Jeroen's Repository

Thoughts on McEwan's "The Comfort of Strangers"

The Comfort of Strangers is McEwan's sophomore novel (or novella if you prefer) and it shows; in positive and negative ways. This isn't a proper review, but rather a few observations on this story and the writing of McEwan.

When I wrote about On Chesil Beach a couple of months I mentioned the "two wonderfully crafted characters and the peculiar realtionship that they engage in" as one of its premiere qualities. There's no doubt in my mind that McEwan is a master in describing relationships between people. He manages to maintain their identity, but also how the relationship can confine their identity.

In The Comfort of Strangers the relationship between Mary and Colin is perhaps not as exquisite as in On Chesil Beach, but is once again interesting and engaging. To me it is clear that The Comfort of Strangers is very noticeably an early work of the author. Some of the writing is heavy-handed. Some of the foreshadowing is clumsy and the counterparts of Mary and Colin, Robert and Caroline, are at times grotesque but also somewhat flat. It's an uneven work but it does show glimpses of the brilliance that is yet to come.
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Now playing: The Jayhawks - Tampa To Tulsa
via FoxyTunes   

Amazing?

Was reading the latest issue of Edge (best videogame magazine in the world), and came across this quote by Don Mattrick who is the senior VP of Microsoft's entertainment division:

A recent study showed that that 18-26-year-olds are roughly spending 75 hours a week with our box [Xbox 360], which is pretty amazing.

I'll grant that this is, in a way, pretty amazing. It's also pretty pathetic. Don't these people have anything else to do? A week has 168 hours and people sleep about 6.5 hours a night on average. So subtract those hours from the total hours in a week and you're left with 47.5 hours. That's 6.8 hours a day in which you're not gaming or sleeping. Don't get me wrong I love me some videogames, but that's just outrageous.

Quick Picks: Zenbe

Zenbe is a neat web application for the the web user who wants to keep track of all his stuff. What kind of stuff? For starters it can aggregate your various e-mail accounts and it has calendars and to-do lists. There's also a sidebar which houses the aforementioned lists, your address book, Facebook updates, and the latest tweets from the people you're following. Of course you can update your own status on Facebook and Twitter there as well. Zenbe has file storage so you can backup your important documents and photos, as well as sharing them with friends. I didn't even mention the "Zenpages". You can create these Zenpages to keep all your stuff related to certain projects or subjects and share these with friend or colleagues.

Zenbe does a lot of things and does it well, but its most significant achievement is that it does so in an exquisitely designed package. There may be a lot of clutter in your digital life, but you don't experience it as such when you put it all in Zenbe (Very Zen). Zenbe is free as in beer, so there's really no reason not to try it.

PS: Yes I do know I sound like I work for Zenbe's marketing department, but I really like the app.
PPS: If you have an iPhone or iPod touch with the 2.0 software you might also want to check out their Zenbe Lists app.

Things to do during my ridiculously long summer holiday

 

• Dealing with the backlog on the to-read list. Just finished: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon. Currently reading: Atonement, Ian McEwan. Up next: Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh.
• Write about said books here.
• Finish Metal Gear Solid 4. I'm in Act 2 right now and enjoying it so far.
• Sleep.
• Finding out what's left of my social life.
• Sleep some more.
• Find an appartment.
• Reading up on new trends and developments in language pedagogy.
• Do some landscape photography.
• Organize my bookshelves.
• Visiting a bunch of museums.
• Cathing up on some of the movies I've missed.
• Add to the Blu-Ray/DVD-collection (see previous bullet point).
• Blog!

   

Tilly and the Wall - Pot Kettle Black

Bo Diddley Passes Away, 1928-2008

BBC:

With his trademark "hambone" rhythm that characterised so many of his songs and was adopted by Buddy Holly on Not Fade Away, Bruce Springsteen on She's the One and The Who on Magic Bus, Bo Diddley was a lasting influence on rhythm and blues. "I play the guitar like I'm playin' the drums", he once said.

The New .Mac: Portable Identity?

Speculation abounds about the possible rebranding of Apple's .Mac (pronounced "dot mac") service as "Mobile Me". Wired's Gadget Lab has an interesting entry up about what this might mean for the iPhone:

Back to My Mac lets you access your home Mac from anywhere on the internet. The routing is all handled by Apple, so you never have to worry about firewalls or IP addresses (when it works, that is). Imagine, though, having full access to your music, movies and files from your iPhone. That would effectively turn it from a 16GB handheld computer into a handheld computer the size of, well, your Mac’s hard drive.

I think this is an idea with a lot of potential. What if you could carry an iPhone, or an iPod for that matter, and use it as a password protected dongle for your virtual identity? Imagine connecting your Mobile Me device to a Mac (any Mac), logging in and being able to use that Mac as if it was your computer. That would be a killer application for any kind of remote work. Of course, it's all speculation for now and we'll likely know more next week after the Jobs keynote at WWDC. WWDC is an event intended for developers, so making an announcement there makes it likely that developers will be able to exploit this funtionality in their own apps. That might lead to some interesting new uses for the .Mac service. I do hope that if they're going to revamp the service they'll also change the rather exorbitant price point.

Death Cab For Cutie - I Will Possess Your Heart (Live @ Letterman)

Energetic live version of one of my fave tracks on Narrow Stairs.

Heavy Rotation: What I'm listening

I thought I'd offer some notes on what has been in heavy rotation on the iTunes lately.

The Bird and the Bee - The Bird and the Bee: I discovered this band through this fan-made video for the song "Again & Again". I instantly fell in love with the song and a couple of minutes later I was downloading the album from iTunes. Really infectious electro-pop.

Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs: I'm still not sure what to really think of the latest Death Cab. I keep comparing it to Plans which is clearly the superior album. I don't know if that's really fair; Narrow Stairs is a fine record in its own right, but a Death Cab may perhaps suffer from unreasonable expectations.

links for 2008-05-15

• Edwards endorses Obama, praises Clinton - CNN.com
  About time...
  (tags: politics)