I’ve already mentioned how great Glenn McDonald’s weekly column The War Against Silence is. It’s even linked in the sidebar of this blog, to the right. I’ve never told you why, although I should have. He’s one of the most interesting music reviewers these days : he makes you feel emotions while you read, musical emotions.

What you need to know is that his 300th chronicle is out this week. He explains why he keeps writing it for no salary at all and how he manages to do it in parallel with his regular job. It’s as entertaining as ever, 4200-words long, in a delightful style and vocabulary, and here are a few extracts that I *so* wish I’d have written :

I have, for nearly twenty years, spent the overwhelming majority of my discretionary income on music. I am better at buying records than I am at anything useful. I buy records to celebrate and to console, to satisfy curiosity, to share and to survive. I buy anything I have any reason to suspect I might find interesting, and I don’t mind wading through a bunch of records I play once and then shelve to find one that moves me. I also have a compulsive inability to ever get rid of anything. […]

Writing about music without writing about how it affects your life is, to me, an exercise in surreal opacity, like writing about sex or child-rearing without talking about love, or writing about food without eating. […]

I take a perverse pride in operating one of the few dead-end sites on the entire web. There is no links page, no message board, no sound-clip archive. I do not integrate, aggregate or repurpose. I do not provide music news, I will not send you updates via email, I do not endorse, I do not take advertising, I will not help you sell or market anything, even if I like it a lot. The rest of the web is full of shiny moving parts; my tiny, drab, obscure, tranquil corner is for me writing about music, with as little administrative overhead as possible. I hope it improves, but I don’t think it needs to expand.[…]

It’s incredibly cheering to get emails that begin, as it sometimes seems like half of them do (although statistically, that can’t be right), « I’ve been a TWAS reader for years, and I never write fan letters, but I have to tell you… ». You’ve written to tell me that I’ve found words for emotions you didn’t know how to express. You’ve written to insist I should be making money at this, which for the time being isn’t necessary, and might be more of a curse than a blessing in practice, but it’s a sweet thought. You’ve plugged my site in your own words, and insisted that you came upon it at random and then stayed up all night reading, which are probably the two most sincere forms of praise the net offers. You’ve suggested that sites like mine are what the internet ought to be used for, and I think we’re both destined to be disappointed, but not just yet. You’ve forgiven whatever obsessions of mine you can’t fathom, and kept reading anyway. You’ve thanked me for championing bands real critics are too uptight to enjoy. You’ve suggested I look up « florid », of all words. You admit, sheepishly, that you read even when you don’t have the faintest idea who the bands are, which is entirely fine. You’ve sent me helpful suggestions about my beleaguered rubber-tree plant, corrections for typos I missed, hundreds of recommendations I’ve followed up on and hundreds I haven’t. You’ve sent me enough emails titled « Thanks! » or « Wow! » that I can raise my spirits just by sorting my feedback folder by subject. […]

We fight silence, sometimes, because the other targets are too well defended. But the war against anything begins with an exasperated bark.

Everybody that (even remotely) happens to know me has probably guessed that Glenn’s vision of life is, for a large part, my own. I won’t be able to say nobody warned me.