Scratch Pad: Craigslist, Oblique, Overload
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Went to the symphony. The orchestra tuned up. My friend: “This is your favorite part, isn’t it?” Me: “Yeah.”
▰ Me earlier this morning: it’d be a good week to catch up on some recent and upcoming album releases.
Autechre just now: here are a dozen new hour-long concert recordings.
▰ Definitely a first for me: I saw a pair of great used speakers on Craigslist. The guy selling them was 30 miles away. Arranging a meet-up was difficult. He was like “How about I mail them?” I was like “I trust you. Let’s do it.” They arrived today, well-packed. It’s the little things.
▰ Every morning I pick an Oblique Strategies card at random. Today’s? “Just carry on.”
▰ I pull up Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon (which it is, I notice after the fact), and my streaming service is like, “Oh, it’s you again. You paused at 16:46 last time. Wanna start from the beginning, or pick up where you left off? Ha, doesn’t matter. We know you’re just gonna let it loop for hours.”
▰ The odd comfort of a siren screaming by, a reminder there is a world outside my home office
▰ I know how to turn off auto-play. I don’t know how to turn off the thing that turns auto-play back on.
▰ I did make a top 10 albums list this year — top 25, actually. I’ll post it in a bit. Still reconciling it with my general disinclination to do such a thing. The main benefit, for me, was how it’s helped me think about tracking my listening slightly differently. Maybe something good will come of that.
▰ Readers: “You never write negative reviews anymore.” Me: “I do. I just only send them to the publicists.”
▰ The hard part about there being so much music is that there is so much music that sounds nearly the same. In 1996, a record of birdsong and ambient tones stood out; now there’s like 10 a week. Ditto arpeggio-heavy synths. And jazzy breakbeats. And laptop-baked “avant-pop.” And so forth. The overload isn’t about numbers; it’s about a handful of siloed monocultures within which the differences between albums has become somewhat minimal.
While I’m at it: I think from a certain perspective, avant-pop is where something might shine through by combining elements toward a unique artistic point of view. But in the end, a lot just sounds like it’s using such elements as window dressing for what is, in effect, a fairly standard song.
▰ Turning up the white noise like a morphine drip
▰ You’d think if computers could do one thing, it’d be to count consistently. I love Obsidian as a text editor (among other features), but it persistently has these slight deviations between word counts. This file registers as both 928 words and 929. Call it Schrödinger’s calculator.
▰ Funny thing about the excellent desktop speakers I got on Craigslist (iLoud Micro Monitor) is only one has an “on” light. I find I tilt my head to the right, wondering if that one’s on. (It is. Fantastic separation.) Love my M1 MacBook Pro speakers but this levels up my desk-time listening big time.
▰ Been reading a lot but not finishing much. I finally finished reading not one but two novels: First, Charles Portis’ widely celebrated True Grit. I’ve never seen either movie (the John Wayne one or the Coen Brothers one), but I will see them now. It’s quite thick with vernacular, and the narrator’s voice is interesting, in that it is that of both the teenage girl who is driving the events of the book, and of the same person a half century later thinking back to her youthful adventure. So, the dialog is her when she was young, and yet the framing narrative is her elder self. And it’s a good story, and the depiction of the late-1800s American west makes me very glad to live in the modern world, even with all its own tensions and shortcomings.
And I finished Neal Stephenson’s brand new and refreshingly brief and breezy (some violence and horrific incidents excepted) novel, Polostan, which is the first third of a novel or, as it’s being packaged, the first book of a trilogy. Like True Grit, it focuses on a young woman who ends up teaming up with men committed to a hard life. It’s written in the third person, but the woman, who goes by several names, Russian and American, is on almost every page, to the extent that it almost feels first-person. I think the main reason it’s in the third person is that, strong as she is, she only has so much control over her life. The third person narration boxes her in, and the manner that suits the story. And, in any case, Stephenson uses — unless I am forgetting something — the third person very rarely in any of his fiction. Polostan is structured as an interrogation, and then the interview ceases and the remainder of the story proceeds. It works well, though a lot of the drama for the first two thirds involves the narrator simply not telling us what happens because, conveniently, we have to flash back to the story being told, such that the answer to whatever question spurred the given reminiscence doesn’t arrive until the end of the segment, if not later still.
And I should finish Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories shortly.
