Wednesday, June 28, 2006
autodidakt
1. that stuff they teach you in grade 5 music theory is beyond worthless when it comes to deciphering bossa nova chords. Eb7#9/b9, F#b9/13. jobim help me; bloody diminishing returns-- pun fully intended-- indeed. MEP's only good for the classical stuff. throw me a jazz progression or (according to bassplayer mag) "dorian scales over pentatonic chords" and i'm just lost. time for some self-edification.
2. i have 7 library books in my room (which looks like a bloody pigsty. time to clear it out, before i go to turkey) waiting to be returned. i hope theyre not all overdue, i already have a lot of things i need to buy; 1. my hal leonard bass books, and 2. stuff for turkey. which segues very nicely into:
3. the history of turke! which is amazing (and also slightly headache-inducing). any place which has been more or less continually-occupied by the seminal civilizations of their respective eras (anatolians, hittites, byzantines, ottomans, arabs in the middle-eastern stage of ww1) since before the birth of christ deserves at least a bit of interest. cradle of civilization, yo.
4. i become dizzy when aileen starts speaking chinese in sentences longer than 5 words, and have to squint and rack my brains when reading chinese newspaper headlines. can understand the most rudimentary conversational cantonese (thanks to my cantonese mother, who thinks canto is the perfect language to hide things from me in when talking to my hokkien dad. who does maths and physics in chinese, and can speak malay, hokkien, canto, teochew, filipino, not-very-good bengali, and decent english. for shame, rouan. where did those genes go??). doesn't bode well for clinics. time to learn chinese.
5. i have not been reading the newspapers! internet addict that i am. note to myself: repeat 100x: google news aggregator is not a replacement for editorialised, reputable newspapers.
6. still trying to piece together georges perec's the meaning of life. keeping track of an entire apartment block, complete with chronological and spatial details, and an index at the back-- amazing.
“I enjoy talking to you more than anybody else because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don't want anybody else to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter when talking to you.
If you were here, I keep thinking, we would spend the time in talk and drink and smoke and I should be laughing a lot of the time, and I should be enjoying myself a lot of the time.”
:) yes, you too.
+ fictions&fires
12:02 AM
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plangere, latin: to strike, or to lament.
in the depth of winter i finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
--albert camus
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to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
-- ee cummings
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