February 20, 2006
Current Playlist
This one is fairly downbeat, but then it hasn't been the greatest month. I had some less gloomy/serious songs on the list, but they seemed really out of place with the rest. (I know that has never stopped me before, but...) They might show up next month. Anyway, here's this month's list. Enjoy:
| R.E.M. - Hope >> 'Hope' is a beautiful song based loosely (or not-so-loosely) on Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne'. Layers of odd electronic noises mix into a relentless, hypnotizing haze. But in the end, it's the lyrics that really make this song. |
| R.E.M. - Monty Got A Raw Deal >> This one's an old favorite from Automatic for the People. Supposedly about Montgomery Clift, which is wonderfully early-nineties in a Douglas Coupland kind of way. |
| Sufjan Stevens - Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother! >> I'm still not sure I really understand all the praise heaped upon Illinoise, but this is one of the tracks that I really dig. The instrumentation, in particular, is just perfect. Gives a great rural-Illinois-in-the-summer vibe. |
| Youth Group - Piece of Wood >> |
| Lloyd Cole - Late Night, Early Town >> Some nice lyrical moments in this one. |
| Calla - This Better Go As Planned >> |
| ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Counting Off the Days >> |
| Cat Power - Good Woman >> |
| Doves - Darker >> |
| Peter Gabriel - Sky Blue >> This is an excellent track from one of Peter Gabriel's best albums, Up. Gabriel did the score for a beautiful little film about the stolen generation called Rabbit-Proof Fence. This song is drawn from that score. (Yes, those are the inimitable Blind Boys of Alabama you hear singing the refrain at the end.) |
| Bob Dylan - Dirge >> I wish I had discovered this song seven or eight months ago as I think I would've really connected with it then. Yet another lyrical gem from Dylan. |
| Radiohead - Gagging Order >> A stripped-down song of beautiful melancholy as only Thom Yorke can sing it. |
| Dirty On Purpose - Mind Blindness >> I had played this song a number of times, but yesterday it suddenly hit me with its well-crafted, moody atmosphere. Listen for all the little details. |
20 Feb 23:56 | Link | Category: Music
February 5, 2006
10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments
A poll of physicists resulted in this list of the ten most beautiful physics experiments. I'm partial to Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference, Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus, and Galileo's experiment on falling objects.
05 Feb 14:19 | Link | Category: Science
February 2, 2006
Women's Heart Week
I was completely shocked this evening when I found out my grandmother was being rushed to the hospital. It turns out she had a heart attack about five days ago and didn't even know it. I'll spare the long story, but as things stand right now, she will still require open-heart surgery (if she chooses to endure such an invasive, risky procedure at nearly 80 years old).
Of all the people I know, she is among the last I would expect to have heart problems, even considering her age. She has always been thin, active, and careful about what she eats. She seems more spry than people 20 and 30 years younger than she. Doctors have repeatedly told her that her heart was in great shape and she'd live to 100. As far as I know, her side of the family has no history of heart disease. The news was a terrible shock. I'm still in that strange mental state of shock one enters upon hearing bad news about loved ones.
These days, I almost always avoid posting this kind of stuff here. But the message tonight is that heart disease is the number one killer of women just like it is for men. (In fact, it's Women's Heart Week this week.) Women often have different symptoms (not the classic ones you think of) and, at least historically, tend to be under-diagnosed and under-treated. (I'm not sure if this has changed in recent years.) My grandmother had EKGs done within the last year, but not a stress test. Her doctor strongly encouraged her to have one even though she displayed no obvious symptoms, but she refused (as I'm sure many older people do). So I guess the message for tonight is for everyone to have tests done even if you're sure you're fine. My dad has lots of risk factors but he's such a stubborn ox he'll never see a doctor. I keep telling him we're going to have to stage an intervention to get him to go have a checkup, and I'm only half joking.
Take care of yourselves, people. (I'm restarting my aerobic exercise routine immediately, despite the fact that it always makes me even scrawnier than usual.)
02 Feb 1:12 | Link | Category: Site/Life News
More First Lines
A few people have commented on the 100 First Best Lines from Novels link I posted in Quick Links the other day.
Last year (or was it two years ago?), I was on a J.M. Coetzee kick. One of his novels (Elizabeth Costello) centers around a fictional novelist. Its opening line offers this take on opening lines:
There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank.
Below are a few more 'first lines' pages (two in quiz format):
- Novel Quiz: Famous First Lines
- Famous First Lines of Novels and Poems
- First Lines: A Sort of Literacy Test
- First Lines from Famous Books
02 Feb 0:58 | Link | Category: Art & Entertainment, Interactive, Misc. Tidbits
February 1, 2006
Who IS reading in America?
(I promise this will be the last post about literacy.)
We've already established that a good chunk of college graduates are "illiterate." Is this yet another sign that Americans are reading less and less?
I don't know that I have much insight. I can say from my time working in a public library that the fluffy stuff is what gets checked out... but it's probably always been that way. (This reminds me of the time a young man was checking out a John Steinbeck novel. I was having a brief conversation with him about it, when another clerk walked by and seemed flabbergasted that the guy was reading it for fun. He smiled and said, "Well, Dan Brown's not for everyone, I guess." Damn, I felt like hugging that guy, since I had checked out about fifty thousand copies of The Da Vinci Code in the previous hour.)
What does it mean when high-achieving college students are reading less proficiently than their counterparts a generation ago? Are we slowly becoming a nation of non-readers?
This isn't the first time I've seen a red flag raised. Ten years ago Lewis Lapham heralded the death of literature in a published letter to his nephew (himself an aspiring writer) in Harper's magazine. I wondered then, as I do now: Could this be true?
Schurmann points out that he's "always found literacy and literature outside the mainstream and in the private corners and cracks of society. Below Manhattan, in the city's subway system you can find more readers of classical and contemporary literature than you can in all the city's libraries." He concludes that "it's society's outcasts who will continue to treasure and reproduce literature."
I have no answers for the Department of Education. I'm not sure if a "proficient reading level" is even that important for students in higher education. To Mr. Lapham, however, I would say that literature seems to come from the dysfunctional edges of culture and society.
(When he writes about Hemingway and Wilde and Flannery O'Connor, it reminds me of a fantastic Nick Cave song, There She Goes, My Beautiful World.)
It's an interesting take, and I think he makes an excellent point. Of the people I consider amazingly well-read and broad-minded, I would guess off the top of my head that the majority either never went to college or dropped out. (I also know a fair number of grad students who are just amazingly clueless. [Remind me to share my story about the linguistics grad students sometime.]) I think this says something about intelligence, conformity, the educational system, society's fringes and subcultures, art & artists (literary and otherwise), and many other things. I need to toddle off to bed, so I can't get into it... but it's food for thought. Mmmmm... tasty.
01 Feb 0:02 | Link | Category: Libraries & Digital Information, Opinion & Thoughts