What I'm Listening To

I just updated my booklist to reflect that I'm reading About Schmidt, and liking it. And considered updating my music list but the truth is I'm sort of stuck on an Old 97's kick that I've been on for months, and am cycling through four of their albums without much else except a bit of Whiskeytown or some Christopher O'Reilly to break things up. Or else I have my digital music system set to shuffle through the "infrequently played" songs on my library -- a constant surprise. In any event, I don't feel particularly musically innovative these days, and the background music isn't having much influence over my posts that I can identify.

I have noticed and puzzled over pjm's decision to append to the bottom of every post a "Now Playing" note. I've seen this kind of thing before, on other blogs. I assume it is automatically generated; otherwise, it strikes me as an impossible and misleading authorial non-sequiter, like deciding to conclude each post with a sentence telling the reader what color shoes you're wearing. Although I'm often listening to music and sometimes it makes me think about things I decide to write about, I don't find it inherently fascinating to know the soundtrack to another person's life, unless they help me understand why that soundtrack should be interesting to me. If the music made you think about the post, tell me why, and help me connect the dots. If it has nothing to do with the post, why draw my attention to it, and away from what you were writing about?

Comments

[pjm]

It's a single click in the desktop client I'm trying out, which pulls it right from iTunes. So I think the root answer to "why" is (so far) "because it's there."

I suppose I should come up with a more intelligent answer than that if I intend to keep doing it. ;-)

[ML]

Reminds me of a graduate Education class I was in once where the teacher, catering to "different learning styles," allowed students to substitute artwork or music for their final papers. Some of them stood up in the front of the room beside a boombox and played tapes of different songs they'd "created." No explanations; their "audio learning style" or some mumbo-jumbo validated it. Smarmy songs like "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," "Yesterday," etc. were supposed to teach us something!
This really isn't a good analogy though, because bloggers' primary purpose isn't to educate; just to tell us a bit about the blogger, I guess.

[mad]

I don't have anything to add on the "now playing" front, but wanted to point out (because I'm just that snotty and anal) that both you and Evan Schaeffer misspelled "non sequitur" today, but with different errors. Thank goodness for Black's!

[Scheherazade]

How careless of me. Unlike Evan, however, I don't pay proofreaders, unless you count my gratitude.