Blueberries and Robert Christgau

I'm loving the blueberry action this summer. There must be a bumper crop of them upstate because my local stores are offering them at abnormally cheap prices -- $1.99 a pint. Yippee! There is nothing like their cool, subtle taste.

Lying on my bed in hot summer air with the electric fan swishing cool swaths over my legs. First time this year for the fan. There hasn't been any heat. As sticky and unpleasant as it can be, I love its limpid, humid embrace. I love what it does to the days. Everything sags. I should have lived somewhere equatorial -- I prefer days when nothing is possible.

Reading Robert Christgau, I'm blearily confused by his jazzed up syntax. His sentences go zigzagging away from you in a pile-up of mismatched metaphors and incongruous adjectives. I get that to write about rock and roll, you want to get into a "gonzo head" as he says in his introduction. You have to go with a certain wildness because that's what the music demands from you. But to write almost incomprehensibly? Here's a sentence on the New York Dolls' Arthur Kane: "But although the Dolls would have been tastelessly aggressive and urban even without Arthur, his inability to come up with a catchy counterrhythm, to supply the kind of syncopation that sets the body swaying, left them no room to be anything else." One negative too many, dude -- I'm lost.

In another essay, on Sonic Youth, he comments that "...early on I thought (correctly) that they sucked...." How can you say you were correct in thinking something? Or comment on your own comment as if you have some higher objectivity?

Still, he's someone who cared a lot about music and it's not unpleasant to quarrel mentally with him while reading him in the soft summer heat.