coriander sauce

Chicago, Chicago III and Chicago II
Yes, Fragile
XTC, Apple Venus Volume One
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Billy Squier, Emotions in Motion

• Happy birthday, Jerri! You are the coriander sauce on my samosa!


• I have almost completely switched over to Spotify from Rhapsody, a change nobody cares about except for Maya. For whatever reason, Apple Venus is not available on Spotify and is therefore, in her eyes, junk software.


• A fella can get down with some early Chicago if a fella lets himself. I was looking for the Ramsay Midwood "Chicago" the other night while jetting across the expanse of the Atchafalaya bridge and landed in the realm of my departed stepbrother's Chicago records. I still have his vinyl copy of IV, the wood grain one, and played it for Maya when she got her turntable. After this morning's dad funk Chicago infusion, she's said they weren't half bad. She was kinda digging Yes, too. I still can't get her into my brother's copy of Tommy though.


• "You don't read books because it takes time?" he asked, not quite sure he was understanding her properly.
  Haruki Murakami, 1Q94, page 95 out of 925.
  


• Driving around to Chicago and Yes and XTC's new-wave hesitant embrace of progressive excess, it struck me how daring all this is. Go complicated, don't give them what they want. Give them what you want. I think that's what draws me to the outsize music of the 70's. Thing is, I don't feel that way when it comes to fiction. I prefer a short, punk rock 45 of a book to an epic opera of a thing. It really does take a lot of time! The short chapters of 1Q94 alternate back and forth between the two protagonists creating a strobe effect across the text. I would love this book if it was delivered a chapter at a time by daily email, which hits me as sort of a really good idea. Maybe not for me; I decided to not even talk about NaNoWriMo because I don't have time to commit to it and I'm not sure sure it's a No I wanna Wri anyway.
  
  Ed. to add: That was a dumb thing to say about NaNoWriMo. How about this instead: I had a dream last night that Stephen King was my new stepdad somehow, and we were having an awkward "getting to know you" interlude. I was trying to ease into saying I hadn't really read any of his books, but he picked up on it and said, whatever, millions of people have read my books. He was sorting through new titles of his that had just come back from the printers, massive hardbacks the size of dictionaries. I saw one of them was a book of writing exercises. It had these old woodcuts and you were supposed to write stories about each in various ways. He was lamenting that it ended up with a really long title. I told him I thought the title was funny, that it fit the struggle to make a story. He shrugged. Then I gave I'm a slim volume of writing advice I'd published in my dream. He flipped through it, and wrote "Seems like a juvenile work of nonfiction" inside the cover.