Music of my Mind

Well, since my last entry some rather spiffing things have happened.

 

Much like everywhere else in the country, it snowed, and much like every person in the country I took some photos.

 

My 'working' at the museum is going brilliantly, for the first few weeks I did do bit of the old filing, but kicked up a fuss and got moved onto cataloging and photographing the masses of stuff in the cellars. Last Friday I catalogued a load of Chinese shoes for bound feet. Although I felt slightly quesy, they were amazing - so small, so ornate, and some of them even had paper tags on them written on with appropriately archaic discourse by European missionaries in the 20's saying things like 'these shoes were taken from a Chinese woman when she was read the Gospel and offered up her soul for redemption and her feet were unbound henceforth...'. Mad stuff. Its all very good sitting in a lecture hall, but coming into such close contact with it is fascinating. Which is why I did it, but still.

 

IVE GIVEN UP TV and can honestly say I feel happier, more pro-active and in control than I have done in years (Steps off pedestal to slow hand-clapping). Going out Iggy-style Nightclubbing and getting my arse down the gym does not require the monumental effort it did before.

 

Work at the Bar's good. SO good in fact that they've offered me a Deeeee-Jay set on Wednsday nights. I promised myself I wouldn't get ahead of myself but I've already told everyone I know and some I don't, and spent too many hours shuffling round independent Record Shops flipping through old vinyl attempting to do some serious music knowledge cramming. And buying at some point (I can't even play records, they're getting CD decks especially. I'm THAT suitable for the job). The game plan's going to be sort of uplifting  'Midweek Melancholic', punctuated by a lot of Waits, PJ, Beefheart, Doors, Smiths, Kate Bush and a load of stuff I like really. Maybe some cherrypicked modern Indie, Scruff, Clap Your Hands.. type stuff et al. I'm so excited I'm currently living in constant fear of wetting myself. And trying to think of a name recruit a manager, a PA and all the trappings one in the muzo biz requires, obviously.

 

Essays.. are just essays. I may not feel that way next year. Even so they seem to be getting done for a change.

 

I booked a one way flight to Hong Kong for TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY POUNDS. Wooooooooooo... I don't know where I'm going, but hoping to visit friends from University who live/ will be staying in Singapore and Taiwan. For the biggest of my fans, they will know I almost but not quite made it to HK last summer so I'm starting off there to make doubly sure. I'd like to go to India as well and see a bit of Eastern European if the moolah lasts. So many visas to apply for. But I'm going to get them on my Brazilian passport this time so they won't be vey much at all. No-one likes a Brit nowadays.

 

Some photos for your ever-deserving retinas. I was feeling a bit bored and posey - not a great combo.

Well its good to be back. I'm triumphantly returning to my desk, computer and deadlines after having been away for the last three weekends/ some weekdays on the trot to spend a last few days with my Grandad before he died, which I'm very glad I did.

 

But it is VERY good to be back. Can't ever move home, can't ever move home.... repeat ad infinitum. I don't see why Dorothy didnt just stay in Oz and see how many more improbable friends she could make.

 

I am now officially wise as my first wisdom tooth is crowning. It is infected however, so I'm feeling slightly floaty having been topping up the Nurofen all day and having just started on a course of anti-biotics which I'm quite excited about because I there is always one person who declines a drink with the most sanctimonious of utterances; 'No thankyou, I can't, I'm on anti-biotics', and it has never ever been me. You've got to grab pleasure when you can (in this crazy world.. ba ba da da..).

 

Its been a while since I left a blog entry that I was reasonably proud of, and not one that just contains what I've been up to - not much, most times. And that's all I've to say for the time being.

 

 

 

 

Take back what I said about Eliot. Write an essay on the bastard and you'll never go back. I don't want to be an embittered Lit graduate (or even student) but I can quite see how it happens.

 

 

I'm doing The Waste Land. Not the best idea but a lot to go off, I thought. Just passed the half-way mark anyway. Only two showers today, but a whole half slab of the dark stuff from my friends and patrons at Lindt. The ones that make them bunnies with the bows. Awwww.

 

I was going to pull a typical 'well, you know, the base, the superstructure, writing and reading is a highly elitist activity.. so, erm, [insert author's name here] clearly doesn't know what he/she's on about', but guess what - in my tutorial today, my tutor said he liked Eliot because it doesn't really have to mean ANYTHING. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Disembodied criticism?

Right, so here's the crack; in both History of Art and English Lit, I am learning about the overwhelming impact of the modern city on what was the individual, now part of the mass. Its brilliant, possibly the most exciting thing I've ever studied, probably because it strikes so many chords and it the work(s) were created when the phenomenon of the metropolis was not taken for granted. I'm preparing my Duchamp presentation as. I. type. I had a fantastic History of Art tutorial this morning, my tutor frothing at the mouth when speaking of the LIES of the reality that journalism (all now inherently propaganda) tries to perpeptuate, the LOSS and SOCIAL CONVULSION caused by mass reproduction. To think I could have been on the 17thc Landscaped Gardens course. My English tutor takes a somewhat different tack, he's just happy because we all live in the city now we don't have to marry our cousins anymore.

 

The only problem is, I cannot take issue with any of it. I've rolled over on my what used to be my fiercely critical back, to be lovingly kicked (alternately caressed) by the various blows of modernity, or at least its more critical manifestations in art and literature, because its absolutely bang on. Although Pound was a facist, and Eliot may have been a tad conservative, and Rhys was a over-decadent bag lady - I love them all dearly. All my essays will now practically fellate instead of tear down. But they are brilliant. I'm in trouble.

 

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.


Ezra Pound

I've got a new pc. Fantastic. A practically empty vessel to fill with utter shite. How is everyone? I'm okay, skiving and complaining, I'm cooking a casserole tommorow so chicken stock (in its correct quantities) is very much on my mind. Party on troops

Right, I've done it and I'm sorry. I've been cheating on my msn space. With.. of all things.. a MYSPACE. I'm sorry, so sorry.. I think its some sort of post-adolescent crisis, maybe I'm trying to reclaim my lost youth. I'm scum.

 

http://www.myspace.com/45988034

Not in the best of moods for it, but maybe this is quite an appropriate time for my

 

 

 

China and all things Chinese

Black Bo's

Reading (not the place)

Guilty and expensive weekends on the continent

Introspection

Referring to Edinburgh as 'home' for the first time. I suppose.

 

 

The bad:

 

The Jamster conglomerate

A mouldy bathroom

The Carling Empire

Emo

Bush

The Pakistani earthquake

'Artistic' egotism

Withdrawal

Exceptionalism

 

 

 

And the downright and utterly mediocre that permeates yet punctuates my ongoing existence:

 

Banality in all its forms

The loud hum of my (old) laptop

Increasingly lengthy ad breaks

Fucking snapfax/NUS/students and the badges of identity they need in general

Unsportsmanship

Chain Italian Restaurants

 

 

 

I have mostly been learning

 

Basic English grammar

How to avoid checking one's balance for as long as possible

That indifference and apathy rule, no matter what

 

 

Resolutions for 2006:

 

Complete a crossword on my own. I am however allowing myself full use of a theasaurus.

Not being so hard on myself.

Taking a good long hard look at myself in the mirror. Maybe then I can smash it and see what happens.

Competing at least once, in anything.

 

Its funny, the post Boxing Day pre New Year void. Everything seems to stand very very still. So much so that I don't feel I have anything to write. BUT I'm still tapping away anyway.

 

Its a larf innit?

 

This has been a very very subdued holiday so far. A few too many bottles of wine and largely yellow/beige coloured sprawling land mass-type meals have left me feeling predictably a bit shit.

 

Southport's a bit quiet, but then so is Edinburgh. TV's shit. I've finally come to realise. Not a moment too soon.

 

My laptop got nicked from my flat in Edinburgh last week. I am getting a new one however, very tenuously claimed off my ma and pa's home contents insurance. Nice one.

 

I'm sick of wallowing. I'm too comfortable. Not sure what the solution is bar jogging.

 

 

Right two more exams to go - I feel perilously unprepared and a bit sick, but as ever I will try to make the best of it. God knows where all this adreniline is going, I feel like I might burst - there are just waves and waves of it. I think I will tour most of Edinburgh on foot before retiring tonight.

 

The terms are too long, that's what it is. Twelve weeks is a long time to remain focused, especially on Coleridge and Illuminated Manuscripts. How I long for three terms - that would be my current Christmas wish. A bit of a sad state of affairs really.

 

I'm still reeling from the rather vicious reaction I received recently upon incurring a feminist's wrath at work. Upon asserting that although I'm not really decided on the merits of certain instances of pornography (she was arguing from an all porn as bad bad bad angle) I think there is a possibility that it might liberate rather than incarcerate women. She did not agree. I am apparently too young to know of such things. I was even overtly generous in my argument, acknowledging that yes, I am continually astounded at how rights of women have been forced through and by extention my own ignorance as to my almost limitlessly privelidged existence. But I was predictibly left feeling a little on the sour side.

 

What do we all think? I know lots of women get (trying to think of a turn of phrase free from sexual overtones.. umm can't) screwed over, but I don't really feel comfortable with asserting this, as someone else could equally imply that I am too getting screwed over in my own lifestyle choices. This reads as entirely santimonious, and I apologise, but I'd like to know what the world outside Edinburgh (I have recently been led to beleive there is one) thinks on the matter.

 

C'mon, we all love a bit of voyeurism don't we? And peversity. And procrastination... Pseudo-feminist questions + blog = a sexless marriage made in heaven.

 

 

 http://artpad.art.com/gallery/?iqqr1jr6u1g

 

I'm gonna get me some felt tip pens. Proper Crayola, not Woolies.. Bring back memories of watered down orange cordial and eating paint.

Its still mighty mighty cold - but that hasn't stopped the homegrown chaps of www.the-chaps.co.uk hiring a cottage in an as yet unspecified location in the Lake District for next weekend! Hooray - we can sit round the fire and tell stories of times gone by. Or just get really pissed and have a big bonfire. Anyway, I'm really excited about it, I'm having to come back to work on saturday night but it will still be the best weekend ever in the history of the entire world (I am currently revising classical epic but my attempts at poetic hyperbole just aren't as good. Yet..).

 

I've got that Sunday early-evening feeling, which unlike that Friday feeling is not accompanied by a carefree, power-riffingly awesome soundtrack but something a little more downbeat, not too depressing, but more mellow without being a)Damien Rice b)Norah Jones c) Jack Johnson or d) any combination of the above... Something to take the edge off tommorrow morning with my arsewipe of a Literature tutor. And getting that essay back..

 

Suggestions please? I might have to dig out a very overplayed and heavily invested with hometown sentiment Gomez CD if nothing prevails soon.

Wasted potential, shadows strewn c. JimW, or something like that. Everything is top dollar, notch and banana at the moment - apart from it being very, very cold. I gave an audible cheer when it said on the news, and I quote; 'this early bitter winter' - as this means I am not even more of a pansy this year but the news said it, so its a fact. Fact. Which leads me nice and phoenetically onto..

 

I went to see Factotum the other day, which although was a good film, proved to be a bad choice. I was in one of those ' nothing ever happens, everything always stays the same' moods, and the film was about nothing ever happening and everything indeed staying the same. Even the opening soundtrack is a girl singing the very words 'nothing ever happens, everything stays the same'.  I went on my own which I normally love doing, but I bumped into the archetypal smug couple on the way back whom, I'm ashamed to say it, made me feel a bit small. But then, a moral triumph! I went out with them and a few other people last night to the smaller candlelit and farylight-bedecked bars I usually frequent that consequently do not need filling with big egos and multifarious forms of ostentation, and they sulked for a bit and went home. A small rather petty victory, but I am at times rather a small, petty person.

 

Speaking of which, I'm having another growth spurt, I'm 5"10/11 now, c'mon 6ft...

 

Right, I'm in the library, there are passwords to remember and new editions of student papers to read. Keep warm, but don't get a flu jab you lot of the worried well.

 

 

After handing in that nightmarish saga of an essay yesterday, I have been skipping in feels, rolling in hay, communing with the birds (though sadly not the bees) and generally feeling a bit lighter all over. I might even read a book tonight that's NOT ON THE SYLLABUS. Reading for pleasure.. such a distant memory in need of a little revivification (that can't be a real word.. let me check.. it is - yesssss. I laugh in the face of conjugation). I might even go for a pint, experience some of this 'student life' I keep hearing about from home.

 

Anyway, I'm hoping for this blog to be a bit work free, even blushingly workshy, for a little while. All apologies for being exceptionally dull for the past few weeks, but it is an outlet of sorts amongst all the essay mania. Now I just need something to write about..

 

Hot damn, my first ever late essay of my university career so far. I have now resigned myself to the 5% penalty (if I get it in tomorrow), but I've really messed this thing up - I still don't really know where its going and am even considering a complete rewrite. I wish I was a bit more determinate - and a better sleeper.

Check it;

 

How does writing in this period represent processes of historical change, and what political purposes can these representations serve?

 

I had four showers yesterday having a good think about it, and what do you know? Still stumped. Bit of a loaded question isn't it? Lots of 'keywords' to 'define' and lots of italics necessary. I'm so sick of thinking about work. Still, the final essay... and then exams which I'm a bit happier about.

My tutor hates me because once when tired and hungover I said that I threw Austen's Northanger Abbey at the wall a few times, I %*&$ing hated it so much (I'd also like to point out that I'm not getting all prudish on yo' asses, I'm merely still a bit embarassed about it). He likes his box a lot I think. I bet he's not cool enough to have an msn space which he updates regularly on the exciting progress of his hundred year long Phd - I bet its on Milton. Clashes of personalities are a very difficult thing to navigate through.. especially when he's marking what is, effectively, a projection of my personality. I'm screwed.