The Count of Monty Cristo

and none of this jedi mind-shit, either

Meme-tastic.

1. The person who passed the baton conch to you.

Out of the Woods Now lobbed it over a sea of scrabbling hands about a week ago, but I've been too tied up in reading, writing, and building a darkroom over at the Forest (today's lesson? plumb lines, and holding them steady) to put it under the light and say: ooh, shiny. But here we go.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

Let's see. On a twenty gig drive, with ten of those eaten by Windows, I'm running at 4.88 gigs of music. So a full quarter of my computer. Not bad. Could be worse.

3. The title and artist of the last CD that you bought.

I'm assuming that online purchases count, not just ones in record stores. If so, then yesterday I ordered a recording of Saint-Saëns' two piano trios, one of which I heard at a chamber music concert in Cyprus. Camille is my alpha and my omega, perhaps the best thing that ever happened to this world ever, and I have lots of little pet theories surrounding his orchestral work with which I will bore absolutely none of you today. Promise.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.

Well, this post has taken decently long to write -- wrote the last half first -- so I've gone through several. Here are a few of them, in no particular order:

Van Morrison -- 'Astral Weeks'
Beth Gibbons -- 'Resolve'
Mississippi John Hurt -- 'Louis Collins,' also 'Staggerlee'
Satchmo -- 'Basin Street Blues,' also 'Indiana' (goddamn, I love that tune)

But right now, amusingly enough, it's Asuka Sakai and Charlie Kosei singing "Que Sera Sera" -- but not the Pink Martini version that you might think. No, this came from Katamari Damacy, about which my lawyers have suggested I say no more at this time.

(I might post the mp3 later, though, if I'm feelin' frisky.)

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs).

1. Astor Piazzolla -- 'Concerto Para Quinteto' (Okay, look. Do yourself a favor, stop reading this web site, and go get yourself a copy of Tango: Zero Hour. Just go. Now.)

2. Jimmy Newman -- La Porte D'en Arriére (because for New Orleanians at heart, a little zydeco is never enough)

3. Arcade Fire -- Neighborhood #1, Tunnels (awesome track, thanks to Not a Zombie's Monday mp3 blogging)

4. Franz Schubert -- a piece from his 3 posthumous piano sonatas, No. 2 in E-flat. (ca. ten minutes, ABACA structure, ranging from lullaby to throwing glasses against the wall to an expert seduction near the end -- difficult to describe, so I'll leave you to track it down for yourself. Murakami, incidentally, has one of his characters give a nice meditation about Schubert in Kafka on the Shore, as out of place in the book as it seems..)

So the fifth entry isn't a song, though one of the tracks I've been listening to is actually called 'Song.' I've been downloading mp3s of poetry readings from the PENNSound web site run by the University of Pennsylvania, and listening to them on my Rio as I walk around town. I've just finished CK Williams' reading from 2001 and am now on to Robert Creeley's reading from 2000 (look under 'Featured Authors' for both of these -- and why do I like 'Bresson's Movies' so much?). Penn explicitly hosts these recordings for the public domain, which I think is fantastic, and for people with portable mp3 players I can't think of a better way to put them to use.

Well, let's see. In other news, things are beginning to heat up here in the City of Literature (read this and you'll never think the same way about UNESCO again) in preparation for the Festival season coming in August. Already you see a few buskers standing on the Royal Mile hawking whatever it is that they busk or hawk, but more interestingly, there are some Events of Note which your humble narrator will be attending. Hey, for all you tilters over at 400 Windmills, Carlos Fuentes is coming to Edinburgh next week to give a lecture on the Quixote, which I will try my very best to attend (depends on the darkroom, as does the fate of the free world these days) and make note of. And hot on his heels two weeks later is a panel of the Man Booker International Prize judges -- John Carey, Azar Nafisi, and Alberto Manguel -- led by Alan Taylor of the Sunday Herald. I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but since it's a free event I've already booked my ticket, and will do another writeup similar to the JTB prize ones back in April.

I'm not endorsing the prize, I should say. I stand wholeheartedly in the "why not give the £60,000 to someone who actually needs it?" camp, so I think of it as grist for the mill. (But what are we grinding?)

By way of closing: in reading this article, specifically these paragraphs --

Other products, though, have a greater potential for consumer spinoffs. The American Technology Corporation of San Diego, for example, displayed an ultrasonic speaker that can focus audible sound, laser-like, so that a warning message can be clearly heard more than 500 yards away.

If a threatening intruder looms, the device can send a high-pitched squeal -- "above the threshold of pain, below the level of hearing loss," said Ryk Williams, a company spokesman -- that will make anyone clap hands to ears at more than 1,000 yards.

The sound beam can be narrowed so that only a small group in a crowd can hear the message. Speculating on future applications for the technology, Mr. Williams suggested that it might be used in a supermarket, for example, sending a "buy Cheerios" message to a consumer in front of the Cheerios and "buy Corn Flakes" to another nearby.

-- I have found myself vastly entertained, not because I think I will enjoy walking down a supermarket aisle and hearing "Buy Weetabix!" (or the corollary, walking down a bookstore aisle and hearing "Buy David Mitchell!" -- or, in a further, creepier twist, hearing "Buy my new novel!" in Mitchell's own pre-recorded voice), but because it will have made a childhood dream finally come true. You see, when I was a kid, I watched a lot of Ren and Stimpy on Nickelodeon. A lot. So much so that over a decade later -- all you "Happy Happy Joy Joy" poseurs out there, you wanna roll with the big dogs? -- I can still sing the whole LOG! song and the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen anthem. (No wonder he turned out like this, they say..)

Anyway, I remember one bit on there, might have been the episode where Ren and Stimpy get stranded at the intergalactic bus stop, where the scene of them sitting around waiting ended by the narrator's saying "We'll be right back, but first, a word from our sponsor." And then you saw a baby carriage pop up on screen, because that was what the sponsor manufactured, and the narrator resumed: "And that word is BUY! BUY BUY BUY!"

And I remember thinking, yep, it sure is, ain't it.

i left my heart in santorini

When I stepped off the plane in Edinburgh a few days ago, it was fifty degrees and hailing. All that came to mind was: I came back for this?

Apparently so, for better or worse. But in thinking back on the past two weeks spent drifting quietly in the Mediterranean, including (1) the loveliest birthday party I have ever had thrown by the loveliest people I had ever met only hours before (Maria, Craig, Lisa, if you're reading this, ευχαριστώ), (2) a day-long solo drive through the spectacular Troodos mountains of Cyprus, driving a stick shift for the first time in six years and on the left side of the road to boot (ex-Crown colonies, how do I love thee?), and (3) a truly once-in-a-lifetime meeting of minds that my (already meager) descriptive powers utterly fail, I have to say, it doesn't quite feel like 'better.'

So here I am: back at home (in name only), a shade more tan (in mind only), and craving paithaikia and meze (in stomach, but not only). Actually, things aren't looking all that bad, what with some innarestin' goings-on looming on the horizon. First off, there's a big fat Scotland on Sunday sprawled out all over the floor in front of me, right next to the first season DVD of The Office -- and none of that American rubbish, either. On the long view, by which I mean anything after dinner, not only is there an ongoing Festival of Scottish Writing at the moment, but there's a very intriguing Debut Writer's Festival coming to the Traverse in two weeks' time, which should draw more than a few heads. (If this makes you jealous, Ms Bookish, I apologize -- I don't mean to, honest.) The poetry panel featuring Matthew Hollis, Jacob Polley, and Choman Hardi looks fantastic -- I've read, and deeply admired, each of their books, and look forward to speaking with them once they're here.

Which I will, in fact, be doing -- yes, Virginia, there is a Segue Claus -- as part of a series of interviews for a new online literary magazine that everyone out there should take note of: textualities.net. Full disclosure: as I volunteer there part-time, I can't gush too much about it, except to say that even in its first few months it's proving a wonderful resource for literature and literary activists both here in Scotland and abroad.  There's new content on a regular basis -- book reviews, profiles, interviews, and original creative work -- and it's only going to grow. So go, check it out, wander a while, spread the word. As Dr B says: procrastinate, you might learn something.

Is that gushing too much? Maybe? Yes? Oh, well, oops.

In any case, as Ricky Gervais is paging me, that's all from the Count for now. I'll be back later on with today's Sunday poem -- heavens, my track record with those is suffering, isn't it? -- as well as a scattershot of stuff I'd set aside to link to shortly before I left. Including Real Live Zombies. (No, really. This one is for real, and may upset you or any small children nearby you.) Before I go, though, lemme just file these under 'at least mildly amusing': snark a la Scotsman, and the Beeb is all excited about a thunderstorm (check out that icon!) that we are currently not having. --Yet, he says. Yet.

ditty-boppin' on down the super slab

..that's what my uncle used to call driving down the highway. Yes, he was a strange man, in more ways than I'm allowed to reveal on this website.

Right.

Steppin' out of the country here and there over the next two weeks, so posting will be scatty. But I leave you ("To leave, / to leave, that's the verb / I am ...) with a motley assortment of reading material: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (there we go shaking things up again). The cognitive neuroscience edition, too: 1, 2, 3. And the zombie edition: 1, 2 (which will take you wherever you want to go). Oh yeah, this is innarestin' too.

See y'all around.

i was just curious, but..

Okay, so, in yesterday's television programming guide in the Guardian, in a brief piece on how there are no more taboos left for John Waters to break, John Patterson quotes John Huston (all these Johns!) from Chinatown: "Doesn't matter how far-out you once were; politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

Normally I would have glided right over this comment with only a twitch of amusement at the corner of my mouth, but for some reason it rang a distant bell in my mind. And after a moment's searching came that reason: some weeks ago a writer in the Independent noted in a review of recent books about the Colosseum that "Great monuments are like great whores: they can be anything you want them to be."

I remember this second passage verbatim, because after reading it aloud to my friends also in the room -- interrupting their conversation to do so, I should add, because I was so struck by the statement -- we had a fairly protracted conversation about the possible ranges of its truth, and came to some rather interesting conclusions. But now, with this first passage in hand, I'd like to ask:  is there some vast warehouse of analogies/witticisms about architecture and whores out there that until now I have been completely unaware of? Does anyone else think this is a little.. um.. guys? Any help?