Oh, my poor livejournal. I've been neglecting you again. Aren't I awefull. I promise to go through another brief spate of posting (but I can't promise that I won't stop posting regularly at some point in the near future. Sorry

After hearing it reviewed on Front Row, I read Markus Zusak's new (2006) novel The Book Thief recently. Its narratively about a girl growing up in wartime Germany with foster parents in a town on the outskirts of Munich. Thematically, its about death, words and colour. Though I was moved to the extent of now being haunted by the image of Liesel pitifully urging her dead foster father to wake up amongst the ruins of Himmel Street, I can't sympathise with the appalling extent to which Liesel experienced death - everyone she was close to by age 14. The colour theme is a device used by the narrator of the book, Death (though not as you would imagine him), to convey mood which, again, I am not left overwhelmed by. It was the words that got me. It was through words that Hitler stirred the German people into war, it was through words that Liesel learned to hate him. Language is powerful, language-fuelled prejudices are the enemy of independent, creative thought.

I had a meeting with my supervisor this morning and, although things seem to be going a little slowly, I now have a plan of work and have solidified some of my thoughts about the direction it should take. Its around the nature of musical knowledge and its relationship to the nature of knowledge in computers - musical- and digital-epistemology. I've been reading Richard Coyne's book, Technoromanticism which has a lot to say on digital epistemology as it frames ideas of representation and interpretation in IT in the idea of digital narratives. He also talks about speech act theory and the reduction of science to language. Language is powerful, we manifest and comprehend through language.

GO WORDS!