my exact chitlins frequency

Not chitlins, but Chipotle which just opened up near campus today. It looks a little like chitlins.

Tuesday:
William Faulkner, Sanctuary
David Byrne & St. Vincent, "Who"
Brian Eno & David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Paul Weller, Sonik Kicks
Spring Break Shark Attack!, Spring Break Shark Attack!
Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers (via YouTube)
The Fall, Ersatz GB and This Nation's Saving Grace


I suck at reading Faulkner. In saying that I think there is a particular skill at reading certain authors; I similarly suck at reading David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and most of the Russians, and it's not that I'm scared of a big book or thorny writing - I particularly like the latter -  but there is something about those authors with which I have trouble. Part of that trouble is I get a scent on them that there is something in there for me, that I'm not going to get anywhere else.

I used to have the same problem with Mark Rothko, still have it with Barnett Newman to a degree. I have on my to-do list before me to write about this place where I ate some chitlins, a rare food I just can't get with, though I think when I finally have the some tuned to my exact chitlins frequency, All Things Will Be Realized.

Which is all stubborn and a perhaps even stupid. People like things and don't like other things, often in sliding brackets of time. It's not that big a deal. John Cage defined his later music as brackets of time in which things happened and didn't generally specify what things. The bracket makes it his. I can get around that, even though I can thoroughly recognize that reasonable people would not consider such a loosey goosey situation as "music." As music, it often leaves something to be desired, but as Music, it is grand and profound.

I think that's what's up with Faulkner. I am actually quite enjoying Sanctuary, which I am mildly obligated to read by a Facebook reading group comprised of bookish bros with good taste. I like the slow orbit of action so far (mid Chapter 5), how you see that car crash happen because you saw it start in Chapter 4 and probably in Paragraph 3 if you don't suck, like me, at reading Faulkner.

I see how history and people and cars and liquor are all atomic in Sanctuary, flowing in the vacuum of a Starkville game weekend, waiting to become molecules in the right setting, and that in Serious Faulkner like As I Lay Dying or Light in August, all this happens at once or even out of order like it does in the world. I'm into it. Maybe in Chapter 7 someone will eat some chitlins and it will be like, whoa.

I tried to explain to a friend the deal with Silver Jews' Tanglewood Numbers, how "Punks in the Beerlight" is the best drug apology song there is (this excerpt from "Dying in the Al Gore suite" from the Fader will explain) , how when he repeats "I ALWAYS LOVE YOU TO THE MAX" he only partially means that it is love to his (or love's) capacity, it also means that it is love to the limit  where it isn't love at all, love to its maximum vacuum. And then, because it isn't on Spottily I listened to it on YouTube just to make David Lowery mad and saw the video for "I'm Getting Bank Into Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You" and yeah, forecast is cloudy, but them walking through that flea market happy like that is a sweetness to their procession where things just stop crashing for a second.