Secret City

I was skeptical about the hype I heard all year about TV on the Radio but I'm glad to have been wrong. The beautiful drone of layered guitars and loops drawn out under the recurring atonal piano chords on "Province" are inspiring, as few albums have been for me recently:

"Suddenly you realize, all your history's ablaze
Try to breathe as the world disintegrates"

Began reading Gravity's Rainbow a few days ago, already familiar with the paranoid, death-laden landscape of that novel. Isn't it merely our very own January 2007? Reading The Crying of Lot 49 in college, I was surprised to find a novelist whose psychedelic descriptions seemed so accurate. The professor for that class (on contemporary fiction) noted Pynchon's influence on Bret Easton Ellis. For instance, in the graffiti about his friend Julian the narrator of Less Than Zero keeps noticing around Los Angeles.

Why does it take months or years to arrive at certain texts? The necessarily circuitous routes to albums & novels that confirm or amplify our versions. Writing drafts that eventually could be a poem or poems. Driving through various Tampa neighborhoods, the same ghost I've been for a while now, noticing the pulses in one of the cities I think of as a home. Did Home take their name from the track on Westing (By Musket and Sextant)? How much of Tampa's sprawling freeways and suburban developments remind me of Los Angeles, in a minor key? Minor discoveries in secret city. My grandmother's paintings hung up all over the house.