CapitalistImperialistPig

Musically I'm an ignoramus. I don't know a dominant from a mediant - or at least I didn't before last night. I signed up for a Community College course in the Beethoven Symphonies, and last night was my first class - I missed the first week, it seems. The instructor's approach is to begin by explaining the musical elements and illustrating them with brief excerpts - dual themes with variations, sonata form, minuet and trio, etc., etc. Unfortunately I'm a bit too slow to pick all that up, and my musical memory is not so hot either. He adds another layer to this sort of syntactical analysis - a sort of Symphony as novel layer. (I liked his remark that Beethoven found the Symphony as a book of four short stories and left it as a novel with four - or five - chapters.) I was a bit less thrilled with the particular novel he found, though. I suppose it would be too obtuse to fail to see Beethoven's Fifth as something other than threat, struggle, and ultimate triumph, b...

It has many times been convincingly demonstrated that I have zero talent for languages. Failed attempts to learn Latin, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese litter my history. I, however, am also not one to learn very well from my mistakes, so I am once again attempting Spanish. Rosetta Stone (Latin American) is my main tool here, but I also got this cheap beginning Spanish Reader for my Kindle. I am beginning to suspect that it might not be too current, since its Chapter on the US lists the population as 110 million! Also our money includes \$5,\$10, and \$20 gold pieces as well as \$1000 bills. What is cool is the fact that I can set my Kindle Spanish-English dictionary as primary and use it to quickly define words that I don't know, or find the conjugations of irregular verbs. It has been a lesson, however, in the limitations of the Kindle interface. I find the five-way navigation button a bit clumsy. A touch screen please.