Bits and pieces of Rent are stuck in my head on constant replay. Not bad, except when I start singing to myself without realising it. This has been going on for days now, except for a brief sidetrack into Indigo Girls' Shaming of the Sun this morning -- and that's only because the radio played Shame On You.

I don't talk about music enough, considering how important it is to my life. If I go back to, say, May and look at the titles for my entries -- they're almost all references to songs. Even the name of this _journal_ is the title of a song that plays in my head at least once a week.

Of course, a lot of the music I listen to is Broadway, and of that I tend to prefer the more snooty stuff (Sondheim) to the more popular stuff (Webber). Thus even my blatant references tend to pass the majority of people by -- for instance: the proper response to "It's hot in here." is "It's hot and it's monotonous." This goes right past anyone who hasn't listened to Sunday in the Park with George, and probably past even some of the people who have.

Earl said, last night, that he used to ask people bizarre things to avoid answering their questions. From everything I've heard about life at Caltech this is an entirely sane coping mechanism. Sometimes I quote music for the same reasons... but more often it's just because I'm caught up in other thoughts, and the music comes to my brain faster than original words do. Push the button, get the quote, and then my mind kicks in that some Person was talking to me. Oh, well.

I've been re-reading more Mercedes Lackey, remembering what I got out of it at fifteen and being amused at how clunky the devices seem now. Not that I'm having a bad time -- oh, no, I'm enjoying it immensely. I can just see all the strings now. It's really not very good, on the grand scale, but it's keeping me amused. I like being amused.

I'm also back to reading about Bloomsbury -- nearly finished with Bloomsbury Women, which is only the first of many, many books that I have. I became fascinated with Dora Carrington a few years ago, with the release of the Christopher Hampton film about her. This led, inevitably, to Bloomsbury, and now I am the proud owner of a good dozen books on the subject -- both objective studies and collections of diaries/letters. The latter are more fun, but really do require the former to tie them together.

I'm not sure why I find the Bloomsbury stuff so interesting. I can't figure out which buttons of mine it pushes. I've never managed to read any of Virginia Woolf's novels. I can sort of appreciate the work of the painters (Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant), but only on an abstract level -- visual art is sort of generically nice unless it's either stunning or dreadful. (This leads, however, into a tangent about my trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, and how I suddenly understood, at some visceral level, why Money is so admired. Paint can shimmer, it turns out. Anyway, it's possible that the Bloomsbury art will float me if I ever see it in person -- but until then it's just generically 'Oh, how nice, a painting.')

Where was I? Ah, yes. Puzzling over my fascination with a group of admittedly talented people who nonetheless have produced no work that really does it for me. Maybe I'm just a voyeur -- like I said, it's the letters that intrigue me the most.

So I've been reading one of my Bloomsbury books. It seems to do good things for my writing.

Earl is here. We had a three-in-one conversation, covering everything I'd been fretting over in the last few weeks. When it was over I'd quit fretting. What a nice boy.

(It occurs to me, just as I'm ready to post this entry, that I like reading about Bloomsbury for the same reason I like gossiping about my friends. As I said to Jim, at some ungodly late hour this past week, "I like finding things out about people. And I'm good at it.")