RileyDog’s back.

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Kafka on the Shore, seems to have just hit the bookstores here in Austria (in German). I saw it in the window of every book store I passed on my lunch break, out walking around, accidentally following women (you know that? Where you’re apparently heading the same place they are, for blocks and blocks, until you start feeling bad and hoping you’re not creeping them out?) and jonesing for this electric cello in the window of the music score.
However, I would prefer to read it in English.
However, it is out of stock at Amazon.com. Tons and tons of shitty books they have in stock, but not this one. All the disgruntled books of revelations by disgruntled Bush insiders, but not a poetic masterpiece (I assume) by Haruki Murakami, my favorite famous living writer, more or less.

I want you to try something, he said. What, I said. Let’s try playing with exact intonation, he said. He played the notes on the piano, I played them on the cello, correcting them until they were exactly right. All I can say is, huge difference. There is a bad habit I have acquired, and that is accepting approximate intonation when I play. If it sounds approximately like the song I’m supposed to be playing, close enough for government work, as they say.

But now that I have heard the difference, I know this to be false. Even if the intonation is very, very close, too close to really hear that the notes aren’t perfect, you’re playing a different instrument. When the intonation is perfect, the cello resonates differently. The body of the cello, and the other strings, resonate with the overtones in that perfect note.

Or something like that. Sounds great, in any case.

Doesn’t sound like such a cheap cello, I said. Even expensive celli are like that, he said. They don’t sound really brilliant until the intonation is perfect. When it is, then you notice the difference.

John Dean has a new book, and boy is he disgruntled.

• Learn to play the harp

• Put harp out where you think tortoises might be
• Play
• Tortoises will crawl out of their hiding places and come in close to listen
• Catch as many as you need before they can run away

It’s still too cold to put our tortoise outside, so she spends the days in our kitchen, usually hiding under the bench when she isn’t wandering around underfoot pretending to be a hockey puck. When my daughter practices, she (tortoise) crawls out from under the kitchen bench, through the living room towards the library, where aforementioned daughter is practicing. It’s sort of a Hallmark moment every time, if Hallmark were cooler.