Billmon used that title several times as he was contemplating giving up on his blog. In my case, the title is more homage than veiled threat, but it is occasioned by a break of activity. I've been dog tired and more than a little depressed all week -- eyes hurt, can't see the computer or anything else very well, probably some allergy issues although it's usually the spring pollen that gets me, not the fall ragweed that does the most damage in these parts. Thought I could at least pull some of my book notes out to fill in those calendar squares. That explains Tuesday's John Dower post, but even though I have pages almost ready for Chris Hedges' American Fascists and Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, I didn't have the strength to post them. Those and many more like them will probably appear sometime this month, as I try to get out from under some things and back on track.

The foremost out-from-under is the Jazz Consumer Guide, which is in its 13th week of prospecting this week -- by definition of a quarterly cycle this should be its last. I'm stuck at 1061 words, needing 1600+, and procrastinating listening to records that have no real chance and even less urgency -- and having trouble making my mind up on them. I'm torn as usual between not tracking down many of the things I think I should be listening to and not being able to spend enough time to do justice to the records that are kind enough to track me down. I'm also annoyed that more and more of the latter are turning up lame, as CDs without packaging or with narrow slipcases that are hard to track or file -- for one, I can't find that Marty Ehrlich-Myra Melford duo on Palmetto that I wanted to play before moving on to the similarly stripped down Melford trio on Cryptogramophone. Then there are labels which let me download, which might be a nice perk for an I-Pod-wielding high schooler, but is a mechanical nuissance for me -- one of many new labor-shifting technologies, like self-checkout lines, that I've steadfastly refused to facilitate.

I don't read much about other critics complaining about these matters, which may mean I'm being overly sensitive, or may mean I'm just becoming overly frazzled. But it raises the question: if it all comes down to money for the label, shouldn't it all come down to money for me? It hardly takes any time at all to determine that writing Jazz Consumer Guide is a dreadful expense of time. Of course, it's not all money to me -- I thought about working on free software back when SCO expanded my free time, then came to the conclusion that free content was more needed. My website is a half-assed way of doing that, and Jazz CG does help feed the website. But how much that's worth is hard to gauge. And it's far easier to imagine that writing my book might somehow pay back the effort than that I could parlay any amount of music writing into a future.

One problem with Jazz CG is opportunity cost: it takes up so much time I can't get any traction on my book. I've alluded to the book many times in the past. Six months ago I started writing a post with a brief outline, then never managed to get back to it. Here's an even briefer outline:

1. Introductory primer (60-80 pages): A rather schematic survey of the essential background that every reader needs to have in order to understand the sections that follow. Three sections: science (how the earth works, environment changes, life evolves, resources are used and wasted; population, diseases, stress); history (key points, especially developments in technology and economics; the making of current political geography); everyday life (the current state of the world, with the usual bias towards life here in the US). This section should be noncontroversial and unsurprising. Anyone who is literate about science, history, and society should be able to skip it, but I suspect those people are in fact few and far between, so this provides the essential reference background for topics that appear throughout the book.

2. The progressive tradition in America (30-40 pages): This steps through events and movements in US history that promote the ideals of liberty, individual rights, equal rights, opportunity, cooperation, etc. Historical periods include the Revolution, the Civil War, the antitrust movement, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, feminism, environmentalism, the free software movement. I want to show how these ideas evolved from American experience, and to set up the contrast of how they've been misused by conservatives.

3. Conservatism as ideology and organization (40-60 pages): Outline the growth of conservative thought and organization, mostly from post-WWII anti-communism of McCarthy and Goldwater, on through Nixon and Reagan to the point where Republicans were able to seize control of Congress (1994) and the Presidency (2000), with the emphasis on how tightly focused these forces were on arrogating power. Explores complementary threads of white racism and fundamentalist Christianity, which have deeper roots. The focus here is on winning arguments and elections, not on governing, implementing policies, or coping with things that go wrong.

4. Conservatism in practice (60-80 pages): This was originally intended as the core of the book, a chronicle of how Bush took bad ideas and turned them into disaster. It should probably start with Gingrich in 1994, inasmuch as Republican control of Congress to a large extent determined what Clinton did and did not do. It could even look back further to the one institution that was thoroughly conservatized before 1994: the US military. But the main emphasis will be on Bush: the use of government for patronage and power to reinforce Republican political dominance, and the furtherance of militarized state power, expanding both across the globe and deep into the "homeland" security state. Bush's very success at these policies drives us into a cul de sac, where problems multiply and government collapses under the dead weight of its corruption and incompetence. Iraq is both an example and an ideal.

5. The way things ought to be (60-80 pages): Title stolen from Rush Limbaugh, who doesn't deserve it. Alternate: prolegomena to any practical utopianism. Probably a rough sketch for a future book, but here a wormhole out of the conservative black hole. Starts by focusing on basics like trust, integrity, transparency, and how these concepts settle uneasily with individualism and the notion of a public interest. Then moves to basic economic models (entrepreneurship, cooperation) and the role of government in balancing ends. (Government's historic role has been one of groups pressing their advantage through force; I see a different role/function, whereby government implements the adjustments necessary to balance a public interest against individual interests. Democratic governments should lean toward the latter, but in practice are often perverted by group identities.) End with a case example, like health care.

6. Appendix (who knows how many pages?): Main thing here is a glossary, which provides a way to hang brief comments on various topics of political interest, fleshing out the worldview through concrete examples (e.g., abortion, advertising, affirmative action, capital punishment, estate taxes, nepotism). Some may merely analyze problems, others may offer positions or programs. How broad and how deep this will be is open. Other appendices are possible, including a further study guide. Some of this could be withheld from book and published on-line, where size is much less of an issue.

Although virtually none of this is down on paper, much of it flows quite nicely in my head. Transcribing that, of course, is easier said than done. I would write the book largely in public on my website, both maintaining the reference text and every now and then dumping bits into the blog. Hopefully I'd get useful feedback along the way. The web would allow extra scaffolding for reference -- e.g., a timeline, a bibliography, a who's who, etc. Most of the book contents would be well known and unoriginal: certainly there are many books that cover the same ground, so much of what I figure to offer is my skill at pulling all that together into a clear and useful digest. I think I'm relatively good at that, and can imagine later moving on to longer and more detailed digests on science, history, economics, etc. -- maybe even music. The philosophical treatise in the last section is likely to be more novel. For instance, I see capitalism as a historically bounded epoch that corresponds to the rise in an S-curve over the period it takes humans to expand production to the point where it is limited by resources. Post-capitalism then needs to find an equilibrium with resources; otherwise we would be beset with repeated boom-and-bust cycles, most likely with diminishing booms and deepening busts. On the other hand, I'm quite conscious that we evolved in scarcity with selection in favor of disruptive expropriation, which is where many of our habits (often bad, but not always) have come from. Despite my reference to utopianism, I tend to think more like an engineer; i.e., as someone who understands that whatever one wants to do has to be done within the constraints of what's possible. Human nature is not immutable, but it's also not arbitrary. I have no desire to throw out something that's impossible, least of all because I'm attracted to the idea. After all, that's a big part of what's wrong with conservative thought, and that's the point of the book.

I always figured the more political parts of the blog make for rough drafts toward the book. When I started that post six months ago, one idea I had was to posit a second book, which could take the blog posts and various letters and documents and edit them down to a chronological journal of the Bush-Cheney years. That's still an idea. I'd merge a skeletal timeline in with them, edit the posts for clarity and compression, and tack on some footnote comments where appropriate. I had done some counting at the time, figuring that the notebook files (a superset of the blog posts) add up to something like 3500 pages. A lot of that is unusable -- lists and things -- and at least half is music, which may or may not be relevant. Don't know about letters and other files, but after weeding out there are probably a few hundred pages worth considering. So it's basically a big editing job, but it should be secondary to the book -- indeed, it would be worth more as a sequel, but it could be done any time.

Needless to say, there's also a huge cache of music writing scattered on the website. I've just handed in the 47th Recycled Goods column, which bumps the reviewed record count up to 2007. Don't have the Jazz Consumer Guide count handy, but it must be over 400. Jazz prospecting must be well over 1000. There's much more, albeit of decreasing quality, in the notebooks. And the rated record count is over 13,500. All this could be stuffed into a database and turned into a website. I built something like that for Robert Christgau, so it's never been beyond the range of possibility. I've just never settled on the compromises to make it work, something we can chalk up to what Brooks called "second system complex" -- the tendency to fail the second time because you got overconfident and overambitious after succeeding the first time. (Another fine example is the Iraq war.)

Meanwhile, I've spent, what, 4-5 hours working on this post about why I haven't been working on posts, interrupted mainly by shuffling low-probability jazz records and moving them from the pending to the flush files. My eyes hurt. It's late. I'd rather be reading. (Although I can't say that the recent spate of books on Russia has been cheering me up any. I look into their misery and see the same groundwork of idiocy and cruelty that Bush so aspires to.) I still have to jot down a note on a record that I neither like nor dislike. And post this.

Don't know whether I feel better or not. But I am pretty sure that the next couple of years are going to be rough going -- most likely even worse than the last few. Even if I do get that book written, I doubt that it will help much. But there's a certain satisfaction in knowing better even if you can't do anything about it. The book would help a few people know better. But a Jazz Consumer Guide would be a more immediate source of pleasure. Too bad it's such a bitch to write.