The first was a Chritmas present and the second from from the library. I'm already thinking about our 'retirement' road trip in either Autumn 2013 or Spring 2014
Our current plan, but very liabale to change, is to fly to probably Seattle,or possibly southern British Columbia, and then drive the West Coast to LA, spending upto 4 weeks. But it is still 18 months to two years away so may well change. (my wife says she is retiring July next year, ie 2013)The other option I have thought about is Route 66, but that wouldn't give us the time we'd like in California. My problem is that there are so many places around the World I want to go to, but time and cash will hold that back a bit! Elderly parents and young granchildren mean that the 6 months travelling around the World trip that we thought about 10 years ago won't happen - it'll be a number of 3 or 4 week trips spread over 5 years instead.
You couldn't go wrong with West Coast trip, though if I were your travel agent, I would start you off in SF and send you north. I grew up in LA, so I know the charms of driving along the coast. In my own opinion, there is no better place to travel in the continental US than New Mexico--the mix of cultures, the landscape, the mysticism.
It's always been something I've wanted to do to drive between SF and LA since when I was studying the Geography of the USA in my final year at school. Travel Agent? That'll be me! I always book direct now via the internet. I'll certainly bear in mind though your New Mexico comments, thanks BT.
That chart is pretty spot on, except in this book most of it takes place in an alternate reality, so no dream sequences are needed. Substitute at least 10% looking at the moons.
Greg, I have a lot of history with Seattle and love it, but I would vote for starting with Vancouver, maybe the most beautiful city in North America.
@Craig: How is Retromania? I have it on my to read/amazon wistlist. The subject makes me want to go after people that overuse the term vintage, among other things.
Not a new book (1997) but good. I don't remember exactly why I sought it out--I think maybe because it has a chapter about Tim Hardin. The author's older brother was Gary Gilmore.
edit: Gary Gilmore probably was not as infamous in other countries as he was here. Gary Gilmore on Wikipedia
For some reason I've never read any Atwood, even though my wife has told me a couple times she's right up my alley. I should probably correct that at some point.
Still reading Retromania, and it is incredibly interesting. There's a whole chapter about how record collecting has changed with mp3s. Let's just say I see quite a bit of myself in what is described.
edit - just been looking at it on Amazon and Apple. I'll check our local bookshop over the weekend, but otherwise I'll order it - looks the kind of book I'd like. Thanks
Yes, Craig, thumbnail sketch of the thesis? Sounds very interesting. (Blog post?? No reason why MiG couldn't have a few posts that are reviews of/reactions to books or sections of books that are about music)
Oh, man...two college professors asking me for a book report? Guess I better.
Basically the thesis of the book is that pop culture in general and music in particular are currently obsessed with the past and there is nothing new under the sun. Artists are simply taking their often incredibly varied influences and mashing them together. This results in music stalling and becoming more about spotting those influences than advancing and growing.
Thus far he's explored nostalgia and how it has accelerated to such a ridiculous point that before the end of the last decade VH1 was already showing "I Love the New Millenium". Now I'm in the midst of the mp3 collection chapter I mentioned before, which talks about how record collecting used to be about having what no one else had. Now, however, it's about sharing what no one else has with everyone else. There's also a fascinating discussion of pure collecting, which can often result in music being added but never even listened to (sounds familiar). Record collecting has changed from the thrill of the hunt to the thrill of amassing gigabytes.
I'll discuss it more once I've finished and will consider writing a blog post.
Thanks, Craig, does sound interesting. A move from "having what no one else had" to Sharing what no one else has with everyone else" doesn't sound to me necessarily like a decline.
Thanks Craig and amclark too. I'm certainly going to try to get it. There are some more extracts on Amazon UK. They have it as a Kindle version but I'll get the paperback as I am sure my stepson will also want to read it - it is his kind of book. In fact I'll ask him if he has it before buying it! Certainly worth an article on MiG. (Thanks for the promotion Craig but unlike GP I'm not a Professor, just a, part-time now, Senior Lecturer!!)
Greg, don't read too much into the professor thing, it's not necessarily a promotion. The term is used differently in the US than in the UK. Here there are basically three ranks in higher ed (at least in the sections of it I've encountered): assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor. But all three are referred to as "professor" (the term pretty much means you teach in higher ed in American English and terms like Reader and Lecturer are not really used) and the job is referred to as being a professor regardless of rank. Also, progression up the scale is, while not inevitable, more common than in the UK: it is theoretically possible for everyone in a department to eventually be full professor, unlike the UK where the professor is typically the one exalted position at the top. I don't know how it works at every institution but at the places I know, it's pretty much criterion-based: how much research have you published in what venues, what grants did you get, what are your evaluations like, etc, so if everyone meets the criteria there is no barrier to everyone getting to the top of the scale. So it's pretty likely that if you worked here you would by this stage be a full professor as well.
Hey, can we talk Infinite Jest a bit more? I just noticed it got mentioned back on page one of this thread. I've never talked to anybody else who read the book, nor looked up anything about it on the internet. I have this bubbling away in the back of my head for awhile.
Now, it's been a very long time since I read it (I want to say around '96 or '97; I remember bringing it with me on a road trip from Denver to Tampa), so many many facts have faded for me. But regarding the end, I recall thinking two things:
1. He did, in fact, wrap it up. However, he sort've presented "The End" at the beginning of the book with the main character with the language/behavior problems and mention of certain characters going to a grave site to retrieve "The Tape" but being too late (the wheelchair gang got it first maybe? Whoever it was, I believe it was the Bad Guys)... so story over, even though the book was just beginning. When the big dude wakes up on the lakeshore at the very end, that was something he had referred to, kind've, earlier in the story when, IIRC, he referred to the beginning of his sobriety. So, in a way, the story does get wrapped up, it's just that Wallace presented the story as a circle, and with any circle, there is no beginning and there is no end, it's just important that you end up in the same spot where you began, and it did seem that's how he handled it. Bad guys win, and you knew it right from the start.
Now, that being said, I did have an alternate theory on what happened...
2. I was never much of a Wallace fiction fan, actually, though I read much of his work. He was a brilliant writer technically, but I always felt like his writing lacked soul. Obviously this is a personal connection issue; others feeling the opposite way are just as correct about their feelings as I and my criticism isn't meant to de-legitimize anyone else's connection... it's just how most of his fiction always read to me. I will always, however, likely be jealous of his technical skill with language and story, and to my mind, he should probably be taught with the masters of language in colleges and high schools. He was a brilliant writer, even if I didn't like him so much as a storyteller.
However...
I loved his non-fiction, which had tons of humanity throughout. Not just his columns for Harpers, but also his pieces On Writing. I could read him all day long as he talked about writing, both as a tool and about trends in it and pop culture. He was the first person I ever read who pointed out the trend in TV cop dramas whereby cops were becoming more and more like desk jockeys and admins. He talked about how early cop dramas had the cops out in the streets and delivering justice with their guns. Then it moved to where the TV heroes were detectives who spent more time in the interview room questioning suspects that street cops, off-screen, brought in to them. Then he drew a line up to Hill Street Blues, where top billed character Frank Furillio sits behind a desk and deals with the politics of cop life. Wallace believed if the trend held up, eventually the main character in cop dramas would be a cut-out of a police officer who was carried by subordinates from scene to scene and just stood there silently while life happened around him/her.
Another thing he talked about on tv and literature and movies was how much "reality", gritty raw violence and sarcasm and cynicism, was be used in tv dramas. Wallace felt like the next movement to come around that would break the wave of cynicism was a Movement of Naivete. People would flock to characters who just blithely went through life unaffected by events occurring around them and just focused on their own naive view of things. I can't remember if Wallace ever mentioned the character Chance from Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There," but that was the type of New Character he meant; an innocence that acted as sword and shield and carried him through life. But not just in the character depictions... also in the writing. That the authors in their omniscience would also display an innocence and naivete similar to that of the characters.
With the end of Infinite Jest, with the Big Guy waking up on the shore after a serious binge of narcotics, I always had a thought in the back of my head that maybe Wallace was riffing on the Naive/Innocence theory and basically saying that the entire story of Infinite Jest was just a narcotic dream, that none of it actually happened. It was just dreamed up by the Big Guy as he nodded off under the weight of all those drugs.
Thanks GP - I knew it is different but not the detail. Here most people do not progress beyond Senior Lecturer, and Professorship really is quite rare. In my last University we had 70 or 80 academic staff in the department and only 3 profs. In my area, teacher education, most staff actually start at the top of the SL band, as school jobs are better paid for experienced staff!
So on the idea of sharing everything with everybody being a good or bad thing, I found this essay in The Wire by James Kirby (aka The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby) to be interesting and to fit with some things I've been thinking; ie what's the point of having everything if you're not enjoying it. Fwiw; I enjoy the two caretaker albums I bought last year much more than the roughly 10 disks worth of stuff I got for free, although there's not a huge difference in the actual quality of the music.
Comments
Just started Storm of Swords, aka Game of Thrones book 3, Robert Rich ambient for musical background.
and
The first was a Chritmas present and the second from from the library. I'm already thinking about our 'retirement' road trip in either Autumn 2013 or Spring 2014
I've owned that book for 25 years and it's still one of my favorites.
Greg, I have a lot of history with Seattle and love it, but I would vote for starting with Vancouver, maybe the most beautiful city in North America.
Reading an epub edition. Pretty interesting so far.
Craig
And:
And:
I like reading lots of things at once, at least until one of them catches my attention, and becomes the main focus.
Not a new book (1997) but good. I don't remember exactly why I sought it out--I think maybe because it has a chapter about Tim Hardin. The author's older brother was Gary Gilmore.
edit: Gary Gilmore probably was not as infamous in other countries as he was here. Gary Gilmore on Wikipedia
This has really be playing on my sense of paranoia and misanthropy. When I'm done I'm going to look for something more lighthearted.
And because it's Theodore Geissel's birthday:
I know the guy who adapted this for PBS.
Still reading Retromania, and it is incredibly interesting. There's a whole chapter about how record collecting has changed with mp3s. Let's just say I see quite a bit of myself in what is described.
Craig
edit - just been looking at it on Amazon and Apple. I'll check our local bookshop over the weekend, but otherwise I'll order it - looks the kind of book I'd like. Thanks
Basically the thesis of the book is that pop culture in general and music in particular are currently obsessed with the past and there is nothing new under the sun. Artists are simply taking their often incredibly varied influences and mashing them together. This results in music stalling and becoming more about spotting those influences than advancing and growing.
Thus far he's explored nostalgia and how it has accelerated to such a ridiculous point that before the end of the last decade VH1 was already showing "I Love the New Millenium". Now I'm in the midst of the mp3 collection chapter I mentioned before, which talks about how record collecting used to be about having what no one else had. Now, however, it's about sharing what no one else has with everyone else. There's also a fascinating discussion of pure collecting, which can often result in music being added but never even listened to (sounds familiar). Record collecting has changed from the thrill of the hunt to the thrill of amassing gigabytes.
I'll discuss it more once I've finished and will consider writing a blog post.
Craig
Craig
Now, it's been a very long time since I read it (I want to say around '96 or '97; I remember bringing it with me on a road trip from Denver to Tampa), so many many facts have faded for me. But regarding the end, I recall thinking two things:
1. He did, in fact, wrap it up. However, he sort've presented "The End" at the beginning of the book with the main character with the language/behavior problems and mention of certain characters going to a grave site to retrieve "The Tape" but being too late (the wheelchair gang got it first maybe? Whoever it was, I believe it was the Bad Guys)... so story over, even though the book was just beginning. When the big dude wakes up on the lakeshore at the very end, that was something he had referred to, kind've, earlier in the story when, IIRC, he referred to the beginning of his sobriety. So, in a way, the story does get wrapped up, it's just that Wallace presented the story as a circle, and with any circle, there is no beginning and there is no end, it's just important that you end up in the same spot where you began, and it did seem that's how he handled it. Bad guys win, and you knew it right from the start.
Now, that being said, I did have an alternate theory on what happened...
2. I was never much of a Wallace fiction fan, actually, though I read much of his work. He was a brilliant writer technically, but I always felt like his writing lacked soul. Obviously this is a personal connection issue; others feeling the opposite way are just as correct about their feelings as I and my criticism isn't meant to de-legitimize anyone else's connection... it's just how most of his fiction always read to me. I will always, however, likely be jealous of his technical skill with language and story, and to my mind, he should probably be taught with the masters of language in colleges and high schools. He was a brilliant writer, even if I didn't like him so much as a storyteller.
However...
I loved his non-fiction, which had tons of humanity throughout. Not just his columns for Harpers, but also his pieces On Writing. I could read him all day long as he talked about writing, both as a tool and about trends in it and pop culture. He was the first person I ever read who pointed out the trend in TV cop dramas whereby cops were becoming more and more like desk jockeys and admins. He talked about how early cop dramas had the cops out in the streets and delivering justice with their guns. Then it moved to where the TV heroes were detectives who spent more time in the interview room questioning suspects that street cops, off-screen, brought in to them. Then he drew a line up to Hill Street Blues, where top billed character Frank Furillio sits behind a desk and deals with the politics of cop life. Wallace believed if the trend held up, eventually the main character in cop dramas would be a cut-out of a police officer who was carried by subordinates from scene to scene and just stood there silently while life happened around him/her.
Another thing he talked about on tv and literature and movies was how much "reality", gritty raw violence and sarcasm and cynicism, was be used in tv dramas. Wallace felt like the next movement to come around that would break the wave of cynicism was a Movement of Naivete. People would flock to characters who just blithely went through life unaffected by events occurring around them and just focused on their own naive view of things. I can't remember if Wallace ever mentioned the character Chance from Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There," but that was the type of New Character he meant; an innocence that acted as sword and shield and carried him through life. But not just in the character depictions... also in the writing. That the authors in their omniscience would also display an innocence and naivete similar to that of the characters.
With the end of Infinite Jest, with the Big Guy waking up on the shore after a serious binge of narcotics, I always had a thought in the back of my head that maybe Wallace was riffing on the Naive/Innocence theory and basically saying that the entire story of Infinite Jest was just a narcotic dream, that none of it actually happened. It was just dreamed up by the Big Guy as he nodded off under the weight of all those drugs.
Just my thoughts.
Influenced by Craig's recommendation, thanks. UK cover.