I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.

This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.

–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.

I think I’m finally off this stupid old-book kick. I don’t know what I was thinking letting it go on that long. Moby Dick is awesome, but it isn’t awesome enough to justify reading 2/3 of Great Expectations. I’m all set for the new Hollinghurst novel, The Stranger’s Child.

It’s actually quite strange to me that it has taken so long for me to get around to reading another Hollinghurst novel, because I adored The Swimming Pool Library back at Hampshire. I think that the problem may have been that I studied it very closely for a paper (reading it maybe 4 times through in a month, and certain sections more than that) and I burnt out for a while. I was reminded of him by a couple of press stories recently, and I’m actually looking forward to working back through the rest of his oeuvre.

Trophies for Mighty River.

Portland’s version of Tarkus:

The big thing, though, is a sort of shift in my sort of mental state regarding my, I don’t know, let’s say “condition” for lack of a better word. I think that in a lot of ways living with C and S has created a sort of suspension or deferral where I’m sort of waiting for things to happen in regard to them, and now that’s gone so I have to do things now, which is going to be strange. I’m not sure I’m up for that any more. I’m not even really very clear on what things are. I guess I’m just going to have to keep my eyes open.

Somebody threw me over his shoulder and I landed on my side in such a way that my right knee was driven into my left calf.

What’s New in Version 1.1

Reduced audio file sizes to keep app below 10mb and stabilized a couple of minor bugs that had been reported.

they aren’t smart enough to use computers.

(Via The Zawinksi, who tags the entry doomed, religion and perversions.)

One of things things that went into those boxes was my copy of the James album Wah Wah. I was heavy into Pulp at the time (I had finished my div 3 with no coffee and very little booze by basically listening to This Is Hardcore 7 or 8 times per day), and I think that I may have considered James to not have enough “fourths and ninths,” my glib way to describe the haute-pop style of Jarvis and co. I didn’t want that kind of space-cadetery any more.

After periodically being made aware of the absence and deciding it would be too much of a pain to get in the cardboard packaging over the years, I finally got a new copy in the mail today. It’s pretty heady stuff. The kind of thing that you get from miles of tape and a deck of oblique strategies. Glad to have it back.

We’ve — and these are ones I really treasure — made some people get what’s going on inside music obsessive’s heads, when they’ve previously never really got pop.

and I thought, “Wait, maybe I can remember how to be a pop obsessive.”

Because I used to be really pop-obsessive. I mean, if I like a song I can tell what elements of it are being underserved by a sound system, and the first thing I put on after reading this (not immediately, but definitely because of) was Circus Maximus, a record that is really, truly by and for obsessives (also: hilarious coincidence city, right?) Of course, it’s also really old. So old that it probably doesn’t even qualify as pop at all. Leaving aside questions about what’s the Momusian analogue to classic-rock status aside, I’m trying to figure out how I can become pop-obsessive again, because I think that I liked that about myself.

I think the MP3 revolution killed my obsession with pop music. I bought the very first iPod about a week after it came out, but by the time that one died they had become too ubiquitous for me to not turn up my nose about acquiring another. Nevertheless, I had moved to NYC and was a student at that point, and I succumbed to the urge to just put everything on my computer and have done with it. Maybe the thing to do now is to become some kind of beardy format-maniac. Obsession rewards masochism.