Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Trying not to look at the news... ah, watched Interstellar. Only three years late. I be only a little musician so wouldn't really know but there might have been a few flaws in the physics there but it doesn't matter, it was a lovely story. Might watch it again tonight, to avoid watching the news. I have this sense of dread impending..

Also reading 'The Book of Phoenix' by Nnedi Okorafor. Quite good although it felt like it could have done with some more proof reading and sub-editing. Trying to think who it was that recommended me the author either here or in FB -if it was here, many thanks; it is a good story with just that proviso.

I think I'm lucky in many ways. I arrived late to what I found out I really liked in life and yet I was able to do it, do it more or less well, do a degree on something like playing the guitar (doesn't it sound kind of crazy, to be able to do that?) but it comes with snags and perils.

I'm self-employed. If those lessons don't happen I don't have money coming in. I work in two schools where, very belatedly, they changed my status and I'm no longer freelance but it still is the case that if there are no lessons I get no money. Still also true no paid holidays, sick days, etc. Of course I knew all along that this came with the territory doing work of this kind. If I had arrived a couple of years before I did in the '80s I probably could have got a proper peripatetic guitar teaching job with a local education authority and be assigned to several schools, I would have been paid by the taxpayer so several issues wouldn't arise: these days I get paid what the parents pay (instead of out of general taxation), so if they can't afford guitar lessons the kid cannot have lessons and that's that. Thank Mrs Thatcher for that , as for so many things.

It is a precarious way of making a living ('you call it a living..?') and more for a guitarist than for other instrument players -back upon the time it was vaguely possible to make a living playing little concerts, restaurants and private functions so one didn't depend so much on lessons.. those times are gone. There is hardly any live music in places like restaurants and when there is it is never a guitarist. When (rarely these days) I have been offered this kind of work they've offered me pretty much the same money I used to get paid for that sort of thing in the '90s so.. no, thanks.

I'll never be able to retire but I'm kind of ok with that as long as I'm in good health and doesn't go la-la. Given the inevitability of human decay and the second law of thermodynamics, we'll have to see what comes.

All the schools I have taught at have their particular little annoyances, but that might be for another post (even though it was one of them that made me start this entry...)

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I came to this book somewhat belatedly after it was recommended to me by a friend. It was a very interesting book even though I didn't always feel I could agree on what the authors were saying, or rather their conclusions, but what it posits is interesting, it does seem to provide useful tools for analysis of things that are not, prima facie, of an economic nature. It is also very entertaining and overall quite well written. Well worth a read if perhaps much more lightweight than you expect at first. There is also a danger, in these Trumpbrexited times, of dismissing experts almost out of hand. This is something that the manufacturers of 'alternative facts' would love you to do.



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A take at home of Flavio playing an excerpt of M Ponce's 'Tema Variado y Final'

@GreekAnalyst on Twitter:
Brexit 52-48: "Clear, decisive victory."
Trump 46-48: "The people have spoken."
Macron 66-34: "OMG France is so divided."

My friend Jeff Conway ( @pushingnormal on twitter) has been putting out anagrams of May's mantra, 'Strong and Stable'. Some do seem to hint at the policies therein:


"Bad Strangle Tons
Stern Sandbag Lot
Bastard's Long Net
Lords Be Stagnant
Bad Glasnost Rent
Altar Bent's Dongs
Satan's Blog Trend
..and er...
Strong Anal Debts"

"Strangled on Stab
A Strangest Blond
Bad Tart Longness"

and, today:

"'Strong And Stable' Anagrams for Thursday:
Slanted Brat Song
Bland Groans Test
SS Blond Anger Tat"

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Another apocalyptic story told in two different time frames? This one works, though, at least for me. I could relate to these post-apocalyptic musicians wandering from town to town.

Things I didn't like: at first the strands of the story, told in two different time frames, feel like one is given the story as a shuffled deck of cards that one has to put in order. This is a device that looked clever and innovative when Cortázar was using it in the '60s but today perhaps not so much.

Things I liked: There was a lot that I did like. The characters and the situation felt 'real'. It makes you think, inevitably, on the ways our civilisation is fragile -a pandemic as described in the book is perhaps not very likely (or is it), but so many things could.

I enjoyed this book which a friend described as 'a most Canadian apocalypse story'. Will be seeking other work by the author.



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This Ars Technica story could be more, long lasting bad news, as it is part of a deliberate policy by the current US administration -they seem to have decreed that climate change does not exist. Echoes of King Canute...


https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/05/epa-purges-climate-change-information-as-part-of-website-updates/

Perhaps a bit gloomy, that previous post.

OTOH, I've been reading Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels in our Nature', where he posits that, contrary to our perception of these things, violence and war have been steadily decreasing along the last thousand years of history. He does support this with lots of stats and sources. So at least there is that. Progress may not be inevitable but it does nonetheless happen.