things twice

I’ve always maintained that Tangled Up in Blue or Brownsville Girl is Dylan’s greatest song. Well, I’ve been wrong, an I’ve known it all the time — I’ve just not been able to shake off the social pressure that his best song just had to be something from Blood on the Tracks, wildly exploiting the Dylanesque shifts of perspective, storylines, and pronouns, or the greatest epic since Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

But of course: it has to be a seemingly simple song, loaded with one-liners, a song which floats on a light, humorous mood all the way to the end, where everything is suddenly turned upside down — not in any way discarding what has …

Most of my posts begin “it’s been a while”, it seems, and so does this one. This time, it’s been a self-imposed silence, because I’ve been busy finishing a book on lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — perhaps not your cup of tea, but it’s what I do for a living.

Anyway, my real book is coming along as well — my collected writings about Dylan and his music — and I’ve wrapped up another article, this time an extended translation of the article I wrote for the Norwegian philosophical journal Agora last spring. It’s a survey of some traits of Dylan’s musical carreer, seen as a pulse of phases of appropriation, internalization, and moving on, …

Some years ago, I got an email which surprised me, to say the least. It bore the title “Dylan with no harp!”, probably in response to something I had written about that, and was from a certain César Díaz. Not something that happens every day, to be sure, that I’m contacted by one of Dylan’s former guitar players.

He wrote:
When I was his tech before I joined the band, I always made sure that there would be plenty of harmonicas for him to use, in minor keys, sharps and flats — you name it I had it.

After I left to have my liver transplant, the new tech never bothered to ask me how I handled Bob. Consequently he began giving Bob …

When I first heard about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project I thought, “Dream on. Nice idea, perhaps a tad imperialistic despite its good intentions, but more than a tad unrealistic — it’ll never happen anyway, so not to worry. Nice dream, but dream on.”

The idea was this: a laptop, designed to be simple, rough, directly usable, under any conditions, even in areas with no reliable power supply, and so cheap that it could be sold in underdeveloped countries and finally let them in on the digital revolution, and powerful enough not to be simply a toy. The precondition was that enough orders were placed, so initially 1 million laptops per order (i.e. per country) was the …

or

Myanmar and The Fine Art of Political Correctnessing

What do you call that country in South East Asia where the streets are filled with monks in red, protesting 45 years of military rule?

Do you call it “Burma” and reveal yourself as a post-colonial, pseudo-imperialist aggressor who deep down thinks that it would have been better if the Brits had been allowed to stay in power, but since they weren’t, the least we can do is use their name: “Burma” it is.

Or do you say “Myanmar”, to demonstrate your respect for the peoples of the world, acknowledging that naming something is to exert power over it, and that it should be every people’s right to be their own “Adams” …

I use KDE, the most usable Linux desktop environment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I love KDE, but I couldn’t live without it either.

Except on those certain days, that is. When I want to look up something in a help file. This is one of those days.

Frankly, and no offense, but the help system in KDE is disastrous. I should have known by now — I’ve virtually stopped even considering pressing Shift-F1 a long time ago. Mainly because it annoys me no end.

(Edit: In fact, it’s so long ago that I’d forgotten it’s ctrl-F1. Shift happens, as they say.)

I will pass lightly over the fact that many programs don’t have proper documentation. Disclaimers such as “under …

Can you tell me what is strange with this picture, which shows the browsers that have been used to view the pages on this site during the three days since I moved?

If you say: “That Firefox has almost 50%, and more than IE”, you’re part right. On the other hand: it is not surprising, is it? After all my plugging for it here, one would really have to be a n00b to use IE, right?

It is not either that “Lynx” is represented, with a whopping 0.6%. Lynx is a text-based browser, quintessentially retro, which is fine for a site like this one and great …

“Well I really wasn’t such a Johnny Ace fan,
But I felt bad all the same”

I don’t think any death in the classical world could have touched me as much as this one, without there being any specific reason for being touched, since I wasn’t really into this particular kind of popular hawling of opera into the marketplace. Strange.

Perhaps it’s just that he was a great singer with an obvious presence and something as old-fashioned as love for what he was doing.

Damn, he’s gone now. I miss him already.

Luciano Pavarotti, 1935–2007