the commodores

the weekend is coming so get this down you! youtube is great for throwing up things i may not have listened to back in the day but now, thanks to years of playing badly, i've got a completely different perspective. i love every aspect of this but especially that bass line! 

richard deakin - flora of the colosseum

 

i remember a few years back beginning to notice that the old buildings i was going to see weren't actually the same as the buildings described in Romantic literature. more dnagerous perhaps, but overgrown and shrouded in an atmospheric host of plants. it hadn't occurred to me that the colosseum would be exactly the same, nor that someone would have gone over and produced a flora of what was there! i particularly like his notion that specific plants had been transported there in the gut of animals hundreds of years before. as i start the year's botanising here's a nod to richard deakin and, as ever the public domain review, for keeping these things alive

king creosote

seeing as i posted pictish trail the other day here's a something from kenny creosote. i haven't heard much from him of late but he's definitely still working as he was playing down the road a wee while ago. takes me back to the productive days of the fence collective and a time in which i entertained a different notion of happiness. good memories.

three cornered garlic

 

trying, (and failing!) to get my activity routine changed to suit my station in life. cycling is one area that it's moving towards what i want as i'm definitely a fair weather fellow now and my excursions outside are not session based, not numbers based but an attempt to get back to just larking about on the bike like i did when i was wee.

today's too lovely not to be out so i'm off for my first botany ride. there are precious few flowering plants out but they're getting. bittercress and chickweed are present, not that people really notice them and i saw my first coltsfoot (a sure sign of spring!) just the other day. came across lesser celandine down by the river last month so i'm expecting them to be out in force by now.

i do all the usual training stuff indoors but my method outdoors now is - take your time, stop, look about you!

*no three cornered garlic where i am these days but ramsons in evidence

the pictish trail

grand route. some odd attitudes re west coast/east coast and some even shonkier history but still worth watching. camping, as ever, appears awful. 

for the non cyclists here's the real pictish trail, in situ in eigg, with a change in musical style from what i remember.

yoshihiro suda

off the scale skills from yoshihiro suda. i was heartened at his interestin some sort of japanese speedwell from the star. i wish there was a video of him working - these are breathtaking! and his exhibition idea is great!

philosophy podcasts

 off the back of the history podcast post here's some of the hpilosophy podcasts i like to listen to of a day

philosophize this! is arguably my favourite, the presnting style is real clear and accessible and stephen's enthusiasm for the subject is palpable. if you only listen to one, then this is it, the recent simone weil four parter is excellent

the history of philosophy without any gaps is a monster podcast, ridiculously detailed and endlessly interesting but, if i'm honest, a bit overwhelming in its scope. that said, with a bit of discipline in your listening you could do a couple of episodes a week and it'd be okay. its focus is on western philosophy and the middle east and the website is great in terms of organisation. they're just up to montaigne et al at the moment so i'll be dipping my toe back into that. if you've got plenty of time, you like history and reading backstories then this is for you

talking politics: history of ideas is top quality political philosophy. true it does have something of the academic about it, possibly a whiff of the guardian reader, but, if you've coffee to hand, it never dipd below the level of interesting. and notable too, particularly with respect to john rawls, just how much some popular right wing commentators (all the while deriding academia) have pirated but giving no credit to anyone.

history of indian and africana philosophy i've mixed feelings about this one. it describes itself as describing philosophy of india, africa and the african diaspora but, as is far too often the case with american podcasts, that means the majority of it will be about americans, and the majority of that will be about race from an american perspective. there's almost nothing about indian philosophy, anything from the francophone world doesn't extend beyond fanon and the cesaires. but, given the dearth of material it's better than nothing. i don't want to sound too down on it tho as, if it's up your street, there's much of interest. nevertheless, it fails its subject badly and i find myself getting grumpy when i listen to it

lest i sound too off about americans here's a firm favourite. as with philosphize this the great books prof sticks to his favourites and his enthusiasm shines thru. i really like his presenting style and the clarity of his explanations. check out the achille mbembe episode to counterbalance the last podcast! 

make your own stock

get a bunch of vegetables. chop them up. cook them with bunch of salt, freeze. boom. i don't use foil for this sort of thing but the person in this video does. buy a sack of local veg and practice this until it suits your taste. what you put in your body should be under your control, not some pre oackaged chemical nonsense 

rachmaninoff

 

you know that way in which professionals make something look so easy you think to yourself, yes, i could do that. so this. i'm four bars in. small steps! lol

hasegawa tohaku

 

i've seen images similar to this prints, encaustic etc, but these by hasegawa tohaku are original and best. and from so long ago! amazing!

breadmaking

i don't normally make bread like this but, seeing as it's a sunday and cooking is what sunday afternoon's are for, i'm thinking i may have a go at this poolish method once the temperatures come up a bit more. but i will be using a mixer! lol 

i've made no bones about my status as a lazy fellow so if the above seems a bit too much like hard work here's some quick and easy alternatives - 

- north wild kitchen's settekake

- vegan richa's herb garlic flatbread

- the veg space herb and garlic flatbread

andf then there's turkish bread. any of these are foolishly easy, tho a bit of care with oil and pan temperature is worthwhile

don quixote

 

as i'm currently on annual leave one of my reading projects is, finally, to have a reasonably close read of don quixote. i did read it years ago but didn't much get into it so i'm approaching it with only a vague familiarity. i kicked off with the motteux but, initially, the language put me off a bit so i ordered the grossman, on the grounds i already had some of her translations particularly of poetry in spanish from the golden age. the grossman is super readable and has more accessible footnotes. that said, once i hit my stride i absolutely fell in love with the motteux translation, finding it akin to a bawdy, blustery, semi drunk 17th century mate telling you a shaggy dog story. i couldn't recommend it to a non first language english speaker (or most english speakers!) as it's very of it's time, lexically dense and idiomatic, but, that aside, it's just fabulous.

as for the spanish version. i'd love to tell you that my spanish was good enough to cope with cervantes' original but that hope, courtesy of grossman's translation of poetry from that time, is absolutely a vain one! trapiello's updated version still isn't easy for me to get through but still a great workout for my spanish (altho i just can read it as quickly or keep up with the other two books). tonally, it feels much more in common with grossman's version but suffers from being much less annotated.

for notes on translations i haven't done better than this site, which is absolutely worth an extended browse.

why then, am i liking it so much? for me, it's because it feels like it speaks directly to the reader (esp the motteux version). it's full of asides, tangents, self awareness, fourth wall breaking (i love the book burning scene where they advise burning the poetry books because, as if errantry isn't bad enough, the don could be become a poet! lol). further, while i don't want to use the word dull, a lot of modern fiction seems to pale in comparison and i find myself wanting to go back to lawrence sterne, james hogg etc as, even now, they feel miles ahead of their time despite being written hundreds of years ago. i even found myself nodding along to the idea of reading schopenhauer's four immortal romances.

in some ways i'm glad i never really read this as a young person altho i also wish i had, had enjoyed it, and could've have watched myself grow along side it as i read it over the years. but, as is the way, it seems to have arrived at just the right time. i see so much in it. form a literary perspective, ahab, austen and many more.

here's the lad mcevoy with his tips on reading it. i actually think the podcast version is better but it was done before he got his recording issues sorted out so, if that sort of thing matters to you, it's unfortunately almost unlistenable. 

reece wilson

to be fair, i didn't know much about reece wilson beyond his flying scotsman moment. downhill isn't, and never has been my thing. that said, cycling is cycling so there's always something of interest. and, it turns out, he's well known in my bike shop! in this case it's the psychological aftermath of the crash, the 'flow' that he describes, that'll be familiar to anyone creative. and, while he seems to have a healthy fatalism, i'm never less than taken aback by the sheer scale of the dumbassery of youth - making my body ache less as a result of far less physical hammering than he's doing to himself, is a daily practice for me of necessity! lol

slavoj zizek

 maybe i'm getting older, or maybe it's just him , but i'm finding slavoj zizek much more entertaining then i used to. here he is channeling aristotle on happiness and then, his favourite, banging on about capitalism. what i like is, here at least, the willingness to question his own positions 

damaris masham

 

despite being a john locke fanboy in my day to my shame i'd either passed damaris masham by or missed her completely. so i was loving this article on aeon the other day.

which lead me to project vox and another fabulous resource!

old lads cycle the tour de france route

 great effort from these boys. rim brakes and even a front triple meet my approval! lol 

tasks and their management

the notion that disinterest (under the terry riley vid) might have affected my creative output is still niggling me. did it really? am i that bothered with what other people think? while i'm in possession of an ego there's got to be a bit of that but it doesn't make much sense to me. so i was interested in this vid.

i've always been writing or drawing, all my life. latterly i was successful at getting my stuff published, primarily poetry, with about 1 in every 3 things that i submitted getting out. but, despite all that, i found myself getting ever more miserable and, eventually, i just gave it up. these days i don't write poetry at all and it's only very recently i've even begun to read it again.

i'm interested in this connection between 'reward' and action, or the commodification of creativity if you like, and what i've found i've been doing in the intervening years is trying to get back to what i was doing when i was a kid - drawing because it was fun, writing stories just to see what happens. i've found the same process in cycling. i've aged out of interest in any sort of racing, endurance etc and i'm trying to get back to that sense of just going out and mucking about on my bike.

similarly at work, which actually does make a tangible difference to people's lives, i feel very lucky to be at a stage of my career where i can focus on the little things and appreciate their importance

maybe i should've listened more when people talked about it not being the destination but the journey! lol

paul celan

i've got a bit of a holiday coming up and i'm intending doing a bit of paul celan reading, conparing and contrasting the hamburger and felstiner translations with this. good interview with joris here

 

astrolabes and their doings

 great article from medievalists 

jon kálman stefánsson

 that sense where i think i can understand what he's saying but i actually can't lol