It's quite acceptable to hate hate hate Songs from Liquid Days, a pop-minimalist fusion album of songs composed by Philip Glass. The music doesn't fit into normal and accepted parameters. It's as if a space traveller explained rock and roll and other popular American music to an alien on a distant planet, sang a few songs with air guitar accompaniment, and then that alien composed songs to obscure poetic texts from the distant planet he'd never visisted.

Alien: Is it difficult music?

Earthman: No. It's simple music! Just a few chords.

Alien: Rhythmically?

Earthman: Make syncopation integral to the music, and you've got it.

Alien: What instruments do you use?

Earthman: Well, use whatever you like. For pop music you just mic them closely and they can sound electric.

Alien: So that's all I need to know?

Earthman. So that's all you need to know.

The texts, of course, are not quite so simple. They are by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Paul Simon (maybe others; I've forgotten). The title song cryptically speaks of a couple undergoing the woman's menstrual period (yes, liquid days). It's sequel, Open the Kingdom, continues the sexual references in the form of a religious parody, sung full get-out by classical singer Douglas Perry, but about the end of said menstrual period. You figure it out, what this kingdom is, and how it can be opened.

The first song on the album, Changing Opinion, has fantastic lyrics by Paul Simon, and great singing by Bruce Fowler.

The song Freezing is, for me, the gem. A brief sad epigram sung beautifully by Linda Rondstadt, accompanied by the Kronos Quartet.

The whole thing is sui generis. Most people will chortle in incredulity. It is not pop. It is not classical. What the heck is it?

As one friend of mine put it, I have no trouble with simple; but this is simple-minded! Well, maybe. But simple-minded is really nothing more than a pejorative for simple. As I see it, The Arkansas Traveler is also both simple and simple-minded, and still a lot of fun to sing. Or, perhaps more in a minimalist spirit, think of Rolling Over the Billows.

The world has a lot of room for a lot of different stuff. Stuff to fill our heads and our lives and chill the spine a myriad ways.

Freezing chills my spine even today.

Even today, listening to the album on my old LP.

Even even today, listening. To the album. To the songs. On vinyl. An old LP. Repetitive? Yes. But not too.

In the last several years, I have found myself unable to read fiction with my old wide-ranging zeal. Science fiction, in particular, wears on me, and I stop after a few sentences.

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, is an exception. This book grabbed me from the beginning, and, had I not lost track of it in the mess of my office, and then in the mess of my bedroom, I would have read it immediately upon purchase, in as close to one sitting as possible. As it is, it's taken me many months to read. (I've since cleaned up my bedroom, and I'm cleaning my office as I move to the room next door.)

It is a first-person narrative, but one of those with plenty of description and opinion, and one that builds up its story. In structure, it most resembles (or so I say in dim memory) Gore Vidal's Kalki. But this book is far superior to that.

And, though billed as literary fiction, and obviously written at a high level, this book cannot help but be called science fiction. It is more science fictional than most books so labelled, for here we are not only dealing with an imagined future, but a science is focused on as a living, breathing human enterprise, and the focus of that science provides the major plot points.

The science? Anthropology. The focus? The Clovis hunters, who (may have) eradicated the bulk of the large mammals of the North American continent. A Clovis discovery by the narrator's star pupil turns into something almost farcical, and then horrific. The general tone of the novel is satirical.

This is one of the better end-of-the-world stories I've read. It is one of the best novels I've read in some time.

The title is meant, I think, to be evocative, not literal. Towards the end there is something said about parasites:

The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled.

Interesting, but not glorious. One might say that's the author's view of humanity: interesting, but not glorious.

I just started reading the satire Jennifer Government, by Max Barry.

It seems to be an anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, anti-corporatist, anti-privatization satire by someone who's never heard of anarchocapitalism, and only skimmed through libertarian ideas. In his novel, all of America (which includes Australia!) has privatized government. For some reason, this means that the corporations take over, and everyone's last name is of the corporation that employs them.

To my mind, this isn't so much witless as clueless. Markets, freed, don't lead to corporations taking over everything. Partnerships and sole proprietorships are everywhere, and would probably grow in influence in a freer market than we have now.

But Barry is one of those anti-corporate types, who see corporations as the worst thing in the world. It strikes me as rather silly.

The last name gag is simply a funny idea. But can it be good satire? It reveals the author's lack of realism, not capitalist reality's hidden entelechy. Capitalism is much more likely to lead to corporations kowtowing to a greater individual diversity than before.

A far more realistic nomenclature would be the evolution of naming one's last name in net terms.

Call me Timo Wirkman.net.

Still, the book isn't bad so far, and the little kid parroting anti-statism at school was funny. I'll continue reading. For a while, anyway.

Gore Vidal is of no close relation to Al Gore. And his Christian name is not, of course, Gore.

Somehow, his given name escaped me, even though I've read Palimpsests.

Gore Vidal remains my favorite living American author.