New CDs – and delivered early. Rather too early, but at least they were
brought to the house which is more than one so-called delivery service used by
Amazon ever does! With self-restraint
bordering on the fanatical I actually did not gloat over them until I had
completed my Morning Pages.
Those are becoming more problematical. I am completing them as per instructions, but
there are not what we in the OU call ‘freewrites’, that is a sort of free flow
of writing where it goes where your imagination and subconscious takes it. You keep writing at all costs, even if it is
only the same phrase over and over again until inspiration takes off again and
the imagination flows onto the page. The
theory is fine and I have done some so-called freewrites, but the Morning Pages
are degenerating into complaints about the dogs next door and loving
descriptions of my morning cup of tea.
There is not much narrative headway to be made trawling through that
sort of ordinariness.
I will have to steel myself to write any
old rubbish in the hope that somehow my imagination and deeper impulses will
eventually turn mere words in to magic phrases that I will be able to use in my
writing. I am not 100% convinced by
this, but I do not want to have the same soul destroying experience of going
through page after page of drivel that occupied part of my evening today,
again. Ever.
My MPs are going to have to be more akin to
prose poems if anything worthwhile is going to come, or rather be pickaxed out
of them. Tomorrow the start of a new
approach. This fits in nicely with my
New Approach to the lack of support from the other members of the course, as I
unfairly refuse to remind myself that they might have demanding jobs, and by
the way Stephen, just how methodical were you when you did your first OU
courses all those years ago when you had a full time job and were fairly
heavily involved in Union activity as well.
Fair point. But I don’t care – I
need feedback and I need to change the way that I write so that I can create
the short stories that I know are waiting to emerge from the remains of what I
am still proud to call my brain! Onwards
and upwards!
I have only opened one of the boxes of CDs
so far, the one with the rather naff title of ‘The History of Classical Music
on 100 CDs – From Gregorian Chant to Gorecki’ issued by Deutsche Grammophon
(2013) 00289 479 1048 GB 100. It calls
itself a ‘Limited Edition’ – if it is then it should be grabbed at once by
everybody with even a shred of interest in Classical Music.
This publication is the sort of thing which
appeals to me – you can imagine how quickly I bought the (hardback) copy of ‘A
History of the World in 100 Objects’ and how things like ‘1000 Paintings You
Have To See Before You Die’ is the sort of thing that I find impossible to pass
without purchase. So sucker I might be,
but this present box set is an absolute treasure trove. Yes there are ‘famous bits’ galore, for
example the single disc dedicated to Jean Sibelius comprises the 5th
Symphony, Valse triste, Finlandia and Tapiola – hardly the most taxing pieces
of his oeuvre, but representative and something to get you started if you
didn’t know the composer. And as the
orchestra is the Berlin Phil and the conductor is Karajan, not a bad band to
have to listen to. Now I have great
reservations about Karajan as a conductor of Sibelius, but he has an
interesting take on the music and, after all, it is not as if I do not have one
or two other versions to compare and contrast!
Carl Nielsen, my other great Scandinavian enthusiasm doesn’t make it
into this history and Gershwin does.
Perhaps that’s fair, but in only 100 discs it is always a question of
what you leave out when you have put in the people who it would be criminal to
ignore. But what you do have here is a
range of recordings which cover something like one and a half millennia and
that is richness indeed.
I have only heard fragments of these
recordings so far, well, I’ve only had the thing for just over twelve hours,
but how wrong can you go when you are being offered the riches from Deutsche
Gramophon’s amazing back catalogue.
Don’t delay, buy today – and at bargain price from Amazon!
My stomach has not recovered from eating
the pinchos we had for lunch. I think it
is such a long time ago that I had red meat that my digestive resources are
finding it hard to cope. I do hope that
this is the case as I think that I could survive quite easily eating only
chicken and pork rather than beef and lamb.
I am certainly eating more fish that I used to, although I am not
convinced that smoked salmon is quite as healthy as the poached cod that I once
made for myself with Toni preserving a look of haughty distain throughout.
Sunday is approaching which is my
traditional weigh day. What will the
scales say this week?