If you ever are in Lübeck Germany during the tourist season and can visit Marienkirche, Buxtehude’s last post, they offer free organ concerts most nights. The concerts I attended were magnificent!
I have been there, but later in the year. I love the idea of nightly concerts.
Buxtehude was an accomplished, versatile composer. His organ works are superb, but he wrote so much more. I was surprised to learn how influential he was.
A cynical comment, on my part, social media has discouraged reading by training people over the last 2 decades to stop reading at 140 words.
I don’t like facebook, twitter Sam I am, I wouldn’t read it in a …
i do love the PSA forum!
We can blame Sesame Street for short attention spans. They knew children respond to quick cuts, fast delivery, bright colors. There is no time to be thoughtful, or even bored. Every Sesame Street child is trained to be intensely entertained at all times.
A diminished interest in reading is simply the result of many other entertainment options. A hundred ears ago, every middle-class home had a piano and books. Now it has a big screen television and an Internet connection.
Typing with one’s thumbs has led to dreadful abbreviations and a lack of complete sentences.
And we’re delighted you’re here and contributing. The internet has changed much, but then change is just a part of life.
Here’s the other end of the spectrum, the library at Florida Polytechnic University. It contains zero physical books.If you are an architecture fan, check out the Santiago Calatrava designed main building where this is housed.
The outside of the building.
Very cool.
But why a physical space? As its website states, one can “access the library and its holdings from any Internet-accessible computer or tablet.”
I’m not sure. The building also houses their IBM supercomputer and digital gaming lab. I think it was a way to use the dome of the building and call it a library for conventions sake. My son attended for one year and is now at Ohio State because his girlfriend attends Columbus College of Art and Design.
Your hypothesis makes sense. It is a neat building.
I read every evening on my e-reader. Glad to hear you will release on Kindle Paul.
I was guilty of contempt prior to investigation, but once I got an e-reader I was sold. And now with built in LED illumination (not backlit!) and one touch dictionary look up, there is no going back.
And nothing like late evenings listening to Steve Roach on my PS Audio kit, and the only light on being from the Kindle. 100% true.
I also enjoy the dictionaries, a neat tool. I was impressed with how much Jamaican slang was defined in the stock dictionary when I read Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings.
The lighting is superb.
I started with the Kindle. It was out of necessity. I fly 150k miles per year on average. That’s a lot of butt-in-seat time. I read 150-200 books per year and I like to have the next five or so queued up. I moved to the iPad mini 4 when it got the retina display. I reverse it to night mode so it’s white text on black. I listen to music from it while I read. I use an AQ Jitterbug - AQ Dragonfly Red - Shure SE535 IEMs. The world goes away.
I envy your ability to listen to music while you read. It’s one or the other for me or I can’t keep both eyeballs going in the same direction!
FYI. It’s not “slang”. It’s a language called Patois. There is a dictionary. And, I studied it as my third language for my doctorate.
Yes, bad word choice on my part.
It was fascinating to learn as I read.
I mostly listen to audiobooks these days. I used to read like crazy - both for work (tax CPA - lots of reading!) and for pleasure. Getting older and eyes are not cooperating any more. They tend to argue, fight and go their separate ways. Audiobooks are much easier.
Very glad you are also creating an audiobook version. Having listened to your videos and podcasts I know you’ll do a great job reading it.
I quickly reviewed the book as it has been a while since I read it. Most of the language I looked up were individual words/phrases such as batty boy, duppies, sistren, mi nuh biznizz, mi soon come.
Are these phrases/words Patois, or slang/dialect/vernacular? How does one make a distinction? So many appear to be alternate pronunciations of English words/phrases or otherwise derivative and were thrown into English sentences. Others like bomboclat have no connection to English at least as I can discern.
Regardless, I enjoyed the book in great part because of the language and world view. It is however a disturbing book and not one I recommend for the sensitive.
Good questions! Patois, from a technical linguistics perspective, is considered a creole language. Creoles differ from Pidgens in two key dimensions: 1) they have fully formed grammars and vocabularies unlike Pidgens, and 2) they are passed from parents to children (ie kids grow up speaking Creoles as a first language). Pidgens are contact languages that arise when two groups come into contact and there is a need for the groups to communicate. Usually, this is the subordinate group needing to communicate with the dominant group, but it can work in both directions.
Jamaican Patois is a combination of English (many varieties—Irish, Scottish, Indian, etc—various African languages—most notably Akan dialects of what is now Ghana—Spanish, and Taino. James like Twain before him is incorporating elements of Patois to give the reader a feel of the world he is re-creating. Patois until recently was not a written language. The sounds do not easily fit American English pronunciation. African languages are tonal as well like many Asian languages.
Thank you! Absolutely fascinating, especially the first paragraph.
I take it back, this is equally fascinating. 
I also immediately thought of Twain as well. Reading Twain was delicious when I was in middle school, very evocative.
As you point out, many words in Patois are nearly identical to standard English words. Jamaican children learn standard English in school. They are code switchers, so it is not uncommon for a speaker to combine the two languages while speaking. Of course, this depends on who they are speaking to. If you were to be a fly on the wall in the hill country of rural Jamaica and were listening to a conversation, I can assure you that you would not be able to understand the conversation.
Much of the lexicon you mention like the expletive bumbaclaat are words the Rastas made popular.
Interestingly, James’ book inspired a recent doc produced by Netflix called “Who Shot the Sheriff”, which focuses on the assasination attempt on Marley.
The movie is mostly well-worn ground but surfaces a couple of new factoids. Anyone familiar with Jamaican documentaries will recognize the footage of politicized street gangs doing gun battle in the streets. The film’s title is an odd allusion to Marley’s song, made famous by Clapton, since the Sherrif was the police, not the rebellious Rastas of which Marley was most well known.