Back to Blood: A Novel by Tom Wolfe.
Due on October 23, 2012.
I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought.
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George Orwell, Pleasure Spots. Recent updates to this process: first, television; next, texting. Anything to avoid communicating with one’s family or — perish the thought — thinking. |
Plans for tonight (by Jose C Silva).
When one gives up (gets rid of…) most television, one has a lot of time for quality music, improving books, writing… all with time to really appreciate tea.
This brings me to the core of what I dislike about Wolfram’s book. It is going to set the field back by years. On the one hand, scientists in other fields are going to think we’re all crackpots like him. On the other hand, we’re going to be deluged, again, with people who fall for this kind of nonsense.
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| — | Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science was entertaining, but I never took it seriously. Cosma Shalizi has a different opinion… |
Another book under consideration. I think there’s a theme to my browsing, probably related to some visceral factor or another…
Ah, this is the american title of Everything is connected: Music Quickens Time - Daniel Barenboim. Also not an essential purchase, but happily I can get it from the San Francisco Public Library. So there!
Tonight’s plan: again an improving book (albeit a different one), tea, some quality musical theatre as soundtrack, and some writing of my own.
you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read
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| — | Kurt Vonnegut writes the head a school board who decided to have Slaughterhouse Five burned (in 1973): Letters of Note: I am very real. A tip of the writer’s fedora to Ted Gioia on Twitter. |
