Concerts in Oslo Updated A Bit
I’ve gone through the list of venues and added new ones that have appeared in Oslo over the last year, so the Concerts in Oslo web site (and apps for iOS and Android) should now be more updated.
The site works by scraping the web pages of counts on fingers 84 venues and tries to make sense of the concert listings. Of course, these days many venues outsource the listings to Facebook, which is a blessing and a curse: It means that I don’t have to write scraping software for so many different sites, but it’s also just kinda difficult to actually scrape Facebook:
Because the HTML is (I guess purposefully?) obfuscated to make it difficult to do what I’m doing. Gotta keep the users on the site!
But so far, so good, I guess — I mean, they change the HTML frequently, and since it’s so obfuscated, the software basically has to guess at what the concert listing is, so sometimes there’s a gazillion bogus entries that I have to clear out manually and then stare at the code for a couple of hours.
(It’s fun when they change the dates from “THURSDAY 24th” to “NEXT THURSDAY” to “THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW” to “C’MON YOU KNOW WHEN” or whatever the next thing is going to be.)
Oh, well.
Anyway, if there’s any venues in Oslo that I’ve missed that you think should be listed, drop me a note.
Jazz Show
Rock Show
Book Club 2025: The Paris Review #84
I’m continuing to sample issues of The Paris Review from different eras (while having lunch). This is from 1982, and is a really solid issue.
Among the noteworthy things is an interview with Philip Larkin, who comes off as a bit of an asshole. Which turns out to be accurate.
The longest piece in the issue is a number of selected letters by Archibald MacLeish. The first half consists of letters to Ernest Hemingway, and isn’t all that interesting, but the latter half concerns MacLeish’s campaign to get Ezra Pound released from the insane asylum he’d been stuck in for a decade after he was charged with treason. (Pound was an enthusiastic Mussolini supporter.)
What makes these letters so fascinating is that Pound is obviously insane, and MacLeish is debating him in an exasperated fashion. It’s so 2025 — you have one guy spouting what seems like deranged conspiracy theories, and the other guy, who’s trying to be helpful, arguing against.
And I quite liked this amusing poem by Lisel Mueller. I feel seen! Dimly and astigmaticly!