Mutterings - 30th October

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Class :: War
2. Shopping :: Trolley
3. Bitchy :: Rresponse
4. Consulting :: Fee
5. Texts :: Phone
6. Sigh :: Despair
7. Office :: Software
8. Develop :: Code
9. Boardwalk :: Pier
10. Prime :: Time

Teaser Tuesday - 25th October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

With Mary's coaching and the exercises she practised every day at home, Terri slowly felt her throat opening, lengthening and widening and the voice starting to form lower and lower in her body. It grew stronger and clearer, rounder and more beautiful.

As last week, a teaser from Jessica Duchen's Songs of Triumphant Love this is turning into a good read - I had mixed feelings at the start where it felt as if musical details were being thrown at you sometimes for effect and the same with the sexual encounters but it has found an interesting pace binding together musical careers, the breakup of Yugoslavia and British troops in Afghanistan.

Mutterings - 23 October

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Inhibitions :: Conquor
2. Sprint :: Final
3. You :: Me
4. Shop :: (til you) Drop
5. Priority :: First
6. Testify :: Witness
7. Guys :: Dolls
8. Phone call :: Ring
9. Removed :: Absent
10. Produce :: Children

Georges Brassens : auprès de mon arbre

Georges Brassens was born 90 years ago today..

Teaser Tuesday - 18th October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

`D'ye know what it means', he'd asked.

'No' She was flat out underneath him at the time 'It means: "tell me, fair ladies, what is love? What is this burning, yearning, seething desire?"

Jessica Duchen's Songs of Triumphant Love - I've read most (all?) of her previous books - she's a music writer - written a biography of Fauré - all of her novels are around the theme of music - and I've enjoyed them so am looking forward to this. The quote is the main character's - an opera singer's introduction to love and the Italian language (as well as singing it!). Yes there does appear to be rather a lot of sex in this work - maybe inevitable from the title - I'm looking forward to the development of other themes! Here are the reviews on her website - the amazon ones are also pretty uniformly positive.

Sacconi Quartet in Bollington

Its over a week ago now but here's a quick reaction to seeing the Sacconi Quartet perform in Bollington. Due to the job situation I've not been to the Bollington Chamber Concert series for some time - when we arrived we found that the proscenium arch has been removed and the performance area is (apparently) much closer to the audience - I gathered that this was the first of these concerts since the change - I welcomed the lack of distancing and I think audibility was better. This was apparently the quartet's 4th visit to Bollington - I'd not seen them before - so obviously they were enjoyed on their previous trips.They performed the first of the Haydn Op 77 quartets and then the Bartók Quartet No 3 - I know this well (bette rthan the Haydn) and have loved - if you can love it(!) - for many years. There appeared to be a certain nervousness and a statement that it was new to their repertoire - comfirmed later that this was the first public performance for them - even the page turns looked hairy - I've never seen it performed and the live performance showed how difficult it is - bits where I thought where all 4 instruments are playing turned out to be just 2 of them. Only just over 15 minutes but what an intense work it is. After the interval came the Schubert Death and the Maiden - far longer but it didn't seem so, the rapt silence of the audience at the end of the slow movement (the variations) showed how much the audience were involved by the performance.

They had cds available at the interval but after persuading a friend to get their Ravel/Lalo/Turina disc I then discovered that there weren't any more of that one - still I see that the Sacconi's repertoire is on emusic - I expect to be downloading...

The Oneiric Ocelot upgrade

The latest version of ubuntu was released last week and over the weekend I decided to try upgrading - this desktop was running the ealier version which had already been installed a few weeks, so I thought it would be pretty smooth as I hadn't had too much excuse for tweaking this machine! I think things are now running ok so let me highlight the issues I had:

• The upgrade of samba crashed - it gave a few error messages but didn't stop the overall upgrade - and I've reported bug 875172
• On completion of the upgrade I rebooted all went smoothly but I found that there was no sound - I deleted my .pulse directory adn logged in again and sound was now fixed.
• I use vm from within emacs for my email but occasionally use kmail in the case of graphic/link heavy emails - on Sunday I read a review of email clients in Linux Format magazine which gave kmail a resounding last place so I was thinking about migrating..but to that point I hadn't yet run kmail in the upgraded ubuntu. I tried running kmail and was confronted with a migration dialog - the new kmail uses a different email backend for storing data. Alas the migration failed... so I then started web searching! The problem was that akonadi was failing to start so I couldn't even view kmail with no unmigrated emails! To start akonadi I tried a manual

  akonadictl start

  but that still failed, I did a lot of searching, thought about moving to thunderbird - but there's no easy migration of data there.. and eventually I spotted this bug report which gave this recipe:

  sudo aa-complain mysqld
  sudo aa-complain mysqld-akonadi
  sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor reload
  akonadictl start

  I've not messed around with apparmor before so I wasn't clear as to what it did but I went on trust and the last command started akonadi ok. I started kmail and it ran! but with no data, I shut it down and tried the advertised command

  kmail-migrator --interactive

  But that complains the migration has already been done! You need to read the instructions here:

  If you have already attempted to run the migrator and it failed, you can re-run it manually by first deleting your
  ~/.kde/share/config/kmail-migratorrc file and your
  ~/.kde/share/config/kmail2rc file.
  Then you will need to run the migrator manually by hitting Alt-F2, and entering the following:
  kmail-migrator --interactive
  The program will run, and all your accounts and mails will be moved over to the Akonadi system.

  And following that kmail now runs ok. I hope the collection of the above instructions in one place helps anyone else struggling with the same problem - I don't know whether it's a general problem or just due to the previous configuration of the machine. For comparison,here are my experiences with the upgrade of the previous ubuntu release. One machine upgraded, 2 more to go!

Mutterings - 16 October

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Neglected :: Pet
2. Sirens :: Seductive
3. Coordinate :: Graph
4. Mellow :: Tim (actually his surname was Mellows)
5. Oscar :: Dear
6. Facebook :: Friend
7. Whoop :: Triumph
8. Affluent :: Society
9. Battle :: Abbey (by the site of the Battle of Hastings)
10. Kisses :: Love and

Terragen again

I've not put a terragen render up in ages, and have nearly forgotten how to use it, I need a few tutorials - these might be a suitable start. This image is fairly basic but I hope to improve it...

If you click on the 'terragen' label at the foot of the post you'll see that this is windows software running very nicely under linux.

Teaser Tuesday - 18th October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Despite the weather the wild daffodil buds are showing their first pale glimmer of colour. Their country name is the Lenten Lily, because they bloom in the liturgical season of Lent.

Spring approaches - at least in Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours! Another, like last week from our book group 'book of the month'.

Mutterings - 9 October

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Fever pitch :: Excitment
2. Unwarranted :: Intrusion
3. Breaking :: News (Glass)
4. Stars :: in their Eyes
5. Thursday :: Man Who was (novel of GK Chesterton)
6. Tips :: PG (that's 2 for the power of advertising!)
7. Recommend :: Offer
8. Season :: Cold
9. Increased :: Exposure
10. Depressed :: Ill

Growing old (dis)-gracefully

On Wednesday was the second film of this season't Silkscreen - Chega de Saudade (Ballroom) of Lais Bodanzky, an affectionate study of growing old set in a São Paulo down-at-heel ballroom

I couldn't find a trailer with subtitles but this isn't the official trailer and has very little spoken dialogue! No punches pulled in its depiction of ageing and growth. Great fun! I was in charge of projection for the first time - so an apprehensive occasion - but all seems to have gone off smoothly!

Trouble!

Just in case someone isn't following me in other social media, here's the latest Simon's cat:

The Window

Say he is any man
anywhere set before the shop window
of life, full of comestibles
and jewels; to put out his hand
is to come against
glass; to break it is
to injure himself.

                     Shall he turn
poet and acquire them
in the imagination, gospeller
and extol himself for his abstention
from them?

                     What is he is not
called? I would put the manufacturers
there. Let them see the eyes
staring in, be splashed with the blood
of the shop-breakers; let them live
on the poet's diet, on the pocket-money
of the priest.

                     I see the blinds
going down in Europe, over the
whole world: the rich with everything to
sell, the poor with nothing to buy it with.

R S Thomas (Experimenting With An Amen 1986)
I'm reading this book - I'd missed out seeing this volume before and I was struck by Thomas' view of an acquisitive society. Particularly after this summer - in the UK - of riots and looting. Shall we offer pretence, a substitute for that which cannot be afforded?

Teaser Tuesday - 4 October

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

My mother used to take me on retreats to Dominican abbeys, and while she was at her prayers, I - a child of eight or nine - would roam about the grounds or help the lay brother in charge of the gardens as he weeded the paths or dug the vegetable patch.
Among the books I brought with me to Morville was my mother's Dominican prayer book, containing a modern text of the Hours.

Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours - here is the Guardian review - it is our book group book of the month - only got it last night - but it looks rather good the story of a house and gardens told through the medium of the book of Hours.

Barbara Smith

Today was the funeral service for Barabara Smith - a much loved member of All Saints Church. She gave so much of herself to so many of us - the picture shows her with her husband John who died around 6 years ago.

Mutterings - 2 October

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Quivering :: Wreck
2. Eclectic :: Mind
3. Superimpose :: Images
4. The best :: Deserve
5. Aches :: Pains
6. Vinyl :: Disc
7. Hot and cold :: in all rooms
8. Girls :: Showers (I'm afraid it followed from the previous!)
9. Wall :: Separation
10. Baby :: Oil