Just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. It’s been on my bookshelf for almost twenty years. Still has the bookmark from Borders Books, which is in some ways appropriate because it’s about, among many other things, the passage of time.

I was able to follow the story, more or less. It starts with the 1895 World’s Fair in Chicago and ends sometime after World War One. Loads of characters. Spans the globe and beyond. Some storylines held my attention better than others. Abstract talk of imaginary mathematical principles lost me, but the book overall is weirdly emotional.

Despite its setting, Against the Day is pretty timely. One of the central tensions is between plutocrats and what I’d loosely describe as “the rest of us” but which the plutocrats in the novel think of as anarchists. To them, it seems, anything that questions their rule represents a slide into total chaos. Meanwhile the rest of us do our best with greater or lesser degrees of success to avoid becoming what Bob Dylan once described as pawns in their game.

Anyway, talking about books is one thing, but talking about music is another, and I’m not really sure what to say about music, hence my years-long dodge of doing interviews with artists rather than offering my own thoughts on their music. This is largely because my thoughts on most music tend to be along the lines of, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.” After a while, though, variations on “Hey, that’s pretty cool” start to get old, and even saying a new artist reminds me of an old artist starts to strike me as a bit hackneyed as well.

The main problem, though, is that writing reviews of music doesn’t really make sense anymore. Album reviews kind of made sense when only a couple of songs might make their way onto the radio and the rest remained safely and mysteriously ensconced in the grooves of a plastic disc, thus turning the purchase of any album into a bit of a gamble. Under those circumstances, a good reviewer could tell a discerning consumer whether or not or, in some cases, why the purchase was worthwhile. Now that music is basically free, what’s the point?

Sure, there’s an argument to be made that with so much music around, the casual consumer needs a guide or a curator to point the way, but that’s kind of pretentious, not to mention presumptuous on the part of the reviewer. The best I can do is say, “Here’s a song. Maybe you’ll like it or maybe you won’t. How the fuck should I know?”

Which I suppose is better than nothing, so here’s a song. Give it a listen. Maybe you’ll like it or maybe you won’t. How the fuck should I know?

The song, by the way, is called “Breathe.” It’s by Hank Harris and produced by Jimmy Goings, whom I interviewed a little while ago.

No new interviews for the foreseeable future, by the way. I’m off to Halifax for a little while.