I just finished reading a collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and short stories. I was already acquainted with Poe’s poem “The Raven” and his short story “The Pit and The Pendulum”. “The Raven” I have always liked for its brilliant rhythm and pace as well as its fascinating insights into the mental state of the main character. I came across “TPATP” in the introduction to an Historical work I was reading on the Spanish Inquisition and it has long been a favorite of mine especially Poe’s descriptive work.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I did not rate his most famous piece “The Fall of the House of Usher” as highly as some of the other collected works. To be true it is a beautiful and haunting descriptive work but I felt unable to engage sufficiently with the characters.
I was pleasantly surprised however to find that Poe had in essence invented Sherlock Holmes before Arthur Conan Doyle in his recurring character Dupin. There is a series of 3 stories containing this character of which the title of this post is one and which I thought was a thrilling engaging read written in a radically different style to what I expected. “The Purloined Letter” the 3rd in the trilogy was my 2nd favorite and I think is the first example in literary work of what we would now understand as a detective story.
I have glossed over Poe’s poetical works in this short critique because I do not feel adequately equipped in literary terms to do more than say which I like and which I don’t. However they are well worth the time to read through as they all have at least some merit to them.
In my world of tech this week I have managed to do quite a bit. I have a twitter account which is highly addictive and potentially might be causing some mental instability (see the feed to the right for numerous examples).
I have redone my desktop to make it cleaner and more efficient and set up a flickr account to post photos of said innovations so that if I want to return to them I have a record and also so that people can actually see them properly.
I have added to said desktop a program called Launchy which I would highly recommend if like me you prefer to use a keyboard to clicking through a ton of stuff with your mouse. Also in the same vein I have added Ubiquity for Firefox which is brilliant and also customizable so that i can now browse for and post stuff quicker and therefore kill off my desire to procrastinate quicker.
Also if you are like me a torrent addict you might want to check out this article. It’s a very useful way of being able to torrent download without using company equipment to do so. I managed to get it working first go so I would count this as very simple to set up.
In film land I have not got around to watching The Departed yet because I haven’t really had a spare 150mins plus to sit down and watch a film. I have watched movies but they have all been in the under 2 hours bracket recently. A lot of James Bond going on recently because Gemma hasn’t seen any of the old ones so I am educating her in why Sean Connery was the best. Having said that I thought Christopher Lee was the best bond villain and that was in a Rodger Moore film.
Also I have recently discovered this site which is well worth signing up to if like me you have watched most obvious mainstream movies you would like and are after finding something that you might not think of. These guys are the same ones who power Netflix’s search engine but the advantage here is that you don’t have to sign up for a Netflix account to get the recommendations. As a result currently on my list for getting hold of are Kontrol, Re-animator and King of the Ants. All slightly freaky and left field so we shall see if the movie matchmaker lives up to expectations later on.
Music:
As threatened to various people I am adding in a video of one of my own songs this week. I apologise in advance for the poor quality of the recording but I think it gets across the idea of what I was trying to achieve with the piece.
I call this one “Under Dark Waters”
Thx for the w/b. I know its been too long, was lacking inspiration I suppose. But n e way. Nice work with the guitar bro. Did you write the whole piece? If so, what program are you using for production? I've been using fruityloops for a few years now but am a bit bashful when it comes to recording my own guitar stuff.
ReplyDeleteI use a program called Guitar Pro to write most of my songs. I am not very good at writing in standard notation so it lets me write all the parts for keyboard etc. in tab form as if it were a guitar.
ReplyDeleteIt takes me forever before I am happy with a piece which is why they never get recorded usually!