Thus we refer to our practices of the world

People do not ordinarily say that they believe X; they simply act as though X were true, and hence as though the world were that way. Thus we refer to our practices of the world rather than to our beliefs, and feel as though it is reality itself we are describing rather than ourselves we are confessing.

— Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace 

Music Books Minor Move

I had earlier today an impulsive, harebrained idea to reorganize some of the books in my study. I would do something with the poetry, move some of it out to the big bookcases in the living room. But a cursory glance at those cases reminded me how much poetry is already there, and that it would probably take several hours to complete the move, given the reorganization my reorganization would require. So I decided instead that I should separate the music books from the other stuff in here (my study). There was no reason for this separation but I pursued it anyway. No less harebrained but far more contained.

I’m happy to report that it bore some bibliographic fruit! I found a handful of books that I either forgot I had or set aside for just a moment or thought I’d get back to.1 Which doesn’t mean I have any more time to read them than I did before I lost track of them but it’s nice to have them handy when I have some time to dig in.


  1. Hello, Julius Eastman biography! Hello Loft Jazz! Nice to see you, As Serious As Your Life! Etc. ↩︎

I picked up a copy of Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! and read through some of it last night and this morning. I enjoy Mr. Gambuto’s style — personable, playful, knowledgeable — and his message is clear enough, that we can bring some ease and comfort to our lives by revising and edtiting our digital activity. “Unsubscribe” is for Gambuto an extended figure of speech as well, and includes personal relationships, prejudices, and anything else that contributes to the noise in the cognitive and emotional signal paths in our lives. If this concept is new to you somehow, it’s a great place to start, a friendly, place to start finding a leaner, more streamlined, more satisfying, less hectic and harried life for yourself.

Of particular interest today was reference to The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary from 2020 whose aims might or might not be obfuscated by an oddly effective family dramatization which features Skyler Gisondo from The Righteous Gemstones.

I’m not sure I learned anything new from the book or the documentary, but I did have reaffirmed that the algorithmic minipulations we’re subjected to do not leave us simply choosing to take part in those platforms or not, that the platforms seek above all else to keep us engaged.

Why I Moved to New York City

“I am going to lose myself in the busy crowd and plunge with it into the open gullet of city and boredom, shuttle from one brief neighborhood to another, underground, like the rats. I am going to ride until there is no more stop or signal, ride between two doomed worlds which a whistle, shrill like the scream of a child-woman riveted to her own vertigo, calls back to the formless world of shadows. I am going to break away from myself through that docile part of me which is not afraid of compromise.”

— Jabès, Yukel, p.28

Julián Carrillo

I started reading Sound within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century and the first subject, Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, is a welcome and inspiring addition to my listening. His primary contribution is in the area of microtonal composition,1 but the author, Kate Molleson, delights in Carrillo’s self-mythologizing, and places it in equal importance to Carrillo’s artistry. If he was neglected, she says, it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was a real character, prone to revision and even fictionalizing his own history, giving himself credit for developments in composition and music theory that could not have been his, and it’s not entirely clear that anyone was even reading these accounts. He was a prolific self-publisher and proselytizer, a passionate tooter of his own horn. What matters most now, of course, is his music. Here’s the search results from Apple Music. It seems to be a reasonable survey of his work, but like all such things, there is probably more to be found elsewhere.

🎵 Listening to On Giacometti, by Hania Rani

  1. An area of musical praxis that sort of eludes me. I imagine that this is due in part to my being mostly auto-didactic, musically speaking, so that Carrillo’s music, for example, sounds unusual to me but not in a way I can articulate. More study, no doubt, to follow.

Frank O’Hara

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

>