One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.

Identify the speaker:

1. “I have actually outlived myself.”

2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”

3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”

4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”

5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”

6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”

7. “Beethoven was wrong!”

8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.

9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?

10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?

11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism’”?

12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies’”?

13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?

14. What is 8’37″ better-known as?

15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?

(more…)

I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.

Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright‘s trilogy.

… from an alternative universe. If you need a demonstration that our universe’s Nobel is meaningless, here it is.

(Via The Rat.)

“The Crime Wave at Blandings” is the single most satisfying short story in the English language.

On a related note, there is a new poll in the sidebar.

Update: Only two votes so far? Good grief. You all need to do some remedial reading.

… by TSO

Book Meme Rules
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people

The stack of books nearest to hand includes titles by George Weigel, Thomas Craughwell, Fuyumi Ono and Robert Benchley. Unfortunately, the one on top was Warriors of Legend: Reflections of Japan in Sailor Moon, by Jay Navok and Sushil K. Rudranath.

The kuji incantation itself is a Buddhist war chant. A large, frightening figure appears on the screen during Rei’s incantation of this ceremony, and he is the god of war from Buddhist lore. Since Rei is a Shintoist and not a Buddhist (and according to one episode, considers the other religions her “competition”), the display of a Buddhist god is a contemporary example of the syncretism we discussed earlier, which blurs Shintoism and Buddhism for most Japanese (in this case, the anime’s writers).

Tagged: Kashi and the Wolf, Maureen, John and anyone else who wanders by.