Monday, August 4, 2014

Psychic pulse-taking: reading choices

RantWoman offers the following items from her daily media diets as a sort of psychic pulse-taking and free association exercise. RantWoman did the first NLLS download before Annual Session, wrote the blog post a short spell after Annual Session, and is clear to schedule posting a few days hence. So the material here may or may not reflect RantWoman's psychic state at time of posting.

1. RantWoman just got one of the new Digital Talking Book readers from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. In WA start at www.wtbbl.org  for more info. Key attractions: both books read by real humans AND the ability to control the playback speed so that it will not take 9 hours to read a whole medium-sized book. The device is also just a KICK designwise. One of these days RantWoman will go looking for a picture. In the meantime, cope.
One night after the device arrived in the mail, RantWoman sat down at the NEW computer (urk!) and tried to download books.

Since the first download, RantWoman has had another much more lovely session. Okay RantWoman was downloading memorial reading of Nadine Gordimer and Margo Adler

But the first time, did RantWoman mess around just in English? NO!
--First, RantWoman looked to see what served up in Russian: The Devils and The adolescent, by Dostoevsky. Um, NO!

--Spanish? Something RantWoman does not remember and Kafka, Metamorfosis y otros relatos. Sure. Why not. The voice is GREAT, but maybe another time with the Kafka.

--English: who to search for...Jon Krakauer, hmm, people falling down mountains or Mormons. RantWoman does not really want to read about people falling down mountains which leaves....Under the Banner of Heaven, for RantWoman's purposes also knowns as Quakers are really a little weird right now, but they've got NOTHING on the Mormons. What a thought!
Apparently, RantWoman WAS supposed to start from there: RantWoman fully intended to search for something cheerier but fell asleep before getting to it.


2. RantWoman is really grateful now both to be reading the NAdine Gordimer essays and to have scraped her eyeballs over the large print edition of Talking Book topics to highlight a bunch of things on a Maybe want to read list and MAYBE even one or two on an actually will get read list.

3. Somehow while trying to find the Not Amish QuakerSpeak video, Youtube decided to offer this one to RantWoman. RantWoman has NOT watched the whole video. Perhaps the title and a few moments at the beginning will be sufficient for others as well.

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