This subject trips me up every time I want to address it. There is always so much more to be said, because the level of ignorance of self is so great.

Why do I have to wait until I am sixty to hear Biggie on one of these stations?

Dylan Hicks rightly excoriates the white as fuck Current in Citypages.

The most common response I've heard and read to this line of complaint - 'why can't you be happy with what we've got' (so far, they imply disingenuously, as if once the station got on its feet or established its identity it would start bumping 'To Live and Die in L.A.'; or better: what we've got in this terribly embattled state we're in, suggesting they're doing the best they can do) - quietly overlooks just how perniciously exclusive that 'we' is. If we are getting some culture, finally, and we are happy and excited, then why don't you just stop your useless complaining, they seem to be saying. It's funny: there is a question in the radio station's FAQ that underscores just how selfish and individualist its approach is (is forced to be, perhaps): 'I do not like this new thing. I only want to support the other MPR station. Are you using my dollars for this thing?' (No, they assure the talk radio and classical radio listeners.)

Do not retread the seemingly endless sequence of slights and insults to black culture and its creators and performers by acting as if you're getting culture here, on this radio station. If it were deserving of the name, it would not be so transparently selfish, while claiming more for itself.

One tires of not saying what one thinks.

I tire of not saying what I think.

I'm tired. I wish I could say what I think. I wish I could talk to people.

Ron Silliman with some things after Creeley's death.

I have moved. Again.

I once again live in St. Paul.

Robert Creeley has died.

I am marking my calendar. Well. That is just a figure of speech. I don't have a calendar.

'He was like those prep-school kids who interpret "coat and tie" to mean sweatpants and T-shirts with tie and coat on top.'

There is much of interest in this post of Franklin's, but here's just a thought on the note at the end: perhaps this asymmetry results from the relatively naive way in which most people evaluate songs ('proper' songs), in just this way: that because the expectation is then created for noise or whatever to be just as naively worthwhile, and it often is not, or not in a way that extends beyond chance affinity (it works for some people, not for others), the response is to theorize, to make noise, and the appreciation of it, into a task, a challenge. To the extent that noise does not enjoy the deeply sedimented conventional matter of the tradition of songcraft, this is justified, maybe; but to the extent that people are lulled by conventionality into forgetting what is vital in songcraft, and illegitimately rejecting it, this is: weak.