Narciso Yepes is a ten string demon. In my uneducated opinion, he is a consummate musician of the highest order. When he plays, you can hear his amazing and absolute control over the music and his instrument in terms of technique, expression and the the wide tonal palette at his disposal. His playing is austere, sober and dignified, never lapsing into self-indulgent sentimentality or sensuousness, never giving more or less feeling than is necessary to convey the emotional content of the piece.

My favourite video is the first, where Yepes plays Recuerdos de la Alhambra, a piece by Tarrega that I loved immediately when I first heard my good friend Hunter play it more than 10 years ago. I’ve also included Romance, a piece that became popular in the 1950s.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Chaconne by J.S. Bach

Prelude – Lute Suite No.1 BWV 996 in E Minor by J.S. Bach

Romance

My friend, Sonny, has just (9 days ago, in my universe) put up a new post on the opera Carmen at his blog Opera Recordings. A place, where he writes about opera recordings up in order to archive them. In his words “You see, if I just write them down in a diary or something, then it will all just be forgotten. This way, at least someone somewhere may stumble upon my blog and gain some small information, or even pleasure, out of it.” I hope his posts will be helpful and enjoyable to someone.

Check it out here.

Here’s a teaser:

No greater contrast could there be to Victoria de los Angeles’ Carmen than Callas’. Callas manages to make Carmen a very unattractive character – cold, dour, sour. The great tragedian in Callas turns Carmen into a great tragic figure, but so turned off are you from the start that you don’t want to hear about it to the end. True, no one makes you sit up at the very first words of Carmen’s entry onto the stage the way Callas does, and no one sings the Card Song (in which Carmen realizes that her death has been foretold) with such a gripping sense of foreboding and brooding. But you just don’t buy her Habanera, about love being like a bird and so on. This Carmen has never experienced love, or passion, or even a moment’s joy anywhere in her life. This Carmen is not even interested in Don Jose, but eyes him distantly from a corner and swallows him in the course of the opera as a means to making her own pact with her destiny……

Link

Must read this.

I am now the proud owner of these books:

Torkel Franzen has passed away. Found out via Logblog. Used to read some of Franzen’s usenet postings on logic.

A logician no less than Soloman Feferman paid tribute to Franzen at the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list.

After reading Feferman’s comments on Franzen’s books, I’m adding Franzen’s books Inexhaustibility and Godel’s theorem to my wishlist. Hopefully, as with the Brothers Karamazov, it will only be a matter of time before I read and understand Godel’s incompleteness theorems.

I leave you with a link. The type of information on this page exemplifies the sort of postings from Franzen that I used to read.

It is a pleasure
When, in a book which by chance
I am perusing
I come on a character
Who is exactly like me.

So writes Tachibama Akemi his poem Solitary Pleasures.

I finished reading Colin McGinn’s The Making of A Philosopher

on 11 Aug 05 and was delighted to find out that he is a practical-phobe like me when he recounted the “traumatic and soul-destroying” ordeal of his move from the UK to the US:

Moving to the USA was a big step, not least in terms of the practical issues that had to be faced. I have never been one for practical issues, finding them at best distracting and at worst totally paralyzing. What would I do with my furniture? Did I really have to fill out all those immigration forms? What if I came and didn’t like it after all?

This passage recounting the reception of his book The Problem of Consciousness also amused me:

My ideas about consciousness started to attract interest from outside the narrowly academic philosophical world. Scientific American ran a story about consciousness in which I was feature, along with a photograph of me looking like Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs…beneath the picture I was described as a “hardcore Mysterian.” Time magazine had a cover story about conscious minds and computers, prompted by the chess match between Deep Blue and Kasparov-in which I was quoted in the same paragraph as none other than Shirley MacLaine, well-known mystic and reincarnationist. Japanese Newsweek ran its own feature in which I was photographed cradling a conical light for eerie effect. Omni ran a story too, with no special effects…I even appeared in Art Forum of all places, accompanied by a picture of the old rock band The New Mysterians, after whom my position had been named.

Reading McGinn’s intellectual autobiography also made me want to read his other books and Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. I will be posting some more passages from his book.

No need to buy books liao.

To read (in no order):

Personal Identity
Pragmatic arguments for believing in God
Revision theory of truth
Correspondance theory of truth
Coherence theory of truth
Deflationary theory of truth
Identity theory of truth
The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics (To read again. Forgot what it’s about)
Tarski on Truth: The Liar T
Paraconsistent Logic
Tarski’s Truth definitions
Hume’s Aesthetics
Aesthetic Judgement
Conditionals
Compositionality
Arthur Prior
Hilbert’s Program
Hedonism
Frege
The Problem of Evil
Death
Curry’s Paradox
Anaphora (For the longest time, I’ve been irritated that I don’t know what anaphora is)
Inconsistency without contradiction
Intensional Semantics Lecture notes by Kai von Fintel
Basic Ideas of Formal Semantics
Article on Grice
Another article on Grice by Kent Bach

People in Logical Semantics
Linguist List
Anne Troelstra
Melvin Fitting
Kai von Fintel’s Semantics Web Resources

Paul Taylor’s Practical Foundations of Mathematics
Paul Taylor’s Proofs and Types
Hans Kamp
Frank Veltman and Dick De Jongh’s Intensional Logic notes
Babara Abbott’s Formal Semantics and its recent developments
Kent Bach’s papers