60¢

Edouard Levé, Suicide
Adele, 21
Richard Buckner, Our Blood (streaming at NPR)
Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Kronos Quartet, Feldman: Piano & String Quartet
Kreutzer Quartet, Coates: String Quartet No. 9 - Sonata for Violin Solo - Lyric Suite

• Lately, I'm finding more satisfaction with reviews over at Goodreads than on any of the other social media platforms. I'm on Google+; feel free to plus me or circle me or whatever it is, but I haven't been moved to really put myself out there yet. I'm not LinkedIn or Quora-ed or Formsprung in any appreciable degree. Come March when the new book comes out (launch date is looking like March 9 or 10, 2011) I'll get on the promotional edge of things. Until then, I did get loquacious on Suicide last night, if you are feeling deprived.
  
  
• Re Adele: I've heard "Rolling in the Deep" at least three times every time I've been to the pool this summer and I'm still not sick of it. The whole of 21 is a little syrupy for me, but I could not get sick of "I'll Be Waiting" when it gets its turn.
  
  
• I was rolling through the drizzle - not a Snoop Doggesque malaprop; it was lightly raining - cutting through Coates Hall after checking out Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities from the library, prompted by a discussion at this weekend's pool party when I came across...
  
  
• A WOLFGANG PUCK-THEMED OLD-SCHOOL COFFEE MACHINE!
  
  
  
• The kind from which Larry Tate would get his coffee. Or George Jetson. Or WOLFGANG PUCK. Besides the Mad Men wow factor of it, I'm particularly stoked because I think this might be the self-same coffee machine from twenty years ago where as a student, in the Era Before Coffeeshops, I'd get coffee when coming back from the computer labs. It was in this same spot, next to the pay phone I'd have to make a collect call from because I used my last quarters on coffee. It is still 60¢, a price so archaically low that it is not directly bloggable by modern keyboards for the lack of a ¢ key. I needed exact change; machines in the past didn't make change! I had to buy some Mentos from the union to get change, because people in the present don't make change either! It was worth the effort. In dreams begin responsibilities, or so the mad poet of Lou Reed's undergraduate years would offer. I shot footage!
  
  
  
  The controls feel like those of your pod at Space Mountain. The clamor in the background is a talking video Coke machine that plays that Drake Sprite commercial over and over, like a robot from the future coming to annoy us all to death. I'm waiting for the day a grumpy Intro to Philosophy prof from lecture hall around the corner smashes it into silence with the last wooden upright chair in the whole higher education system.
  
  
  The modern corrective to this gush of nostalgia: you don't get a lot of coffee for 60¢. Still, I'm so enamored with the old Coates hall coffee machine that I'm gonna listen to Gloria Coates bend time around a string quartet for the rest of the afternoon.