Janathon #6

When I run, I listen to music on my headphones. When I was younger, I listened to music pretty much constantly, on an array of Sony Walkmans and cheaper, Aiwa or Bush branded cassette players. All of which missed some component: the battery casing, the front, the rewind button. I moved on to a Goodmans portable CD player, which spat out spent batteries in no time. 

A brief foray into minidisc, one which we're both embarrassed and ashamed by, then back to my beautiful chrome Sony Walkman with proper clunky buttons. And now, IN THE FUTURE, to a bunch of shit MP3 players. All MP3 players are shit, no matter how fancy they are dressed up. I just don’t get on with them. They do not operate in the way I want them too. This is not me being a luddite, this is me not syncing with technology: bitrates, playlists, play queues, filenames and album art.

So I listen, instead, to music on my phone. It’s vaguely functional, semi-intuitive, and very annoying. And I’m sick of ripping CDs and copying them onto devices and so on and so on. So I only have a limited selection to choose from when I run. Currently, I’m alternating between James’ Fresh as a Daisy singles collection, Belle & Sebastian Write About Love, and the first The Lovely Eggs LP.

So that’s running sorted. But writing... that’s more difficult. With any significant writing project I have a soundtrack – whether it’s an album or band I listen to when I write, or an integral soundtrack that the character would listen to within the text. I have a (dark, insular) novel that I’m three (insular, bleak) chapters through, and the only music I can listen to when writing it is The Holy Bible by the Manics (dark, insular, bleak). There’s only so much of that process I can take.

Two of my current projects have no soundtrack. I think that this is why I’m finding it difficult to really get into them. I've always been aware of the correlation between my writing and music, but I never realised it was so symbiotic. Which leads me to question: why am I currently writing an essay on ‘Creative Process’ about the joy of intertext and authorship, when perhaps it should be about music as an accompanying muse? (But not the band Muse, who I dislike. A lot.) Perhaps I’ll save that for further study. Back to Barthes for me.

Janathon: ran 5km.
Fruitalution: ate another boring apple. No! Tomatoes are fruit too. I ate lots of cherry tomatoes. And an apple.