I wonder how I find out what's required to start a journal.

I wonder why I can't shake the idea of starting one.

I forgot about the Clipse record on my list. Unfortunately it's too late to return the jackets.

I have been, to my excitement, making a great deal of headway in A Thousand Plateaus. So I had thought to periodically follow up (however lamely) some of Deleuze and Guattari's ten million sources by posting the appropriate links here. But today, I can do nothing more than quote this remarkable sentence from page 377 (still in the 'Treatise on Nomadology'). I submit it for your careful contemplation today.

'Thought is like the Vampire; it has no image, either to constitute a model of or to copy.'

I have already begun shopping for a tweed jacket and a leather jacket so that I can dress in the style befitting my elevated musical tastes. And also ruin two perfectly good jackets.

These are the records I have listened to in the past short week. (I think people should adapt historians' terms like 'short century' and 'long century' for everyday use.)

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Glenn Gould - J.S. Bach - Goldberg Variations (1955)
Herbert - Around the House
Takacs Quartet - Bela Bartok - String Quartets 5 and 6
Miles Davis - In a Silent Way
Thelonious Monk - Live at the Jazz Workshop
John Fahey - Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes

If not for a handful of others I could truthfully say that these are the only records I've listened to for more than a long week or two.

And also foul.

Is every classical music performer ever except Glenn Gould a big fucking pussy? Wait, don't answer that.

My, so belligerent this week.

And I am well aware that the way I noted the instruments is standard. And yet.

I wanted to mention Monk's late sixties quartet in a paper I'm writing, but as noted below I am avoiding, like, filler. But I acknowledge that I should probably include some. So I was proud to have written:

'This aphorism of Thelonious Monk's takes on special significance in light of his later recordings, especially those of the quartet with Charlie Rouse (ts), Larry Gales (b), and Ben Riley (d).'

Yet somehow I feel like anything less than a big dumb ugly sentence or paragraph full of context-setting information will be regarded as unacceptable. Mark called something I asked him about - a place where I was being snotty about someone else's argument - a 'mastery move', and now I see them all over the place. I think the coded instrument names are a kind of mastery move. Or at least an exclusionary move. There shouldn't be a problem with them - I can't write without excluding some people, especially when it comes down to contingent exclusions based on knowledge - but in this paper, at least as I've got it in my head so far, I'm going to be testing those limits much further. I'm allowed to act as if Kraftwerk is common knowledge, right? And a million jazz records? And 'NY State of Mind'? All in the same paper? I know how footnotes should work and how they can be abused, but I hate footnotes. And anyway they would be cheap.

My constant excuse to myself - pre-emptive excuse in response to my pre-emptive mental failure to live up to imaginary standards - in the past few months has been: I am writing about popular music here; if you aren't familiar with these canonical artifacts then that's your problem, not mine. Yes, I know that this is likely a serious attitude problem when 'you' is my professor.

I mean, seriously, it's like that phrase I quoted somewhere a couple of years ago, from an academic source: 'The Beatles, a popular British rock music group'.