#173

Real quick before I go on with Album Week 2019, I'll letcha in on how reading has been happening. You like that, you like when I talk about the books I'm reading. 

Well, I like writing about them, baby. What we have here is a case of synergy. Let's hunker down.

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Just about halfway through the pages of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, which is to say I have read the original translator's introduction and the introduction by the commentator which took ninety-seven pages and am about fifty-two pages into the text itself. I have only about fifty-eight more before I am done with the book and then there are the roughly hundred and seventeen pages of commentary. I'm not sure if I'm going to read them this time around. I liked his intro enough to do it, but come on. Not a big "coulda been done with this already" guy, but the math on this is damning and Kierkegaard writes accessibly by my lights, really seems like excess.

Due to misunderstanding about a copy of Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore, I read it in its entirety so I could return it to a coworker only to be told that it was mine to keep. It was a pretty dang good book--and as an added bonus, my typing those words marks the end of a whole teenaged-to-adult life with a prejudice against Christopher Moore on the basis that his books look stupid and annoying and he seems stupid and annoying and the very first page of one made me hate him when I was a teen so I have never read one of his books till now, to show my coworker that I have an open mind. The book as an aesthetic object still drives me crazy, it looks bad and stupid and they made it ugly and hateful and painful to the eye and mind, but he is a real, real smart dude and a skilled and funny writer and the book's content skips and kills and frolics like its titular creature/totem (never does trick you, though). Great stuff, I'll read more in future.

Read Distance Mover and Don't Come In Here by Patrick Kyle. That's everything I could get my hands on, everything collected and bound I'm pretty sure (I mentioned reading Roaming Foliage I'm pretty sure, I know I mentioned Black Mass and it all started with Everywhere Disappeared) and it checks out: genius-level ouvre, can't wait for Death of the Master to drop, raise no monuments to the living and all but Patrick Kyle is a living king.

Also read the first couple pages of Death World by Harry Harrison. I'll get back to that soon.

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Okay! Album Week. Album Week 2019. What fucking day is it? How many of these have I done? 

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It is raining outside. A beautiful rain. Silver light, thick heavy drops coming down even. Further south this business was a fucking shitstorm, floods everywhere, railroad tracks high in the air, the gravel beds they rested upon washed away completely in deluges that tore people's homes from where they sat and washed them away down the street, windblown chunks of roof coming to rest in what branches remain to the trees. 

Few were injured. Truly incredible. Yesterday there were tornadoes all over the place; not many people hurt then either. Miracles happen, they demonstrate video evidence of miracles, and we just keep on going like nothing is real. That's part of the overarching miracle, I suppose.

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My dad's recording of Handel's Water Music got lost somewhere I think, so I can't determine the details of my formative recording of the composition. I can't even think of it right now, in my mind. I forget how it goes. Sad.

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Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is a great song. I've never heard the studio recording, only outtakes. That's how I like Dylan, by and large. Some of his studio stuff is okay, but I like The Gaslight Tapes and stuff from No Direction Home and old live recordings and stuff like that. I read Chronicle vol. I, appropos of nothing. Talk about a book that changed nothing in my life. Unlike "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". Unlike "Moonshiner".  So forth.

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Rain's slacking off already, after an hour. I stared out at it and watched it fill floodplains over the asphalt and burst crystal fireworks on the corner of the roof the garage building.

You know what's a good album? Having everything be totally quiet and listening to the rain fall on the world.  

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Precipitation's done for now. Got the window open to let in the breeze.

--JL