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2015-04-27 - 9:21 a.m. I used up my used book store credits on a couple of quick grabs at the front of the store since the lady is trying to get out of the business and who knows how much longer it will be around. One of the books in question is Gibson's Spook Country, where he tries to update The Names, but since it's set in New York and Los Angeles then it isn't particularly I dunno...interesting? One of the characters is a has-been singer, perhaps inspired a bit by Kim Gordon (who is not a has-been but who was, after all, well into her fifties when the book was being written). This for whatever reason has allowed him to state not once but twice (so far) that music is the most atemporal of the arts. A ridiculous statement if you actually listen to music instead of using it as some kind of background to promote efficiency or patriotism or sell cars and alcohol...Music that really touches you is anchored to time and place like nothing else really. Besides, if by this statement he means that a given piece of work can still reach out and touch people of another generation, then surely sculpture or architecture or jewelry-making/lapidary are far more "atemporal" than music. Nothing's more annoying than the "music" of the previous generation. And, for many people after a certain age, nothing is more bland or un-interesting or "popular" or "vulgar" than the music of the next generation. There's nothing atemporal about it at all. It's exactly like the novel -- either you speak to the people of your time or you speak to no one ever. But maybe he knows the statement to be ridiculous and intends it to be so. Hard to tell. I'm sorry to say that I keep falling asleep. One of the characters is a drug addict pro translator who is the captive of some sort of gangster, and I keep falling asleep during his chapters.
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