Sunday Music

~ 63mago

Looking over the small valley below the house I live in, I perceive that land, meadows, trees, it all looks drab, a mix of brownish yellow and fade shades of green ; the large field with winter seed shows no ambition to become green, even the wine yards look dishevelled ; above all a medium grey sky with dark grey clouds ; at least it stopped raining, and the temperatures are fairly high, I already saw the first school of mosquitoes (kind of), and I think some over optimistic tits already started to look for places to built a nest.
Yesterday I got a parcel with some books from the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Ger., Eng.). Founded in 1949 as a kind of self-help organisation for scientists it is organised as a book club (since the mid-fifties) ; I usually forget to buy something so receive at the beginning of the year some books and a bill. The WB is pretty proud on its standards, has critically looked at its own history, and is host to some interesting series of publications. So I was pretty surprised when I opened one of the books and the first thing was an inserted printed list of errata, containing not just two or three missed letters, but nearly thirty real mistakes. From the table of contents to the last page. The book is in quart-format and has 288 printed pages. Looking at the mistakes shows that they all are related to the meaning of words – of course, the machine took care of the spelling, but it is a difference between “deutsch” and “Deutsch”. So they had their spellchecker running over it and did not feel the need to have the whole text read by a human before printing ; in earlier days this was called Fahnenkorrektur or proofreading. I wonder what it would have cost them to have the proofs corrected – two or three days ? Two thousand Euro ? A publishing house that is proud of its high standards and publishes standard texts of different scientific fields easily ruins its reputation ; especially when the meaning is distorted in a text on the history of the German language.
Hmpf. Enough of this old geezer babble.
I looked for Sunday music and found strange noises by Silver Apples (Ger., Eng., article) and the Soft Machine (Ger., Eng.) (Joy of a Toy ; here together with Allan HOLDSWORTH (Ger., Eng., website), 11 interesting minutes) – and the grandfather of all sampling from Egypt, Halim EL-DABH (Eng., website) (wire recorder piece from 1944).
But in the end I opted for classical guitar : Hear and enjoy “Malagueña” by Isaac ALBÉNIZ (Ger., Eng.) performed by David RUSSELL (Ger., Eng.). Don’t let the flower pot irritate you.
I hope the tempests will come to an end now – have a good week.

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Published by 63mago

Want better dingaling ? No.

14 thoughts on “Sunday Music”

  5. My applause to this beautiful “Malagueña” (also to you for typing the “ñ”, the genuine Spanish letter, which I presume is not in you keyboard). I’d love to be like the guitarist in your video, Mago. Living in Galicia, making a living on playing golf and guitar and touring the world. Lucky man!

  6. You’re very right: Books with typos damage a publishing house’s reputation. We pay for perfectly readable books, don’t we? My knowledge about birds is very limited, so when I’ve read “some over optimistic tits …” I thought there was some kind of erotic show in the surrounding of your flat. ;)

    Nice week to you too, dear

  8. I thought it was Marie Hu, Anna K.

    But why do they rely on a stupid machine then, Looby ? In a second book from the same delivery (about Roman kitchen) I found four mistakes, the first in the table of contents. Books were never free from errors, misspelling etc. but here the machine (the spellchecking computer) did not come to help the human, it replaced the human. Like what a pr head once told me: “We do not need a photographer any more, we have a digital camera now.” This is what you call in German “strümpfig”.

    I think pot’n plant were so fascinated by Russell’s performance that the simply not dared to move, Pflanzen LX. Thank you very much for the Theremin : Now you are responsible if my friend’s thesis won’t be finished …

    I’d skip the golf and am too clumsy for the guitar, Leni, but living in Galicia, yeah ! I often visited a now closed site by a man called Pappalardo (don’t know whether I write his name correctly) who photographed old military installations around the golf, Ferrol etc. and he showed also landscape of his (native ?) Galicia. It is so different from our postcard image of Spain. And the colours of the Atlantic are different from those of the Mediterranean.
    Ach …

    The erotic activity around my flat is non-existant, Hipster Yaya. Maybe in spring there will be an outburst of ecstasy in the newly made pond down in the valley, when oversexed amphibians and Lurche will be reproducing … Quaack …

    The weather is actually acting like a drama queen, Austere : Dramatic gestures with grey clouds, rays of light down on greening fields in the distant, spots of blinding blue sky – really a Norma Desmond entrance …

  9. I used to be an optimistic tit… now I’m just a tit.
    Crikey it is still raining here… and a temporary repair has given up the ghost, so I have a leak again.
    Sxxx

  10. Black-breasted, yellow-bellied or rufus-vented (to name just a few !) ; a grey-headed is also know. It think of you as an elegant tit. I am sorry to hear about your leak, I hope it will be taken care for soon. But I think the worst storm is over – ?

  11. What an amazing performance by M. Russell. I wonder if people realise how difficult this is to play. Thousand and thousands of hours of practice and many years of training were needed to reach this level.

    Still winter over here. We simply deal with it. Have a great week.
    Hugs
    Jon

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