Fortnight. Mary-Ann.

although that’s a bit of a down twist, the Fortnight project sounds very interesting… i follow the activities of “Improv Everywhere", which seems to use some similar methods for various events…

Mutual wanting and becoming closer?! Is that it, then?! Do you know I was well into my 20s until I discovered that foreplay did NOT necessarily involve incessant begging. Imagine that! Now you tell me its about mutual wanting. Pish.

DF: It was a bit of a contrast to the kind of language she uses, but it’s only a small, nitpicking wrong note in an otherwise very enjoyable and original project.

UB: Ha ha… I recognise that ("Oh hurry up, can I, er… yet?"). This is completely different. I feel a bit foolish even talking about someone I haven’t even met yet but even virtually, it’s exciting and lovely.

I don’t want to appear to be a antisocial scientist-type here, but that art sounds like the biggest load of shite I’ve ever heard.
It’s pretention level is super-stratospheric. It’s got as much relation to art as Hitler did to world peace.

It reminds me of a piece I once saw in Dundee. As you got in an elevator (in the art school) you were presented with a TV chained to the floor, showing a looping video of a couple making love. As the elevator reached the top floor, the couple orgasmed, and white aerosol was ejected from the top of the TV.

There were 20 or so of us, all science students, going to a temporary lecture theatre in the Art school, and after a momentary embarrassment, we all started to chant, “WHAT A LOAD OF SHITE", with 3 of us adding the word pretentious between A and LOAD, and one young lady who also added the word F*CKING before SHITE.

Sit and look at a Rodin sculpture, or a Monet piece. That’s art, which can be seen and understood in extreme emotional depth by most people, working class or not.

Please do not be offended by this, it is purely my own personal opinion, and is open to dispute and discussion.

I thought it sounded like a bit of a laugh. Things like that are always hit and miss, but if they stimulate a bit of interest or reaction that’s fine by me. I’d rather people were having a go and risking putting out what can be pretentious or ridiculous, than nothing.

It certainly stimulated something in Looby.

TSB: Your reaction is similar to the reception that the Impressionists, and many other artistic movements which have now been taken into the mainstream, received when they started out.

Sounds to me like you can’t be bothered trying anything new and dealing with the fact that 95% of everything is shite. You want other people to do the critical effort and pass it, before they give it to you to call real art. Although I’d have loved to have been there when that uproar broke out.

If we had more time, and we were in a pub, I would convincingly demonstrate that artistic and scientific enquiry are, at root, born of the same impulse and that you are WRONG and I am RIGHT and we just need four more pints of Orkney Skullsplitter to sort this out.

ISBW: It stimulated me to write unexpectedly to Mary-Ann, and apart from the fact that I don’t know her address and the card is still rather uselessly pressed against my tit in my jacket pocket - just for that, it was a great idea.

All middle class people say they’re working class

And all middle-class academics say “oh, I don’t think I’m any class, really.”

Despite her environment and the influence of relatives that I too knew and loved in my childhood, my Mum has tried really hard all her life to make herself as middle-class as possible; K’s parents, on the other hand, achieved a hippyish kind of middle-class long before she was born, moving to the metropolis of Cardiff and away from any destructive, “getting above yourself” working-class prejudice very early on. You can just about tell the difference between our two slightly different brands of middle-classedness: K’s more well developed; mine occasionally, falteringly non-U.

But then however bad the Welsh valleys were in the 1950s, they could never be quite as harsh as the (basically) slum properties that some of my Mum’s cousins and friends grew up in. It was those that made my Mum force herself to adopt middle-class values, and especially middle-class attitudes to money and finances; the memory of playing and going to visit in those one-up-one-downs, lurking in the shadows of the gradually expiring cotton mills, drove her relentlessly to a different class. Coincidentally, their location: Mary Ann Street, Blackburn. Not very complimentary to your own Mary-Ann, but metatextuality knows no favour.

If you were a girl I’d start chatting you up.

And that art project sounds fantastic, like being parachuted into some kind of steampunked, Lynchian landscape of hidden meaning. I love it, and I love your experience with the iPod. A serendipitously revealing breaking-down of the artwork.

I’m working class… I’m not having the debate again. Nothing to do with what I own, drive, earn, have learnt etc. it is about a sense of belonging, of where you came from and will continue to go to etc… Go back nearly 200 years my great whatever Granddad was a brickfield labourer who couldn’t write… that’s working class. You try to tell the kids today etc. etc.

TwistedScottishBastard: I fucking love the sound of that ‘experience’ that someone created for you ! I would have loved to have been a witness/observer/audience - how hilarious. It is inspired! An elevator taking you to climax? you don’t GET THAT? it’s fantastic fanTAStic! And the aerosol? Fucking genius. I don’t get how you don’t get that, even as something amusing!? It doesn’t matter of course, just that I rather liked it.

Looby: Don’t bloody make up the rest of the woman that you’ve only met in text and typed word - dear god you are setting yourself up there darling. But wishing the best for you, nontheless and, by the way, when are you coming to London please? X

I know, that’s why we’ve decided to push it along with a meeting as soon as we could. I’m full of trepidation that we won’t be able to continue in person what is so lovely online. I don’t want to lose this and have it all in fragments on the floor but at the same time I don’t want a disembodied literary affair.

Not sure about the next trip to the smoke but whenever it is you and me are going our for a drink or six. And perhaps you could meet my friends Helen and Melissa, as I imagine you plus them two would make the evening go with a bang!

If you were a girl I’d start chatting you up.

There’s your new “about me” text for every dating website there is, right there. Short and to the point.