'To be sure, I can't say whether things will be better, once they are different; but this much I can say, they have to be different if they are to be good.'

'the meetings / were boring'

Given that he sets himself up for it, I don't think I earned the right to say that Creeley 'subverts' his technique of selective emphasis.

(I have in mind both Sinker - 'use other words, please', and Kogan.)

'... now I was alone, sick with some unknown affliction; my private life was in a mess, and I was without a defense. I often wished I had never written that fucking book.'

I can't say at the moment but it occurred to me recently that I don't often identify the 'I' of a Sonic Youth song with its actual singer, as a person or personality. It is someone less specific than that person.

But that is probably most true of Thurston songs. Lee songs probably feel more personal to me, and Kim songs more likely to seem based around a dramatic, acted, constructed (but not fictitious or false) persona or voice.

Likewise I don't seem to feel especially implicated into any of the 'you's.

Pazz and Jop results, my ballot, and Glenn McDonald's critical alignment ratings.

I am disappointed to have been the only person who voted for Amerie's album.

At times it occurs to me that while my sense of the way things are is basically nihilistic, my wish for how I would like them to be is hopeful, and anything I regard as good work or worthwhile thinking on my part always contains at least some small expression of that hope. But this seems to make my failures of will, failure to work, especially dispiriting. It's an unhappy lot, caring just enough to want to care more but not enough to actually care.

'I decided to think of it as a period of training in techniques for dealing with boredom.'

(So write about the situation, already.)