Composing

From the Observer Music Monthly article by Paul Morley on studying composing:

"I waited to see what difference it would make to me as a writer, as a listener, as I got used to the idea of bars, and how you fill bars with the notes and, indeed, lack of notes that you definitely desired, and let the bars dissolve, and how you structured a piece so that it didn't seem like an arbitrary collection of sounds but a considered piece that accurately reflected not understanding of technique but the mystery of thought and the strange fluctuations of feeling. A change did start to happen. I began hearing music in a new way; it was as though the music expanded into and beyond itself, and with my favourite music, my listening to the music as pure abstract sensation formed in distant, unknown ways merged with appreciating how it existed as the result of a calculated but uninhibited series of spontaneous, experienced and surprising decisions that both accepted the limitations of arbitrarily arranged rules and strived to stretch outside them."

Content of religion

From review of Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England in the LRB of 23.7.09 by Eamon Duffy:

"The sterner kinds of Christian preacher and ascetic had indeed a perennial tendency to present Christianity as largely otherworldly, to see this world as nothing but a vale of tears. But that has never been the whole content of Christianity, or indeed of any other religion. For most of its adherents, most of the time, Christianity has been just as importantly a 'road to fulfilment', a motive for hopefulness about the world, and a call to the love of God and neighbour."

July 7th

From The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy, which I've just finished

"...that Australian girl got his goat first thing this morning...she'd infuriated Robert no end...looking at the front page of Robert's newspaper, saying how scary she found all this terrorist stuff. Robert told her London had lived with terrorism for years, floods, riots, bombs, the lot. It wasn't news...
'Of course it was terrible for the people actually hurt, the bombs here...But how many did that actually affect? In their day to day life? The families, friends or injured, I grant you, but not everyone, not really. Look, after those bombs up in town, half my bloody customers were in here, carrying on about how it was all different now, but at the end of the same time they were picking up nice clean clothes for a do somewhere, or a job interview, and getting on with it all just the same. If it was true that everything had changed, they wouldn't be haring off for a fancy weekend away, would they? They would have been as changed as they said they were...
'And then you get some kid...going on about someone else's grief as if it's her own, but it isn't. She's stealing other people's grief. Like there's not enough to go around.'

Principles of good design

Visibility - user can tell what state the device is in and the alternatives for action

A good conceptual model - designer provides a good conceptual model for the user with consistency in presentation of operations and results and a coherent, consistent system image

Good mappings - it's possible to determine the relationships between actions and results, between the controls and their effects, and between the system state and what is visible

Feedback - use receives full and continuous feedback about the result of actions

From The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.

Patriarchy?

From this week's LRB:

"...men, to a remarkable degree, seem to have internalised those norms, playing at a 'dominant' role that forced them to do pretty much what their wives wanted.

"'Cecil explains that..back then 'the man was always the governor', while his wife agrees and then interjects, seemingly out of nowhere: "Pardon me, but piffle'".

From review by "Going up to heaven" review by Susan Pedersen.

Pics from the Ots

Pics of Third sector minister Kevin Brennan performing with Cabinet Office civil servants for red nose day, and view from Admiralty Arch during the snow earlier this year.

How to make anything

"First , get a clear notion of what you desire to accomplish, and then in all probability you will succeed in doing it...Keep a sharp look-out upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without; put to yourself the question, 'What business has it to be there?' Avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible."

(Henry Maudslay (1771-1831), engineer and entrepreneur, quoted in James Hamilton's London Lights from James Nasmyth - Engineer: an Autobiography edited by Samuel Smiles.)

Understanding-economy-simplicity: how to go about approaching anything.