Paradise unread

I should be reading Paradise Lost right now. Instead I am distracting myself on the computer. I have been trying to break this habit of late. I have been mostly successful. It is astonishing how much interest one can take in the flat surface of the internet. I never really learn anything interesting online. The internet really is a non-event. A perpetual revolution of the same. Yet I still stare away. Back in the pre-Internet days I used to spend many hours reading my CD-ROM Encarta encyclopedia (of course I used to spend many hours reading, writing, and making mix tape covers, ie I used my time creatively). Then, at least, I learned something. The internet is sometimes just too hyperactive for my already hyperactive state of mind. In any case, I have been listening to an excellent album, Suicide's 1977 eponymous debut. I have known about this album since high school. At that time I purchased the excellently titled album, Some Girls Wander by Mistake, a collection of early singles and B-sides by the Sisters of Mercy. Andrew Eldritch mentions in the liner notes being enamoured with Suicide. Now, Denver had/has a great record store downtown called Waxtrax (many a weekend pilgrimage on the 0 bus that shot down Broadway were made to Waxtrax in those days. During the summer, I would ride with mom to her job, pick up the bus and spend the day downtown, going into thrift stores, sitting at the Market (back in those days the cafe was split into two halves, one smoking and the other non-smoking), walking around alleyways; quite fantastic days those were). You just couldn't find Suicide albums back then (or at least I couldn't and that was before Amazon etc. I often feel that pop culture became too hyper-intense with the internet, no longer does one have the thrill of the collector upon the experience "stumbling" upon something, even though I have the nifty "Stumble-Upon" plug-in installed on my computer). In any case, Mute re-released the album in 2000 (who has populated by collection of CDs with everything from Throbbing Gristle to Einsturzende Neubauten (yes, I was an industrial-head back in the day). Anyhoo, the Suicide album is very nice, a kind of affect-less sublime sort of affair (work out the paradox).