Time: 8:00 a.m. Sunday, right after my morning gym visit, having some coffee, with a coffee shot and a coffee chaser.
Place: At my main computer at home.
Reading: Since my last visit to the Salon, which admittedly was a while ago, I have completed A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, Umberto Eco’s The Book of Legendary Lands (which I also wrote about), and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, all of which were outstanding. Current reading includes Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto and Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby.
Viewing: My movie viewing was severely interrupted a few weeks ago when Dish Network, my now-former cable provider, dropped Turner Classic Movies along with several other Turner-related networks, including CNN. TCM is my one essential channel, and I gave Dish a couple of weeks to see if anything got resolved. Nothing happened, and therefore I am now a Charter subscriber – both for cable viewing and for internet. So yesterday’s viewing included TCM’s airing of Them!, which fit right in with all of those other (often very good) late 1940s and 1950s films about paranoia and the end of the world and Communism and the atomic bomb. Also viewed recently was Shohei Imamura’s dark, clinical, and remarkable Vengeance Is Mine, and, finally, The Big Lebowski (can’t believe it took me so long to see it).
Listening: Along with a sudden inexplicable interest in revisiting old Genesis songs that I haven’t heard for years (“Mad Man Moon” from A Trick of the Tail and “You Might Recall,” an outtake from Abacab, are current favorites), I can’t point to much I’ve listened to in the last week or two. However, a live performance in Berkeley last weekend of Benjamin Britten’s church parable Curlew River, with Ian Bostridge, is something I hope to write about in the next few days. Watch this blog.
Blogging: I haven’t been very active recently, aside from posting a couple of bits of poetry by T.S. Eliot and Xu Lizhi. But I have a couple of pieces in the works along with the Curlew River notes mentioned above.
Pondering: How I am going to spend my Thanksgiving holiday of five days. Aside from Thanksgiving dinner with the family, nothing is scheduled. It could be a time of writing, or reading, or movie viewing, or traveling, or staring at the wall. Possibly a little of each…
Anticipating: Among my recent technology changes is the addition of the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall to my media empire. Even watching several trailers of archived performances last night was pretty exciting, and I will probably watch my first concert today. The treasures they have stored away are many.
Gratuitous Photo of the Week: Alexander Graham Bell and his grandson Melville wandering in Beinn Bhreagh, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1908. I saw this photo in the most recent National Geographic, loved it, and wanted to share.
Thirty-Two Minutes 