Conrad Blog:

Testimony Again

I finally got to the library today. Here's the list:

2 books on DHTML... they kinda suck, whatever.
Shostakovich's Testimony
Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration - if I want to be phil spector, this is required reading.
Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones including the Garden of Forking Paths.
Elgar's Enigma Variations which is almost certainly the most beautiful music ever to come out of Britain.
Beethoven's Triple Concerto
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (with libretto)
Penderecki: Violin Sonatas 1 and 2. Some random 20th C composer, but he's Jonny Greenwood's all time fav so... i must know.
Charlie Parker: the birth of bebop
Miles and Monk at Newport.

Oh and the Naxos classical label kicks.... donkeybrains.

Well here's an excerpt from Testimony (p. 121 in my Harper and Row 1979 edition) to mull over before you fall asleep:

"How did people behave then? As soon as the next poor soul was declared an enemy of the people, everyone destroyed in a panic everything connected with that person. If the enemy of the people wrote books, they threw away his books, if they had letters from him, they burned the letters. The mind can't grasp the number of letters and papers burned in that period, no war could ever clean out domestic archives like that. And naturally, photographs flew into the flames first, because if someone informed on you, reported that you had a picture of an enemy of the people, it meant certain death."

Why can't I find my copy of 1984???