Music Banter - What are you reading right now?

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Gave up on glamorama. I think I hate Bret Easton Ellis.

Next book on my shelf: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I was told it was worth reading, so here goes.

Today's read: The 50th Anniversary Edition of Cage's Silence: Lectures & Writings.

Yiddish for Pirates. It's a neat idea and I'm sure lots of people love it, but I'm just not one for the "boy goes on an adventure" type stories. I can't get into it, I'm quitting it.

I'm waiting for the next in a detective series by a canadian author that's coming out mid September. Louise Penny, the Three Pines series.

I was wrong, came out aug 30, but I got it today. Reading shall commence shortly.

Reading this one
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It's a collection of essays by other authors, about Wallace and his dissertation,
followed by his philosophical dissertation itself and then some end notes by other authors.
All published after his death.
Pretty interesting stuff, but the dissertation itself is incredibly heavy reading.
At least that part of the book isn't all that long.

Bob Dylan's Chronicles Vol.1

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Influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the superior novel so far IMO. Dystopian vibe with "One State" being the "Big Brother" equivalent.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Goofle (Post 1743376)

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Influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the superior novel so far IMO. Dystopian vibe with "One State" being the "Big Brother" equivalent.

Such a classic. I have the Mirra Ginsburg translation printed by Avon in '87 but would love to get an early English edition. Sadly there is but one copy for sale of the 1924 translation by Gregory Zilboorg (produced after a copy of the manuscript had been smuggled into the US in 1921). That copy is currently listed at $17,500.00.

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Rings of Saturn

I had a lot of downtime this weekend so I brought this book with me. **** me is it one of the most beautiful and unique novels that I've ever read. I think it might have just become my all time favourite (formerly Invisible Man).

From the first sentence on it's simply amazing.

Quote:

In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless patch of sky framed in the window. Several times during the day I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with black netting, and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on my belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours, I dragged myself, despite the pain, up to the window sill. In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka's narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. And just as Gregor's dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street where he and his family had lived for years, taking CharlottenstraBe for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders. At that twilit hour there were no passers-by to be seen in the immediate vicinity, but for a nurse crossing the cheerless gardens outside the hospital entrance on the way to her night shift. An ambulance with its light flashing was negotiating a number of turns on its way from the city centre to Casualty. I could not hear its siren; at that height I was cocooned in an almost complete and, as it were, artificial silence. All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears.

Presently reading: How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry. The Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy.

The author's approach is fascinating - the chapters interweave three stories - that of the two men who developed MP3 technology for Fraunhofer, two unassuming low-level shrink wrappers and box droppers at a Polygram plant who became responsible for over 90% of the leaks at the birth of the digital revolution, and the story of Doug Morris, who ran the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011.

He reveals the inside story of how the first two men offered MP3 technology to the heads of the music industry, even suggesting that it could be used to stream music from a central commercial source for a subscription rate (and this was in 1996!), but the industry had no interest and used their financial clout to bury MP3 in favor of the inferior MP2 format backed by all their corporate contacts. (Beta, anyone?)

And we all know what happened from there.

The book is outlined brilliantly and reveals intimate conversations between the men who took down an entire industry. And it poses the question, "What happens when an entire generation commits the same crime?"

How Music Got Free is the story of three individuals whom you've likely never heard of. But it's written all over your hard drive.

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