before or since
Hello hello,
this must be something of a record. two blog posts, relatively close together? gosh.
well, here be the reason. it’ll only be a short one, containing details of the Definition of Art – i’ve solved the debate once and for all (ho ho) – and also details of a new blog. ooh.
so the art thing. yes. on the bus on the way back from a scintillating seminar, a small group of us somehow came round to the topic of Art, and someone mentioned Damien Hirst. I, without really thinking about it, said ‘yeah, but that isn’t Art’. Cue furious debate. I should initially point out that in my mind, i hadn’t capitalised the A of Art, which leads to an interesting point: what’s the difference between art and Art. as far as i can tell, this is: kid’s finger painting, an exhibit of fairly samey watercolours by a local artist that you find on the walls of the local tearoom with amusingly high prices pencilled on them, and that clay thing you made in GCSE art class – those are art (unless you’re a spectacularly gifted GCSE art student, of course). Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the Venus De Milo, the Clifton Suspension Bridge – those are all Art.
(The inclusion of the bridge may have baffled you – i have a bit of a thing for Victorian architecture. If you like, replace with something inoffensive like, uh. the Sistine Chapel ceiling? that’ll do.)
The question of what the difference is leads me on to my next point – what is the difference between say, a rock someone pulled out of the ground (I.e. an object) and the Mona Lisa? no, not the Mona Lisa. too many people i know have seen it and said it’s not as good as a posters of it. a strange simulacra, but there we go. Let us say, instead, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, a particular favourite of mine. the difference between an object and a work of Art.
the difference, and this is the summarised nature of the thought that struck me there on that bus ride, is this: Imagine you have the rock, and a piece of paper explaining exactly what it is and what it represents. this piece of paper tells you what kind of rock it is, where it’s from, what colour and shape it is, a brief summary of Baudrillardian Simulacrum theory and Derrida’s ideas of representation to explain why it’s not a rock but an embodiment of the word rock (or the other way round, i forget). In essence, this piece of paper sums up the rock utterly. who wrote it? who cares. God? The person who found it? doesn’t matter.
Now imagine you have The Night Watch. hanging on the wall in front of you. next to it is a similar piece of paper telling you all about it. What the frame is made of, what the paint is made up of, the way pigments were made at the time of it’s creation, all about Rembrandt, what the painting shows and what it represents. you read all this, and then you look up at the painting.
Here’s the difference: you look at the piece of paper, you look at the rock. You see nothing in the rock that isn’t mentioned in the piece of paper. There is nothing more to that rock than is on the piece of paper.
You look at the piece of paper, you look at the painting. There is more in the painting, some indefinable and inescapable quality, that transcends what is, and could ever be, on the piece of paper. You don’t know what it is, but there is something extra, something other about it. That’s what makes it Art.
to return briefly to where these thoughts started, Damien Hirst. Let us not get started on the dot paintings which he didn’t actually paint himself. Art-by-Proxy doesn’t happen, i’m afraid. but let us take, say, the Crystal Skull or, since i’ve actually seen it, the Shark in Formaldehyde (spelling?). You could look at the shark, and you look at a piece of paper which tells you where the shark came from, who caught it, the details of a tiger shark’s diet, what formaldehyde (again) does and how much is used in preserving the shark (a 5% solution, if you’re interested), everything that Hirst wanted it to represent, and so on – everything about it, in other words. Look at the shark again, and what do you see? nothing more than what’s on the paper, because there is nothing more there.
Let’s not get started on Tracey Emin.
And of course people will say that Art is subjective, and of course they’re right, but it was an interesting little theory that entertained me for a few minutes, and possibly ever entertained you (or nauseated you or filled you with cold fury and bloodlust – who am i to know?) for a few minutes, depending on how fast you read and if my scattergun approach to punctuation and capitalisation causes you to give a small twitch every time i decide that capitalising an I whenever i refer to myself is both uproariously egotistical and time consuming.
(some people, generally of the long flowery skirt, braided hair and ‘free tibet’ persuasion, will say that the rock itself – remember that, all the way back up there? – is a Work of Art. They’re wrong. It’s a Work of Nature. it may be beautiful, and it may inspire and instill emotion, but it’s a bloody rock formed by movement of tectonic plates on magma – or something, my GCSE geography is a bit sketchy – and it’s a work of nature, not art. Humans are the only species who create things as utterly beautiful and completely worthless as Art)
anyway. any, way.
The other reason, 950-odd words ago, that i decided to blog was because, in a roundabout way, i’ve decided to blog. Another blog, that is, to be dedicated to my culinary adventures. The reason behind this is manyfold. Partly, because i know a lot of people who are sycophantic enough to tell me regularly that they like what i cook, partly because i may one day shape it into a cookery book, partly because a few of my friends have actually asked me to teach them how to cook, and that’s such a hideously vague and potentially mammoth request that i’m going to enshrine a few things in online print to save myself time and effort, and partly because cooking is one of the few areas of my life where my ego, such as it is, is allowed to roam wild and free and trample delicately all over other people’s. so there. I’ll edit this post and link to it as soon as i’ve actually created it. Ta Ta for now.
xx
Timewarp
People keep telling me to write more – oh how harassed i am, woe is me! – so here i am, writing more. I’ve actually done quite a lot of writing this week, doing a first draft of the first chapter of my dissertation. as happened with the review of literature, i wrote about a thousand words before realising that what i was writing was either too detailed, too messy or just wildly inaccurate. so i started again.
but it got done, a bit late, but done. My tutor wants to talk about it, but he’s gone down with the deathflu that’s been going around so he wants to call me instead of us meeting face to face. I’m mildly nervous about having a phone conversation with him. I thought the part of my life where i gave my phone number to camp spanish men was over, but apparently not… ho ho.
I was discussing this with my housemate Ross last night. various periods of my life have been defined or soundtracked by what music i liked at the time. My GCSE years, when all around were listening to slayer and slipknot, or to whatever terribly emo/indie was the flavour of the day, my friends and i were listening to Dave Brubeck, Esbjorn Svensson Trio, and particularly in my case, Steely Dan. I got into some of their deep cuts recently and i’ve been reminded why they really are one of the best bands ever. there is no-one else like them.
That said, my new listening habits have been defined by a guy called Amon Tobin. i never saw myself liking Drum and Bass, really, but i discovered through Ross a whole load of what’s called liquid d’n'b, i.e. jazzy and free flowing with lots of samples. there’s basically two types of drum and bass, liquid and grime, and i almost without exception dislike grimy drum and bass. it’s horrible and noisy and ugh. but liquid jazz is fantastic.
somewhere in the region of liquid d’n'b, down the murkier, darker alleyways, is dubstep, really beat-heavy, sample heavy atmospheric music. If the apocalypse has a soundtrack, it’s dubstep. ‘dark’ seems like a strange word to describe music, but the actual word ‘dub’, if you pronounce it slowly, gives you a good feel for what it’s like. for more, go to http://soundcloud.com/duskky, to listen to my friend Sandy who’s a dubstep artist.
anyway, somewhere between this dark, slow, heavy dubstep and the upbeat and smooth liquid jazz is a guy called Amon Tobin, who came as a revelation to me. Some of his tracks are slow, some are fast and jazzy, but there’s rarely a dud one in there. he samples lots of old records, which i love.
I’m not really qualified to talk about music, i don’t have the neccesary critical vocabulary, but the best lesson is to learn for yourself, so spotifind Amon Tobin and listen to the albums Bricolage and Supermodified, amongst others. Those of you who are on the shared spotify playlist may have heard one or two tracks before.
anyway, what else is new. dissertation, music. WSC reviews are looming above me like a great big loomy thing. I’ve been eating a lot of asian food recently, in part because having two asian housemates has made me appreciate the food more, and partly because i found a shop that sells those amazing pork-and-greens dumplings that you steam and then fry. gorgeous.
my computer died halfway through writing that last sentence, so i’ve lost whatever train of thought i may have had. I’ll publish this rather than saving it as a draft, and hopefully i’ll write again soon(er). Fi’s coming down on friday, so all work, academic and otherwise, will likely be suspended while she’s here. and cooking and lying around in bed levels will soar.
excellent.
The National Anthem
In which our hero discusses religion, enlightenment, and anal rape.
actually, discusses is not quite the right word: it presupposes you can argue back. you can of course, that’s what the comments are for. but, you know.
at the start of this module i’m doing, we were asked to write a definition of ‘enlightenment’, or rather, to summarise three definitions chosen from wherever we wanted. i picked one literary/cultural definition, one historical, and one, just to mix things up a bit, from ‘a dictionary of buddhism’. anyway, we were discussing the fact that in Robinson Crusoe, what is generally referred to as ‘the first novel’, Crusoe is a man driven entirely by economic motives – profit, in other words. the novel is a perfect encapsulation of ‘enlightenment thought’, and how the individual became seen as the basic unit of society, rather than the family or the village community. how, in essence, capitalism started. if man is no longer defined by his status as part of a community, but by his status as an individual, then there are no allegiances, it’s every man for himself. anyone can become president of the united states.
as you might be able to tell by the last sentence, i’m thinking in a rather tongue-in-cheek way about the motives of the Enlightenment and its thinkers. to summarise, for those who haven’t had this drilled into them by a selection of history teachers: Enlightenment thought = man is able to achieve near perfection, through the reform of society to exclude tradition, superstition and ‘imature thought’. they kept a place for God, because they’d have been censored otherwise, but the tenets of Enlightenment are secular in all but name
the trouble with the ostensibly noble ideas of Enlightenment is that it was largely a European phenomenon. Crusoe’s island was supposed to represent man (Crusoe is designed as a universal representative) stripped of ignorance and superstition, free to achieve the absolutes of intellectual, social and economic freedom – a blank canvas. But Crusoe doesn’t see a beautiful tropical island, rich in colour and lush with life. instead, and this is one of the things that troubles me, what he sees is something to profit from. he doesn’t see a beautiful hillside, he sees a stretch of land to be terraced, ploughed, and sown with seed to grow wheat.
What the book suggests is that this representative of the new society – and it’s a society that we still live in today – is stripped of all the trappings of the previous 1700 years of cultural development, and as a result becomes a creature unable to live in the company of other humans, and who sees everything in terms of exploitation and profit. and what’s worse, he is not a greedy man, he’s just trying to survive. if we are to survive as a race, the book suggests, we must abandon all thoughts of community and sociality, and be driven by economic gain.
now, this has set me thinking. as far as i am concerned, organised religion hasn’t been relevant to our society since the Reformation. people realised that to commune with God and to have faith didn’t require a Church to pray in. before the Reformation, the Catholic Church was so integral to the founding and continuation of society that any attempts to remove it would require – well, did require - a war that ravaged Europe for near a century. when people were presented with the notion that to have faith in God, and to live an everyday life did not require the incense, priests, icons, damnation and hellfire of the Catholic Church, then organised religion began an irreversible decline in relevance. why do you need a church when you can pray at your bedside at night, or on your knees facing Mecca, or on the way to catch the bus in the morning.
well, there’s a simple answer there – you need the church because you’re not Robinson Crusoe, and neither is anyone else. we can’t live on profit alone. man is a social animal and we need to be with other people. particularly, since we spend so much time putting up a front and shielding our emotions, it is a huge and neccesary catharsis to do something as personal as praying, performing the actions of your faith, in a group of other people all doing the same. the vicar, or the priest, or the mullah, might as well not be there, if their only job is to represent the Anglican Church, or the Catholic Church, or the Prophet, and to tell those present that their (and only their) church is what allows one to truly communicate with God.
but it’s not of course. going to church is a community action. you go to see people and chat to people and gossip about them behind their backs, and eat the stale biscuits and drink the tea, and chat to the Vicar about his trip to Mali to visit deprived children. you don’t go there to pray, or at least, you don’t need to.
everyone believes in something. that is as close as i will ever come to laying down a certifiable fact. everyone believes in something, because to not believe in something higher, lower or other than the everyday world would mean one had ripped aside the shroud, stared into the abyss and seen one’s place in the universe – one molecular speck in the vastness of infinity – and that is not something humans are capable of doing. Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in Darwin with more fervour than a cathedralful of ordinary people believe in God. everyone believes in something. you may not believe in God, but you ascribe what you cannot understand to quantum mechanics, or a butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings, or to ‘these things just happen’
so organised religion may be irrelevant – turn the vatican into an art gallery, get some use out of it – but the community that it engenders is more important than ever, especially since we live in a society founded upon the principle that man can perfect himself by believing in profit alone. there’s no Universal Church, where anyone can come, and sit, and pray, or read New Scientist, or salaam to Mecca, or rant and rave about Genesis and Darwin, or drink a really good cup of tea and find the last chocolate biscuit in the tin – but maybe there ought to be. the Quakers are about as close as it gets. i hear they do a good line in biscuits.
oh yes, i mentioned anal rape. we watched a film for Aesthetics today, a french film called Irreversible, starring Vincent Cassell and Monica Belluci. you’ve probably seen or heard about an American film called Memento, where the scenes of the movie are shown backwards? well, this is the same, but considerably harder to watch. for one thing, the camera swoops and spins and flies around, but never cuts – every scene is a long take. for another, the second scene – the penultimate one, chronologically – is twenty five minutes long, set in the claustrophobic, red-lit interior of a gay fetish club, and features one man’s arm being snapped at the elbow by someone kneeling on it and pulling the hand, and then that same man, the one who did the arm snapping, has his head smashed to a pulp by a man with the bottom of a fire extinguisher. the camera never cuts away. you see the whole thing. for the whole 25 minutes, by the way, the music in the club is a low-frequency undulating hum calculated to make the audience feel nauseous.
several scenes later – or earlier – Monica Belluci leaves a party, in a skin-tight, skin-coloured dress and not much else, takes the underpass to cross a busy Paris street. a man and a woman come into the other end of the underpass. they argue, and the man starts viciously beating the woman. Monica Belluci intervenes, the woman – a prostitute – runs away, and the man proceeds to threaten Alex – Monica Belluci – with a knife. he rips her dress off, forces her to the floor, and with his hand over her mouth, anally rapes her. when he’s finished, he rolls off her. she gasps and coughs, because she’s been screaming herself hoarse behind his hand. he waits for her to get to her knees, then kicks her in the face – a long, rugby-conversion kick, with a small run up. when she gets up again, he does it again. then he sits on her back and slams her face repeatedly into the concrete floor of the underpass. the camera never cuts, you see everything. probably the very worst part is that in one corner of the screen, as she’s being raped and screaming, an indistinct figure walks into the underpass, pauses, looks at them, looks back, and leaves.
it’s a charming little film. actually, a few scenes later, there is a long section where Cassell and Belluci roll and roam about their apartment, naked, and discuss everything in the world, in a perfect, perfectly French Cinema dialogue – covering every topic that comes up. they were husband and wife when the film was shot, and it shows – they’re absolutely comfortable with each other.
anyway, the reason i mention this film, apart from its effect on my general mood today, was that it raises interesting thoughts about the nature of revenge. because the scenes are played derriere-votre-face, pardon my french, you see the consequences (Cassell leaving the club on a stretcher, his friend in the hands of the police), then you see what caused those consequences, the horrifying bit with the fire extinguisher (the sound of metal hitting wet meat and bone is not a pleasant one), and later what caused Cassell and his friend to go into that gay fetish club, all madness and rage. all i’ll say about the implications the film puts forward about revenge is that after wildly questioning everyone in the club, the man that Cassell tries to fight and Pierre bludgeons to death is a stranger, and the real rapist is standing behind them while they do it, with a slight grin on his face.
Effigy
Okay, well, now i have something to write about – the two things mentioned at the end of the last post, and a few others besides.
So, work experience at the bbc. even though i had to be there disgustingly early, it was great fun and i can definitely see myself doing it as a career – the journalistic side, rather than the technical side. i learned to use their desktop software, reading news wires and emails and all sorts of exciting thingybobs. the atmosphere in the newsroom was slightly more relaxed than i was expecting, but then, this was only regional news – but still, there seemed to be a number of people doing extraordinary things that weren’t always directly related to the lunchtime or evening broadcasts – the girl behind me on one side was doing something that appeared to be keeping tabs on all the local politicians and their press-sheets and whatnots, while the lovely if rather intense chap directly behind me was looking over old programmes from the sixties, seventies and eighties and recording them, if they were relevant, into the main server – and interestingly, checking them for any copyright material – there was a piece he came across while i was there, from the early nineties, about some coastal erosion, and he had to put a big red mark against it in the archive log because the copyright fee for some of the underwater photography was £750 a minute. imagine being a rookie and making *that* mistake.
The whole thing was pretty exciting – sitting in the gallery and watching the show go out, with four people all talking (in some kind of code) at once, and one guy who’s whole job appears to be counting down, and the poor presenter has all that going in her ear all the time, and has to filter out everything that doesn’t apply to her, and still look composed and sane. mad shit. but yeah – i can definitely see that (the journalistic bit – not presenting) as a career. let’s see, huh.
What else happened. oh, my laptop died – the graphics chip melted or something – so i have a shiny new one, much better, for less money, on which i write this very blog. it cost me £39 pounds for a very nice man to take it away, do more or less exactly what i did to it, to ‘fix it’, bring it back, and no sooner had i written him a cheque and he’d driven off, than the screen went all purple and green again and it died. so there you are.
The Romsey Show was on Saturday, and was a huge success, as usual. fantastic weather, hundreds/thousands of people. i went all middle class and bought lots of cheese and pork pies and cider and so on, and some nice thick socks. there’s something that the show brings out in me that i love, it’s almost approaching patriotism – not that strange, St George’s flag waving, barely-concealed-xenophobia that daily mail readers pollute the concept of ‘England’ with, but a genuine and deep-seated affection for a country, and a way of life, and a people that got left behind a long time ago. sometimes i do worry, you know. the world moves faster and faster, and we don’t think. we don’t stop and actually think about the consequences of our actions. humanity skims from one narrowly avoided disaster to the next – Terry Pratchett calls it ‘the catastrophe curve’, and i think we skim closer than ever to the point of falling off. part of me is morbidly hoping that what in my head i persistently refer to as ‘The Collapse’ happens in my lifetime, so i can experience it, and recover from it, and find out what sort of person i really am. situations like you see in the movies or in videogames, with the total or partial collapse of civilisation, fascinate me.
we had this discussion fairly early on at Rootes, a couple of years ago. What would it be like if The Collapse happened overnight, and we sixteen, H Block First Floor, were the only people (as far as we knew) left alive? consensus was reached fairly swiftly that Sam, the smelly sociopathic Marxist, would be given a crowbar and our hearty good wishes, and shoved firmly out the door to face the headcrabs on his own. but beyond that, i wonder who of the fifteen of us would be the leader, and how things would work out. films like Children of Men always inspire daydreams about what i would do in that situation. in the event of the zombie apocalypse, you can be fairly certain, i would take the samurai sword that sits meekly in the corner of my room and it wouldn’t leave my hand until i was (relatively) safe. but i’m not sure if i’d be one of those leader-of-men types. maybe.
bah. enough musings. another time, folks. xx
White Tooth Man
well, at least that’s better than what the other title was going to be. about two songs ago, i started writing a blog post under someone else’s name, who’d foolishly left themselves logged in.
I’ve got the place to myself tonight, and my my, hasn’t it been a while. i did some writing earlier while watching radiohead live at reading (very good, lots of neon and wibbley electro bits, and a fair bit of jonny greenwood sitting cross-legged on the stage fucking about with a sampler/theramin crossover doodad), and now, here i am, bloggering.
i suppose i haven’t talked about somerset. that’s the trouble, i get so far behind that i forget details. this was a couple of weeks ago – i and nine others headed down into the wilds of somerset to frolic, drink cider, read poetry, bung ourselves into rivers and generally feck around. it was wonderful. i drove, along with another guy, and i also cooked all week and got a good foundation down for a recipe book with some well appreciated things, i may even post the recipes up here at some point.
frankly though, i’m struggling to find things to write about. nothing much has happened. i’ve bought a lot of books for next year, i’ve failed to do much work for my dissertation, and as a result i’ll need to get my arse in serious gear over the next couple of weeks or failing that, go up to leamington earlier than i was already planning and hide in the library until it’s done. sigh. still. work experience with the bbc later this week, and the romsey show the week after that – win. i’ll write again when i’ve got more to say. sorry if you wasted your time reading this. x
Airbag/These are the days
you’re right, it has been a very long time, hasn’t it. not much has happened.
(i was told off the other night for saying ‘not much’ happens in my life. to me, it’s just stuff. other people, apparently, find it interesting. i can’t think why – it’s not their life. there’s only so much interest one can dedicate to things that happen in an entirely different world.)
so, to me, telling you, not much has happened. to me, for myself, plenty of things. i got a job, i got a car. the job is hard work, and the hours are long and inconvenient, and as much as i like the work and the people, i won’t be working there for very long, because when i’m under pressure, i fuck up. no, that’s not the case. to clarify – when i am under the pressure of time, i fuck up. when we have five orders in, that’s an average of twenty people all paying around twenty pounds each for their starters and main courses combined, and i’m making twenty starters and preparing the vegetables for twenty different main courses, and i’ve got to do it in a non-sequential order, mixing four different starters here with rice for this, new potatoes for that, green beans for the other and salad for something else, and then back to starters, and help another guy who is only my subordinate by a matter of days and several years’ cooking experience do whatever he’s supposed to be doing, and i’ve got to do all that in about two minutes per order, then i start fucking up. pressure of expectation, not a problem. but time is a thief.
but today, and tomorrow (times of day be damned, it’s still wednesday) i have a day off. no work, no nothing. only what i want to do. driving around, doing what i please. except it’s not what i please, of course, because life isn’t like that.
yeah, it’s going to be one of those posts.
life isn’t like that, or i wouldn’t be sitting here, in my living room, at currently twelve minutes past two in the morning, listening to radiohead very loudly and
not listening to radiohead any more, because the gods of spotify have singled me out for special punishment. i’ve so far listened to two songs and three adverts. that’s motherfucking perverse. that’s not how the ratio works. back on to radiohead now – but if this song ends and i get another advert for a band that the market research people think i might like, (florence and the fucking machine. stop throwing yourself around the stage, get some singing lessons and get a fucking grip),
what was i saying.
listening to radiohead very loudly, when i should be in bed. but i came home from southampton, fucked about for a bit, ‘hopped in the car, went up to asda for some shopping, and hopped back in the car to go home’, in the words of my brother,
testing. the song has ended. AHAH! straight on to another song. still, by rights, i should be advert free for another four at least.
put my shopping away (a very me shop. a bottle of white burgundy, two bottles of ale, one of turkish lager, two bags of salad, some radishes, bread, cheese, a joint of gammon, some ben and jerrys – half baked, since you ask - and some broad beans) and sat down, with v for vendetta in the background, editing and uploading about a third of the WSC reviews. put my laptop away, sat and watched Vanilla Sky, which turns out to be a really good movie. i’d heard mixed reviews, but i’m always up for a good dose of headfuckery and scantily clad penelope cruziness. all good.
and now, sitting here, writing this personal letter to you, whoever you are, and feeling, after a glass and a half of wine, like i ought to be all maudlin and wittery. but actually i feel okay. nervous about some things. a long car journey when i’m used to doing half hour hops at the most. and i’m still not that great a driver. i fuck up easily, going too fast. having to overcompensate, which i shouldn’t have to. but, everything seems so slow when you’ve driving at sixty or seventy for half a mile, doing the other half at thirty feels like crawling on your hands and knees. tired of work, and wishing they’d understand i didn’t sign up for a full time job, and that i don’t have to give a reason for not wanting to work a particular day. and that i don’t, really don’t, want to work. it’s something i do because i have no choice, and i really don’t have to be grateful to them. so don’t smile at me and patronise me, and treat me like a benign but wayward child, that just needs managing, steering, to do what they want. they, you, the people who run this pub. you are there for my convenience. not the other way around. there is no working relationship. for the moment, i work, and you pay me. soon, as soon as i have been paid enough, i’ll quit, at a moment of my choosing. you’ll complain, and haggle, and persuade, and wheedle, short staffed, under pressure (of expectation, not time), under a lot of strain, selfish, and so on. and i will say, sorry, don’t care. thanks for the pay packet. bye.
i don’t care. and it probably is selfish, and i probably ought to feel bad about planning, even now, to drop these people in the shit. but i don’t care. they’re just people, who as far as i’m concerned exist to give me money in return for something that, in a way, i rather enjoy.
this has turned into something of a rant. my apologies for the breakdown of grammar, spelling, syntactical comprehension and society. maybe it is one of those posts. enough. i’ve made it through the first eight songs of OK Computer with five adverts, only one of which has been a condom advert. five ads, eight songs. i remember when i started using spotify, it was about one advert to ten songs. i suspect a plot here. gradual phasing in of more ads per song. hmm. wikipedia does not confirm.
This is an insert, because i always start lines of thought and never finish them. the car – it’s a blue rover. it has four wheels, an engine, and gets me from place to place, which is more or less all i ask of it. it does other things too, like play music with the bass so loud it makes the windows rattle, and steam up in cold weather, but those are just extras, i didn’t pay for that. my brother. as he said, when he rang me, unexpectedly and wonderfully, in the middle of the vegetably aisle at asda, this must be the first time we’ve spoken on the phone for a year. the last time i saw him was early july, just after my last post, in london, for lunch. before that, christmas. i don’t see the boy enough, and that’s a fact. i also, as Nick reminded me, don’t see my dad enough. and because he’s my dad, bless him, he doesn’t complain, but i miss him sometimes, and i know he misses me. so i’ll go and see him tomorrow, and i’ll make sure we actually talk about things instead of just sitting on different sofas watching tv.
i’m actually on my own at the moment. mum and julian are in Dorset, and they’ve taken the cat with them. Dad’s in his flat, spending all day watching the Ashes and doing i know not what because i don’t spend enough time there. Fi’s working hard, worrying about resits, and living her own life. sometimes our lives interweave, and those are wonderful times. but sometimes they seem very seperate. who knows.
but it does get lonely, sometimes. as much as i say, to myself and to anyone who, in the wee small hours of the morning, will listen, that i like being on my own, and i like being away from my mum and her boyfriend and all their banal ramblings, and that i like living on my own, sometimes, i’d like to live on my own with somebody else around.
enough now. i’ve done stuff recently, but honestly, i swear to god, it hasn’t been that interesting. i’ve watched movies, eaten sandwiches, drank drinks, played videogames, swept, mopped, sweated and chopped a hell of a lot of parsley. i made a lot of lists, had to erase one (which broke my heart) to make room for another, of things which are a lot harder and less pleasurably to achieve. and i’ve got too much to do, and not enought time to do it in. time is a thief.
(the title was originally just ‘airbag’, the first song off Radiohead’s third album, OK Computer, which i can’t recommend highly enough. if you think Radiohead is dreary shoegazing music, you’re very, very wrong, and it would be nice if you found the time to listen to the album when they stopped being good and started being really, really fucking good. the second half of the title is the song i’m listening to now, around the time of writing the insert paragraphs. having finished OK Computer, i moved on to another album i discovered around the same time, back in the early 200os, Jamie Cullum’s Twentysomething. almost as good as i remember, which is rare.)
She Moves She
It’s nice to run into old friends, and newer ones, every now and then, especially by surprise. tonight i did a bit of itinerant waitering, barlording and a lot of washing up at the gym round the corner – an odd place to do the above activities, but the chef there sometimes does steak/curry/seafood evenings, this one being a seafood evening. the food is evidently pretty good, because the night was booked out a couple of months in advance, and it all looked pretty nice. anyway, the other two people doing the waitering were the chef’s son Lewis, who despite being roughly sixteen, dislikes Linkin Park (can’t blame him) and sings along to Take That and Bobby Womack while working. almost certainly a screaming madam in the making, but we’ll see. the other was an old friend from college, a girl who i’d known through my friend Ollie, and who i’d always got on pretty well with, even when i didn’t really like most of her friends. we shared a love of Dire Straits, Steely Dan and old funky music generally. and the other person i ran into was G, having dinner with her parents, which was nice. she kept collapsing into giggles whenever i asked them if they wanted any more drinks or if everything was okay. can’t blame her really, i tend to go a bit Jeeves when i’m waitering.
but yes. job hunt still in full force. car hunt over, insurance sorted, so i’m going to pick it up tomorrow afternoon. i’m not that confident on dual carriageways etc, but fine on the roads, and i pick it up pretty quickly, so i’m looking forward to being mobile, and having to pay a whole different lot of money, for petrol instead of train fares etc. i’ll try not to crash. that would be nice.
i…don’t really have a lot to say, actually. i try and blog about important issues, or social wierdities, but i’m a lot more tired than i thought i was, both from work and from actually, shock horror, going to the gym. so i shall leave you with the following – spotifind Four Tet, and read the sPeak Your bRanEs blog over there on the right. it’s very entertaining. goodnight. snore.
09:52
yes, i know, the title is also a time. but it’s still a song title, from an album full of times-as-song-titles by an Icelandic composer called Olafur Arnalds, whom i insist you Spotifind right away. and yes, that is a new word.
hello my deary darlings, hasn’t it been a while. well over a month. sorry. i really ought to go back and recap everything that has happened to me since i last wrote, but it would take for-fucken-ever, so i won’t. here instead is a brief summary: i avoided revision for a bit, then i did some revision, then i did some exams, nearly all of which went better than i expected. then i came home and had a beer. then i proceeded to fart around at a practically olympic level from then (last tuesday, my girlfriend’s birthday) until now, my birthday. i drank a lot of beer, smoked a few joints, and pottered hither and yon trying to herd reviewers for the Student Cinema, which is so far proving to be a moderate success.
so, now, on with current events. i have in my notebook the title of a poem, one of the refrain lines, and a series of suitable rhymes for the key word of the refrain. the title is ‘The Feast of Fools: a Villanelle’, and the refrain is ” ‘if i ruled the world’, she said.”
if you don’t know what a villanelle is, go and look. but ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ by Dylan Thomas is probably the best modern example. i wrote one before, http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfpq3pk3_0dghgf4cn , just as an experiment, and in terms of form it turned out pretty well, i think. hopefully this one will be okay both in form and content. but i don’t have an already-written-and-discarded free verse poem to start from this time. we’ll see. i haven’t written anything, blogs, poems, stories or anything for a long time, and now that i’ve got the whole summer ahead i’m hoping the muse will strike me with her pointy feathered sticks once more.
what else is happening. oh yes. it’s my birthday. i treated myself to breakfast at cafe rouge: a croissant and a hot chocolate with the paper, and then scrambled eggs on toast with a glass of kir royale with the crossword, which i failed miserably at. i got most, if not all of the top right hand corner wrong, and then failed on the sudoku. i’m out of practice, clearly.
met my dissertation tutor to discuss what i have to do over the summer – read a lot of books and watch a lot of films, surprise surprise. a summer like any other, but this time i’ll have some responsibility, and this time, this fucking time i’m not going to waste a second. all grown up now. time to get moving. time to leave some things behind.
A is for Action
just a warning: this post is likely to be extremely long, moderately irritable, and jammed to the gills with inconsequentiality.
so, yeah, it’s been a while. i’ll see if i can go chronologically, and if i forget things i’ll do another post tomorrow. here i sit with some water, some chocolate, a paper plate of Madelines, those delicious little morsels which have been unfairly tainted in the minds of some by their apparently causing Proust to go off on perhaps the world’s longest tangent (four volumes! four fucken volumes! get the fuck out of bed and have a wank. jesus.), and yeah. trying to relax myself, basically. err. what happened. essay the first happened. nothing too painful. i already had the plan and quotes etc, so it went okay. i got a first for another essay while i was writing it, so that cheered me up.
my short term memory is extemely poor. i can’t remember what happened before last tuesday, but on tuesday evening a motley selection of us went out to a pizza place for James’ birthday. good meatballs, decent beer, moderate company. what am i saying, i love these people. some of them, anyway. they all have good and bad points, but a few of them – there were thirteen there, and i’m talking about perhaps four) are just fucking gems of human beings. i’ll name no names, for modesty’s sake, but they’re just excellent people, people i genuinely enjoy spending time with. sounds unfair on the others, and i don’t *not* enjoy their company, but there are little niggles, aspects of personality or character flaws that get to me a little, which these other four don’t have.
next…uhh. ohyes… wednesday was one of those days of loosely organised chaos that the English department, not savvy at the best of times, does ever so well. it was the options market, which involved first of all me utterly failing to subtly leave the main options talk about Shakespeare, a compulsory module for straight English students, when i realised it didn’t apply to me. i was in the front row of seats, and quite close to the middle – i had to dislodge two other people to get out the end of the row, and every seat that flipped up made the most incredible noise. not subtle, at all. the guy giving the talk actually paused to let me leave. anyway, after that slight incident, i went up to the english department to sort out what was what, get the right form, give it back, get another form, read it, give that back, get the first form back again and generally fuck about for half an hour or so, striking up quite a friendship with the unexpectedly cute and young department secretary – all the previous ones having been decidedly on the frumpy side of fifty. after a certain amoung of dithering, i settled on a top three of modules, and then had to get another form (cue a redux of the getting the wrong form sketch detailed above) because i read the module options printout and saw the world’s most amazing module, called, for some reason best known to the module convener, Reeling and Writhing. didn’t have an awful lot to do with the content, which was….oh, i’ve wittered about this enough on the group thread, and nearly everyone who reads this is on there anyway. suffice it to say, we read lots of Homer, Ovid, Herodotus, the Bible, look at lots of paintings based on mythology, study the intertexts of various myths, and then (and this is the best bit) write 300-500 lines of poetry based on our emotional response to what we’ve read. i literally cannot wait, i want it to be september right now. sigh.
thursday, not much during the day. a friend’s birthday barbeque in the evening. i met a girl who pretty much embodies ‘Rah’ but, surprisingly, i didn’t take an instant dislike to. perhaps because she appeared fairly dizzy and sweet-natured, perhaps because she was just incredibly *nice*, but partly because i couldn’t help suspecting that underneath it all, she had a slightly self-critical attitude – i felt like she was very self aware. another very dear friend of mine had a fall on some distinctly H&S-baiting ground, and i spent a bit of the evening chatting to her and doing a spot of calming-down – although considering what could have been, she was heroically calm. i know people from back in the old days who would have made themselves the entire focus of the party over a slight flesh wound. it was nice to actually sit down and chat together, frankly, because she’s one hell of a person and i haven’t actually had a chance to properly talk to her in real life – late night facebook chats don’t count, even if they do go on til three am without any lulls – something that used to happen a bit in the old days but which i’ve got out of the habit of.
it’s interesting to see how people move on. this late night chatting business has got me thinking. i used to talk to my friend Ella on the phone at least three or four nights a week, and while i wasn’t her best schoolfriend, being a year above her and at a different school, we clicked really well and were…confidantes, i suppose. we talked about *everything*. i can’t be arsed to go into the whole history, i’m tired enough as it is, but we drifted apart because we turned out to be quite different people, in the end – and because our various mutual friends fell out and caused havoc, and, probably, because we were both a bit too lazy to put the effort in. oddly enough, i think we’d get on better now than we did before – we’re much more similarly in outlook, if nothing else. she’s in france, on a year abroad, and appears to spend her entire time doing cabaret shows and acting along to the Rocky Horror picture show. she also appears, through the university of Paris, to know another old friend of mine, Maddy, who i’ve known since god knows when and…i don’t know, there’s an odd class of relationship. i have it with two or three people, all kids of my dad’s colleagues – it’s sort of like distant family. I’ve known Maddy, and Izzy and her sister, for so long it feels like they’re my cousins, and even though we barely speak and we haven’t seen each other for years, and are living completely different lives, we could bump into each other in a coffee shop tomorrow and still get on like a house on fire. even when i was at school, and Maddy and i kept completely different circles, we’d get on really well on the rare occasions we talked, and it made me wonder why i didn’t make more of her friendship. Izzy likewise, although she was the year below. we went on holiday together as kids, for god’s sake – how people drift apart.
ugh, wittering. i don’t know, i find myself vaguely dissatisfied tonight. probably because the essay i handed in today was a complete crock – no proper introduction or conclusion, i didn’t answer the question (which i’d written)… the story i was writing about, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, is irritatingly difficult to analyse, or rather, to express one’s thoughts in terms of. and i haven’t spoken to Fi properly for a couple of days, and i know she’s having a rough time of it, but i miss long, rambling phone calls. to be rectified soon, i hope.
i’m just getting irritable with small things, like John’s obstinacy and ignorance-based cleanliness fetish. hopefully i’ll be less pissed off soon, because god help everyone around me if i’m like this til exams.
i haven’t written about James’ birthday party (nothing much to tell, but a few interesting details) or compiled, as advertised, a list of “Fantasy” books even normal people ought to read, (the top three, which is all i have so far, runs: 1) The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, 2) The Dark Tower by Stephen King, 3) the Bas-Lag books by China Mieville – read them all, now. drop whatever you’re doing, get the books, read them, and enjoy your new outlook on humanity and the universe), or about visiting Ross in hosptial, but i’m tired, and i’m (probably) going to go to bed with some Ray Bradbury, or possibly Sherlock Holmes, and a cup of tea, and see you all on the morrow. enough for now. xx
(nearly 1500 words! writing double that for an essay was like pulling teeth, and this happened in about twenty minutes…sigh…)
