Weird to some, not to me

I acknowledge that the posts this week have been on the short side, and I'm afraid today is going to be no exception. I don't have a 2K-word geek rant rattling around in my brain at the moment. In fact, my brain is on the partly cloudy side at best as I seem to be fighting off some kind of crud involving a cough, a sore throat, and achy fatigue, so that further explains the low-content mode of the past two days which is about to extend into today.

But to make a general concession to the pop culture theme of Wednesdays, I will relate that today I read a couple of different articles online which fed directly into my personal obsessions. One was about the re-issue of Nirvana's Nevermind. I've talked before about how Nirvana isn't my cup of tea, which should be no big deal because lots of bands aren't, except Nirvana's place in the pantheon or canon or whatever seems so wildly at odds with my distaste for them, so I really put a lot of mental energy into justifying my contrarian opinion, blah blah blah. Obviously there is no way in the world I would willingly acquire the Nevermind re-issue in any form, but by the same token I can't seem to help but click on every link I see that talks about it. I'm forever trying to understand my own inverse obsession with Kurt Cobain's musical legacy. The article didn't really move that along very much, but who knows, maybe some day it'll be one more tile in a mental mosaic that makes some kind of sense.

The other article was about The Cambridge History of the American Novel and some of the predictable controversy between traditionalists and non-traditionalists about What It All Means. I thought to myself, "That there sounds like a book I need," and of course the article itself linked to the book's Amazon page and I promptly clicked over and added the book to my Wish List, only noticing after that the book retails for $185. (But can be yours at Amazon for $157.37!) It is also 1272 pages long, yes that is a four-digit number not a typo. But as I said, I noticed these things. I didn't freak out about them or really find them all that strange, and they didn't make me reconsider for a moment the Wish List status I had just bestowed on such a big whomping pile of dead trees. I still think it sounds like a book I need, albeit one which might finally convince me to invest in an e-reader. (Except it's not available in that format right now. So there you go.)