Okay - Either It's Recommended Or It's Not

LibraryThing is one of my favorite sites on the Internets, but as of late their automatic recommendations feature has been driving me crazy. This is how it works: LibraryThing lets you catalogue all your books (up to 200 titles that is - if you want to catalogue more, there's a nominal annual fee) and then helps you find people that are interested in the same authors as you, gives you recommendations on what to read next (usually much more accurately than say, Amazon, unless of course you rate your whole library there), allows you to check the contents of your library from anything that has an Internets connection, including your mobile phone (a feature that would be quite helpful to me if I, in fact, owned a mobile phone), and so on and so forth. Basically, it's social networking for book geeks, and it's about goddamn time somebody thought of it, I say.

So the deal with the recommendations is this - you catalogue all (or most) (or some) of your books, and LibraryThing gives you back a big-ass (like 1,000 titles) list of recommended books that aren't already in your library. It's usually pretty accurate - for example, LT has recommended titles by authors like Salinger, Golding, and Bradbury, all of whom I like, and none of whom they know I've read. Having said that, there's sometimes a little systemic programming glitch that drives me crazy. To wit: every other time I log onto the site, I look down at the list of automatic recommendations and I'll see listed there, along with 2 or 3 other titles, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.


Cover courtesy Penguin Books. Cover image: Detail from Sunset, Mont Blanc by Wenzel Hablik, in the Wenzel Hablik Museum. Copyright Wenzel Hablik Museum, Itzahoe.

This is great, and I'm very flattered that LibraryThing thinks that I may be able to read the infamously difficult and ambiguous Nietzsche with something approaching comprehension, I wish they would decided whether they really want to recommend this to me our not, because the next time I log on to the site, it isn't there. I don't see it on the home page, and when I click on the link to the recommendations page, it's nowhere to be found; but then I log on again a couple of days later and it's back. A couple of days later, it's gone again. A couple of days later... you get the idea.

The fascinating thing to me is I'm now much more interested in reading this book than I would be if it had just come up as a recommendation and stayed there. But I still wanna know... what's the deal, LT? Am I worthy of reading Nietzsche or not? I guess I'll have to take the plunge and find out for myself.

Django Reinhardt

Here's the deal: I am totally not impressed by other guitar players. With the exception of Stanley Jordan, Robert Johnson, Jerry Garcia, and perhaps 2 or 3 others that I'm can't remember right now, it's really unusual for me to sit up and take notice of a guitarist; I've been playing myself for over a quarter of a century, and while I don't consider myself particularly great at it, I know too much about the mechanics of the instrument to be really blown away by anyone who isn't a player of really exceptional passion, technique, and/or imagination. What I'm attempting to get at is this - when I tell you that a guitar player knocked me out of my chair, I'm talking about something that has happened (maybe) a dozen times in my life.

Such was the case yesterday when I was surfing around YouTube and I saw some performance footage of jazz great Django Reinhardt for the first time.

There I was, sitting in our living room with my 4 year old daughter, playing with our new laptop while she was watching cartoons, watching mostly classic rock-type videos when I got a sudden random urge to see if they had any Django footage. I had heard his records on several different occasions and had heard the amazing story of how he had badly injured two of his left-hand fingers in a fire and still managed to play, but I realized I had never seen the man play. I did a quick search, found this video, got to about the 2:50 mark on the clip (where he plays a particularly blinding run during his solo), and literally started YELLING (much to my daughter's chagrin), "WHAT?!? WHAT?!?"




I mean, is that one of the most amazing things (and humbling) you've ever seen in your life or what? If that doesn't inspire you, I guess I don't know what will.

Rock Improvisation - Links And Examples

As is often the case now in the Age of the Internets, I'll get an idea for a post, do a quick Google search on the topic, and find an article where someone has said everything (or almost everything) I wanna say about it. So anyway, here's a link to the article (on, in this case, improvisation in rock music), from the excellent Perfect Sound Forever website:

Improvisation?

I also found some useful information from the following text; I of course take exception to the characterization of the Grateful Dead's improvisations as "ponderous", but I gotta give some respect to any author that's able to discuss the Dead, John Coltrane, and Black Flag in the space of two pages and say something significant about each one.

From "The Path to Freedom" in Free Jazz and Free Improvisation by Todd S. Jenkins

For those of you who still have no idea of what the hell these guys are talking about, here's of few of my favorite examples of rock improvisation, courtesy of YouTube:









Johnny B. Goode (Live in Berkeley, CA 5/30/70) - Jimi Hendrix

Arthur & George - Julian Barnes

I was surfing around LibraryThing (one of favorite websites) and found the following book, which I was surprisingly unaware of up until now (although I have heard of Julian Barnes before):

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes - LibraryThing

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Drop me a line in the comments section if you've read it.

The Experts Pick The Best Robert E. Howard Conan Stories

Hi, folks. I've been spending the last few weeks getting re-acquainted with the work of Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and I thought it might be fun to surf around the Internets and see if I could find if there's any kind of consensus regarding what are the best of his Conan tales. Basically what I've done here compiled the selections from three main sources: the stories that John Clute selected for the Penguin Modern Classics anthology Heroes in the Wind: From Kull To Conan; the stories selected for the two Best of Robert E. Howard volumes, edited by noted REH scholar Rusty Burke; and the top five stories selected by forum posters at Conan.com, the official REH website.

Here are the results:

Stories selected for HEROES IN THE WIND: FROM KULL TO CONAN (Penguin; John Clute, ed.):
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN
RED NAILS

Stories selected for THE BEST OF ROBERT E. HOWARD VOLUME 1: CRIMSON SHADOWS and VOLUME 2: GRIM LANDS (Del Rey; Rusty Burke, ed.):
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT
RED NAILS

Top 5 REH Conan stories as selected by forum posters at Conan.com (and % of votes obtained):
1) BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER (19%)
2) HOUR OF THE DRAGON (12%)
3) RED NAILS (10%)
4) PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE (9.5%)
5) QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST (9.1%)

So the final tally is something like this -

On all 3 lists:
RED NAILS

Selected by Clute and Burke only:
TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT

Selected by Clute and posters only:
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST

Selected by Burke and posters only:
PEOPLE OF THE BLACK CIRCLE
BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER

Selected by Clute only:
A WITCH SHALL BE BORN

Selected by posters only:
HOUR OF THE DRAGON

So what do you think, Howard fans? Is this a pretty good sample of the best of REH's Conan, or is there some glaring omission that newbies should be made aware of? Let me know.

PS If you're rarin' to start reading some of these Conan yarns, most of Howard's fiction (as well as a decent chunk of his letters, poetry, essays, etc.) can be found online here.