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Girls, I love the things they know, love the things they show
To the Girls' Grammar School. I'm helping organise this thing where some PhDers talk about our research. It's called the New Ideas Festival, which is a bit unnerving as I never feel I have any new ideas. I went there to meet the Head of Sixth Form. The observation of door-opening etiquette and how even 12- and 13-year old girls looked behind themselves before releasing a door.
On a noticeboard, they'd printed all our talk titles and their précis (whatever the plural of précis is). The girls have had to sign up to whatever talk they find most interesting. I suppressed any expression of my delight in seeing that my talk is amongst the most popular.
My title is "'Why are you listening to that din?' Avant-garde music and social identity." Then, next to the title, they have your précis, which in my case is
When I was a teenager, listening to what my Dad called "way out" music on Radio Three, he used to sometimes yell at me up the stairs, "Turn that racket off! Why are you listening to that din?" It's a good question and one which needs an answer. This talk discusses my attempts to find out why people ever get into "difficult", non-chart music, and what, if anything, this says about them.
Heady with relief over a meeting I'd been worried about, I went to the Sun. In a relationship that was going down a cul-de-sac, a man said to a woman, after a shallowness of colleagues had departed, "You work in Marketing. You talk bullshit all day. And all you can think of to say is 'I'm a student'?"
An email arrived this morning that revealed that made me punch the air. After forty-seven years of living, I will finally be in the same room with the gorgeous and talented Jill Saward. My much danced-to Shakatak are playing Birmingham on 1st February.
Here's a link to a live version of Nightbirds. If by some inexplicable lapse of taste nine minutes of jazz-funk in a 1982 stylee is beyond you, just wind forward to 5.10 and tell me honestly that that is not one of the sexiest things you can watch a woman do.
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looby, n.; pl. loobies. A lout; an awkward, stupid, clownish person
M / 61 / Bristol, "the most beautiful, interesting and distinguished city in England" -- John Betjeman [1961, source eludes me].
"Looby is a left-wing intellectual who is obsessed with a) women's clothes and b) tits." -- Joy of Bex.
WLTM literate woman, 40-65. Must have nice tits, a PhD, and an mdma factory in the shed, although the first on its own will do in the short term.
There are plenty of bastards who drink moderately. Of course, I don't consider them to be people. They are not our comrades.
Sergei Korovin, quoted in Pavel Krusanov, The Blue Book of the Alcoholic
I am here to change my life. I am here to force myself to change my life.
Chinese man I met during Freshers Week at Lancaster University, 2008
The more democratised art becomes, the more we recognise in it our own mediocrity.
James Meek
Tell me, why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for instance, or a beautiful evening, or a conversation in agreeable company, it all seems no more than a hint of some infinite felicity existing apart somewhere, rather than actual happiness – such, I mean, as we ourselves can really possess?
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
I hate the iPod; I hate the idea that music is such a personal thing that you can just stick some earplugs in your ears and have an experience with music. Music is a social phenomenon.
Jeremy Wagner
La vie poetique has its pleasures, and readings--ideally a long way from home--are one of them. I can pretend to be George Szirtes.
George Szirtes
Using words well is a social virtue. Use 'fortuitous' once more to
mean 'fortunate' and you move an English word another step towards
the dustbin. If your mistake took hold, no-one who valued clarity
would be able to use the word again.
John Whale
One good thing about being a Marxist is that you don't have to pretend to like work.
Terry Eagleton, What Is A Novel?, Lancaster University, 1 Feb 2010
The working man is a fucking loser.
Mick, The Golden Lion, Lancaster, 21 Mar 2011
Rummage in my drawers
The Comfort of Strangers
23.1.16: Big clearout of the defunct and dormant and dull
16.1.19: Further pruning
If your comment box looks like this, I'm afraid I sometimes can't be bothered with all that palarver just to leave a comment.
63 mago
Another Angry Voice
the asshat lounge
Clutter From The Gutter
Crinklybee Defunct
Exile on Pain Street
Fat Man On A Keyboard
gairnet provides: press of blll
George Szirtes ditto
Infomaniac [NSFW]
Laudator Temporis Acti
Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder
On The Rocks
The Most Difficult Thing Ever nothing since April
Quillette
Strange Flowers
Wonky Words
"Just sit still and listen" - woman to teenage girl at Elliott Carter weekend, London 2006
5:4Bristol New Music
Desiring Progress Collection of links only
NewMusicBox
Purposeful Listening (né The Rambler)
Resonance FM
Sequenza 21
Sound and Music
Talking Musicology defunct, but retained
