verse forms in Gravity's Rainbow: 'sonnet (532), epic (357), nursery rhyme (98, 177, 314), haiku (696), hymn (760), aubade (8-9), blank verse (226). The limerick, the ballad, the macaronic and verse forms adapted to musical rhythms such as the tarantella (204), the beguine (229), the cadenza (685) and the foxtrott (182) must be added.'

'a list of tones and styles which are to be found in Gravity's Rainbow and which runs a gamut of possibilities including the "visionary, poetic, serious, declarative (factual, matter-of-fact), commenting (or judging), questioning, ironic (or satirical), prophetic (or ominous), commanding, jovial (or funny), casual (or colloquial), mocking, playful, gross, and self-conscious"'

Ten small pleasures:

- 'all in circles like duck duck goose'
- WC over the 'Ante Up' beat
- 'you a silly chick / thought you was really live'
- Charlie Haden, thrumming on Science Fiction
- the guitar solo on 'Counting Down the Hours'
- 'see we / date em like we hate em'
- the 'Teach Me How To Fight' beat (nb: handclaps!)
- RZA vocal percussion, digital beeps
- 'my ideals / have got me on / the run / towards my connection / with everyone'
- finally seeing Monk dance in Straight, No Chaser

My first response to this omnibus Christgau review was to impatiently lose interest upon noticing its a) length and b) omnibusiness. Despite appreciation for the crackpot formalist music-criticism theme. And then I saw the LISTS!

(This didn't restore my patience or interest right away but it stored some up for the future.)

'Both the Tractatus and the Investigations are obscure books but in quite different ways. The Tractatus is obscure because we are simply presented with conclusions or answers to questions we have not been told ('1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things' (T:1).) and the effort to overcome this obscurity consists in the reader reconstructing the reasoning that gives these assertions meaning and point. In his preface, Wittgenstein says it is not a textbook, and this is usually taken to mean that its difficulty prevents it from being an introduction. This is certainly correct, but it is also true when construed as a remark about genre. Mathematics textbooks, for example, consist either of worked questions and answers, or sets of unanswered questions, or some combinations of these. No textbook ever consisted of sets of answers alone.'

Last night at the Second Moon the barista (baristo?) was playing Electric Masada - I love being able to figure out what something is, never having heard it before - and oh was the atmosphere, uh, heavy in there. Then his boss stopped in and he switched it to 'Desire' or something.

Tonight at the Second Moon the barista, apparently in a state of agitation (she skipped a number of things in the same way), let 'Since I Left You' play well after the singing came in before skipping it.

'Sehend deine Haltung, interessiert mich dein Ziel nicht.'

'waiworinao' = 'why worry now'

The mere prospect of some books lightens my mood; but then I set out to read.