urgency to bleed

I know I said I might not be posting for awhile but I saw this prompt on the front page of Livejournal when I signed in and it inspired me: Is there any song you could listen to 20 times in a day without ever losing interest? I mean, it's perfectly suited to this blog, no? So I thought for awhile about whether I should go with the old standards, aka the songs I've loved forever and already gushed about and will never grow tired of, or newer obsessions that I haven't yet posted. I decided to go with the latter since I basically just posted a week's worth of entries containing songs I've already mentioned. Maybe that means I'll look back on this entry in a year and think, "Seriously? I could have listened to that 20 times in a day?" but at the moment they all seem like good choices. They're also a rather odd combination of artists I'm just getting into and ones I've loved for awhile but I'm 99.9% certain that every song here can be found in no other entry. So, enjoy!

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Yeah, can you tell I quickly gave up on trying to describe most of these songs eloquently? Sigh.

November is National Novel Writing Month. I don’t know if many of you are writers but I personally couldn’t live without writing. My head is constantly filling up with all these random ideas and if I don’t get them down on paper as soon as possible, they begin to invade my real life. Well, if I really care about a certain character, they end up invading my real life regardless but writing it down at least keeps me relatively sane. Now, I’m not going to build myself up as this excellent writer because I don’t really know how my own writing stands up to the rest of the world’s but I have written a fair few things that I think I can be safe in saying I’m very proud of. (If anyone is honestly interested, I post my stuff here. Two warnings: I write mostly about love and depressed people and, usually, both of those things together; I am also not really a plot person. If that already sounds unappealing to you, please don’t read it and then tell me how much I suck, mmkay?)

Now, back to NaNoWriMo, this is my first year attempting it and I didn’t decide to do so until the last minute so it’s all rather hectic and exciting. So far, I’ve been doing well but I imagine when the things I’ve already decided will happen have been committed to computer screen (that sounds so much less eloquent than paper) I will start having a much rougher time of it. It doesn’t help that I am a notorious procrastinator and a frequent victim of severe writer’s block either. But I am determined to trudge through even if it means wanting to pull my hair out some days. If anyone reading this now is going through the same thing, here are some lovely songs related to reading and writing to help you through. Even if you’re not an author – or at least not an author insane enough to attempt this – I’m sure you’ll find plenty to love in these songs too.

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And if the music isn’t enough and you aren’t spending the month trying to write your own novel, here are my reading recommendations for you! Now get to your local libraries, people, (or direct yourself to Amazon using these handy links) and read until you drop!

• Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
• Aimee Bender – The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• Bret Easton Ellis – Lunar Park
• Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex
• Jonathan Safran Foer – Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• Siri Hustvedt – The Sorrows of an American
• Miranda July – No One Belongs Here More Than You
• Carson McCullers – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• Ian McEwan – Atonement
• Lorrie Moore – Anagrams
• Audrey Niffenegger – The Time Traveler’s Wife
• Flannery O’Connor – Wise Blood
• Dorothy Parker – Anything! She was hilarious. But especially her poems.
• Sylvia Plath – Collected Poems
• J.D. Salinger – Franny and Zooey
• Donna Tartt – The Secret History
• Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited (if you want to think)/Vile Bodies (if you want fluff)
• Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Virginia Woolf – The Waves
• Markus Zusak – The Book Thief

Yeah, I like to read. A lot. Unfortunately, it’s on the backburner this month as I can only focus on so much at once! Plus, I’m afraid I’ll inadvertently steal from whatever book I’m reading and I do that enough as it is with the books I’ve already read.

So... um, I haven't posted in a couple of months, have I? Sorry about that. It's not that there's been a lack of music to inspire me, it's just that I'm lazy and... yeah, mostly lazy but I've also been burned out on writing in general for awhile now. All kinds of writing apparently: music reviews, fiction, fucking around with no purpose but to entertain myself. Yep, it's all been pretty difficult to accomplish lately. But here I am, trying to amend that! By briefly convincing you to check out some albums from this year that I haven't gotten around to mentioning yet! There are quite a few because, as we have established, I am a lazy fuck so this will be split up into a couple entries. It's basically a mix of albums I adore, albums I really like and albums that aren't so great but have a few really good songs and, hey, sometimes it's fun to say bad things instead of good all the time, isn't it? So, yeah, have fun, discover new music, be merry. I will try to be more prompt regarding the next installment.

( Arcade Fire - The Suburbs )

( Azure Ray - Drawing Down the Moon )

( First Aid Kit - The Big Black and the Blue )

( Jenny and Johnny - I'm Having Fun Now )

( Lydia - Assailants )

( The Narrative - The Narrative )

( Ra Ra Riot - The Orchard )

And, truly, saving the best for last, even though this is more a review of two songs instead of an entire album because regarding these specific releases, that seems far too daunting a task to even comprehend for at least several months...

( Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People/The Age of Adz )