The blog
Writing & notes
Essays, notes and reflections on technology, law and life.
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Anton Webern: Complete Works, Opp. 1-31
This collection presents all Webern’s works with opus numbers in chronological order, allowing listeners to scrutinize the inner workings of this influential composer’s intense, compressed style from the lush Passacaglia to the starkness of his late vocal works. A broadcast recording of Webern conducting a group of Schubert Dances makes a lively bonus. –Jed Distler Read more →
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Schubert: String Quintet in C, D. 956
When not composing songs, Franz Schubert was most at home with chamber music, not because he was a miniaturist, but because his most profound thoughts were most readily contained by smaller, more concentrated ensembles. His Quintet in C–by far the great work ever written for a string quartet with an extra cello–shows him at his… Read more →
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The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw’s daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling… Read more →
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The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)
In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves — including one Jack Shaftoe, aka King of the Vagabonds, aka Half-Cocked Jack — devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues — a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver … nay, gold … nay, legendary gold. In… Read more →
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Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
In Quicksilver, the first volume of the “Baroque Cycle,” Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch’s message conveys, is key to resolving an… Read more →
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The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)
England, 1714. London has long been home to a secret war between the brilliant, enigmatic Master of the Mint and closet alchemist, Isaac Newton, and his archnemesis, the insidious counterfeiter Jack the Coiner. Hostilities are suddenly moving to a new and more volatile level as Half-Cocked Jack hatches a daring plan, aiming for the total… Read more →
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Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I – Swann’s Way & Within a Budding Grove (Vintage)
Marcel Proust whiled away the first half of his life as a self-conscious aesthete and social climber. The second half he spent in the creation of the mighty roman-fleuve that is Remembrance of Things Past, memorializing his own dandyism and parvenu hijinks even as he revealed their essential hollowness. Proust begins, of course, at the… Read more →
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, providing an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is… Read more →