Up early, not all night

Which is so novel for me, and so welcome. Pretty damn near a night of uninterrupted sleep.

A lot of times, I find that music does help me get to sleep — the right music, that is.

Tonight, it was (as it is so often) “Secret Agent Radio” from Soma FM. Streaming radio that’s mostly downtempo, lounge, and all sorts of other stuff mixed in with bits of dialogue from various spy movies and detective shows.

Soma’s got all sorts of other weird and cool stations. Check them out here: http://somafm.com/listen/

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I finished “On Truth” by Harry Frankfurt last night. Thought it was far better and more coherent than “On Bullshit.” I felt that in the latter book he took such a limited view of what constituted honest speech, at one point suggesting that a simple metaphor (“I feel like a dog that’s been flattened by a truck”) demonstrated “the essence of bullshit” because the speaker didn’t actually know what a dog felt like after it had been flattened by a truck. (He was expanding on an anecdote about Wittgenstein saying the same thing to a woman in the hospital when she described herself that way.)

Anyone else read these books?

It’s back to Lakoff’s “Metaphors We Live By” now. Then I think I’ll retackle Harrison’s “The Dominion Of The Dead.” Seems like all my reading lately is this philosophical stuff regarding the nature of truth, reality, and the influence of cultural conditioning on a world view. It’s stimulating some poems, by Jove.

I do wish I could read more fiction, but I find it all so…boring? pointless? Not sure what the right word is. I can’t think of the last time I read a work of fiction, or started to, that held my attention for more than a day. This includes everything from Sue Grafton to Umberto Eco. I’ve got Ian MacEwan’s “Atonement” here, courtesy of Barbara Adler, and I’ve started it twice — no dice.

I read a lot of fiction when I was younger, in my teens and twenties — I read voraciously back then, and read a wide range of stuff. Now it’s pretty much poetry, philosophy, and cultural studies, with a lot of topical magazines tossed in for good measure. Interesting shift.