I've been using fluorescent "swirly bulbs" in hard-to-reach spots for a while now. They do last longer than regular bulbs, though the claims of 6-10 year life spans are exaggerated in my experience. But the figures on energy savings are startling enough that they are making me think of switching to them wholesale. See
this article for details.

Think globally, act locally and all that stuff. I know most of you jamokes hate Walmart, so buy them at your local mom-and-pop (or, in my experience, pop-and-grandpop) hardware stores intead.

Well, I see the Dylan album has just gone to #1, which makes me either a cultural bellwether or an exemplar of the old saw that when your shoe-shine boy starts to give you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market.

Current reading: James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime. Filled with sex and obsession. Salter writes more concretely about sex than just about anyone I know. By "concretely," I mean he sees it plainly and presents it to us, like a great painter, in what seems to be (but of course is not) a completely unmediated fashion.

Also, Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the recent Penguin edition, with different translators for each volume of Remembrance/In Search of.... It's living up to my first reading, twelve or so years ago. I won't bother with my incoherent thoughts other than to say that this is definitely a book to reread, since knowing what is to come later imparts a great deal of meaning to what comes before. Of course, this too is filled with sex and obsession, though the former is described more glancingly by Proust than by Salter.

Recently, Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine and Alan Warner, Morvern Callar -- two Scottish novels read in Scotland. Liked, but didn't love, both.

Listening: Bob Dylan, Modern Times. This is the first of his records I've bought since Street Legal, just to give you an idea of how out of touch I've been. I like it pretty well. I've been following with great amusement a debate on jazzcorner.com over whether his patent influences have crossed the line into plagiarism, though I think the real issue here is his taking writer's credit for such numbers as "Rolling and Tumbling." I'm cynical enough that I don't much care. Presumably, the origins of a lot of blues are lost in the fog of time anyway. I wouldn't get exercised if he wrote new lyrics to "The Great Speckled Bird"/"I Am Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes"/"The Wild Side of Life"/"It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels" either. I've also been listening to downloads of some installments of his radio show on XM. Highlight so far, among many, is a song he played in the "Mother" theme hour called "Mama Get the Hammer (There's a Fly on the Baby's Head)!" by Bobby Peterson, of whom I had never heard.

Recently, Dave Holland's new one, Critical Mass. His recent quintet releases (as well as the big band forays) are of such uniformly high quality that it's almost boring. I'd like to hear something out of the sextet that he formed several months ago. I don't remember who all is in it except for the excellent Mulgrew Miller and (I believe) Antonio Hart.

And Dr. John's debut record, Gris-Gris. I would venture to suggest that this was a key influence on Tom Waits's last several recordings.

Viewing: A really superb "play" at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival called A Letter That Never Reached Russia, adapted from three or four Nabokov short stories. The four young women (I'm probably old enough to call them "girls") who acted in it were ideally Nabokovian if you know what I mean (and you don't because you have a dirty mind), and the direction and the adaptation brilliant at capturing Nabokov's recurring themes of loss and longing. Jerked a few tears from me, and I'm no crybaby.