it’s not a great summer when one hasn’t reached the satiety level yet of listening to the endless arpeggios of ravel as requested over and over by member-subscribers of the only classical station in one's area and gone through reading at least one bad fiction. i just notched up those milestones this weekend and throughout the more painful exercise of going through a bad novel, i couldn’t shake off this one character, that despite the writer’s foolhardy resolve to go on with this narrative campaign, just digs in his heel. i could still hear that recalcitrant guy saying to the exasperated writer “i aint doing that shit.” this, i told a friend who is as much a dilettante in this fiction thing as i, or some version of this talk on the intrinsic motivation and drive for character autonomy in fiction and other works of art. he dismissed it as just a bunch of western thought taradiddle which, knowing him who always demand the last word for any talk between us, basically was the end of all that. for good measure, he liberally paraphrased the author of a slew of best-selling, if rather unstellar, business books, saying that for those who have no notion of where their next meal is coming from, the concept of inner motivation is comical. if only there is a more satisfying and organic way to wrap up this equally depressing entry before i go back to the salt mines this week. if only summer lasts and great fiction survives, 19th-century, polite, bourgeois, "impressionistic" music be damned.