I've found it almost impossible to get any real reading done over the last few days, except for poems and articles here and there, due to the weight of the Toad work. But I have managed to do a bit of listening to sweet sounds, usually late at night - in fact, generally falling asleep in the process. I'm a bit guilty about the sleeping bit, as if I'm abusing a wonderful privilege in some sense, but there's a kind of inevitability about the process that assuages that guilt.
For the most part I've been spinning RVW, always a good man in a crisis. I've been indulging in a fairly steady diet of Flos Campi, the Pastoral Symphony and the fifth. Just listing these gems is a reminder of the sheer unashamed gorgeousness of this part of the output of the greatest of all English composers. (There, I've said it. Apologies to Sir Edward and Lennon & McCartney, but he just is.)
And then earlier this evening I treated myself to the first CD from my 3 CD set of The Otis Redding Story, the one with a lot of the very early singles on it. Music from a happier, simpler time - well, maybe not simple, no time ever is, but a time that knew how to simply enjoy itself. Everything just works: the Stax house band (Duck Dunn's bass is to die for on my Bose system), the Mar-Key Horns and that utterly wonderful, transcendent voice. What must it have been like for those guys to walk out of a recording session and know you'd made something as entirely beautiful as that?
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