Future daze

Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

The web was a neighbourhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. (p 9 in the Abacus edition) Not the limits of that expectorant Low German dialect? [That’s Dutch, folks] An orthography to write home about. And crikey! How do you deal with that syntax? An even by native speakers not until the ultimate grammatical arrival capable of being unravelled word order that one’s brain in ever more excruciatingly elaborate cortical knots trivially can tie. (18). Age lurches in fits and starts, like a failing refrigerator compressor. Like a gawky, grand mal-adroit adolescent on ancient roller skates, navigating a stretch of worn sidewalk in a subduction zone. (57) I was supposed to redeem the sad disaster Dad had made of life. (61) Gnomic is in. We just have to push ‘privilege’ and ‘reify’ up to the middle of the verb frequency lists and retrain. (91) The elaborate seduction of the already attained. (105) In this clasp, the couple graduated to inseparable, mutual foreigners. Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. (152) Intelligence meant the systematic eradication of information. (156) She gave me a look, bafflement routed slowly by inference. That she could unpack, decode, index, retrieve and interpret my reference at all was an unmodelable miracle. More miraculous still, I could watch her grin of understanding unfold in less than hundredth-millimetre increments, in split seconds. (182) Linguistic training bras. (195) Inside, Helen was singing. (198) It occurred to me: awareness no more permitted its own description than life allowed you a seat at your own funeral. Awareness trapped inside itself. The function of consciousness must be in part to dummy up and shape a coherence from all the competing, conflicting subsystems that processed experience. By nature, it lied. (217-218) [cf. DFW] Hers was the purest cynicism: hope concealing itself from itself (267) The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it (313) [… and the universe between words and experience… the place of fear in memory-laying… the discrete limitation of intelligence and perception vis. language… the perpetual suffering]

David Gilmour in Concert, DVD

Brave solo acoustic rendition of Shine On. The two versions of Comfortably Numb (verses sung by Robert Wyatt / Bob Geldoff) illustrate the special character and heavy sarcasm that only a Roger Waters can bring to them. The second version has better solos and guitar tone. Rather flaking throughout, mild and middle aged — problems of song selection (with exceptions: Je Crois Entendre Encore and Syd's Dominoes) and Rick Wright’s rather pedestrian song of positivity. But Dave’s voice is incredibly well preserved, he reaches all the high notes. The extended scenes of pure fretwork in the extras are a godsend for learners tuning into this gentleman guitarist for the first time. The patent simplicity of bluesy pentatonics. The bassist was a tosser. But my new guitar fetish is the Gretsch Duo Jet. What a great tone he gets from it. Truly old school warmth and 50s purity.