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It's a great set, one of the reference recordings of the Beethoven string quartets. It's been OOP for ages; this one could be either a reissue or one of those CD-R reprints. I'd check with the seller before buying. I guess this is a new naive reissue box set, part of their low-price series. It's available at European amazons pretty cheap as well: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beethoven-Complete-String-Quartets-set/dp/B0000DET84/ Apparently this set was selling for big prices on the 2nd hand market until this reissue, which appears to be standard CD. Interestingly, Amazon US does not appear to carry it, so maybe Arkiv has a scoop. In terms of dollars to discs, it is not an amazing bargain, but compared to reseller prices, it looks pretty good. Right now I have the complete Beethoven String Quartets only in 3 LP box sets issued years ago by Quartetto Italiano, which I think has been well-regarded. On CD I have the Middle Quartets (only) by The Fine Arts Quartet on Everest, and some of the Quartets performed by the Budapest String Quartet on Columbia, reissues of 1940s mono recordings. I could probably use one or two reference sets. I'd probably go with Tokyo String Quartet, esp. from an Amazon third party: http://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Complete-Quartets-Tokyo-Quartet/dp/B008BOWG7C

I'm actually in the middle of a lot of novels, which isn't something I generally like to be doing, so I will try to close out on a few. The main problem is that the Proust volumes are quite heavy in addition to being slow going, so I can't take them everywhere, esp. if I know I need to be carting other things back and forth to work. I will have close to 8 hours on the bus tomorrow (Sat.) and maybe will get through a couple of shorter books instead. Anyway, Proust's Within a Budding Grove. An e-book version of Henri Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl (I am not at all taken with this one. I find it repetitive and quite tedious actually.) That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda (Maybe the best of the bunch, but I am having some trouble understanding why what comes across as largely a police procedural was considered (at one point) a major modernist masterpiece. Unless I am totally off-track, the revealing of how many unlikely people are implicated in the crimes was old hat when Priestly did it in An Inspector Calls.)

Yes, but... I'm reasonably sure that this kind of a project would get yanked for violating Kickstarter rules, i.e. there is almost no way you can deliver a product without having the rights. Of course that presumes that anyone cares enough to pay attention and report it to Kickstarter staff. And if you are honest about the fact that even if funded, there is less than 10% chance of seeing a physical product, who is going to chip in? So lame as it may be, I think the petition or Facebook campaign is the way to go.

Did this one get added: Also virtually every album with Honegger's Pacific 231. I have this one: But not these: These are all messed up. I think I finally have them fixed. Sorry for the delay.

I often go years between any alcohol consumption at all. I'm sure it has averaged out to less than 0.5 glass of wine/year. And I never drank beer even in my college days.

Probably a poor idea, but one never knows.

Saskatchewan - 40

Yefim Bronfman playing Beethoven Piano Concertos with the VSO (Vancouver Symphony). He played #1 & 2 on Sat. and plays #3 tonight. Then he comes back in three weeks or so to do #4 & 5. Looking forward to the cycle, which seems to be a bit of a Vancouver exclusive. I believe Bronfman is Toronto in Feb. but only doing #2 and #4 (though Torontonians will have Angela Hewitt passing through in March to play #5).

I'm sorry -- that's simply insane. Fortunately, I've almost never been dinged here in Canada (the trick seems to be to avoid UPS like the plague), and in general they don't seem to be worrying too much about packages from Europe or the U.S. In general, the personal exemptions for cross-border shopping keep going up. However, the Conservatives refuse to lower the tariffs on goods imported for retail sale to average Canadians. It's almost as if they wanted to encourage more mail order business and cross-border shopping. What gives?

That hardly figures. The truly hardcore have found a way to heard this session, but hardly everyone. I wasn't even aware there was a window in which to get my mitts on the music. Put it out on EMI-Japan, and hundreds of copies would sell due to the number of completists out there (and then some of the hardcore folks who either want to be legit, want the tangible product with liner notes or both). How do you know there's not liner notes with the illicit copies I don't. That's the problem.

I think this is very true. And at some points of my life I am more open to this than others (both in my reading and in my personal life). Still, it is inevitably just as much of a pose to be a provocateur as to be one of the self-confident Yuppies that she was poking in those particular novels. I definitely liked her other work better.

I don't really remember much about The Fifth Child, other than I thought she was more than a little unfair at attacking the smugness of the middle class and thought she was actually sticking the knife in a bit gleefully showing how they behaved when things fell apart (and they were not masters of their domain the way the English middle class like to pretend they are). With The Good Terrorist, I found the portrayal of the "terror" cell to be far too glamourized, even though -- on the surface -- you could claim she wasn't intentionally "siding" with the leftists. Still I thought she certainly gave them the most compelling arguments and was knocking the concerns of the bourgeois neigbours. In general, it is a really tricky balance to get right when you are writing about desperadoes and people on the fringes. One is always being asked to explain how much you identify with fairly despicable characters. To this day, there are people that feel Milton made Satan too appealing in Paradise Lost. I vaguely remember around that time I had been helping a friend deal with tricky tenants in Newark and that kind of coloured my view of squatters to the point I didn't want to read anything that wasn't an outright condemnation of them. To this day I am pretty allergic to those who espouse squatting and freeganism and other kinds of off-the-grid nonsense. (The only book with anything of a similar plot that I did enjoy was Atwood's Lady Oracle where the leftists are total bunglers -- and slightly less blood-thirsty than those in the film Four Lions.)

Sad, but she had a long and productive career (passing away at 94). Interestingly, the Guardian obit (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing-dies-94) mentions that she had been caring for her youngest son and he passed away 3 weeks ago. I would certainly assume the two are related, perhaps feeling that she was no longer as needed -- and could thus pass away peacefully (according to the report). Her last full novel was Alfred and Emily, which sounds curious but perhaps not really my thing. The first half imagines her parents if there had never been WWI (and they never even meet), and then the second half walks through what their lives actually were like. Maybe just a bit of the alternative reality she did in her SF, mixed with more than a little "As Times Goes By." Anyway, surely not the best place to start with her work. I really liked The Golden Notebook, which I read at university. I strongly disliked The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child. I vaguely remembering reading her Jane Somer novels and thinking they were pretty good. There are some others that I should have read but don't think I ever did. One of these days I will read the Martha Quest/Children of Violence series. I saw her once at a reading in Newark (probably @Rutgers-Newark) in the early 90s. I can't remember what she read -- either a short story or perhaps something from The Fifth Child. I had her sign a paperback copy(!) of The Good Terrorist, but disliked it so much that I eventually gave it away. I wish I had been more together to either get a new copy of The Golden Notebook or The Four-Gated City. I was tempted to ask her a question about The Golden Notebook, but probably wisely said nothing and let her get on with the signing.

That hardly figures. The truly hardcore have found a way to heard this session, but hardly everyone. I wasn't even aware there was a window in which to get my mitts on the music. Put it out on EMI-Japan, and hundreds of copies would sell due to the number of completists out there (and then some of the hardcore folks who either want to be legit, want the tangible product with liner notes or both).

That was my impression. Some of the sessions are on the short side. I'm leaning towards getting this, but more like 2015. It is nowhere near the top of my list.

Slowly progressing through Proust, but since I am not enjoying it much, I go off on tangents. I was thinking about reading some of the more obscure high modernist European novels and turned to Witold Gombrowicz's Ferydurke. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had read this, though I can't quite recall when. It is possible I read the earlier translation. This translation from 2000 is supposed to be the most accurate. I wouldn't say it did that much for me. It is really repetitive (and probably had a better reception in the late 60s and 70s when Erving Goffman and his frame analysis was "in the air" among the intellectual classes). I've started thinking of it as a fictional equivalent to some of Bunuel's films. However, this wasn't actually the book I had set out to read. I had wanted to read Henri Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, but got confused. It looks like there are 5 competing translations out there. I am in no position to judge, but I heard decent things about R.B. Russell's from Tartarus Press. Tartarus seems to specialize in slightly offbeat, eerie works. They have started selling e-books both through Amazon and on their own web page. I particularly like 1) the fact they are willing to sell epub files (which are not locked into the Kindle format) and mobi files and 2) that their e-books are much cheaper than their print versions, which is how it ought to be in my mind. The Le Grand Meaulnes, for example, is only 3 GBP, which I thought was quite reasonable. If anyone wants to check it out, you can start here. After I am done with this (and not sure how long it will take to read on the screen -- I can imagine doing some binge-reading), then I think I will tackle That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda, which I've never actually read. It sounds pretty interesting though.

I think you'll find that very few stores in the U.S. anyway will allow you to listen to an unopened copy of a CD. You might be able to listen to a used copy. And unless it is a best-seller, they won't have enough copies to have an opened copy. For a while Virgin did have listening stations that must have tapped into Amazon server since it would allow you to play soundclips if you scanned the barcode (and thus didn't actually open the CD). Once the in-store experience was essentially no better and often less convenient than on-line, then brick and mortar stores were pretty much finished.

Really? I guess I should record my son doing silly songs on the off-chance that when he makes it big, I can flog this to the public. And maybe the early demos have some merit, but who benefits when nonsense like this is combined with said demos. Definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In unrelated news, the Onion is ending its print run in Milwaukee, Providence, RI and Chicago. These were apparently the last hold-outs where you could get the Onion in hard copy. Print editions ended in New York and Madison last year. It will continue as on-line only. Most people will hardly notice the difference, but I certainly enjoyed getting it once a week and flipping through the different bits, then going to the "serious" section, the A.V. Club. I feel like such a frigging dinosaur, remembering the good old days when alternative press papers could put out 3 or 4 section editions, now shrunk to hardly anything. And alternative comics that weren't on-line. I do think newspapers and certainly news reporting is demonstrably worse than it was even as late as the 1990s. And of course used CD stores around every corner. Even video, then DVD stores, had a place where you could occasionally get recommendations from somewhat knowledgeable clerks. I guess some of this can be replicated on-line, and I generally like on-line convenience, but it just seems to add even more to the atomization of society... (I know this whole rant belongs in the other thread about stores. Anyway, it looks like we'll be on the move again this summer, and I will at least pay some attention to seeing if there are any used bookstores or CD stores or second-run movie theatres within the neighborhood or on a transit corridor from where we end up. But it's a moving target for sure. Within only a few years of moving to Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood (the northern edge) many of the stores I shopped at quite a bit (doing my part) went under and I was definitely less satisfied with my residential choice.)

For now, I'll go with the free Kindle edition translated by Gummere. It starts with "Lo, praise the prowess..." I read through the article, and it definitely seemed a lot of todo over nothing. Some new academic discoveries are truly interesting and even world-changing. This just seems like scratching around in the dirt for such a limited payoff. Yeats was addressing a slightly different issue (of how "scholarship" strangled love poems), but I think it is still generally applicable in this case: Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way? W.B. Yeats - The Scholars

Yes, I have this with a totally different cover.

So this is on the edge of being a bargain, depending on whether you go for a reseller or not: http://www.amazon.com/Original-Album-Classics-Isaac-Stern/dp/B002K8BJM8/ref=sr_1_12?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1383507731&sr=1-12 I kind of go back and forth on the OJC and Original Album approach. Sometimes it seems the resulting albums are quite short, as they are here, but I am increasingly finding that shorter but more focused CDs works pretty well for classical. Anyway, while I have a bit of duplication (Stern doing Beethoven with Barenboim) I can live with it. I'm actually quite intrigued by the Boulez Original Album set (including the marketing behind it ), but it will have to come down quite a bit in price before I get reeled it with that.

So has anyone other than Erwbol heard and weighed in on Out to Lunch alternatives? Any other opinions? And Speak No Evil. I am leaning towards getting these (and perhaps bundling with some Ormandy releases I've been eyeing for a while at CDJapan), but another opinion or two would be helpful. Thanks.

It's a little hard to tell, but the 4 CD Chicago years appears to have a lot of overlap with (or indeed be a reissue of) this 4 CD set from EMI: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tribute-Giulini-Birthday-Chicago-Recordings/dp/B0001ZMBV0/ref=sr_1_6?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1383228466&sr=1-6&keywords=giulini It is a straight reissue. Now as I was checking this, I see that another massive box set has slipped under my radar: Arthur Rubinstein Plays Great Piano Concertos. Apparently it was released just a couple of weeks ago. (If listed upthread, my apologies) Here are a few places it is on sale for fairly absurdly low prices: http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Sony/88883737172 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arthur-Rubinstein-Plays-Great-Concertos/dp/B00EC0VWEM/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t http://www.amazon.ca/Arthur-Rubinstein-Plays-Great-Concertos/dp/B00EC0VWEM Sorry to keep going on tangents, but one detailed review of the Rubinstein box said that many of the recordings were top notch, though he slightly preferred Rubinstein-Krips for the Beethoven concertos (as opposed to Rubinstein-Barenboim in the box). It seems that there is an ultra cheap 4 CD box set of Rubinstein-Krips that is making the rounds): http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Cascavelle/VEL3164

It's a little hard to tell, but the 4 CD Chicago years appears to have a lot of overlap with (or indeed be a reissue of) this 4 CD set from EMI: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tribute-Giulini-Birthday-Chicago-Recordings/dp/B0001ZMBV0/ref=sr_1_6?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1383228466&sr=1-6&keywords=giulini Now there is a different 5 CD set of Giulini recording with the CSO from DG, but there does not appear to be any overlap. Curiously, the Amazon.co.uk price for the largest set (The London Years) is not the best, though it is for those smaller sets. That may change after taking shipping into account. I haven't worked through all the details of exchange rates and shipping, but Presto Classical is offering these at very good prices as well -- and they have a lot more details of what is actually in these boxes. I definitely might spring for one or two: http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Warner+Classics/9937392 http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Warner%2BClassics/4317522 http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Warner%2BClassics/4317612