Haven't made a blog entry from my basement office in a long time but here I am. The damaged netbook screen took a turn for the worse. I'll take it into a computer shop tomorrow.
The timing was ironic. In my head, I'd composed a Book v. Kindle blog entry. It went like this.
Forget for a moment the romantic Luddite's love affair with the book. All a book is is a delivery system. It delivers language. So does a Kindle. I maintain that from this perspective, the Kindle is far superior to the book as a language delivery system. With the Kindle, you have control of look, size, placement of text. It is easier to hold, lighter than a book. It is easier to read. Indeed there is only one area I can think of where the book is superior to the Kindle: longevity. Its battery doesn't run out. It doesn't have electronic issues.
Ah, the gods! What comics. Shortly after composing this in my head, but before I wrote it down, my Kindle screen went blank. Menus worked but no book text. I couldn't believe it. Well, to make a long story short, snooping around on the net gave me some things to try and one of them, what is called a soft reboot, worked, and it's been fine ever since. I also learned how to take off the back cover and do a hard reboot if I ever have to.
But for a moment there I was thinking, hmm, maybe the typewriter and book weren't so bad after all.
Saw the opera Don Carlo on Saturday morning, all four and a half hours of it. Extraordinary music! And watching, I understood something more clearly. Here the lyrics serve to define relationships and conflict, quickly, directly, and all nuance and subtext of the drama is in the music. This is why reading libretti feels like reading doggerel. It is doggerel, taken alone. But it has a different function than dialog in drama, which must do everything. In opera, lyrics define the context of the music but it's the music that matters most.
Without music, this opera would be a terrible soap opera. With music, it is engaging and moving.
Going with H to the Christmas music service at the Unitarian church. Then across the river to Vancouver for a quick visit with her grandson, on an excursion of some kind, and I'll like escape to a Starbucks with my Kindle and read for a few hours while they go bowling or something. They like time alone. Well, so do I for that matter.
Missed the Army-Navy game but taped it and see Navy won handily. I'll watch the ending later. I like to see the good sportsmanship because it has become rare in college football apart from academy games.
Our basement survived the rain, so far at least, knock on my wooden head.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment