According to Pitchforkmedia, Wilco is about to head out on tour in support of their new album A Ghost is Born, which you can listen to in its entirety online. They are scheduled to perform in Manchester (UK) on July 14 at Manchester Academy, a venue I passed twice a day last summer as I trekked between The Verdene and the John Rylands University Library. I should, in fact, be in Manchester on July 14 and will probably be staying only a short walk from the venue. So while their show in Columbia (MO) was cancelled, it looks like I’ll get to see them after all.

In other music news, I recently purchased Loretta Lynn’s new album, the Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose (iTunes), largely because I liked what I heard when she performed “Portland, Oregon” on the David Letterman show recently. I’ve picked what I think are the four best tracks (iTunes iMix), if you want to give her new music a try.

This morning we leave for San Francisco, where we will be staying at the Hotel Rex. Apparently, we will be close to Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s City Lights Bookstore, a landmark of American literary history. It’s been twenty years since my last visit to the city. My junior year of high school was spent in northern California, a beautiful part of the world. Unfortunately, it was one in a string of bad years: four schools and three countries in four years. That was a long time ago, though.

William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition will be coming along as airplane reading. The very first page features this particularly nice passage:

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct, that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

The aforementioned graduation present will be, as Sheri suggested, cash.