'From this it is evident that, although two attributes are conceived as really distinct - that is, one without the help of the other - we cannot infer from this that they constitute two entities, or, two different substances. For it is of the nature of substance that each of its attributes is conceived through itself, since all the attributes that it has were always in it at the same time and one could not be produced by another, but each one expresses the reality, or, the being of the substance. It is therefore far from absurd to ascribe several attributes to one substance. On the contrary, nothing in Nature is more clear than that each entity must be conceived under some attribute, and that the more reality or being it has, the more attributes it has which express both necessity (or, eternity) and infinity. Consequently, nothing is clearer than that an absolutely infinite being is necessarily to be defined (as we stated in Def. 6) as an entity which consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence. But if anyone now asks by what sign we can recognize the diversity of substances, let him read the following propositions, which show that in the universe there exists only a unique substance, and that this is absolutely infinite. So the sign in question would be sought in vain.'

Dear every single first person ever to type in song titles and submit them to my interweb CD database,

Is it really that fucking hard to type exactly what it says on the CD?

curious,

Josh

I'm so confused. Somewhere after 'Just Blaze, Bleek & Free', M.A.D.E. very much stops sounding like a Roc-a-Fella album. I miss New York!

They have a chef?!?

A note on Derrida upon the occasion of his passing, by someone actually eminently qualified to write such a note, Alex Thomson.

This Stylus review is a nice piece of thematic criticism; I slightly enviously wondered how they came up with the connection to Francis Bacon before realizing the obvious (that it shows up in the onesheet or some such). This of course does nothing to invalidate the work done in the review.

This review of this year's four-hour Panasonic album Kesto focuses on the group's industrial predecessors to the exclusion of the high-art minimalist ones (slightly odd by itself since their earlier records, whatever noises occurred on them, cried out 'minimalism', but odder since two of the tracks are dedicated to Alvin Lucier and Charlemange Palestine) and so its capping point, that Panasonic have somehow made the industrial album to end all industrial music, goes slightly awry.

I doubt one need even to restrict the glance backward to the high-art minimalists, given the number of one-or-two-track drone albums that have passed through my stacks of CDs in the past ten years, without my even really trying.

Now, the thing, though, will be to actually hear the damn thing. I hope to do it all at once at first. But I'm not feeling up to it yet. Maybe next week.

A note to myself: I'd like to read this book, not to mention the others Christgau refers to.

I randomly encountered Desrosiers while walking through Seward tonight.

It is part of my method of working to set down in a place, say my office or a coffeeshop, only to leave it a while later to walk elsewhere. I can't remember how I ever stood working on papers and homework when I did so by remaining in one place.