…continued from last.

Here I am bitching about my ex when I should be turning my thoughts to work. My aim is to ultimately beef up my freewriting ability within the context of my need to do academic writing, not vent my frustrations about my soon-to-be-ex-wife. Fuck it.

Freewriting requires that I write without stopping which is what I am doing in writing this stupid sentence. All I am doing right now is putting words on the screen. One of these days I need to start to direct these freewriting exercizes toward my academic work: Sun Ra, Fela, history stuff I may be teaching at the moment.

In fact, let me meditate on Sun Ra a bit. One project I need to finish is listening to all of Sun Ra’s recorded works while taking notes, both words and notation. It’s one of those exercises that could produce some good writing, or it could be just notes. I don’t know what I’m going to hear. I mean, I’ve heard all the music before, but every time I do a focused listening with a piece of music something different stands out. The real project would be to listen to the entire catalog (or as much as I have access to) for an extended period, taking notes and freewriting sometimes, but other times just letting the music absorb. I always find it is best to listen to music in several ways before giving it a full account. If the music is unfamiliar to you, spend a bunch of time with the music as background. Play it while you do the dishes or some other household chore. If the entire genre of this music is unfamiliar, spend enough time with it. Try not to do any focused listening to a particular piece of music until that genre of music at least sounds familiar to you. Chances are, the music sounding unfamiliar, your first impressions will be only that of difference, missing the ways in which the piece is or is not a decent expression of the genre.

Lost my train of thought. Sorry if the paragraph ends abruptly, but I’m freewriting without editing for now. I’m dying to edit this writing - parts of it are bad - but for now I am working on the flow of language as I write.