Another year, another page of complete nonsense for your delight and delectation. H'mm, I've finally got some neat photos of my real office (like the one I'm actually sitting and writing this junk in), though I should stress I was just using up the film. I'm not quite sad enough to go around specially taking pictures of my office, however adorable, just to bung them up on the web. Well, not sad enough yet.
H'mm, now you can check out all those nice features I mentioned on the last page, and check I wasn't fibbing. Some of the stuff got moved on in the last year, of course, but hey, you can try and work out what's still there (or was still there when I took the photograph) if you really care.
Being utterly unoriginal and thus bereft of ideas, this page is going to look a lot like the last. This time the lists of seven (seven, of course, being a deeply significant and mystical number, not) kick off with a bunch of books that I haven't read. Let me explain. I'm a compulsive buyer of books, and so my buying tends to run ahead of my reading (helped by all the friends and family who buy me the books I want as presents thus freeing me to buy others). These are a selection that are sitting by my bed in a pile (all the bookcases are full and there's no room for any more):
Auto-da-fe, Elias Canetti.
Good Things, Jane Grigson.
The Island, Anton Checkov.
The Viceroy of Ouidah, Bruce Chatwin.
Accordian Crimes, E. Annie Proulx.
World Orders Old and New, Noam Chomsky.
Visions of Gerald, Jack Kerouac.
The biggest single improvement in my life in the past year (number two, by the way, was when they started up a place on campus where you can get reasonable coffee) was when I bought a CD player for my office. Nothing like a jolt of good music to cheer up an otherwise drab day. These are eight on heavy rotation at the moment:
Rumba Argelina, Radio Tarifa.
Second Toughest in the Infants, Underworld.
Washing Machine, Sonic Youth.
Né La Thiass, Cheikh Lo.
Burning Blue Soul, The The.
A Swingin' Affair, Dexter Gordon.
Decksanddrumsandrockandroll, Propellorheads.
Moon Safari, Air.
Some old favourites, some gratuitously recent ones. Most of them, sadly for my neighbours are best played loud...
Another view of my office, where you get to see my collection of postcards. Let's list some of them, as a clue to where I get to go to when they let me out of here.
An interior shot of the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
The hall at Osterley House.
A picture of the centre of Cologne
in 1945.
The head of a child by
Toulous-Lautrec (from the Lautrec museum in Albi).
A drawing of a Kannon from the Oriental
art museum in Budapest.
A Pollock painting from the National
Museum of Art in Washington DC.
A photograph of the Phaistos disc.
There's a mystery prize for anyone who can identify the remainder.
And now... a chance to see me sitting on top of one of the standing stones in the circle outside Daviot, just to the north-west of Aberdeen. Forgot to compensate for the background light, so it doesn't work too well as a photo, but hey, I like it. Guess where I went on my holidays.
That's all folks.
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