—glinting snow blanketing the surroundings, Bardo Pond lumbering on

Creeley:

'As a young man, then, moved by poetry, feeling its possibilities as inclusive, bringing all the world to one instant of otherwise meaningless 'time,' I wanted, not unexpectedly, to participate in that wonder. We struggle with them a good deal, mutter, mistake, but words seem even so significantly common and in that respect accessible. My own commitment to them was not easily understood. Was it that nothing else was open to me? Did I turn to them simply that no other act or substance permitted me such occasion? I know that I felt in those years now past very often useless in other attempts to find place in the world. As so many of that time, I married primarily to reify what might be called my existence. The fact of wanting to be a social person, as well as a private one, seemingly demanded it. Again, there was nothing I otherwise 'did' that argued my relevance to a general world.

In short, I was markedly self-preoccupied, lonely, inarticulate at crucial points in my relationships, and again, and again, restless. If they did nothing else, words gave instant reality to this insistent flux, which otherwise blurred, faded, was gone before another might in any sense witness it. That poems, stories, fed on this experience of reality was of great use initially. Just as I had used reading as a place to be, a world of volatile and active nature yet also 'unreal,' not 'flesh and blood'—and yet that surely, how else could it be—so now the possibilities that words might engender became a deep preoccupation.'

Carl Wilson's 'Ex Week': part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

'If they fuck you, you're fucked, you're fucked!'

As soon as I hear the clapping in 'Black Satin', I want to clap along. But it never sounds the same. I don't have a Teo Macero.

Eric Harvey on Sonic Youth's (music) business decisions.

a guitar or two, a skittering screeching saxophone duo, carefully cut breaks, two (2) hours of barely remitting feedback, blast beats, a harp, a temporary suspension of, a chopped-up vocal sample, insecure sex boasts, birdsong, the center of a black hole, drum machines, old Biggie lines re-flipped, craftsmanship, bombast, artfully arranged stretches of silence, passionate confusion, folk settings of Emily Dickinson poems, more drum machines, vocoders and imitation vocoder effects, endless depths of nihilism set to clangorous drones, kiss-offs, as many different words for 'money' as possible, cooing, moaning, adenoidal whining, obscure clouds of hissing and whooshing, inhuman bellowing, beat science, noise that just won't stop, whatever occurred to the performer at the moment of recording, actual honest-to-god guitar solos, particles, this synthesizer and that synthesizer and maybe that's a synthesizer, minutes and minutes suspended in time, sublimated resentments, unholiness, sublime holiness, a thriving career as a musician, the private talk of women, sounds like it might be about love or god or something, an awful lot of drugs, whatever they want, the time to write during a brief stint in prison, swagger, attitude, anxiety about the global economic catastrophe, tape-loop alchemy, a more relaxed second take, an accent, the joy of language, horns, are you sure this is even music, how long can this—

Five yard signs in a row, none betraying its candidate's party affiliation.

Some writers leave too much to their adjectives.