Kestrell

_The Notation Is Not the Music_
Barthold Kuijken (Indiana University Press, 2013)

Synopsis:
Written by a leading authority and artist of the historical transverse flute, The Notation Is Not the Music offers invaluable insight into the issues of historically informed performance and the parameters--and limitations--of notation-dependent performance. As Barthold Kuijken illustrates, performers of historical music should consider what is written on the page as a mere steppingstone for performance. Only by continual examination and reexamination of the sources to discover original intent can an early music practitioner come close to authentic performance.

_Guitar zero : The new musician and the science of learning_ Gary F. Marcus (2012)

I loved this book, and I will be keeping it in the reread pile, because it is full of useful information for the would-be guitar player of any age. It is also suitable for the general reader, gently introducing some of the more technical terms used in both neuroscience and music theory, but never becoming bogged down with jargon. It's real strength, however, is that it provides a strong dose of encouragement for any adult who has thought of learning to play a musical instrument but felt overwhelmed by what seems to be the steep learning curve.
( continued below cut )

I am really lusting after this book

_The Carmina Burana: Songs from Benediktbeuern (Second Edition)_
by Tariq William Marshall (Apr 15, 2013)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Carmina-Burana-Benediktbeuern-Edition/dp/1481117599

which is not available in e-format, although a reviewer claims that an extra when you buy the paper book is a downloadable version.

As the format being used for the downloadable files is PDF, which has about a fifty-fifty chance of being accessible with my screenreader program, I am wondering if anyone has bought this book and tried out the downloadable content, specifically, is the PDF just image files, and does it have the highest setting of DRM attached, which locks out screen readers?

It seems that searching the galaxy for your buddy's lost brain is period, dating to at least the Renaissance.

I only found this out this week, while reading Umberto Eco's _The Infinity of Lists_ which is, surprise, a collection of literary lists.

You can read the appropriate canto from _Orlando_ here
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/orl/orl34.htm
beginning at:

block quote begin
LXXIII. He, that with other scope had thither soared,
Pauses not all these wonder to peruse:
But led by the disciple of our Lord,
His way towards a spacious vale pursues;
A place wherein is wonderfully stored
Whatever on our earth below we lose.
end block quote

And here is a brief description of some of the lists in Eco's book:

begin block quote
The history of literature is full of obsessive collections of objects. Sometimes these are fantastic, such as the things (as Ariosto tells us) found on the moon by Astolfo, who had gone there to retrieve Orlando's brain. Sometimes they are disturbing, such as the list of malign substances used by the "witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Sometimes they are ecstasies of perfumes, such as the collection of flowers that Marino describes in his Adonis. Sometimes they are poor and essential, such as the collection of flotsam that enables Robinson Crusoe to survive on his island, or the poor little treasure that Mark Twain tells us Tom Sawyer put together. Sometimes they are dizzyingly normal, such as the huge collection of insignificant objects in the drawer of Leopold Bloom's kitchen sideboard in Joyce's Ulysses...
block quote end
from _The Infinity of Lists_ by Umberto Eco

subtitled: What to read instead of Dan Brown's _Inferno_

Set in Venice, _The Abomination_ is an action-packed conspiracy thriller which features two strong female protagonists: Kat, a captain in the Italian military police who is working her first homicide, and Holly, an American Army intelligence officer who just arrived at her new post in Venice.
Holly's first day at work involves what she thinks is just an annoying paperwork task, but soon she realizes that there is much more going on....something involving old secrets which someone doesn't want to see the light of day.

Kat and Holly also find themselves getting entangled with a notorious hacker who has created an online world called Carnivia, which is a virtual representation of the city of Venice itself, and, as in a number of Walter Jon Williams's most recent novels, this virtual world reflects many of the cultural tensions of the realtime world upon which it is based.

Holt obviously did a tremendous amount of research for this thriller, and his characters come across as believable, flawed but sympathetic. _The Abomination_ has not one but two female protagonists who are both literally kickass characters, but are also complex modern women in male-dominated professions, where sexism creates just as many complications for them as criminal activities. More than once I found myself checking that this book had been written by a male author, which I realize reflects my own personal bias, but hey, as a female reader I have had my heart broken more than a few times by male authors who promised me a strong independent woman who soon turned out to be a brain-numb nympho with improbable breasts who had to be rescued by her much stronger and smarter boyfriend.

I didn't actually finish Dan Brown's new novel, _Inferno_, but I did get somewhere between halfway to two-thirds of the way through it before being so completely icked out by the characterizations of female characters that I had to stop. It's an interesting thing about the three female characters in _Inferno_: the good women are distinguished by the fact that they reallyreallyreally want to have children. On the other hand, if you are born female and a genius, this will totally mess you up psychologically, including making your hair fall out and causing you to be so confused by normal human emotions and relationships that you will remain a virgin until you are in your thirties, at which time you will likely fall for a sociopathic geneticist who claims there is evidence supporting Malthus's theory of overpopulation so, despite your medical training and your supposed grasp of logic, you will play Pinky to his Brain and join him in instigating a pandemic which will solve the world overpopulation problem, and somewhere in there there will be some really superficial references to Dante's _Inferno_.

But I'm not going to rant about Dan Brown's writing, promise.

Last week I scanned a paper copy of Guy Davenport's _Seven Greeks_, which is a collection of his translations of the writings of seven Greek poets who came after Homer and Hesiod

The page design must have been in two columns, however, because the scanned text came out all scrambled.

But when your scanner gives you scrambled eggs, it's time to make souffle.

So I have been piecing the scrambled fragments together by going to Google and entering the search terms of the title of the book and then the last phrase which I know was in the correct sequence, like this

"Seven Greeks" "The trap's spring."

And I get back a result like this:

7 Greeks - Page 45 - Google Books Result
books.google.com/books?isbn=0811212882
1995 - Poetry
115 Gently cock The trap's spring. 116 Let us sing, Ahem, Of Glaukos who wore The pompadour. 117 Damp crotch. 118 Where, where, O Entias, Is the guidon ...

(You may have already realized that this Archilochos guy was more than slightly obscene at times. but, hey, he was a soldier-poet so his two favorite subjects are sex and fighting.)

Anyway, I then take the results and go correct my scanned text. It is both time- and mind-consuming, and I often find I have been doing it for hours without realizing it.

But this morning I realized something--well, two things, actually.

1. I am insane.
2. I am getting a metatextual experience of the fragmentary nature of the texts which is very similar to the scholars who pieced together the original paper fragments.

And *that* is pretty cool.

For my sighted friends who have never had the experience of reconstructing a patchy scanned text, here is a link to an online project which allows people to help piece together papyrus fragments in the British Library.

Ancient Lives
is a collaboration between a diverse group of Oxford papyrologists and researchers in the Departments of Classics and Astrophysics, the Imaging Papyri Project, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, the Egypt Exploration Society and the Citizen Science Alliance, a collaborative body of universities and museums dedicated to allowing everyone to make a meaningful contribution to scientific research.
http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/Ancient_Lives/

While I'm kind of at a loss for the popular fascination with zombies, I seem to have developed a sudden addiction for reading academic books about zombies in popular culture. The book I am currently reading was very obviously scanned from a paper version of the book and, frankly, I think zombies could have done a better job of it.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I wanted to mention was that sometimes one comes across a scanno which opens up all sorts of new ideas.

The one which I am particularly fascinated by is one scholar's statement that, zombies, unlike other varieties of monster, do not have a long narrative history, unlike, say _Dracula_, written by *Brain Stoker.*

Let's see: _Dracula_ contains piles and piles of maundering prose, and Stoker *was* a theatrical agent...

I think that an argument could be made that Brain Stoker was some variety of evil zombie. Really, I want to read the book where Brain Stoker, the zombie theatrical agent, and Robbie Stevenson, the wimpy ailing guy with a split personality, team up to solve a mystery, possibly located in an alternate London where Holmes only accepts cases from those who are not life-impaired.

_Some Kind of Fairytale_ (2012) by Graham Joyce

I don't read a lot of fantasy anymore because most of the fantasy books I pick up turn out to feel like the same old story. Of course, most of my favorite books turn out to be the same old stories, so obviously it is not the fact that the story is familiar which is the turn off, so I guess it is still something of a riddle for me why the same old story works some times and not others.

_Some Kind of Fairytale_ is the first fantasy novel I have read in a long time which made me think, "Oh, yes, this story *had* to be told as a fantasy story because it does something only fantasy can do."

The plot: It's Christmas day, and a middle-aged couple hear a knock at their door; when they open the door, a young woman is standing there. She claims to be their daughter who disappeared twenty years before. There is a lot of evidence to indicate that she really is who she claims to be, but she refuses to explain where she has been or what caused her disappearance.

The story has a definite "Turn of the Screw" atmosphere which creates a lot of ambiguity regarding whether or not anything fantastic is actually going on
( continued below cut )

1. _Introduction to Planetary Geomorphology_ by Ronald Greeley (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Nearly all major planets and moons in our Solar System have been visited by spacecraft and the data they have returned has revealed the incredible diversity of planetary surfaces. Featuring a wealth of images, this textbook explores the geological evolution of the planets and moons. Introductory chapters discuss how information gathered from spacecraft is used to unravel the geological complexities of our Solar System. Subsequent chapters focus on current understandings of planetary systems. The textbook shows how planetary images and remote sensing data are analyzed through the application of fundamental geological principles. It draws on results from spacecraft sent throughout the Solar System by NASA and other space agencies. Aimed at undergraduate students in planetary geology, geoscience, astronomy and solar system science, it highlights the differences and similarities of the surfaces at a level that can be readily understood by non-specialists.

2. _The Phonological Mind_ by Iris Berent (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
"Humans instinctively form words by weaving patterns of meaningless speech elements. Moreover, we do so in specific, regular ways. We contrast dogs and gods, favour blogs to lbogs. We begin forming sound-patterns at birth and, like songbirds, we do so spontaneously, even in the absence of an adult model. We even impose these phonological patterns on invented cultural technologies such as reading and writing. But why are humans compelled to generate phonological patterns? And why do different phonological systems - signed and spoken - share aspects of their design? Drawing on findings from a broad range of disciplines including linguistics, experimental psychology, neuroscience and comparative animal studies, Iris Berent explores these questions and proposes a new hypothesis about the architecture of the phonological mind"--