Posthuman Blues

I transferred Morrissey's "Southpaw Grammar" to cassette last night (along with some R.E.M. rarities and Vangelis instrumentals) and listened to it on my drive to work. "Southpaw Grammar" is the overlooked masterpiece of Morrissey's career. It's lyrically spare but it's a damned good listen, touching on everything that makes Morrissey's music compelling: raw angst, revenge, spite, oddball humor and self-reflection. "The Boy Racer" is one of his all-time best. It rocks yet it's deceptively subtle.

I ate southwestern fusion last night, then drained an espresso con panna at Starbucks, which was amazingly uncrowded. The typical residue of students was there poring over laptops. I think I may start going there again, if only for the change in scene.

This Saturday I'm going to talk with my editor about illustrations for the Mars book. I'm quite set on doing the expository sketches myself; I'm not a bad artist and I'd rather not pay a professional (who probably wouldn't know what to make of my requests anyway). I'll have to see if my scanner is up to the task now that I no longer have PolyView (a freeware download I used to have before my system crashed in '02). I had the computer repaired and the technicians replaced virtually everything -- including the DVD player, which they unfortunately forgot to connect. I'm very close to buying a TV and a DVD player; watching movies on a computer monitor is kind of shoddy.