C-wod.com

Now that I’m firmly entrenched in post-graduate ennui for the foreseeable future, it’s probably about as good a time as any to start updating this thing again. I know, outside of the UK or Texas, people don’t really care about The Kooks or the Cowboys, respectively, which means you obviously have more literary interests. You know, books and stuff.

But first off, I should expound on a new joy in my life. I didn’t see it coming, for several reasons, and now that it’s here, I am as closed to excited as I, as a non-excitable kind of guy, can be. Relatively speaking. I’m referring to the new rock radio station here, 101.9 RXP. Apparently, contrary to rumors of its death, as well as the emergence of intelligent music dance music, rock ain’t quite dead yet, with RXP even replacing the requisite “smooth jazz” station that used to occupy 101.9 FM.

I never expected this kind of station around these parts. This is New York. People listen to lots of things—hip-hop and top 40 pop and reggaeton, and who knows what else—19th century opera, I guess. We already have three “rock” stations. Three’s company, right?

Also, I was always under the impression that every area needed a smooth jazz station to supply, if nothing else, inoffensively boring elevator music, but rock’s resurgence has swept easy listening aside in favor of classic and alternative RAWK. I know lots of parents who probably miss listening to smooth jazz while doing the Times crossword on weekends. I just can’t see them sitting down to The National and going about their business. That’s because listening to The National is all about introspection, contemplation, and post-punk surreality.

With all this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised that our new rock station includes so much indie-alternative rock. I know that K-Rock pretends to play alternative rock, but they play a decidedly mainstream and commercial variety from the catch-all genre. RXP is like listening to a Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack, throwing out Nada Surf singles in between Radiohead’s “Creep” and your mom’s least favorite U2 single. It’s great. Of course, if I have to hear “I Will Possess Your Heart” one more time on the radio, at Borders, or in Panera, I’m going to be upset. Very upset.

I guess I should start finding a new layout for this mess of a blog.

Most people create a summer reading list for one reason or another. I created my summer reading list, because I have so many books I haven’t read yet.

Summer reading list:
You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Beautiful and Damned and The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Aureole by Carole Maso
Without by Randie Lipkin
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Ada, Pnin, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
The Gathering by Anne Enright

I’m also reading short story collections by T.C. Boyle, J.D. Salinger, Rick Moody, Jennifer Egan, Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Junot Diaz.

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