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Saturday, July 28, 2007

When Great Art Meets Great Evil

When Great Art Meets Great Evil
Dr. Samuel Hsu and Marshall Taylor have done a series of concerts in this area under the title of Entartete Musik or Degenerate Music playing music written by composers who by some who lived and were displaced by the Third Reich. This article examines the other side of the coin using fiction as the vehicle. This is an issue that has been explored numerous times, any of Michael Kater's books, but the article at least provides an interesting read.


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HEELPRESS.COM

It's not difficult to do but I have a poem published on the front page of HeelPress.com.
Take a look
(the title is post-it note)

Friday, July 27, 2007

Monday, July 23, 2007

Pay attention

Misc

1) Walt Crawford's new Cites & Insights is available here.
Frankly you should already be subscribed to it but if not, check it out.

2) If you use ScribeFire and got the latest update, have you noticed that there is no longer a way to exit? There used to be an "x" in the upper right hand corner and now it's gone. Not sure what happened there.

3) I've shared some articles in the share box in the lower right hand corner of this blog which are worth checking out.

4) After the last week being at Pitt, which was awesome, I'm having a hard time getting back into the flow of things. But Pitt was uber cool especially since I got to do a lot of non-required reading.
I would recommend
Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (yes like the Beatles' song)
Bluebeard Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater Kurt Vonnegut
Player Piano Kurt Vonnegut
The Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, So The Wind Won't Blow it All Away Richard Brautigan (I really like Brautigan's writing and this is frankly the best of his work that I've read so far.)

5) Check out heelpress
It seems to be a sort of self-published peer review deal. I'm going to try it and see what happens Will let you know how it goes. so it goes.

6) Really fantastically good used/rare bookstores in Pitt:
CALIBAN BOOK SHOP
TOWNSEND BOOKSELLERS

Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War

Sunday, July 15, 2007

film

I'm staying with a roomate from college this week while at pitt and his roomate is a director of some really fantastic short films. His name is Lucas McNelly and his most current project is gravida. Check out his website here.Buy a DVD; they are awesome!!


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Thursday, July 12, 2007

it's up and it's amateurish

Well my website is up and you can see it here.
It needs some work but it's progressing.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

keep it coming

another Peeling the Onion review definitely tempers the John Irving review and the John Irving defense.



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Reading habits

This article from the NYTimes dealing with the Harry Potter books and reading is interesting because of the varied displayed approaches to reading and more importantly what is expected from the experience of reading. Growing up time for reading was never optional. If there was time it was spent reading. I'm now 24 and I still think that is true much to my wife's amusement and occasional chagrin. (I do believe this is due to my mother's influence, mainly because she read to me while I was still in the womb, at bedtime and lunchtimes before going to school and we still share book titles and thoughts on books.) The real point of this post is that the goal of reading is pure enjoyment; reading isn't meant to be easy. Yes, there are some lovely books that are meant to be enjoyed. I enjoy Harry Potter. Really. I also enjoy Joyce though I believe that enjoyment results from a much higher and more intense intellectual stimulation but I have to work hard to ejoy Joyce. Extra reading outside of the source material is required in order to gain the proper perspective to truly appreciate and ultimately enjoy the work. (This is also true in modern music; education about the piece and its composition is the key to understanding and possibly appreciation. At the very least understanding will garner a level of respect and a correct criticism based on the work's merits rather than just personal opinion) Gunter Grass is another writer that requires research from the reader to accurately and clearly read, appreciate, ponder, mull, discuss, debate and critique if only in one's head, the work at hand. Grass has the Germanic history at his fingertips and uses it fantastically and unless I do the extra work to understand his allusions, puns and meanings I miss the point of the work. The struggle, as it were, the fight through the book becomes the reward because knowledge is reaped. (Corny but true)

I liked it fine so I decided to change it

If anyone questions the worthiness of the Internet I offer this example as the redeeming point of of the web. It's only 17 minutes long so please take time to listen.
Click here to hear Donald Antrim read Donald Barthelme's "I Bought a Little City"


1) It's a Barthelme short story; what else do you need?
2) Donald Antrim reads this fantastically!
3) The discussion at the end is humurous, especially regarding Antrim's replies to the interviewer's thoughts and questions on the story.



(For my fellow MLIS students it provides a lovely surreal backdrop to wrestling with Kompozer)


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and the winner is

I posted an article recently from the NY Times on all those hip librarians out there.
Well check this out here. I wasn't paying particular attention to the author and surprise, surprise I'm subscribed to her website feed. (If I was really hip I would have caught this sooner)

Also check out other feedback in the share box directly to the right of this post for some other feedback, by a musicologist no less.

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

graze away

I don't know why this took me so long but graze to your heart's content. The widget will give you the same information. For whatever reason the code when generating the widget for the opml was screwing up Blogger with an inability to parse the xml. After multiple attempts to adjust decided it was easier just to update the link. hurray.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

A Hipper Crowd of Shushers


A Hipper Crowd of Shushers

The fact that this is in the fashion section is a little silly but here's to us! (well those of you who are already librarians and I include myself because I am looking for a librarian job, I'm enrolled in a MLIS program and I'm hip and with it or something like that.)



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Review of Peeling the Ontion by Gunter Grass

Gunter Grass is by far one of my favorite authors. His ability to create memorable chracters utilize incredible language to set unsurpassable scenes is unmatched. He spins Germanic history directly into his stories and the fall of the Berlin Wall with onions in hand waltzes through his works as a leitmotif. I haven't read Peeling the Onion just yet but it's on my list. This review by John Iriving published in the Ny Times is fantastic.


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Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Death of an indie publisher

The struggle for independents


The bankruptcy
of a book distributor sent shock waves through the indie publishing
world, leaving small presses like McSweeney's struggling to survive.
Can the Internet help keep them afloat?



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Sunday, July 1, 2007

Celebrating the Bridge

Bridges can play music to!  Joseph Bertolozzi is using the Mid Hudson bridge near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., as an instrument and is composing a suite for it. Check it out.


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