Yes, I've been quiet . . . The proofs of Bogus Science have had me at my desk for long hours the past few days, and will do so for another few. So far I've read the proofs, making my marks as I've been going; I've also written the running heads for the right-hand pages. (I thought it'd be fun in this book to follow the model of some Victorian/Edwardian books of having a different header on every right-hand page, rather than just using the modern style of showing the chapter title there. Besides, the book doesn't actually have chapters . . . but that's another story.)
Still to be done: (1) the captions; (2) compiling a list of all my corrections (of which there are many, because I tinker) in a form that I can e-mail to the designer without any possibility of ambiguity; (3) the index.
Task (1) shouldn't take me more than a couple of hours, but the other two are significantly more onerous.
Quite a long while ago I acquired a complete set of the Haydn symphonies: there are 104 numbered ones plus three unnumbered items. Of course, a Haydn symphony is not quite the same as a Bruckner or Mahler symphony, nor even a Beethoven or Brahms one; still, 107 of them amounts to a fair ol' temporal tract of music, very little of it resembling anything by Jim Steinman. Yesterday afternoon I thought it might be fun to see which lasted longer: the rest of this chore/set of chores, or the Haydn symphonies. At the moment I'm on #36, which is a little more than one-third of the way through (they get shorter as they go, Haydn having obviously worked out he could get paid as much for 18 minutes as he could for 28); as yet I don't know for sure which'll finish first, the job or the symphonies.
But I'm enjoying this as a mode of working. One advantage of Haydn is that all his symphonies sound much the same. I should clarify that statement: even though some of them do sound a bit different, because more like concertos than symphonies, they all sound as if they're part of the same megasymphony. You could probably use the "shuffle" option on them and never notice the difference. In other contexts this could be irritating; when working with the symphonies as background for long, fatiguing hours, it's the other way round -- there's no "Oh, gawd, it's the effing Pastoral abloodygain" problem to cope with.
This is also making me itch to have another set of proofs. There are other consignments of music I own that'd seem ideal to serve in the same role: my complete set of the Beethoven piano sonatas, for example, or the Bartok string quartets . . . although I think I have nothing else of the same extent as the Haydn symphonies. (My pal John Clute has the complete Scarlatti keyboard works on about 1048 CDs, which of course I now covet quite a lot . . .)
On the subject of good music, on Thursday night we're going with some friends to see a Vienna Teng gig -- YAHEY!
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