Is it just me or does the idea of a 'listening tour' sound particularly silly to anyone else?



In other news...

- Essay count: down to two teeeny weeeny ones that should be done by 2011 or so.

- The officially anointed 'feel good Summer album of 2006-7' : Basement Jaxx's Crazy Itch Radio. We say yes to carnivalesque banging Balkan knees-ups! And surreal, exuberant vocalists that sound like muppets.

- Am surprisingly still not sick of "I Don't Feel Like Dancing". Though while out at a plastic franchise Irish pub the other night, I noticed that it blent in seamlessly with the ABBA-heavy, daggy mix of pop classics that was being played in order to make people feel safe / signify "good times" in a Gold FM kind of a way.

I'm not really sure why I feel compelled to write things down and record them. Is it simply that it gives more permanence to the 'I', to see yourself - well, not really yourself, but the self of a few moments ago - reflected back at you? Could well be. I note of course that I felt compelled even to write down my queries about writing itself.

(I am reminded of the scene in Sartre's Nausea in which Roquentin writes some words on the page and then only seconds later, after the ink has dried, feels no connection to the words before him. What relations do these objects of my creation have to 'I'? My second thought following this is, of course - Roquentin was a man who had spent a very long time by himself, with only his thoughts.)

If only it weren't so arduous to attempt to get the contours of language to follow the suppleness of thought, in which everything is presented whole with assumptions and connections already made and present.

The question is: why get language to follow thought anyway?

Anyway. Time to retire for the evening. Only two teeny-weeny little essays to go and then I ascend into realms of freedom in degrees unknown to mankind ever before in history. Or so I like to imagine it.

(Make sure you catch some La Rochefoucauld quotes!)