Does the fact that there are so many more artists [now], mean each of them has a smaller share of Art? Or is that only how art-history has to be written?

Perhaps freedom only has meaning applied to a group, for how little they coerce each other. If you use it individually, that creates all kinds of illusory possibilities which don't in fact exist: in a "totalitarian" state one can be completely "free" by becoming an outlaw-- even if they live but 5 minutes that way. But most won't, and that's where freedom finds its limit. Americans like to talk about freedom as if it's a matter of being able to choose among different name-brands (that being the kind of thing they can always show a skeptic). But when you must choose starvations or letting corporations rape your body with lethal chemicals (the choice very many city-dwellers face, who aren't rich or enlightened enough to try to hunt down good food), that's nothing to brag of. Our freedom of speech & job are also like that. Just because there's not (usually) police to shoot you down the moment you step out of line, doesn't mean you're exempt from slower, more subtle but no less certain reprisals. in a depression, the threat is more naked and the fear more open, that's all.

What's illegimate about music as religion is that it's a religion mainly of nonmusicians. But isn't that true of all religions, past a certain point?

The artist is the clothes-maker who's always naked.

I write my Odes as follows: first, i decide what time span to cover. Then i go through all those poems i wrote, selecting the best lines. I add some computer or plagiarized lines for seasoning. And from this list i compose a cento, connecting consecutives or music, sense (or disjunct frisson), & my mood.

02 06 04

To be quietly, rationally desperate: yes; whether or not i play at making plans. The real struggle, though, is managing a laugh.

To know something worth knowing, is to make oneself an Enemy of the State.
--saying of Asmodeus