'The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that ought to be told in it is not told.'

And again:

Derek Bailey / Ballads
Luomo / Vocalcity
Scarface / The Fix
Sonic Youth / Daydream Nation
Miles records: E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro

Gff has suggested that his lyrical find would be better notated:

bounce. bitch.

I suggested:

bounce; bitch

And now it seems we're at an impasse. Just like musical notation, it seems Western punctuation is insufficient to capture the nuances of Jay-Z records.

This one feels like it's going to be challenging to reconstruct. Well, nominally challenging. Maybe I should start making a game out of it, Skinner-stylee.

disc four of the Blanton/Webster Ellington set
Herbert's Around the House
the last Scarface album
Music for 18 Musicians
69 Love Songs discs two and three
Bossanova
Highway 61 Revisited
the second disc of Life After Death
the first disc of the Warner Bros. Herbie Hancock set

Something's missing.

Actually, that section deserves to be quoted in full, considering how discomfiting it is, coming from someone who professes to be so concerned with suffering and such.

§5 How nice of you, Doctor. - There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better. Mistrust is called for in face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy toward the superior might of the existent. The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to the toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses. The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth. Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. Sociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the concessions made to the interlocutor debase him once more in the person of speaker. The evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its full bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm it in the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility, and violence needed to exert domination. If, in the latest phase, the condescending gesture has been dropped and only the adaptation remains visible, this perfect screening of power only allows the class-relationship it denies to triumph more implacably. For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity. It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

Given how self-effacing Adorno's writing is, I was surprised to find him referring to himself in §5 of Minima Moralia. And I can't even figure out why the aberration, now.

'Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.'

And I don't mean the grunting.

Oh, god, shut up already Glenn Gould.

Maryann says she thinks maybe criticism exists to help you stop being thrilled by literature. There is a very deep and unnerving truth hiding in there, somewhere.