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The man in black
I've got a start date for my cleaning job at the hospital: 3rd March. Not really what I want to do, but neither is servicing a credit card. Both are slavery. "Work is a prison of measured time," as Raoul Vaneigem put it. But on the bright side, I can cram all my week's hours into three days of twelve hours each.
There's a good pub about half an hour's walk from Mel's flat. It's along a car-dominated road, with the infernal grey noise of tyres on wet tarmac, and it's winter, so we don't often go there, but the other day she proposed a walk there "just for one or two" before we came back for our tea.
After "one or two", we were asked to move, as the DJ was setting up where we were sitting. "Well, we could just see what he's like I suppose," one of us said. We got chatting -- or were talked at, rather -- by this disabled woman on crutches who had been invalided out of the army who took delight in showing us her grotesquely malformed knee, and the foot pointing the wrong way.
A couple of hours later I was dancing under the 70s disco ball and those big bulbs of coloured mobile disco lights, which have a lovely catalytic relationship with alcohol in the brain. A woman was dancing near me in an absolutely enormous jumper. With no preamble whatsoever, she put it over me while she was in it, and we started dancing with our two heads sticking out of the neck hole, our bodies in a pleasant abutment underneath.
You may remember that I said that a friend of the family was playing about with a new phone one day, whilst laying on the bed, facing the mirror, in a room which a child had always reported as having a bad feeling to it.
She accidentally pressed "burst" instead of the normal take a photo button, and in a single frame, out of scores of them, there was this figure looming over the bed in which the child felt so uncomfortable.

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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 (inactive)
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 (inactive)
The Most Difficult Thing Ever (inactive)
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
