Not Publishing

You know how I am always being inspired by phrases. It is a real weakness! And I find most of them in the New York Times, which is just piling shame on top of weakness. But it is too late to change my life now. Anyway, I was reading about Emily Dickinson's house in today's New York Times, and came across a phrase to add to my collection: "Dickinson ‘had such freedom in not publishing,’ Cybulski said. ‘She could leave all those variants in.’” It reminded me of something notably eloquent that Sonny Rollins said about his grave distrust of recordings, I swear to God he really said it, but I have "clicked" on my Sonny Rollins "label" for this "blog" (visible on your laptop, but not your phone, I think; much like Cinemascope, the "blog" is not ideally suited to your phone) and I can't find that interview or quotation anywhere. I'd like to recall exactly what he said because I'll never say it right like Sonny Rollins. Something... about... how music is meant to exist temporally, fleetingly, and to capture it does it a disservice, because it falsely values that one captured moment over all the uncaptured moments that are at least equally important. That's not even close! But it does remind me of something I just read in the new Bob Dylan book. Old Bob maintains that a spectacular song and a spectacular record are not the same thing. "Some of our favorite records are mediocre songs at best, that somehow came alive when the tape was running." Well, I have "blogged" twice in two days, is this the beginning of a disturbing trend? After the TV blew up in 2016, we had a nice steep descent going, and 2019 proved to be a banner year for not "blogging." Then, the unpleasantness. Everything is still somewhat skewed. As of yesterday, we surpassed that nice low 2019 figure, meaning we'll just have to do better (less) in 2023.