Sigh.

Add an 'of'.

I told my devotedly feminist friend Kris I had been wanting to make her a mix of current hip-hop (since she professes liking hip-hop), to sound out her reactions to the state its misogyny. She didn't seem to think that was such a good idea. The other day, I heard 'Pull My Hair'. I think if I were to put that on that hypothetical mix, Kris would never speak to me again. Luckily (?!), though, I've only been able to get myself to listen to it one more time since then, so it's not as if it's leaping to the head of the list.

Nothing I pick up is what I want, is what I'm saying.

Kind of in a haze. Out of apparently nothing more than compulsion here are some of the books I have picked up and read some of in the past few days (titles only): Finnegans Wake, Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake, Biographia Literaria, Varieties of Religious Experience, Notes to Literature, The Jerusalem Bible, Love and Theft, Distinction, Joyce's Book of the Dark, The Dialogic Imagination, Literary Transcendentalism, In the American Grain. To no effect, really; I can't get a fix on anything, can't find my traction. Records have made more sense but not because I've engaged more with them; they're just more satisfying to take passing affect and sensation from. Not just that; I can do it and not feel like I'm wasting my time. Still, the sensations are just that, passing.

Back issues of Pynchon Notes.

I'm overloaded! With my newly won freedom I have this incredible urge to find out about everything. Here are some of the things I consumed some or all of today: the new Channels EP (eh), Ice Cube's third album (!), Dylan's last album, the songs sampled on Ice Cube's third album (very pleased to learn that that Ohio Players song was the basis for Xzibit's 'Shrooms', too), the entries on poetics and prose in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the beginning to Bakhtin's 'Epic and Novel', a paper by one of my professors arguing that in the Republic Socrates stays ignorant throughout (i.e. that polis ain't his, i.e. Plato doesn't 'express his own views' there either), some John Lee Hooker and Ghostface and selected playlists, about a zillion ILM threads that mentioned Love and Theft or Dylan and Cohen, some General Tso's chicken, a cup of coffee, a sandwich, chips, pop.

I wonder whether the biggest failure of the legions of Dylan imitators isn't that they somehow never let speech into their singing.

You have no idea how much it pleases me to see Eric Lott say that the title of Love and Theft is a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel.

Forget April, sometimes it snows in fucking May.