my mental universe-scape ever since.
I also remember being impressed by his quiz-run in late 2005/early 2006, where he not only won Celebrity Mastermind (special subject, whisky distilleries) but went on a few days later to lead a team of writers to win a celebrity University Challenge competition against some experienced BBC journos (Kate Adie, Michael Buerk, Nick Robinson and Bridget Kendall). He took his victories with affable graciousness, as I recall.
]]>This was brought home to me when I passed through York and Manchester in 2004, revisiting old haunts.
I was at school in York, and looking down Bootham (which is the street as well as the name of the school) towards town you see some Georgian domestic buildings that have been there 250 years, with St Mary's Tower (built 1324) on one side, and the vista ends with Bootham Bar (the arch of which is a smidge over 1,000 years old, though most is 14thC) overlooked by York Minster (built 1220-1472). So the view has looked broadly the same for hundreds of years and almost certainly will for another 150 and quite possibly 500 years. (Except that York is already prone to serious flooding, come to think of it).
I went on to Manchester, where I'd been a student in the late 1970s and lived in a prefab concrete deck access block of council flats built only a few years before. To build them streets of low-rise Victorian terraces had been demolished (leaving only the odd corner pub standing). They were declared unfit for families pretty sharpish, which is why students were moving in, and they were knocked down in their turn sometime in the late 1990s, to be replaced by a massive ASDA and some low rise houses. So within 30 years that whole urban landscape had been transformed twice over.
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