shadows of echoes of memories of songs

Never even heard of your recommendations, so thank you -- that means they're things I mightn't've found otherwise!

B1 Are you a goth?

Noooo! No no no! Not a bit! The anti-goth, that's me.

2 No, really, are you a goth?

No! We-ell...

3 Be honest now, you're a goth, aren't you?

Okay maybe just a little bit (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~janetmck/goth.html).

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publicansdecoy.livejournal.com

If you haven't read Arthur Goldne's Memoirs Of A Geisha it might make sense to read that before Geisha of Gion.

-x-

From:

taimatsu

Why do you say that? I read Golden's novel before I read any autobiography or non-fiction about geisha (and I've now read an awful lot), and in retrospect it seems... just a bit fake. I'd recommend Liza Dalby's 'Geisha' or anything by Mineko Iwasaki over Golden.

From:

publicansdecoy.livejournal.com

Geisha of Gion presupposes reade rknowledge of a lot of things to do with Geisha, I think. Arthur Golden's book explains things much more clearly, which is why I was glad I read that one first.

-x-

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

Okay maybe just a little bit.

oooh, pretty.

*hug*

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saraphale.livejournal.com

I can only think of a book, I'm afraid: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

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Ah-ha! Thank you. Various people have recommended me this in the past, & now it's approaching critical recommendation mass, which means I will probably get round to reading it soon. :-)

From:

taimatsu

Yes! I just read it recently and really enjoyed it :)

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

I thought it was entertaining, and sometimes very clever, but it is Really Silly. No, sillier than that. And while the first one is amusing, by the time you get to the third, it's either fun because it's a retreat to comfortable same sort of silliness, or it's no fun. Annoying avoidance of major ongoing plot issues, and also, while his various silly notions are fun in and of themselves, they don't really work so well tied together into a world-background. [ As opposed to, oh frex, Aberystwyth Mon Amour, which is very funny in some similarly surreal ways but holds together much better ]

The litmus test seems to be, if you like the idea of Richard III being given the Rocky Horror audience participation treatment, you'll like Fforde. [ "When is the winter of our discontent ?" ]

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As opposed to, oh frex, Aberystwyth Mon Amour, which is very funny in some similarly surreal ways but holds together much better

Now there's a book that I've recently read and enjoyed very much. Completely potty but great fun, especially the running gags about Swansea. Has Malcolm Pryce written anything else?

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rysmiel.livejournal.com

There is a sequel, called Last Tango in Aberystwyth, which I did not buy this summer as it was only out in yuppieback, but will get when it's in reasonable-sized paperback. Other than that I know of nothing.

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marnameow.livejournal.com

[A]1 Happiness
[A]2 Re-read the entire Daphne du Maurier big pile 'o' books!
[A]3 General Khaki! (i am turning into Sean, see?)

[B]1 As you were having your *horrible* morning, did you not take refuge in the fact that you could turn it into an excellent lj rant?
[B]2 Could I keep sheep on my balcony, do you reckon? Little shetlands, for the wool for spinning with.
[B]3 Who's your favourite fictional cat?

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As you were having your *horrible* morning, did you not take refuge in the fact that you could turn it into an excellent lj rant?

Och it wasn't that horrible really, apart from the stupid woman in the car, that sort of thing always makes me feel icky and angry. But yeah, the thing that keeps me sane when people are being STUPID around me is the fact that I'm turning it into narrative & dialogue in my head as I go along.

Could I keep sheep on my balcony, do you reckon? Little shetlands, for the wool for spinning with.

Yeah! No problem! That would rock! ... Oh, wait, what would they eat?

Who's your favourite fictional cat?

Faithful, the kitten in Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness books. He's a little black kitten with violet eyes who kind of looks after Alanna on the Goddess's behalf. Read Tamora Pierce! She rocks! At least, if you like reading about girls doing Great Deeds, and magic, and stuff. :-)

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barrysarll.livejournal.com

1. Unless I am certain people have seen it, I always say A Matter of Life and Death.
2. Mademoiselle de Maupin - Theophile Gautier
3. Hawksley Workman!

1. Has Cambridge gained any good new shops to replace all the fine ones it lost?
2. If you moved to London where would you want to live?
3. Jamie Cullum - why?

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I haven't seen A Matter of Life and Death. In fact I haven't even heard of any of your recommendations. Ace! New stuff!

Has Cambridge gained any good new shops to replace all the fine ones it lost?

Um... what did it lose? I've only been here for 4 years. It still has lots of ace cool charity shops on Burleigh Street. :-) And there's Fopp, which is the best record shop EVAH, but they have those everywhere. Well, lots of places.

If you moved to London where would you want to live?

Camden! (Where could I afford to live, now, that's another question.) I dunno really... Greenwich seems pretty damn cool from what I've seen of it so far. But then lots of my friends live in Bermondsey, & that seems like a decent place too. If I was living in London but still commuting to Cambridge, it'd have to be North London somewhere, though...

Everywhere! I want to live everywhere!

Jamie Cullum - why?

Is he the one who did the cover of 'High & Dry'? If so, I suspect the answer to "Why?" is "Because R2 promoted him lots and lots". See also Lucie Silvas (who is boring, but 'What You're Made Of' was so totally the right song at the right time for me); Katie Melua (who I sort of sneakingly like even though she is quite bland, but don't tell anyone); Juliet Turner (who is fucking brilliant); Beth Nielsen Chapman (who I thought I liked, but really I only like the one song of hers, "I find your love"); and lots of other female singer-songwriters. Maybe Jamie Cullum is actually a gurl?

From:

addedentry.livejournal.com

Everywhere! I want to live everywhere!

It's not where you're from, it's where's your hat.

Hawksley Workman rocks. Traditionally and unashamedly. I convinced

verlaine to come to his last London gig in a comment, and I hope to convince you of his merits later.

From:

barrysarll.livejournal.com

You don't even mention the one of that pack I vaguely like, Amy Winehouse! But yes, there are plenty of them and I suspect Radio 2 is indeed partly to blame. I just find Cullum especially tiresome, perhaps because he looks so simian.

Shops Cambridge has lost: Jay's, Pineapple and Unicorn were all far finer record shops than Fopp. And Galloway used to have two branches, maybe even three.

Apparently The Damned are turning on Cambridge's Christmas lights.

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Lucky old Cambridge. Here in Bradford, where the first putative snow of winter is attempting to fall, our Christmas lights are about to be switched on by G-G-Gareth Gates. I dare say the lad's fifteen minutes are up and he'll be playing East Bowling Unity Club supporting Black Lace faster than you can say "Berni Flint".

From:

k425.livejournal.com

Wogan seems to be the cause of the singers you either sneakingly like, like, or like a bit. I blame Parkinson for any of the jazz people. And I can't remember Lucie Silvas at all.

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jazz people

Jazz-lite people...

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Some of us think that having a tune is a feature where songs are concerned.

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Feh. So do I; but these people aren't jazz musicians; they just sound a bit jazzy - like Gershwin...

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Well, they might be jazz musicians. In their spare time. But who cares? FFS, "jazz" even trumps "indie" in the hierarchy of "musical genres which were clearly only invented so that people could sneer at other people".

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Sorry! For the record, I'm not sneering - I like some of that stuff. It's just that I get frustrated that stations ike Jazz FM, for one, never actualy play any jazz... The term jazz is used by marketroids because, somehow, it still has a certain sophisticated cachet attached to it. God knows why, though - it's just as anoraky as folk (and much the same connection with Real Ale drinkers).

Look, I don't really care for labels on music, but if you are going to use them, they ought to mean something...

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Jazz is NOT anoraky! Unless, of course, you mean bad trad a la Acker Bilk, which is music that came born in a snorkel parka, with a pint of Ramsden's Old Rotgut in its baby bottle.

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Jazz is NOT anoraky!

Uh, yeah, and that's why people don't quote matrix numbers for Parker's Dial sessions, yes?

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'46 or '47 Dial sessions?

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Bad man!

(I own the domain jazz-police.org.uk, you know...)

From:

bopeepsheep.livejournal.com

A1 Riding In Cars With Boys
A2 The Queen's Fool, Philippa Gregory
A3 Electric Warrior, T.Rex
B1 Have you made any nice cakes lately?
B2 What's the worst thing about your job? (Not the coffee, one of your 'job description' tasks.)
B3 Are you allergic to anything?

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Don't know the film recommendation, but then I'm film-illiterate. :-) I think I've got another Philippa Gregory around somewhere, but can't remember which one... it may even be that one. It's something I keep meaning to read, anyway, or at least it keeps popping up to the top of the physical to-read piles (which don't always line up with the mental to-read piles, actually). Oh, and I like T.Rex but don't know that one specifically.

B1. I made a good ginger-enhanced version of the standard fruitcaaaaaake allbran cake thing for our not-really-hallowe'en-party. With ginger beer as the liquid, and lots of proper crystallised ginger in with the fruit. I only realised today that there's actually some left!

sion_a hid it in a tin. :-)

B2. Dealing with STUPID PEOPLE! No, actually, I quite enjoy the challenge, for all I whinge about it. ... I like it all, really, even the bits I complain about. :-) The Reporter is probably the most pointless bit, and the bit that reminds me the most of the stuff I got stuck doing at ProQuest, but it's only once a week or so, & it is something that people actually use so it doesn't feel like a complete waste of time. The worst bit for me really is that I know I could make more of the job as a whole, I could develop it & do more stuff & revolutionise the website ... but I'm too lazy.

OTOH they're running the Perl course again next year so I think I will brush up my geeking & try to do some more stuff in that direction. Not really quite what I want to do but I think in this job it could be fun.

B3. I used to be allergic to dairy, but I'm not any more, otherwise I'd be ill ALL THE TIME. I do seem to be allergic to nickel or whatever it is that's in cheap nasty earrings, because they make my skin come up in horrible rashes; does that count as an allergy? It's a real pain, whatever it is, because I have fancy goth collars that I can't wear any more because the metal makes my neck all swollen and itchy.

From:

k425.livejournal.com

B3 - if you get a rash it's either an allergy or a sensitivity. Apparently painting clear nail varnish on the metal helps, but I don't know if you fancy doing that with your collars.

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I've done the clear nailvarnish thing with one of them & it helped for a while but I think the nailvarnish has worn off now. I also glued a patch of soft leather over the studs on the other one (it's a leather collar, and the backs of the studs were bringing my neck up in very specific spots of rash, which was one of the things that convinced me it was the metal that was giving me the rash). I only started getting this allergy/sensitivity after wearing a chain-type-thing for ages which was made of really cheap metal ... I wonder if there's any way I can un-sensitize it again?

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k425.livejournal.com

I'm not sure that you can desensitize, but IANADermatologist! I've never managed it for sticking plaster, put it that way!

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ok...

[A] 1. An absolutely beautiful and well gothic Czech film called Valerie a týden divů which translates as "Valerie and her Week Of Wonders" and is available via redemption. You, being a goff of great brain and aesthetics, would love it.

2. The boy Coe has done it again with The Closed Circle, but you really do have to read The Rotters' Club first to make sense of it.

3. You absolutely positively need some Godspeed You Black Emperor.

[B] 1. Have you got OS X on a CD-R?

2. Which do you prefer? Malt whisky or vodka?

3. Where did you learn to write as well as you do?

[C] Thanks, but no thanks; if I and others do, my LJ friends list will be CAKE-d in memeage between now and breakfast time.

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A1. The Czech film sounds cool... but would a film-illiterate like me 'get' it?
A2. I've read House of Sleep and What a Carve Up! -- will get round to all the others eventually!
A3. Ah!

acronym talks about them. Two recommendations from cool people is close enough to critical mass for music, because I can listen to it while I do other stuff (books require more recommendations to bump them up into the waiting list).

B1. Um... only a VERY old version. Like, 10.1 or something. I could probably get a copy that fell off the back of a multimedia lab if you wanted one... ;)

B2. To drink on its own, whisky. Though a really good vodka would probably beat a bog-standard malt. If I want to drink lots of whatever it is, though, you can't mix a malt, so it'd have to be the vodka. I drank so much really shit vodka as a student though that I'm quite picky about the stuff now.

B3. (*blush*!) I guess I learned by reading a lot, and by writing all the time. I wrote lots of 'stories' as a small child (which were probably utter rubbish, of course). As a teenager I kept a diary (page-a-day -- first A5, then A4 because I was adding so many supplementary pages in -- for several years) and a seekrit journal as well; I wrote poetry in my science lessons, I wanted to write A Novel and used to write the sort of prose that these days I'd put on LJ. (I might put some of what I wrote then on LJ, actually, just for the hell of it.) I've always done writing-heavy subjects, at school & at university; I wrote 2 essays a week for 4 years at Oxford. Not the same thing, really, but it all helps to refine the process of finding the right word for the, for the wassname. :-)

C. No probs.

From:

juliet

Godspeed are ace, & would get recommendations from

dogrando & myself, as well. If that helps with critical-mass :-)

From:

rbarclay.livejournal.com

A:
Great Balls of Fire (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097457/)
The New Sufferings of Young W. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826409520/qid=1100729268/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/026-2334761-4755662) (although I don't know if the translation is any good)
These 5 Down (http://lyrics.duble.com/T/these5downlyrics/these5downlyrics.htm) (mp3s a/v on request, I don't think they're actually carried anywhere any longer)

B:
1: Why do you want me to ask you questions?
2: I'm bored of questions, what else do you have oin store to entertain me?
3: Could you ask yourself a sensible questions for me?

C: dunno

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The lyrics link for 'These 5 Down' doesn't seem to work... mp3s would be cool if it's no hassle, otherwise I'll add them to the list of bands to look out for. Not heard of any of your recommendations in fact... either all my friends are really eclectic, or I'm just not very well-read/listened/watched/whatever. :-)

B1. I don't especially really, I was just bored so I thought I'd chuck the meme at my flist & see what happened. :)
B2. Um... invisible badgers! Look! Dancing, over there!
B3. I'll try to think of something. Though I suppose all my LJ is just answering questions that people may not have asked yet.

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Oh, no, wait, the link does work! What didn't work was the popup that looked like it was the actual link. Gah. Sometimes I hate teh interweb, y'know..

[looks at lyrics]

Yikes, they look very Christian. The music would have to be damned good (no pun intended) to persuade me to like something with that much God in it. ... I'm not actually as anti-God or even anti-Christian as that makes me sound, honest. It's just ... associations. Y'know? *waves hands incoherently*

From:

rbarclay.livejournal.com

I'm no Believer in anything (other than human stupidity) either, but the music is good IMHO.

This, and the other stuff, I mainly picked because I figured you'd probably wouldn't have heard/seen it already ;)

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[A]
1. The Big Sleep
2. Keigo Higashino: Naoko
3. Joe Gallant & Illuminati: "Terrapin"

[B]
1. If not now,when?
2. If not you, who?
3. If not here, where?

[C]
Done.

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Is "Naoko" the thing you were reading when you were at ours for the party? If so, it looked interesting. Don't know "Terrapin" (though it rings a bell so maybe you've recommended it before?), have seen "The Big Sleep" & it is indeed excellent.

B1. "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."
B2. Another girl...
B3. ... another planet.

I'm afraid I'm just filling in the blanks with other people's words here; I don't know the answers to your questions. :-(

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