Archives Project: STL #40

Title: Silencio
Description: N/A/
Date: 18 June 2004

At this point, the unhealthy blog begins to whither. It actually mirrors my current rut on a macro-scale, since as you see the demands of work draw me away from blogging. I can say with confidence that I am not the only blogger to experience this.

Sorry about last week, and for that matter sorry about this week. If you're interested, the file is a draft of the conference paper I'm giving next week on Objectivist poets and their literary silences.

Next week, also silence.

[following is the unformatted, unedited draft]

Paper Title: Rhetorics of Silence: Objectivists and the 1940s
Author: REDACTED

Intro
To call the Objectivists poets 40’s is a bit paradoxical. Although the poets most directly associated with the quasi-movement—such as George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky—were all alive and well, they wrote little and published less during the decade. Objectivists might be better considered poets of the 30s, based on early association and publication in the October 1931 issue of Poetry which include Zukofsky’s famous manifesto on sincerity and objectification, and when a discourse on Objectivist practice briefly circulated, even tho the poets associated with it never actually formed a cohesive movement. Alternately, they might be called poets of the 60s, because of the renewal in interest in and return to print of these poets during those years. Indeed, the major publications of these poets in the sixties and seventies—such as Reznikoff’s Testimony, Zukofsky’s All, the American edition of A 1-12 in 1967 and complete A in 1978, and Oppen’s string of remarkable volumes beginning with The Materials in 1962—represent their greatest contribution and continuing influence. But the decade of the 40s falls into the period of what Ron Silliman calls “Second Phase Objectivism,” the fallow period between early publication and the return to print in the 1960s, a period marked by silence and neglect. Oppen had fallen into his famous 25 year silence, and Rakosi followed suit after his 1941 Selected Poems. The ever-busy Zukofsky continued to work, but took a long break from his “poem of a life,” “A’ for most of the 40s. Though this silence has fascinated readers, particularly Oppen’s, it is difficult to integrate into critical discourse, for the very reason that it provides us no text. In this paper, I will briefly look at three Objectivist silences—Oppen and Rakosi’s absolute silences and Zukofsky’s relative one—and consider how we, as literary critics, might read them.

Hugh Kenner, in A Homemade World, explained this fallow period as resulting from the neglect of publishers and academics.
The academy has consistently shunned [the Objectivists]. Though the Objectivists were college men, though Zuk spent many years at college teaching, and tho the New Criticism of the 1940’s tended to be first and last something practiced by teachers, though Ph. D. candidates with New Critical supervisors scratched on their hands and knees for dissertation subjects, the Objectivists remained unnoticed, unreprinted, till the late 1960’s . That is because, when the university network was linking up after the war, and taste for the first time was being made in classrooms, the prime criterion of poetic excellence was tending to become teachability…
Kenner then catalogues “teachable” aspects of poetry (according to New Critics): paradox, concrete imagery, and a certain obviousness of argument, and concludes that “Poets who offered no handle for such apparatus to hang onto were simply ignored…” (173). While this academic neglect is demonstrable, we must also recognize that the silence of some these poets was intentional. They weren’t simply waiting around for the award committee to call, but chose other forms of work. The paradigmatic case is George Oppen who Jerome McGann calls a “symptomatic and instructive figure” in considering poetry and silence.
Oppen
George’s wife Mary Oppen writes in her memoir Meaning A Life that she and her husband left off artistic work for political work because it seemed the appropriate response to first the suffering of the Great Depression, in the 30’s, and then war and fascism in the 40’s. Direct political action was more valuable to them than political art, which they found largely insincere (a noteworthy violation of the Objectivist credo of sincerity and objectification in poetry). Mary explains that
an appeal was made to intellectuals by the seventh World Congress of the Communist Parties in 1935 to join in a united front to defeat fascism and war. We responded to that call, and in the winter of 1935 we decided to work with the Communist Party, not as artist or writer because we did not find honesty or sincerity in the so-called arts of the left… We said to each other, ‘Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our other interest in the arts for a later time.’ (151)
As they worked as organizers for the Communist Party, they still, as Mary recalled, “held close a belief in ourselves as artists, and we intended to find our way back to a life in poetry and the arts.” George later enlisted in the Army to fight in the European theater. After the war, the Oppens were harassed by the FBI because of their communist background and in turn fled to Mexico, where they lived and worked for several years. By 1958, the Oppens were able to return to the United States and in Mary’s words, began to assimilate the violent years… into thought and poetry” (200). George began work on The Materials, which was published by New Directions in 1962.
An understandable impulse in Oppen criticism is to use his long silence as a frame to interpret his subsequent poetry. Consideration of silence in poetry often figures it textually—a mute or unresponsive interlocutor, semantic gaps, or a spare style. Even the use of white space on the page is often taken as a material metaphor for silence. John Taggart, one of Oppen’s best readers, calls Oppen’s poetry “a structure which is so composed as to contain—almost preserve—all that which is most threatening, the openness of time, the abraiding grain of silence” (227) through various stylistic means. That the qualities of Oppen’s poetry can be talked about in terms of silence may propogate an overriding explanatory myth of silence, creating a metaphoric frame for the poetry. This frame is strengthened by the ethical motivation of the silence (other work was more important for the good of all) and the corresponding ethical issues of the poetry. Nevertheless, the frame valorizes the poetry and de-emphasizes Oppen’s other work. It also romanticizes and in fact fabricates silence: the work of organizing, or of simply carrying on quotidian life, obvious is not done without using language.
Maybe a better tactic is to read the silence itself. In his introduction to the recent Collected Poems Michael Davidson reads Oppen’s silence as a form of refusal:
In a culture heavily committed to production, the idea of a writer who becomes silent seems heretical. Hugh Kenner provided the most convenient explanation of Oppen’s silence by observing that “…it took twenty-five years to write the next poem,” a remark to which Oppen has given assent in various interviews. However elegant, Kenner’s formulation dehistoricizes Oppen’s silence by sidestepping the challenges it was trying to meet in the politically charged 1930s…. However much one may want to textualize his silence by seeing it as a lacuna in a long—a very long—poem, the facts of economic depression at home and the growth of Fascism abroad placed demands on his aesthetics that could not be resolved through aesthetics.”xxxi
But even Davidson translates the silence into Oppen’s poems, noting that he “found value in the not said, in the incomplete phrase, in the bare noun.” This is not to fault either Davidson or Taggart, who are sensitive and articulate readers; they use silence as fruitful interpretive frames.
It might be more accurate to seek instead of a poetics of silence, a rhetoric of silence, which reads not speaking (or better, not writing or publishing) as a meaningful gesture in the context of a life’s work. To do so it would be necessary not only to read texts, but also careers, as Libbie Rifkin suggests doing in her book Career Moves. Citing Bakhthin, she calls for “a ‘social evaluation’ of the interlocking set of textual and historical factors … and thus ‘actualizes the utterance both from the standpoint of its factual presence and the standpoint of its semantic meaning’ (121). Poetic careers are both produced by and productive of this larger social texture…” While I have no problem with using silence as a context for Objectivist texts, the silence of Second phase objectivism has an existence and a meaning apart from the renaissance of the Third Phase.
Rakosi
While Oppen’s silence is one of the crucial tropes found in his criticism, Rakosi’s 25 year gap is less deterministic in the few considerations of his work we have. However, it was apparently used as a sort of promotional device, an enticement for readers. The jacket copy of his first Third Phase volume Amulet reads as follows:
New Directions published his POEMS in 1941. Then to the great disappointment of his admirers, R stopped writing; he had become disillusioned with the state of our society and felt there was no place in it for a poet. The world seems little better off today, but at least we can be grateful that R began to write poetry three years ago and has now given us this selection from his poems, old and new.
This blurb interprets silence as a strong ethical stance: like Oppen, the times did not call for poetry, but direct action (in Rakosi’s case, social work and psychotherapy—again, talking professions). But in his 1969 interview with L.S. Dembo, Rakosi said this was only part of the story: “social work just drew me very strongly…it wasn’t until the late thirties that it seemed impossible for me to be a social worker and to write at the same time” (179) In this formulation, it isn’t that “the times” invalidated poetry, but that they called for a response other than poetry. The jacket copy is another instance of substituting historically-situated silence for differently historically-situated text. But as it turns out, the frame of silence doesn’t provide much help to Rakosi’s aphoristic, genial work. The textual metaphors for silence—semantic gaps, white space, etc—are simply not pronounced features in Rakosi’s early or late work. Not that it was easy to separate his early and late work: 28 of the 37 poems in the 1941 Selected, turn up some with minor revisions, in Amulet. suggesting a continuity across time. That his silence hasn’t been the object of fascination that Oppen’s has may be because it is not textually resonate. (Incidently, Rakosi celebrated his 100th birthday last fall and, as far as I know is alive and well and living in San Francisco)
Zuk
In 1941 Zukofsky self-published The First Half of “A”-9 as his first volume of poetry. According to Celia’s “Year by Year Bibliography to the Works of LZ,” he didn’t finish this movement until 1950, the longest gap in the writing of “A” . But as I indicated, he did keep himself busy in the 40s, as the panels here testify to. This silence is, like the others, only silence in a sense.
The First Half of “A”-9 represents a welter of conversation; in addition to his poem and explanatory materials, it includes work by Guido Cavalcanti’ Karl Marx, various modern physicists, Ezra Pound, and Zuk’s friend Jerry Reisman. The formula of “A”-9 suggests that literary production results from textual interchange, from vibrant discussion. Zuk’s essay “Objectification and Sincerity” says that the goal of poetry is to record “historic and contemporary particulars” (189), a task which silence obviously could not accomplish. So it would seem that silence doesn’t bear much on Z’s work either.
But publishing the first half independently accentuates the rupture in the composition and publication of “A”. The second half of“A”-9 was not published until 1959, in the Origin Press edition of ‘A” 1-12. I’ll turn now to pieces of A which recuperate this gap while thematically engaging silence: the completed A-9 and A-10.
The completion of A-9 is obliquely narrated in the essay “Poetry. To My Son When He Can Read” printed at the back of the American edition of A 1-12. In the essay, Zukofsky tells his infant son that he had recently taken some “almost illegible notes on poetry” out of his wallet (269). He explains that while the war had discouraged him, his son’s emerging language skills inspired him to follow up on these notes. While he is not specific, it is possible that these notes refer to the card on which he had sketched out the plan of “A” in the late 20s. The second half of “A”-9 takes on additional significance as the resumption of his life’s work. As many readers of A have noted, the 2nd half of A-9 represents a turn form the public realm of materialist critique to the private realm of love of family. This shift is not to silence, but perhaps to quiescence. The reprinting of A-9 in its complete form, without the additional voices in the first half, contribute to this impression.
“A”-10, appearing obviously immediately after 9, was actually finished first, in 1940. In straddling the gap in this fashion, it engages the question of the poet and silence in time of crisis. Describing the wreckage of war, he say “Let a better time say/The poet stopped singing to talk.” This strangely traces personal decision made by the organizer Oppen and the psychotherapist Rakosi, tho the reference is more likely to himself, descending toward his lower limit to engage political tumult. Though he kept at literary work, he acknowledges that wide scale suffering challenged him, and challenged his very medium. As the movement draws to a close, we find one of the flattest, most banal lines in the poem: “The capital of France is Vichy.” There’s a subterranean logic in that line: if war and fascism forces language to such a position, perhaps silence is the necessary choice.
Conclusion: a rhetoric of silence

And so we arrive at last at George Steiner’s position in his well-known essay “Silence and the Poet,” that “the political inhumanity of the 20th century” has made language “debased” and “dehumanized” so “to a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question…two essential courses are available: he may seek to render his own idiom representative fo the general crisis… or he may choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence” (69). But the Objectivist suggest that silence need not be as dire as this, nor be considered a single monolith. Silences might speak as well, and speak variously. We should then, as rhetoric scholar Cynthia Ryan urges us, “perceive silences within broader cultural and social terms” (675). We need rules that govern the “interpretations we make.. about the discursive significance of individual instances of silence” (675) that go beyond framing subsequent texts, but address the gaps and blanks in the terms of poet’s, the man or woman’s, life’s work. Although Rhetoric and poetics have historically been at odds, the silence of 2nd phase Objectivism can, after all, be read as an “unquiet gesture” a rhetorical act composed of a rhetor, implied auditor, and an ecodeable and decodeable statement.

Wolfgang Iser “What is said only appears to take on significance as a reference to what is not said.” (168)

Christopher Gaynor’s piece “Speculations through the mirro: silence” in Code of Signals invokes a GENERATIVE SILENCE and he juxtaposes VOWS OF SILENCE-AN OCCULT ORDER- A LOGOS

Davidson: “His silence was political in that it represented the inability of art to provide an adequate image of human suffering His return to writing was political by representing the inability of communal forms to account for individual agency.”

Mary: “We have always felt that our writing required distance from the politics of experience. ““Gestures of silence are filled with unquiet implications (Ryan 676).

Why Study Literature? Part One: The Usable Past (STL 59)

Really only scratching the surface, but the following began in reply to a student of mine who asked about what I thought about her use of the first-person in the conclusion of an essay she wrote. The usable past is from Lionel Trilling, and I first came to it through a book called The Unusable Past that usefully categorizes historical approaches to teaching American literature.

Dear X(tina):

Thank you for your e-mail. See I never really meet or speak to the students in this class, I am always glad to hear feedback. I did appreciate your use of the first-person in the essay. It was an appropriate and effective strategy. The reason that students are warned away from the first person is that it can steer them away from the actual subject at hand. Instead of studying the thing to form an understanding of it, the inexperienced student might rush to judgment view the thing (the story, the historical event, the biological specimen) with pre-formed and unwarranted opinions. But more experience and accomplished students should use the first person, since understanding is ultimately a personal experience. (Especially in literature, but true for other fields too.)

One of the reasons we study literature is to recover what is called "the usable past." So much of our lives are defined by the times we live in. Political and technological factors are always changing, so any moment in time is a "now" sealed off from the past. But as your connection with The Yellow Wallpaper shows, our reactions to where we are now aren't necessarily that different than people in the past. By connecting with a woman who wrote 100 years ago, you might begin to see connections between now and then. Without pausing to reflect on it, the conditions of a woman in Victorian times--that she is little better than her husband's property, that she is thought of as a child unable to make her own decisions--are far removed from your own life. Yet the fact that you can't end an academic paper without referring to your own experience is proof that Gilman's story relates to your life on some level. (The fact that you respond so well to this unit suggests that the experience of 19th century American women is somehow useful to you as a 21st century American woman.) As you point out, the specifics are different, so different that we can only partially empathize with that past. But part of it we can incorporate into our own 'now,' and so benefit from the power of a "usable past."

Horrorfest 2007 (STL 58)

Every year around Hallowe'en, wifey and I curl up on the couch and watch a few horror movies. I kind of like horror movies--they can be exquisitely crafted, beautifully composed, and, thanks to creative scoring and sound design, incomparably moody. Nevertheless, we don't see that many during the course of a year. Aside from our seasonal viewing, we might only see one or two other horror movies a year, or none. Unless you count Snakes on a mf plane or Pan's labyrinth, I doubt if we saw any last year, aside from our Hallwe'en goodies, The Wicker Man (original British version, please) and the Dario Argento movie Deep Red. This year's batch was a Hammer film starring Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance called The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It was rather dull, and the plot was somewhat like a middling episode of Angel in the way it mixes vampirism, corporate intrigue, and science fiction. The hired heavies in this movie are hilarious. They are typical mustachioed 70's dudes in sheepskin vests, that look like they were made out of their Trans-Am seat covers. Much better was Suspira and Halloween. Suspira is not as good as the Dario Argento film we saw last year (Deep Red), which relied more on suspense than the supernatural elements and gore of Suspira. (There's an evil witch, and a close up of a heart getting stabbed, if you want the specifics.) Wife puts her finger on Argento when she calls him the Italian DePalma (which only now sounds funny and redundant). They're both Hitchcockian (with a dash of Fellini), with deliberate and vivid imagery and a tightly controlled camera. By far the best of the three was John Carpenter's Halloween. All three of the qualities I mentioned earlier--craft, composition, and mood--are abundant in this movie. The horror comes from the background--of course it does, always--which remains still and empty most of the time, but is several times subtly violated by the affectless mask of Michael Myers, an inexplicable and incomprehensible evil. My favorite scenes are of the house across the way, observable by Jamie Lee Curtis. It's dark out but the porch is well lit. Several times Michael Myers comes around the corner, slowly and malevolently, but often it's just a still and horrible suburban night.

Archives Project: STL #39

Title: The Moon In Its Flight
Description: Okay, what you weren't waiting for: STL returns, (in May, as promised!) with some thoughts on Gilbert Sorrentino's collection of stories.
Date: 31 May 2004

Written, apparently, on my 34th birthday. Sorrentino's best work is his essays, which are collected in Something Said. Perhaps one day I will blog on that work, which are one of the models for what I do here. (To the extent I have models).

In an interview, Sorrentino called Ed Dahlberg "a subversive and destructive master of prose, who is, at his best, so good that he takes your breath away. He is also zany, goofy, loopy, misogynistic, deeply prejudiced, bitter, nasty, paranoid and absolutely unfair... He is a great American writer, astonishingly original, a virtuoso without peers,and probably much too good for us." You might say the same about Sorrentino himself, and that Sorrentino is virtually unknown (like Dahlberg himself, these days) tells you something-- that he probably is too good for us too. Sorrentino was first a poet (some of his work was incorporated into Paterson 5) and a literary raconteur (he befriended Hubert Selby and Leroi Jones early in their careers--if I'm not mistaken, Last Exit to Brooklyn is dedicated to him) and went on to write a stack of novels in the last 3 decades. The Moon In Its Flight collects his occasional short stories from the past 35 years.

Not only is Sorrentino is a master stylist "irreducible" prose ( vide this interview.)--manifested in perfect, acutely observant sentences, but he's a supreme innovator whose range is apparent in this collection. My favorite mode of his work combines metafictional self-awarenesss with a conversational, seemingly off-hand tone.* He works diligently within imposed constraints, such as writing a story only in questions (he actually continued this constraint through an entire novel) or integrating popular song titles into a discursive narrative, as he does in the title story, a moving consideration of nostalgia.

To top it off (so to speak)**, the right-minded reader might find an almost moral satisfaction in reading Sorrentino. He is a cranky Jeremiah who rails at fakeness where he sees it--whether in the insincerity of self-satisfied "fine writing" or in the intellectual laziness of contemporary America. Like Dahlberg, he's not for everyone--like any prophet he can turn nasty, which he does against inconstant women of his own creation, and his art is strongly devoted to artifice, which some might find cloying, if not occasionally befuddling.

And honestly, it's not his best work. His experimental and digressive tendencies need space to develop, which probably explains why he's written comparatively few stories over the years. Those of us who cultivate "oppositional" tastes (read "snobs") get some pleasure from our sure and unprovable knowledge that time will show us right. We would surely have been enthusiastic about Moby Dick, would have bought the first edition of The Way By Swann's, etc. In 2050, GS will have readers, if anyone has readers. Once we get a full picture of his body of work, his stories won't seem major in the way that novels like Mulligan Stew or Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things already do for some of us.

*"Meta-fictional" is an over-used description of an over-used device. Thankfully, in GS it's played less often as a writer sitting at his desk writing than as a story-telling questioning himself, and checking in with and interacting with his audience.
**This bracketing of the cliche is a GS speciality--it accentuates what the cliche glosses over.

Archives Project: STL #38

Title: "Other Dreams My Erring Soul Employ"
Description: A Note on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Date: 2 April 2004

I admit being drunk (droonk) when I wrote this, and it shows. This shames the previous candidate from worst post ever! It was also the last post before a temporary hiatus that then gave way to a longer hiatus. Ergo, my drinking ruined my blogging career.

This is the briefest of notes, written on a Friday night after inventing a ratio for making boiler makers out of "Gentleman Jack" sub-trademark and Shiner, left all alone after my hard day a-reading. It was edited thereafter when I remembered that some drunk guy left a post on me blog.

I saw Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My first nota bene leads to the next: no other screen writer gets benighted with the project. Yeah, some guy named Michel Gondry directed this, but it's a Charlie K. "film." Secondly, note the way that the writer's process, his "inventio" gets captured in the plot of the movie. At the crucial juncture between the clinical treatment and 'reality' (also between the mental projections of Joel and Clementine and the 'real' clinic staff), Kirsten Dunst recites two quotes she gleaned from Bartlett's, one of which gives the movie its name. When I saw this wonderful movie, I thought to myself "hey, I bet that Charlie wuz paging thru Bartlett's one day, and these two quotes starting knocking together, until the sparks led to the script." But later I start thinkin' to myself: what if it's a little harder than that? What is CK is only pretending to be like the clinic receptionist, reading quote books for conversation topics. And so I checked my sixteenth edition: four quotes from 'Pope, Alexander's' "Eloisa to Abelard," not including "The world forgetting, by the world forgot/ Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"! I bet the Nee-Chee aint there neither, but I is too droonk to look it up. My point? There's a lot of work happening here, a lot of deep thinking and reading of the old school that's getting disguised in an entertaining movie. The bottom line is that this movie isn't as simple as it looks.

In fact, it doesn't seem that simple compared to other movies: it respects your intelligence to let you juggle temporal lines based on the color cues of Kate Winslet's hair. But I think as I see this movie again and again, as I hope to, I'll keep thinking about the significance of this movie, of the intertwining of the subject and object, of the inseparability of moment and history. The saddest part of the movie only comes to you in retrospect: by removing Clementine from his life, he's sacrificed Huckleberry Hound, who obviously threaded in with his life earlier. You can try to separate emotional entanglements from your life, but like Alexander Pope says in the Big Alexander Pope Book and not Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, there are always "other dreams" that "my erring soul employ."

uh, missed a post on a day I had off

Not too good at this blog every day thing. I found out about it on the second and missed my first post on the fourth. At least I've posted more entries than days, thanks to the archive posts.

I'm tagging myself on a blog 'meme' wherein I list 7 facts about myself. I'll do my best to avoid simply listing books I've read.

1.) I've read all of Proust's A la recherch du temps perdu. I read it in English translation, but cite the French because it's fancy. I mean, because it's known by two English titles, the Shakespearean Remembrance of Things Past and the more accurate In Search of Lost Time. I've read the first volume 3 times, and also a comic book adaptation of the opening "Combray" segment (and posted on that somewhere). There are big parts swaths where I thought I was simply running my eyes across words, but a hundred pages later would be swept up in the cumulative force of the preceding mass of observations.

2.) I keep up on current happenings in the major comic book universes through a combination of webpages, podcasts, and first hand reading. To me, it's like the news; I just want to be an informed citizen of the multiverse. I now shudder because of the geekiness of that statement and from the fact that you already know that I keep up with said shiznitz from reading earlier posts.

3.) What's more, my dream job is to be a comic book writer. A straight-up, give-the-people-what-they-want, work-for-hire comic book hack.

4.)My wife and I got married in Las Vegas. Her name was Lola. She was a dancer.

5.) I have an amateur interest in the field of professional communication. The oddness of this statement can only come out in a separate entry.

6.) As a boy, I ran a fantasy baseball team. Not a team made up of real players banded together nor even of all-time greats, but a team of imaginary players with carefully crafted skill sets and backgrounds who would play and invariably defeat real world teams, while breaking selected single season records.

7.) I once saw a spider the size of a dinner plate. Or I like heavy metal. A lot. Or I fell in high school gym class and hurt my wrist, which still hurts to this day. I don't know how to end a list like this....

Detachment (STL 57)

To follow up on my previous archival post on selling the bulk of my records (for those who stumble on this site, I'm losing my former blog host so have decided to repost blog entires from 2003 in an "Archives Series"), I did in fact not only dispense with several hundred records at once, but then got rid of the cherry-picked seventy-five, the record player, and, finally, several hundred CD's. The first big lot of records we sold to a friend for a nominal sum ($10 per grocery bag, I believe). A few years later, faced with the fact that we hadn't even hooked up our turntable since moving, we took our 'good' records to a used music store which did still sell LPs. That lot we got some money for, but I don't remember how much. Obviously we got far, far less than the store will get. Most of these records were sure sellers even in the limited trade of used records--several Al Green records, Sticky Fingers with the zipper cover, Physical Graffiti with an undamaged insert, etc. Just this past summer, facing a long period of unemployment and a big move, we decided to part with more of our possessions. Wifey cleared out her closet, and I cleared out books, CDs, and comics. I made several trips to used bookstores, and I jumped into ebay with the comics and CDs, and actually made decent money. Ebay became an overbearing presence though--while far from equivalent to a full-time job, photos, auctions, correspondence, and trips to the post office seemed like a near daily obligation. Despite the fees, time, and occasional postage miscalculation, the money helped us pay the bills over the summer. I also sold our turntable on craigslist. It was posted for all of an hour before I got an offer from a hipster audiophile. There were practical as well as financial considerations for getting rid of this stuff. While I'm a lover of collections and have a professional need for a well-stocked library, it all takes up so much room. What doesn't take up so much room is the hard-drive right under my hands and which houses 1158 albums (and growing). I did comparative listening, and yes, Purple Rain does sound best on vinyl, next best on CD, and a little flat from an mp3 file (worse on an iPod plugged into the system than the laptop). But most of my listening actually happens on the iPod while walking the dog or going to work. I still love music and actively seek out new music, but my interest is more conceptual and/or analytical than what you could describe as affective or immersive. I listen to music to have thoughts about the music. Another topic I'd like to get into is how the iTunes/pod interface actually influences what I listen to. But that's a post for another day of this month o' blogging.