The amount of necessary objective truths I believe in now is significantly smaller than it was when I entered college. I think though, that Earl Grey tea is best enjoyed in the afternoon- and I believe that to be objectively true.
I realize that's a terrible first line for my first post in well over a month. I hate that it's been a month; my most recent post was, of course, on the break-up of R.E.M. It was, literally, the first month of my life that they didn't exist.
That happens though, when you're younger than all of your favorite bands. Anymore, only the Red Hot Chili Peppers still make new music. It's not what it used to be, but I'd generally rather listen to their new stuff than the majority of the other things that actually get played on the hit radio stations. I'm not even opposed to pop music the way other people can be- I actually appreciate Lady Gaga quite a bit, and I can enjoy most hip-hop. But there's a poetry to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, even in The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie, that other songs tend to lack.
Once they break up, I'll probably create a new top 5 of bands that formed post 1983. That's a random year, but it's the latest year any of the five formed (in order of formation: The Beatles (1959ish), Led Zeppelin (1968ish), R.E.M. (1980), The Smiths (1982), and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1983). In actuality though, bands just aren't what they used to be- post-modernism saw to that. I still though, trust that the world is better for it.
I need to tell you about a book I'm reading; it's short, but it is magical. I'm not quite through- I will be soon, and I relish the opportunity to get back to it, hopefully later today. I'm learning how to write. Not like this, not simply by juxtapositioning words and creating shared shades of meaning. But how to actually live it; how to create, with words, the impression of my own soul that I've been chasing for years.
The book, you may have heard of it, is The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. She's illuminating to me things I feel I've always known. She's drilling into my soul with a narrative that isn't narrating. I've sought, for years, the perfect narrative voice, free from artifice of plot and characterisation, driven by the goal to tell a frivolous story. I may have found it in Dillard. No word is wasted; no sentence useless. I guess, when they say opposite's attract, they're not lying.
I need to read her fiction as soon as I can; you do too, I imagine.
-Zack
"We'll never be short of redemption"
-Jars of Clay
