waste

Whence?

Has there been no pulpy scifi/detective/romance/softcore porn novel, story, or other such piece of written or performed literature yet published which takes place in the not-too-distant future—in a society not unlike our own—concerning people not dissimilar from those you or I encounter every day on the street, at work, or in the coffee shop—a world in which cellular, bluetooth, etc technology has been carried forward to such an extent that rather than wearing headsets or toting around devices chips and whatnot are implanted in the very flesh—and rather than resorting to speech or even subvocalization, communication is carried through by the monitoring of certain areas of the brain—a world in which the sounds that you appear to be hearing as you walk down the boulevard conversing with your distant interlocutor is actually generated inside your own head, and, more sinister, the touch you seem to feel as you sit down to breakfast with your estranged spouse is similarly phantasmal, but generated now not by an innocent business associate or neighbor but rather the person with whom you have now for some years been carrying out an affair, all without ever having met?  It could be called Wireless Infidelity.

He don't write smileys

That gaim reports users who have stopped using their client for a period without having set an away message with the message "so-and-so has become idle" pleases me, for it suggests that, far from being a procrastinatory aid, talking to people online is work, dammit, and I'd better get cracking.

The 60s were a more innocent time

Lots of sites seem to be suggesting that the release of Donovan's "Superlungs My Supergirl" was delayed because the line "she's only 14, but she knows how to draw" is a drug reference.

There ought to be a study done of the modes of the shaggy dog story as dependent on its medium.  A written shaggy dog story must, since we are accustomed to reading stories longer than those which we hear or relate orally, be correspondingly longer than the spoken shaggy dog story (or such is my guess); of course it can also be more complicated, involve more characters and goings-on, etc.  I suspect, too, that if you told someone a shaggy dog story over a medium which is generally very quick, and used for short messages only (say, text messaging), it wouldn't have to be very long at all for it to have its effect.

This thinking is prompted by the impromptu telling by a certain frequent commenter here with whom I correspond of a shaggy dog story on IRC last night.  This individual tends to have trouble making such stories, when in the classic "shagginess competition" mode, long enough; really the only way to extend their length without resorting to adlibbed monologues and speeches on the part of judges and the owner of the dog (his normal method) is to add extra layers to the competition.  However, it worked out ok even with only five.

Michael made noises about seeing the joke.  Therefore, it is reproduced below.  Only Michael is allowed to read it (and besides, if you read it, you will have read an IRC log, and will therefore be denied human contact for a month).  It concerns Broca's Area, part of the brain.  (Actually it is now here owing to weird <pre>-ness.)

This just in

The Who were totally scooped with respect to "Won't Get Fooled Again".  Danny Ben-Israel's "The Hippies of Today are the Assholes of Tomorrow", recorded three years before Who's Next, contains every thematic element of the Who song, except more explicitly and less rockingly.

Bubo-Lytton Awards

I would like to write the opening sentence of a novel or short story.  This narrative would be an exercise in reminiscence and, preferably, have the feel of gauzy nostalgia characteristic of a certain species of the genus.  Most preferable of all would be if all this were apparent from the first sentence alone.  Sadly, I fear myself unable to carry out my mandate.  (qui mandatum mandavit? I, myself.)  I can see the shape of the sentence in vague outline, but then the path bifurcates.  It splits.  The possibilities compound.  I know not how to proceed, and qui scribet nisi ipse scriptor?

The constraint under which I labor: this sentence must begin as follows:

They say that pride, like the summer, goeth before a fall,

Now, as I see it, there are two main ways to proceed in this sentence, starting from either pride or the summer.  It would be easy to establish a backward look in the latter case; simply introduce some sort of concession ("but") and remark on some long-ago summer, say of the narrator's youth ("this is the harder part, but it would be clever here to incorporate some mention of high-running pride and insinuate that in that bygone August it seemed as if nor the summer would end nor the pride would ever be dashed, thereby setting the stage not just for downfall but, if handled right, perhaps some violence, which would interact well with gauzy nostalgia, at least in my mind—imagine Dvorak's string quartet (op 51) played on a staticky radio"—obviously this needs some cleaning up).  Or you could start from pride.  I haven't thought about that possibility, really.

You could also start from "fall", but that would be silly.

I have a new favorite insult

Do you know what it is?  It is "purulent bubo".  As in, "you purulent bubo!" or "don't be such a purulent bubo, Frank".  (I don't know anyone named Frank, but maybe you do.)

I have no idea if buboes are strictly a plaguely phenomenon.  There's a lot I don't know about buboes, and about pus.  Maybe I shouldn't call people purulent buboes until I'm better informed.

This is a list of countries in which the bubonic plague still occurs: Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Zaire, Botswana, Uganda, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, the US, Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Burma.  I found it here.  I make no claims as to its accuracy except that I already knew it's still in the US of A, in, for instance, the Rockies.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.

What could this even mean?

"Never thought I'd see anything with Kimmo Pohjonen here. That guy really is the Merzbow of polka."  What?

Also, the Wire's Invisible Jukebox with Keiji Haino is remarkable.

donnerstäglicher Übersetzungsversuch

Yeah, I'm ripping off Kotsandko, and moreover it's not good.  Whatever, suckers.  From Die Ringe des Saturn:

Der im Laufe des Tages des öfteren schon in mir aufgestiegene Wunsch, der, wie ich befürchtete, für immer entschwundenen Wirklichkeit durch einen Blick aus diesem sonderbarerweise mit einem schwartzen Netz verhängten Krankenhausfenster mich zu versichern, wurde bei Einbruch der Dämmerung so stark, daß ich mich, nachdem es mir irgendwie, halb bäuchlings, hal seitwärts gelungen war, über den Bettrand auf den Fußboden zu rutschen und auf allen vieren die Wand zu erreichen, trotz der damit verbundenen Schmerzen aufrichtete, indem ich mich an der Fensterbrüstung mühsam emporzog.  In der kramphaften Haltung eines Wessens, das sich zum erstenmal von der ebenen Erde erhoben hat, stand ich dann gegen die Glasscheibe gelehnt und mußte unwillkürlich an die Szene denken, in der der arme Gregor, mit zitternden Beinchen an die Sessellehne sich klammernd, aus seinem Kabinett hinausblickt in undeutlicher Erinnerung, wie es heißt, an das Befreiende, das früher einmal für ihn darin gelegen war, aus dem Fenster zu schauen.

The wish, rising oftener in me in the course of the day, to assure myself of a reality I feared vanished forever with one glance through this hospital window which was hung, strangely, with a black netting, became so strong by the break of twilight that, after I had managed somehow, half on my side and half on my belly, to slip over the edge of the bed onto the floor and, on all fours, reach the wall, I propped myself up despite the pain involved by laboriously pulling myself up to the windowsill.  In the spasmodic posture of a being that has for the first time lifted itself up from the flat earth I stood leaning against the glass panel and involuntarily thought of the scene in which the weak Gregor, with trembling little legs clinging to the back of his chair, looks out from his room with a faint memory, as it says, of the sense of freedom that looking out the window [once gave him? this must be a use of liegen that is not in my dictionaries].

You know why birds don't write memoirs? Because birds don't lead epic lives, that's why!

Have you ever noticed how sometimes, someone will say something completely off the wall? What are you supposed to do? Just ignore it?

Could it be that I … like tomatoes?

Observe this chart indicating the amount of money it is not worth Bill Gates' time to bend over and pick up as a function of time.  The chart assumes that it takes four seconds to pick up some money (and doesn't take into account that picking $600 in denominations likely to be lying around to be picked up will take longer than picking up a single), and that while picking up money, he isn't making any other money some other way.  Fine.  But what it fails to consider is that it might be worth Gates' time to pick up a tenner and thereby forego earning $600 in four seconds—simply because by doing so he thereby makes a statement, in effect, about how much money he already has: enough that he can casually shrug off over half a grand without thinking, and do so several times an hour.  The amount of money he might choose not to earn—or even to lose—as an expression of his financial power will, of course, only increase as his worth increases; however, there may come to be a point at which it's worth his ego's while to forego exactly the income he would otherwise make, at which point he will plateau.  Or perhaps he'll jump beyond that point, and find himself in the curious position of demanding compensation for taking the trouble of being paid.

Because, you see, this pasta's sauce contained no tomatoes.

The book by W.G. Sebald whose title is commonly Englished as The Emigrants would, so they say, more accurately be rendered as Those Who Have Emigrated, but that would, of course, be hopelessly clunky.  A compromise: why not The Immigrants?

Also, I must tell a certain institution my health history, including my parents' major health complaints, for to be properly insured.  I note that I have the option of reporting my father as having had ovarian cancer.

I'm somewhat worried about what that might imply, actually.

YOUR NEW LORD AND MASTER:

Though I curiously have yet failed to raven the pasta I made last night.

It is well known to all, or at least me, that a trumpeter can, through the cunning employ of a mute, create sounds reminiscent of the human voice. (One can also merely speak through the mouthpiece, somehow—but that doesn't concern me.) Less widely known is that a person, for example, Tim Buckley, can cause his voice to be reminiscent of a muted trumpet, and even, if one's imagination is hyperactive, a muted trumpet being played in such a way as to resemble a human voice (saying "marmalade", no less).  This can be heard on the track "Jungle Fire" from Starsailor, and is worth keeping in mind when reading "How to Talk: Some Simple Ways".

The curious resemblance of my toothpaste just now to licorice is of less obvious utility, and possibly the result of mind control.

Pies do have something of a hypnotic effect on me, though—like pasta.

I approve of this joke.

Just that it's not as if anyone would have been compelled to duplicate my actions because of its quality.

I give you the Box-Scavenger's Creed:

Is there aught that can protect a dumpster from your depradations?

There is naught.

If there are how many boxes in it will a dumpster be spared?

If there are nought.

Are there any more homophones remaining?

There are not.

Which is by no means to say that it was bad

Holy fuck! Ruins! So good!  Tatsuya Yoshida is awesomeness wearing glasses! Things:

• Many people were moving their heads and bodies as if they were following the rhythm (which, to be fair, some were, but not for very long).  What was going on in their heads? They were obviously really into it, but in a way that didn't require them to notice that they were not synching with the music at all.
• There was a lot more melody than I expected, which in this context isn't saying a whole lot—you have to take what melody is given you, after all.  But it still surprised me, perhaps because I only have one Ruins album.
• For most of the show it was just Yoshida drumming and singing along with a bass track, since the bassist quit.  First, it was amazing that he was able to keep up the frenetic drumming and sing clearly and go from falsetto to singing deeply, etc; second, although I feared that him playing along to a recording would be teh lame, it was actually still quite cool (possibly because Ruins pieces in general don't allow for much flexibility—or do they?), especially since there was just enough time between the tracks for him to hurriedly say "thank you" immediately after one ended and then, with maybe a second of applause intervening, start up again.
• I think, though I cannot be sure, they played two medleys, once with the bass track and once with the Chicagoan guest bassist: the Classical medley (I only think this because during the piece Yoshida played a recognizable, straightforward martial rhythm on the snare, and then later there was a clear quotation from Marche Slav), and the Hard Rock medley (because of a riff from "Black Dog").  I can't be sure, though, because I only really recognized the noted bits.
• The bassist (Jonathan Hischke, former Flying Luttenbacher and current touring member of Hella, and who also played bass for Yowie in their opening set to replace a missing guitarist, which didn't work out quite so well, since one of the things about Yowie is that they play with two guitars tuned a quarter tone apart, and that doesn't translate so well to one guitar and one bass) was awesome; he didn't seem to know the names of the songs he had learned so he'd just play a very brief bit from them when Yoshida wanted to know what to play next, and that very brief bit sufficed, to my amazement, to uniquely identify it.  Once, he played a bit, and Yoshida asked him, "Warrido?" (one of the few tracks I recognized, and the middle of which featured an improvised section), and he just shrugged.

Honestly, it wasn't even that great a pie.

How disappointing that the Palace Brothers song "Meaulnes" seems to bear absolutely no relation to the great novel Le Grand Meaulnes, known to such as have no French as The Wanderer and known to me as an old Anchor Books paperback with an excellent cover by Edward Gorey (which is actually in color).

I think I would add J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country to the Guardian writer's list of novels with a similar effect.

so much as what it says about me; my ability to resist temptation, e.g.

There seems to be some kind of consensus among the lady-fancying humans among us (and I count myself as one such) that, in Ghost World, it was not Thora Birch but rather Scarlett Johansson who was the more attractive of the two female leads. (I will grant that she's very attractive—all the more so now than then—but that's no matter.) For support that statistically everyone feels that way, I turn, say, here.

But this is simply insupportable. Insupportable.

It's not the ill effects of having eaten so much pie in a day that concern me,

A review of my week not working: Enjoyable.  I have accomplished gloriously little, thus confirming my belief that Samuel Johnson was completely correct in stating that every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.  I also created a delicious & simple ESSENCE of LEMONADE, created with: 1 cup lemon juice (I used lemon juice), 2/3 cup sugar (I used turbinado), and 1/2 cup ginger liqueur (I used homemade), the former two ingredients to be made into a syrup and added to the latter one, the resulting combination to be added in smallish quantities along with water tonic, seltzer, or still to ice.

Not that that's much of a victory; I still ate 5/6 of a pie in a single sitting

Here's an odd experience: I chanced upon (or rather, sought out, once I realized that I was in a position to do so—but that's like chancing upon) a picture of my dad from 1970, and, aside from the part of his hair and the fact that he was wearing a suit (barely visible, it's a head shot), he could pass, mostly because of his glasses ... for a hipster!  In fact he doesn't entirely disresemble this clown.  I should go back with a teeny tiny picture of a can of PBR and paste it up there.

But he's not a patch on R. P. Kiehl, heir (perhaps) to the Kiehl's fortune and martial arts enthusiast, who had a waxed, pointy moustache.  Awesome!

In the end I finished the rest of the pie (about 1/6) this morning.

I'm something of a pettifogging reader of philosophy—v. frustrating for me.  E.g. in this book I seem to be unable to read a full paragraph, or at most a page, without having to put the book down, because I feel that either the same term is being used for things that are different, or something that ought to be explicated in greater detail (or at all; there's a blurb on the back of the book saying that it has "the precision of the best analytic philosophy" and yet one of the first things Walton does is say he's not going to try to define imagination since (1) it's mad hard, yo and (2) we can get by, in this case, with our intuitions—even though it seems that various kinds of imaginings are going to be incredibly important for him and most of my confusion at this point stems from being unsure what he means by his various invocations of the concept), etc.  This despite the fact that I've read all of eleven pages of non-introductory material and a reasonable person would probably be inclined to suspect that some elucidation of initial material might come in the next, oh, 400-odd pages.

This is no way to read a book!

By the end of today I will probably have eaten an entire pie.

What does one do after finishing a book?  It seems to me that there isn't anything to do.  But something must be done.

As that which now I draw from my pants

[MACBETH, the bi-curious Thane of Cawdor who hasn't had sex in years, pauses outside the door to a gay bar, when suddenly a hilted dildo appears before him]
MacBeth: Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of "blood",
Which was not so before.

Dim proleptic memories

I note that Sean McCann's comment at the Valve is a pale imitation of an earlier post of mine.

I don't have a problem with consistency

From an email, quoted without permission, recently received:

I was listening to the stylings of the Dutch goth-rock band Within Temptation (has your head exploded yet, trying to contemplate the sheer impossibility of such a thing?) and thinking about authenticity.

Going on to mention things similar to what's been discussed here recently (at least in my mind).  Clearly, I have to kill him. 

Suspension of disbelief

Was Oskar Matzerath, with his three-year-old body, capable of producing spermiferous ejaculate?  Or was spilling his spittle in Maria's left palm the closest he could come (so to speak)?  This could be important in resolving Kurt's paternity.

Also: when describing the damage the artillery is doing to the street, the translator has translated the street names—Big Weaver Street, Hook Street, &c.—but up until then, and after that point, the street names are all untranslated: Labesweg, Kleinhammer-Weg, Ringstrasse, and the rest.  Fuck you, translator!

The condition to which I aspire

He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.

But!

As soon as one begins to see all in everything what one says usually becomes obscure.  One begins to speak with the tongues of angels...

And, of course,

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

Porcum non conveniens

A troo exchange:

I:	You shouldn't talk on the phone while driving, $name1
With whom I spoke:	I'm not driving well, $name2.

c-h-i-c-k-e-n, that's the way you spell "chicken"

It is possible to be confused as to the point of erudition, or even learning in general, I suppose.  But isn't it obvious?  The point of erudition is to be able to make clever allusions and maybe even humorous jokes to other erudite people.

Ignis infatuate

I eventually want to write a follow-up to this post (and I don't just say that to invoke Weiner'sKotsko's Law concerning announcements of future posts), but I think that my real problem is with motivation & "strategy", in the end.  Of course I—pocket-watched, fountain-pen'd, becaned*—have a vested interest in distinguishing eccentricity from affectation.  Or rather, I don't, really, since if the distinction were collapsed then, presumably, the negative connotation attached to "affectation" would be lessened—but I almost can't conceive of "affected" not carrying a negative connotation.  It's self-awareness that fucks everything up, in the end.  At one point I thought that you could divide affectation from eccentricity on a motivational/self-awareness basis, the eccentric being someone who behaves the way he (and since everyone's paradigm eccentric is an older British gentleman of a certain type, "he" isn't unjustified, perhaps) does from a kind of unreflecting just-the-way-he-isness, while affectations are the mark of someone who behaves strategically.  Somehow that became tangled up with the belief that the genuine eccentric would not really have the concept of eccentricity or apply it to himself—which is clearly ridiculous; if you read interviews with Edward Gorey, who was certainly a bit off the beaten path (and I've read many), it's clear that he's got self-awareness about what he's doing.  I almost feel that in such a situation one should stop and start acting in a conventional way—just because once the distinction is made explicit and taken up, how could you avoid becoming ipso facto merely affected?—or at least it will surely affect your behavior and your self-analysis.  You can innocently & unpretentiously read Joyce on the train, say, in unawareness that people will think that you're being pretentious, but once you find out that they will so judge you, what will you do?  Cover it with a bag?  But why should you do that?  But if you don't, won't that constitute, in some way, pretention?  I don't think this is a matter of being concerned with what other people think of you.

*I don't use the cane, it just hangs from a bookcase.

Ignis fatuous

Some time last year I learned that rue is a plant—or that "rue" names a plant, let's say. It's a bitter herb, used in the making of bitters both non and potable. A relative of the plant is used in Angostura bitters, for instance. Instantly the more common verb, words like "rueful", Housman's poem, &c., became altogether more portentous and unfamiliar. It really had a strong effect on me.

But it turns out the words are actually unrelated. "Rue" the plant comes from Greek ; "rue" the sorrowful feeling from Old English "hréow". What a disappointment.

Sweet productivity

My computer's CPU fan went kaputt in the night—again—which means that there's a slight chance that I'll do such things as explore the world outside my apartment and read.  Hurrah!

Aquatic demon hellspawn below.

A niche market

Amazon recommends to me almost nothing other than socks and books on aesthetics.

Who killed Laura Staunton?

The number of books which I know I've read, but about which I remember vanishingly little, is distressingly large.  And not even in the distant past.

Orthrelm's OV: Kickass or totally sweet?

I mentioned it before (I have no idea why that page has a completely different theme, btw; it only happens, it seems, to individual posts and archive pages from before July.  How bizarre), but only just now listened to it, and it is indeed like a very intense version of the Necks, and now Mick Barr is talking about "guitar, 2 drummers and oboe"?  (Interesting that it's getting pegged here as modernist, instead of what I hear as extremely ramped-up minimalism (totalism?).  Though given their earlier albums in which they never repeated a phrase ever, and the huge fandom of Weasel Walter, and the somewhat inescapable sense that Orthrelm's music is designed with something not entirely unlike this incredibly toxic conception of musical progress (the "development of mathematics" part) in mind, it makes some sense.)

You're gonna lose that girl

While nearly everything I've read about him, never actually having read the dude directly, has made me think of Adorno as one uptight nut with whom I would generally not agree (and a friend once suggested: "think of Adorno as two giant jowls wiggling in disapproval of most everything. I find that this explains a lot."), I am highly intrigued by the attribution to him of the thought that "the fragment that hints at a totality but never aims to achieve it is considered the only viable alternative", since it puts me in mind of various things said by such as Yoshida Kenko and Junichiro Tanizaki.

Why am I always the last to find out about things?

It seems that some time ago it was discovered by researchers at Cambridge! University! in the U!K! that it doesn't matter what order the internal letters of a word have so long as the first and last letters remain first and last (respectively).  You'll still be able to read it no problems!  I thought the sentences used to demonstrate the phenomenon (which described the phenomenon itself, clever clever!) were a little simplistic, though, so I ginned up the following.  So far, every single person I've showed it to has been able to decipher it no problem, and in a pretty short amount of time, too!  Longer than just reading it straight through would take, but much shorter than brute-forcing.  Pretty impressive results IMO.  Here's my text:

Ciitnnnoug my aailynss, it ouerrccd to me that Boeadsw had the nmae of both a piiayhcsn and an eeerxlmty hhgily-rradgeed eiiuacasnodltt.  All the faeecs drieaepspd, iltnsegnetiry, an iurasltotiln of rviaptilutede ammnteirraaa rcnoteeeernud in a fliruusoy magltheuansr of a pintaet uireognndg a cceimtlpaod mtttrriiieeaospnn of not utaicernn saonuiilttps rridnaegg the ttnnneercaasdl cnnoodtiis of eeeiirxnaptl ccsssinuneoos as reeelvad by pnhllltyyccaaaiosy rrlbtaieeacd thqnieuehs.

You wouldn't think it would be so legible!

Tom Cruise should be careful

I broke two fingers jumping over a couch.  They still don't overlap right when bent.  My burgeoning career as a violinist was ended forever.

The doctor placed one of the fingers so it would heal more-or-less correctly by the trusty grab 'n' twist method.  To prevent my passing out when he did this, he first pumped my hand full of anaesthetic.  This involved inserting a huge needle, attached to a huger syringe, into my palm, and then depressing the plunger until hemispheres of liquid formed on both sides of my hand.  I think that, by the end, the tip of the needle would have been all the way through my hand were it not for the newly-formed bulge.  He then basically pushed the stuff into my fingers.

It was almost cool enough to render the whole ordeal worthwhile.

You're going to set me up as some kind of slovenly attached pig that Jack Kornfeld can slice down in his violent zen compassion?

Holy crap!  There are remains of the version of this blog that used to be here two years ago floating about the net! And it's not completely awful—mostly because there were more puns then than there are now, including:
- A proposed replacement of "coitus interruptus" with "aposiopenis"—and this predates unfogged becoming cock joke central;
- A proposed study of a certain kind of hairstyle to be called Die Afroliche Wissenschaft;
- A tortuously set-up joke about engineering and Aristotle, culminating in The Nickelcadmium Ethics
Overall, though, in the beginning there were lots of longish posts where I was obviously trying, earnestly, to be all s-m-r-t, the best of which was probably about Yoshida Kenko (that is: the one I'm thinking of was definitely about him, and it was probably the best), with occasionaly tryings to be funny intermingled (eg, a proof that Jesus is Santa Claus).

I have a problem with Kai Hammermeister.

And it extends to not being able to remember his family name, but it starts with his chapter on Schopenhauer in this book.  He obviously doesn't like Schopenhauer much—fine.  But the summing-up that takes place at the end of the chapter seems awfully tendentious and out of place in a book that the author claims to mean as a historical survey:

The problem with Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory is not so much that it is full of inconsistencies and that many questions remain open.  That is also the case with Kant's Critique of Judgment, for example, although certainly to a much lesser extent.  Much more problematic, however, are Schopenhauer's departures from central positions of idealism.  For one, there is the individualistic turn in his aesthetics.... True to the soteriological impetus of his metaphysics at large, the importance of art results from its relevance as a means for relief that it provides for the consumer.... Secondly, the individualistic turn also emphasizes the role of experience in art over and above the work of art itself... Furthermore, Schopenhauer's theory of art complicates both the epistemological and the practical moment of art to the point of reversing their traditional function.

(And so on.)  Surely I can't be completely mistaken in thinking that he's enumerating, at best, controversial elements of Schopenhauer's aesthetics, and not necessarily problems with it?  Even if Schopenhauer is flat-out wrong in the ways that Hammermeister pretty clearly thinks he is, there's difference between your theory being wrong and its having problems.  (Right?  I think maybe so.)

Also, whoever edited this book really needs to be fired.

I am going mad

I'm watching a movie of a speed attack on the original Final Fantasy (why?  Fuck you, that's why), and it occurred to me that the beginning of the overworld music is highly reminiscent of a particular Sufjan Stevens song, or maybe a song Sufjan Stevens is likely to write.  But probably the former, because it maps tolerably well onto the melody of the line "it's been a long long time", up to and including the first "long"—but I can't remember which song that line's from, and I don't have the patience to listen to 190 minutes of mallet percussion and banjo to figure it out.  Is it "He Woke Me Up Again", which I initially thought?  Is it "Romulus"?  "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands"?  Am I on crack?

Also, the music for the second dungeon, the one after you get the ship?  Prog as fuck.  Just sayin'.

New breakthroughs in musical descriptive terminology

"Core", previously relegated to second-class status as a suffix with the curious power of turning any word or phrase to which it was attached into a musical genre (hardcore, slowcore, sadcore, metalcore, skullcore, Nintendocore, Lady Came from Balticore, etc.), has undergone a mutation—possibly as a result of being struck by lightning and having its circuits rewired, or because of exposure to radiation of some sort—and become a freestanding descriptor on its own, and quite possibly gained self-awareness into the bargain, as evidenced by this (ridiculous) description of Ahleuchatistas' new album: "best yet from this amazing power trio technical avant improv core math metal art punk rock band".  (Yeah, of course it's the best yet, Steve, it's on your label.)