Vulture's Picnic, Rating the Audience, The Wrong Answer Faster, and Other New Books

A UAA book I checked out in January escaped someplace on the West Coast this spring so I went to pay for the book. (I'm not that late - faculty can check out books for the whole semester.  They told me to wait in case it showed up.  It was called Standards and the chapter I read was terrific.  I can't believe someone could find a library book and not make any attempt to get it back home.)

 I find it hard to get past the New Books shelf when I'm at the library. If I didn't have a blog, I might just disappear in the library. There are so many books on so many topics. Despite the difficulty of writing a book, there are plenty of people doing it. For those of you who have abandoned libraries for the internet, good books get you more than superficial tidbits. Really good ones give you a good overview of a topic with enough background to understand the basic issues. Here are a few I saw. Please excuse my photoshop experimenting. Some worked ok, others I learned something from. But I've too much to do to make them perfect now.

They can all be enlarged a bit by clicking on them.

How about some books on oil and energy?

 

Music?

Books looking at different aspects of media.

Get into other countries - literature, law, superstition.  The concept here was ok, but the execution needs some work.  The bottom book is Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics: From Majlesi to Ahmadinejad by Ali Rahnema.

Biology books - genetics, cognitive biology, and Feathers:  The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson. 

Here are three books with German themes. Das Amt is all in German - the title translates as The Official and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic.  There's the history of the German firm Krupp.  And then there's the book on Robert Musil.   (Musil was Austrian, but he wrote in German.) I've written about Musil before.  Here's a more abstract post and one that is more concrete. He's a German writer who wrote The Man Without Qualities [sometimes translated as Characteristics].  Think about what such a man would be like.  When I saw the title I knew I had to read it.  It took a while to find it.  It's a very cerebral book.  I've only read about 180 pages.  Not because it isn't good, I just had other things to do and it needed close attention.  I also read another of his books - Young Törless.  So a book that will help me understand Musil - it's the one I checked out.   I could have added the Brahms book to this group. 


The table of contents below is from Expeditions in Mathematics. 

The second book is In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman:  Mathematics at the Limits of Competition by William J. Cook.  Then there's The Wrong Answer Faster:  The Inside Story Of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions.  


The first two books are about African Americans and I snuck* the third one in because it had Soul in the title as did the second book. 

Think about all the authors spending a year of five writing these books.  And because they are here, you might spend a second or two on them.  And before you pay money for some entertainment or distraction, consider that all these books and more waiting for you to borrow them for free at the Consortium library at UAA.  And no you don't need to be a UAA student to check out a book.  A Muni library card will do. 

*The spell check doesn't recognize snuck, but it's a regionalism that rolls off my tongue.  Sneaked can't compare.

The Man Without Qualities - A Chapter that May be Skipped . . .

Some time ago I said I’d try to post excerpts from this book by Richard Musil, and Austrian novelist who died in 1942. The more I read, the more I’m struck by the insights Musil has. But it is also a strange novel as the characters seem all to be more generalized figures that Musil can use to talk about human behavior in general, than real, specific people. But I find Musil to be insightful, over and over again. Of course when someone thinks someone else is insightful, it just means they agree.

The other night I read a chapter with this title:

28 A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation (p. 115)

Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation of a man thinking. When someone asked a great scientist how he managed to come up with so much that was new, he replied: “Because I never stop thinking about it” And it is surely safe to say that unexpected insights turn up for no other reason than that they are expected. They are in no small part a success of character, emotional stability, unflagging ambition, and unremitting work. What a bore such constancy must be? Looking at it another way, the solution of an intellectual problem comes about not very differently from a dog with a stick in his mouth trying to get through a narrow door; he will turn his head left and right until the stick slips through. We do much the same thing, but with the difference that we don’t make indiscriminate attempts but already know from experience approximately how it’s done. And if a clever fellow natural has far more skill and experience with these twistings and turnings than a dim one, the slipping-through takes the clever fellow just as much by surprise; it is suddenly there, and one perceptibly feels slightly disconcerted because one’s ideas seem to have come of their own accord instead of waiting for their creator. This disconcerted feeling is nowadays called intuition by many people who formerly, believing that it must be regarded as something suprapersonal, have called it inspiration; but it is only something impersonal, namely the affinity and coherence of the things themselves, meeting inside a head.

It goes on, and I hope my daughter is reading this part:

The better the head, the less evident its presence in this process. As long as the process of thinking is in motion it is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain’s convolutions were suffering from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form of the thinking process as one experiences it but already that of what has been thought, which is regrettably impersonal, for the thought then faces outward and is dressed for communication to the world. When a man is in the process of thinking, there is no way to catch the moment between the personal and the impersonal, and this is manifestly why thinking is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly avoid it.

Susan and William Goldenberg Make Stunning Music

In amongst the books I've been reading simultaneously is this passage about a married couple who go off into another world while playing the piano together:

The millions sank, as Nietzsche describes it, awestruck in the dust; hostile boundaries shattered, the gospel of world harmony reconciled and unified the sundered; they had unlearned walking and talking and were about to fly off, dancing, into the air. Faces flushed, bodies hunched, their heads jerked up and down while splayed claws banged away at the mass of sound rearing up under them. Something unfathomable was going on: a balloon wavering in outline as it filled up with hot emotion, was swelling to the bursting point, and from the excited fingertips, the nervously wrinkling foreheads, the twitching bodies, again and again surges of fresh feeling poured into this awesome private tumult.

Robert Musil's description on page 45 of The Man Without Qualities came to mind last night as I listened to the Goldenberger Duo - a brother and sister - play the violin and piano together. While last night's music was mellower than Musil's couple's, the Goldenbergs too were invisibly connected, their fingers and souls producing magical sounds that is the promise, but rarely the reality, of live music.

The sanctuary at Beth Sholom has great acoustics, and the trees through the window made a soothing backdrop that included, for a while, a bald eagle making lazy circles in the sky.

I did take a bit of video, but if you watch it, remember it was taken with my little Canon Powershot and so the sound is a raspy whisper while their live sound was rich and enthralling.

For people like Phil who know the music, here's what they played:

Antonin Dvorak - Sonatina in G Major, op.100, Allegro risoluto

Astor Piazolla - Oblivion

Manuel de Falla - Suite Populaire Espangnole (six songs)

John Williams - Theme from Schindler's List

Ernest Bloch - Nigun - Improvisation from Ball Shem Suite

Antonin Dvorak - Sonatina in G Major, op. 100, Allegro

Traditional Hebrew and Yiddish Folks Songs


The last because this concert, nominally, was a musical performance for Yom HaZikaron and Yom Haatzmaut.

The two musicians were concluding a busy week, having played in Juneau, Skagway, Haines, Homer, Eagle River, and a morning concert at West High School in Anchorage before last night's concert.

Thank you, William and Susan, for sharing your window to a better world.

Kuala Lumpur

Everything went well today. The plane left a bit late but we made it to KL with no problem. There was a decent bus into town from the airport (about $2 (9 ringit) for 60 minute direct ride)- not the spectacular airport, but the LLC (low cost carrier) airport 20 kilometers further out. We walked down steps out of the plane into the tropical, humid heat. We haven't had that sort of weather in Chiang Mai yet, so it was a bit of a surprise. But nice to be embraced by the atmosphere.

On the bus I sat next to a Dutch student who was finishing up his 6 months management internship here in KL. From the bus we took the monorail to the hotel. An expat was giving us advice on the train and then an Indian told us about the Hindu festival taking place this weekend. We waited a few minutes for the downpour to end, then crossed the street to our giant Renaissance Hotel. Not quite our normal style, but there was a good deal on the internet and it has a big pool. And if you stay at little hotels you get free wifi, but at the big hotels (this one is a Marriot) you have to pay for internet.

It turns out that right across the street is a big tourist info and Malaysian cultural center. And they have free internet and wifi. So, all is well.

I got to read from my book The Man Without Qualities by Richard Musil. I'm warning you now that I'm going to be telling you about this book over the next few months as I read it.

More later.

Poop, Swoop, Can Weird Be Cool, and other Google Searches

Watching how people get to this site offers an interesting view of how people search Google (and other search engines) and how Google handles them. Some of the more recent ones are below.  For previous posts on google searches click here.


the millions sank awestruck in the dust -This person got to  Susan and William Goldenberg Make Stunning Music a brother and sister team who had reminded me of another couple making music together in Richard Musil's The Man Without Characteristics. So I had a paragraph from the book that began with "The millions sank, as Nietzsche describes it, awestruck in the dust."  I'd say this person found what they were looking for.

pennsylvania had to endora, sorry, endure this lady in 1972 - Who says civility is dead?  This searcher (why do I think it's a woman?) even apologized to Google and corrected herself. I have no idea if she found the scurge of Pennsylvania. She got to Famous People Born in 1908, so maybe.

half moon bay beach - I've gotten this a couple of times recently.  I have pictures of Half Moon Bay beach on this post and this one in moonlight.   But they get sent, instead, to this post of Venice Beach, which does mention Half Moon Bay.  Google, why isn't there an easy way for me to tell you that you sent them to the wrong page?  I've since linked from the Venice post back to the actual Half Moon Bay beach posts.

can weird be cool - got this lucky searcher to a post on Strange,Weird, Wonderful, and Cool, Buildings.  Perhaps the title answered the question.

aiff 2010 film festival scam? - Google, sometimes you exasperate me. I have posts about the aiff film festival scam.  More than one. With scam in the title. And usually you send people to a film festival post that at least mentions 'scam.' But this poor reader was sent to a post of AIFF 2010 Features in Competition which doesn't mention or link to a post with the the scam aspects. Why?   BTW, The Anchorage International Film Festival is legit, and weird and cool, but not the other AIFF which has changed its name to AIFA.

clearing customs in anchorage alaska flying from lower 48 - The same way you clear customs flying from New York to LA.  Oh dear.  There are still people who don't know that Alaska is in the United States.  On the other hand, when traveling overseas where Americans aren't too popular, we can say we're Alaskans and we're always welcome.  They got Flying to Light - From Seattle to Anchorage.  That said, you can go through customs in Anchorage if you are flying from overseas, but not from the Lower 48.
 

morning discovery i shouldn't be alive -  Now, that, with a little editing, would be a great first line for a novel, or at least a short story.  This searcher from India (using a computer set on US English) got to this photo of sunset on Chester Creek in an archive that included an energy conference and Bridgman/Packer.




what does poop look like in litter box - This isn't as dumb a question as it might appear.  They got to my post  kitty litter technology, who knew? which included pictures of what I figured out, eventually, were clumps of cat piss, not poop. 

 money for being born in alaska - Let's get this clear.  There isn't money for being born in Alaska.  There is money - Alaska Permanent Fund Dividends - for people who live in Alaska and intend to stay indefinitely (ie - have no plans on moving away.)  The person got to a previous Google searches post where I'd highlighted someone asking a similar question, and then linked to Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Application Time.

Horse diagram from an Oklahoma State website

where's mane on the map  - I'm sorry, I can't resist.  (click to make the image clearer) Strangely, the searcher got a map of Africa.  I've noticed, as a searcher, that Google gives you lots of choices of images, so I assume people might check out something different from what they were looking for. Is that serendipity or Attention Deficit Disorder?

 
hulling rice in a thai village - Usually Google does a pretty good job, as it did here. This searcher got to pictures of an old and a newer rice huller in this post  (Sustainable Farming The Old Fashioned Way - Karen Village)  at a Thai village.


how to wash a white rooster -  No laundering instructions, but this person got to a post called Swinging Bulbul and White Rooster.  There's a  video of the bulbul swinging in the tree outside our Chiang Mai apartment window in 2008 and a photo of a white rooster I passed daily on my ride to work. 

what does swoop mean in todays facebook languages - Six Books:  Media, Ethics, Balance and Language, which has the words 'swoop,' 'facebook,' and 'language'  but doesn't answer the question.  (I checked and the online slang dictionary says, in a 2000 posting, that swoop means:

to take something or somebody from someone.
  I swooped on your girlfriend.

The Source for Youth Ministry Slang Dictionary gives it a little more positive meaning:

swoop me up
1. requesting someone to pick you up in their car.  "Swoop me up for school in the morning." 

 The Urban Dictionary in its definition for the verb 'to ninja' echoes the first definition:

14. v. the act of stealing, swooping, or snaking something. usually the person who has been ninja'd upon does not realize it for a little while, and then they are mad when they find out that something of theirs has been ninja'd.

Hey man you ninja'd my chair. Why the hell did you ninja my book, Jordan?

Does this answer the question? 



I've never thought about it before, and I'll check, but I'm guessing the reason there are no capital letters or question marks is that Sitemeter simplifies things.  Sitemeter is how I see all these search terms and much more.  You can see what Sitemeter  tells me at the Sitemeter link in the right hand column below "Blogs of Friends and Acquaintences." Click on the number.  Because I believe in transparency, I've left the data available to anyone.

Enjoy your day and reflect on how you phrase your searches and what you get.

For My DC Readers, The Goldenberg Duo - A Musical Treat

The world works in mysterious ways* and the internet makes it seem more so. There's a concert in DC on August 8, 2010 - the 36th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation**:

William Goldenberg, Distinguished Professor of Piano at NIU, and his sister, Susan Goldenberg, violinist in the Kansas City Symphony, have performed as the Goldenberg Duo for 30 years at various universities and performing arts series. On August 8, the Duo will perform at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. as part of that institution's ongoing performing arts series.

This comes from The Arts@NIU (Northern Illinois University) website, which probably explains why William Goldenberg, who is a professor there, is highlighted and not his sister, who is not a professor there.  So I'll highlight her here. 

So, what's the mysterious way here?  Well, I never heard of that website until today when someone got to my blog from that NIU post on the concert. At the very end it says:

An excellent review of a 2009 concert by the Duo may be found here.

Clicking on the 'here' above will get you to an April 2009 post I did of one of their Anchorage concerts.  I would distinguish between an 'excellent review' and a 'positive review.'  Excellent review refers to the quality of the review in my mind and while it is pretty good - mainly because of a perfect Richard Musil quote I had just read - I don't think NIU would have linked if it hadn't been positive about the music.   There's also a video from my little Canon Powershot which will give you a sense of the music. 

Anyway, I'd urge my DC readers to consider attending this concert on Sunday.  The Duo have a real musical connection and it should be fantastic.  From the Museum's site:

Steinway Series (Aug 8, 3pm)
Susan Goldenberg, violinist with the Kansas City Symphony, and William Goldenberg, distinguished professor of piano at Northern Illinois University, present an eclectic program including works by Frank Bridge, Samuel Barber, Claude Debussy, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

And it's free!  And air conditioned. 


*I realized as I was typing it that the opening sentence starts with a cliche, and so I thought I should at least find its origin.  Googling only got me uses of it online by other people.  Two quotation sites gave me:

Search Results for “World Works in Mysterious Ways”

No documents match the query.

Methinks that 'mysterious ways' simply means 'ways we don't understand.'  Probability explains a lot of 'mysterious ways' - after all, even though the odds of winning the lottery might be ten million to one, at least one person will buy a winning ticket.  And the power of google increases the odds people will make obscure connections they never would have made in the past.   

**I'd also note that the reason I know the exact date Nixon resigned is that my son was born two days before.  So, if you know him,  wish him a happy birthday Friday. 

Oh yes, one more connection.  I spent two summers at NIU in DeKalb.  That's where my Peace Corps training was.