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Podcasts Time Again

I have been listening to and searching out some podcasts and podcast directory type stuff. I like the availability of Berkley things online, the one have been liking a lot is the Foundations of American Cyberculture Art 23, which talks about how modern technology has changed the culture in which we live and how we understand ourselves and our world. The nature of identity in the world of multiple identities that is the internet. You can find Berkley's podcast output on iTunes and some of them here.
Of course there are my favourites Buzz Out Loud (Tech news, Very Entertaining with a nice listener interaction thang going on) and Gadgettes from CNET.
Buzz Out Loud and Diggnation I heard about on Valleywag newsfeed, (though I rarely read it) and am so glad for having discovered them.
I haven't listened to WHYME (Worst Music You've Ever Heard) in a long time, but i have it listed in my links of note over there.
Adam and Joe is fabulous and funny as they always are.
BBC Podcasts are many and varied, (Find the BBC podcasts here) my favourites are - Digital Planet, In Our Time, The Now Show (when it's on), Start the Week and From Our Own Correspondant. Russel Brand was funny the couple of times I listened to the "best bits" Show.
Cory Doctorow's Craphound has some great sci-fi stories along with the odd talk gives by Cory, usually about Tech/DRM/CC type stuff.
There are other sci-fi story podcasts but I have yet to get down and listen to them. Escape Pod looks good.
The UK guardian also has podcasts, I have been listening to a few, they sound fairly interesting, though I have come across nothing mind blowing yet.

There are many directories, the big ones like iTunes, Odeo and Podcast.net and also Podcast Bunker. But I find that it's not so easy to find podcasts, maybe I'm missing some vital podcast portal or summink.

Links for 2nd Jan 2007

Ok I have links (if nothing else).

Semiotics for Beginners a book by Daniel Chandler is a link that I can honestly say is of the "It can change your life" variety. Info about the stuff of semiotics with enough information to get to grips with it, lots of examples very useful. For a while there reading one of the linked articles I really felt as though the world as I see it through my eyes is not inviolate reality as we take it for. Nothing has made me feel that way before. This makes me wonder if I should get around to reading John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" anytime soon.

The Andrea Dworkin Online Library has large excerpts from various Dworkin books, speeches, articles and can show you that Dworkin is not as you may have heard some crazed man-hater. See the "Lie Detector" link for a guide to "is this true about Dworkin" thang.

OK, OK

So I haven't posted in a month or so. I am in an orgy of lethargy to be truthful. I haven't been doing much; haven't been listening to much music, haven't been - actually I have been watching far too much TV. I find that it's a good gauge of depresion/stuckness/boredom, more TV more of those listed elements in my life. When I'm all abuzz, TV doesn't usually get much of a look in. What's on that I watch regularly? - Rumpole of the Bailey, Ironside, Midsommer Murders, Frasier, The Simpsons, QI, Wycliffe, Pie In The Sky, Jeeves and Wooster, Without a Trace, Star Trek TNG, Monk, Curb Your Enthusiasm and I was watching the latest US Season of Desperate Housewives but that is on hiatus now till January.

I have been reading, still slowly plodding through War and Peace (the Russians have fought of Napoleon's advances, huzzah, but Moscow is now ablaze) and have read a couple of Penguin Classic crime books. One was a jolly romp set in a University, with all the English academicness that I love and a poetic Scotland Yard detective, though the book was mightily prolix, I larned me some new words, but have since forgotten them. The book was "Death at the Prestdent's Lodging" by Michael Innes. (Here's a review) Oh yes, it's an all male cast (pretty much) which is a little erm..., the odd woman does get a mention here and there.

I was going to post some links, but then I take a look at my web habits and see there isn't really anything of note, Well I'm sure there is but nothing leaps out at me.

I might add that I have become aware of the number of Farmers (Farmer's or Farmers' ?) Markets around the Birmingham area. There is a bi-monthly one in Birmingham City centre and Monthly ones in Harborne, King's Heath, Moseley, Bearwood (a tiny one), Sutton Coldfield and Solihull. A friend of mine is a regular at these events, I keep away as I am likely too see ducks on sale, all wrapped up in plastic and labelled. My friend tells me she saw some Mallards last Saturday at Harborne, she even bought some duck breasts.
I'm still unsure as to how I feel about that.

I will now return to my life of quiet (and fruitless) aspiration.

Peace Man. Online Books And Some Bleak House

I finished Bleak House a few days ago and have taken up with War and Peace again. This time I'm finding War and Peace (the Norton edition, longer pages) much more enjoyable, (when I say this time I mean picking up from where I left off last time, not re-reading it). I am in a better frame of mind to read it now, I'm in the mood for reading large books, I think I'm going to read another Dickens when I have finished, at the mo I am a third of the way through W+P.

I found a good place for online books at the Universtiy of Adelaide Or here is a list of books there by theme (of course there's the ol' Gutie among countless others, but I have found things here which aren't at Gutenberg e.g. War With the Newts which I read a long time ago and meant to re-read but have never found again, I think it might be out of print) The Crime and Mystery section has some stuff that I want to read, as does the Russian Lit. section all Dostoyevsky Lermontov, Turgenyev and the like.

Aaaanyway, I feel like throwing myself into 19th or early 20th C. books at the moment (I read most of the book as a physical book, and some of it online, it's nice to be able to do this.), not sure why I am shunning contemporary things, if I am shunning them; I don't think to focus on some things is necessarily to shun the other things, but I do wonder why I am more eager to read things from round about the 19th C. I think temporal distance is a kind of safety device, but there's more to my interest than just that, cos I'm not reading stuff from like 1700, I like the rules and the structures of society, I mean I like reading about them, I wouldn't want to live with them. And of course reading about the past illuminates the present, reading about past societies, their values, their unwritten rules etc. with a view to the present and how life is lived now is fascinating.

As I conjectured before I can't be arsed to really go into Bleak House though interesting it is, though I shall say a bit about it. So for those (if anyone is reading this) who couldn't care less about Bleak House stop reading here, the rest of this post is all Bleak house from hereon.)

I found the character Skimpole very intruiging and was disappointed that Jarndyce didn't "have it out" with him about his pretensions as an adult child with few wants and no concept of money and his conviction that he leads a more nobler and less base life than everyone he comes into contact with. And I do think his character is believable, unlike G K Chesterton who says
"By the end of the tale he has brought Skimpole to doing acts of mere low villainy"
(The low villany being taking a bribe that led to the feverous Jo being ejected from the comfort of Bleak House) I don't think of this as some kind of traduction, I think Skimpole has always been shown as a "low villain". The first such thing we see him do is demand money from people who barely have any to spare, and then make them feel as though he has done them a favour for allowing them to experience the joys of generosity (I mean OK they could have refused to give over the money, but when the alternative is for Esther (sp?) and co. to see their benefactor's friend go to debtor's prison (or whatever hellhole he was off to) they aren't going to say no are they?). And Mrs. Jellyby the supporter of hopeless causes having given up her Africa pursuit at the end of the book is now into Women's Rights, which Dickens seems to ridicule, having had a proponent of women's rights in the book previously shown to be a boring and if I recall correctly unattractive woman. Well we kinda know what Dickens thinks makes a good woman and devotion, humbleness, selflessness and kindness are all part of that.
Ok enough now.

Halloween Textmate

Textmate had a Halloween update that included nice new icons among other things

Then in another update a few days later all the modding got removed.
The readme says -

" >[2006-11-02: REVISION 1324]
"[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock -- ticket 945BEB5D"

Awwww. But I have a copy of Halloweenified! So's not so bad.

Beginning Borges Again

So, I am starting to read Borges again. Really inspiring and exciting. I only have the one book "Fictions", which contains the stories The Lottery in Babylon, The Library of Babel and Funes, his Memory among others.
I love that some of his stories are all about possibilities and permutations and infinity.

I love the reviews of a fictional book by a fictional author, that Borges does, which I feel is not just writing a review of a book that you couldn't be arsed to write, but is something much more intriguing than that. It's writing the bones, like writing the skeleton that allows you to build your own stories. There are so many structures that could hang on these bones that this the skeleton provided by the fictional review is more intriguing than the promise of one single story that the book would provide. I would like to see some of the books that could be written calling themselves - Insert Title of book Borges is reviewing. By writing a review the skeleton becomes more interesting than the book itself, to me at least. Especially in stories like "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain"(There's an online scanning I found, it's not the translation I have) which has a structure that allows the book "April March" to be a romance, a mystery, a Communist book, an anti-Communist book because it it contains different paths to follow each path is a different version of the story (an illustration of the story's structure, it's Like a tree root, or like those choose your own adventure type things, (well, not exactly)) There are altogether 9 stories in one book. This seems to have inspired some people on the web, for example here.

Reading all this treatment of Quain as a factual man (example and another) is making me believe in his existence as a real man, writing real books, that Borges reviewed. Which is nice, I feel as though art is creating reality.

Art creating reality is a thing that arises in the story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" text here is the most recent thing I read. (I'm taking the stories slowly, I think I will re-read this one a few times.) Mysterious discovery of a place that the narrator is never sure exists and the literature of that country. I'm going to re-read it before I talk about it. The idea in this story about a literature that is like philosophy, the point of the literature of this uncertain country seems to be to be as incredible as possible. That is just a tiny part of it. This and many other of Borges stories are as dense as poetry and as beautiful.