Cryptonomicon

I seldom read novels, really. Well, I seldom read them to the end, and I am often disappointed when I do, feeling that I have wasted a lot of time for very little long-term gain.

Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon is 1,152 pages long, in the crappy paperback volume that I am going to throw away the minute I finish it, probably late tonight.

It takes a lot of clever writing and plotting to keep me going on a novel of this size. A few laughs also help, and I find this book one of the most amusing things that I have read in 20 years of so, since I read Enderby, by Anthony Burgess. It is also the kind of book that whips your head around a few times, so that afterwards, you think a little differently.

I read a book on the history of codes and ciphers when I was in high school, and it interested me a lot, though it got only as far as the Vigenere scheme. Neal's book goes a great deal further, because cryptography has gone much further.

But really it is the humor and entertaining similes that will force me to buy a better copy someday and reread it.

New shakuhachi pieces

I have added several new pieces to the shakuhachi scores page.

There is a new solo piece in western notation, called 'No Answers', and a second solo piece written in Kinko-ryu notation. This is handwritten and scanned in as a JPG file.

I have added three violin-shakuhachi duets that I wrote to play with a friend at work who is also a student. 'Water Mirror has the hardest violin part, and 'Pear Tree Branch' the most difficult shakuhachi part, I think.

Last is a piece which I wrote and performed in church recently - I sang the voice part and played the shakuhachi part, accompanied by a keyboard koto sound. This is written in the pseudo-Japanese style of my chamber opera 'Komachi'.

Mistake corrected

I have updated my last posted composition because of an error in the second piece in the set. My transliteration/annotation of the Chinese text had the wrong 'tone' or 'intonation' for one of the words - this had to be changed to make the text comprehensible.

I doubt this has caused anyone any inconvenience, but if so, my apologies.