(October 27, 2009)
Time for another seasonal upgrade! Fall is here, and the trees are already showing quite a bit of color. Our dog likes this season, too, since he usually manages to find food under the fallen leaves, when we take him out for a walk.
I don't usually comment on topical issues (this is not a blog, after all), but there was an amusing development the other day. When I learned about this petition, I told myself, "well, that would be a nice list of people to boycott in the future." Then I actually looked at the list and realized that I have already been boycotting them for years. I haven't seen a Woody Allen film since 1989, nor a Martin Scorsese since 1985; and, I can now say with pride, I have never seen anything by Pedro Almodovar.
I have actually been asked if I am not reading manga anymore. Actually, I do not read them as often as I used to, but I still follow two series: Adachi's Cross Game and Yuuki Masami's Birdy the Mighty. Two other series I collected, Naoki Urasawa's Pluto and Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha, finished recently, and, unfortunately, I am not very interested in Takahashi's new series, Kyoukai no Rinne, which appears to be just more of the same...
I also haven't gotten any new music for a while; I'm just trying to become better acquainted with the stuff I have, especially Bach's violin sonatas and partitas. It is amazing (and I know I am not the first one to say this) how Bach manages to get something like polyphony out of an instrument that cannot play more than two notes simultaneously. (Along these lines, it is also very interesting to compare the violin partita no. 3 in E major with Bach's own transcription for lute, BWV 1006a.)
I just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Making Money (which was pretty much everything I could have expected from another trip to Ankh-Morpork--in other words, very enjoyable), and I have started on Jan Swafford's massive biography of Brahms, which is actually very interesting.
Update: "Julio's little book of God" is offline for the moment. I'm sorry...
As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.
It has just the quality of the madman's argument;
we have at once the sense of it covering everything
and the sense of it leaving everything out.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ch. 2)