I don't see how John could ever get sick of all five thousand songs on his new iPod; I've had mine for a few months or so and 3551 out of 5200 of the tracks I share between iBook and iPod are still unplayed.

'a teenage love that didn't feel no hurt yet'

'Why, Doctor Wong, what brings you here?!'

The spy-guitar shit on Britney's Toxic seemed to have vanished once I listened to it for the first time on my decent headphones, and the bendy bassline gained prominence.

Undergraduate humanities educations are sincere but premised on things that aren't really possible with a normal life outside the academy: leisure time and a community of intellectual friends. They are possible, but only by rejecting much that is difficult to reject.

It seems as if the tracks on this Akufen mix tend toward a consistent sound, where the beat and the bassline and maybe some other clicky ffft things are separable from a midrange sound or sample or something or other, often a vocal from an original track; this is noticeable because over the course of the record, since the beat is let's say polite, and the other component has a certain distanced smallness to it, it begins to sound as if the record is just a chain of episodes of these little fiddly midrange bits. Maybe playing it louder changes things; it does seem less monotonous (in that good way) than the last time I had it on, and up much louder.

Lately I've felt more pressingly the sort of lack in music that must be what makes some people eventually defend one of two positions - and the military connotation should be taken seriously. Either, that there is great art and then there is the disappointing remainder of the field; or that art, no matter what level, has no claim to truth and is ultimately mere entertainment or stimulation. On the one hand, crossing one's fingers hoping that by a vigorous enough defense (and thorough enough repudiation of what is 'ephemeral'), what hasn't yet betrayed you will be able to be saved; on the other hand, folding early.

I feel this lack more acutely when I also think that my inability to write something that feels significant about a record is a sign of the whole enterprise not really being worthwhile in the first place.

On The Ex and the austerity of their musical materials: imagine what a different-sounding record it would be if they had used some chords with some color to them. (Imagine how the then automatic requirement of some kind of more traditional - pick a tradition - tonal organization would have forced on them the resemblance to, say, fusion, or progressive rock.)

'The problem of the orientation of speech toward another utterance also has a sociological significance of the highest order. The speech act is by its nature social. The word is not a tangible object, but an always shifting, always changing means of social communication. It never rests with one consciousness, one voice. Its dynamism consists in movement from speaker to speaker, from one context to another, from one social community to another, from one generation to another. Through it all the word does not forget its path of transfer and cannot completely free itself from the power of those concrete contexts into which it had entered. By no means does each member of the community apprehend the word as a neutral element of the language system, free from intentions and untenanted by the voices of its previous users. Instead, he receives the word from another voice, a word full of that other voice. The word enters his context from another context and is permeated with the intentions of other speakers. His own intention finds the word already occupied.'