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Academic/literary weblogs
Apothecary's Drawer
Break of Day in the Trenches
Do Thy Research
Early Modern
Notes
Little Professor
Philobiblion
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London weblogs
73 Urban Journeys
Abstractboy
Belle de Jour
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Geezer
In the Aquarium
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London Leben
Metroblogging London
Route 79
Random Acts of Reality
Urban Badger
Vixgirl
Writing
'London Blogging: Weblog Culture
and Urban Lives' (draft)
Current Music
Richard Crandell,
Mbira Magic
Rufus Wainwright,
Want Two
Konono No.1,
Congotronics
Tinariwen, The Radio
Tisdas Sessions
Devendra Banhart,
Oh Me Oh My...
Folk Is Not a Four-Letter
Word (comp. Andy Votel)
MADVILLAIN (MF Doom
and Madlib), Madvilliany
Email me:
james.blogwell@[::remove::]
hellsdexterities.co.uk
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Saturday 3 September 2005
I've started a new blog!
Wednesday 30
March 2005
Somehow the desire to put this diary up on the internet seems to have deserted
me. I'm not sure whether it will return. Perhaps I'll start another blog,
in which case details will be posted here. In the meantime I'm going back
to keeping a private diary, handwritten in a notebook, as I've done for
most of my life. A weblog was exactly what I needed when I started this
one last year: the discipline of writing for an audience lifted me out of
a number of bad thought habits and bad writing habits. Becoming part of
a writing community, and communicating with other bloggers, were great pleasures.
But now what I seem to want, and possibly need, is a return to the kind
of introspection that is of no interest to anyone but the subject. I'd like
to analyse further my reasons for stopping blogging - but the point is to
stop. So I'll shut up now.
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Wednesday 16 March 2005
Saint Dizzee
There's something saintly about Dizzee
Rascal. He played
the Royal Festival Hall last night like someone who has his mind on higher
things, while still somehow giving his followers everything. He rose above
the unsuitability of his surroundings to communicate his message of responsibility
and joy, of suffering and redemption, of East London, West London, North
London and South London. He began in the gloom with 'Sittin' Here', and
ended with a dazzling lightshow and the front rows bouncing to 'Stand Up
Tall'. He's beginning to look less like a boy and more like a man, with
a fuller figure - he's beginning to look a bit like Jay-Z. Yet there's not
an inch of slack about him, and he seems strangely egoless, especially when
he's rapping about 'Dizzee Rascal', which may or may not be a version of
himself. He seems to take pleasure in his work, and even to admire it, but
never to indulge in self-admiration. Craftsman as well as artist. Angel
in a white t-shirt, baggy trousers and big trainers.
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Tuesday 15 March 2005
Ironically, in shining a bright light on weblogs last week, I seem to have
driven my own into bashful retreat. I think it just needs time to rest and
regain confidence. It will be back soon.
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Wednesday 9 March 2005
I gave my talk at the ICA Sixth Form English Conference, and to my delight
I persuaded six teenagers who had never heard of weblogs before, and one
who had, to contribute to a group blog which we called ICAed.
Very rewarding. They seemed genuinely interested in starting blogs of their
own, and asked questions like 'Can you write about politics?' and 'Do people
ever leave nasty comments?' I hope I kept them entertained with the webpage
slideshow that I'd concocted.
Thanks to the wonderful people at the ICA (that's you, Alex)
the whole conference seemed to be a great success, in spite of two schools
pulling out at the last minute. John
Bird, founder of the Big
Issue, gave the opening talk, a naughty-boy-silencing mix of swearing,
crim-to-philanthropist autobiographical
narrative, jokes, anecdotes, funny voices, tirades against the media, and
more swearing. A truly amazing person, and an excellent choice of guest
speaker. Somewhat surreally his talk was delivered interview-style, with,
as his interlocutor, the incongruously genteel temporary Director of the
ICA, Lynne Williams. She smiled very gamely as he did his posh accent jokes.
I'm ashamed to say that, in fifteen years of studying and working in universities,
this has been the first time I've ever done any voluntary work in education.
But it was a good start.
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Tuesday 8 March 2005
Tried out my ICA weblogs talk on Natalie and she unabashedly told me that
parts of it were 'boring'. It was constructive criticism, though - she gave
me some good ideas for what to put in their place. I'm looking forward to
doing a bit of public speaking again. The last time was at the Ford Madox
Ford conference in December, which was difficult because it didn't really
interest me very much (though the audience of Ford aficianados didn't seem
to mind) - I just did it because I thought it would be good for me, and
because I fancied the idea of a trip to Manchester. This time it's the other
way round - the subject seems fascinating to me, but I just have to convince
other people of that. (And it's just down the road, so no lure of the exotic.)
Any suggestions, anyone? What are the best things about blogs?
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Monday 7 March 2005
The view from our front room
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Friday 4 March 2005
Fortunately I remembered to post a Mother's Day card in time to reach my
dear old mum before Sunday. It's just a shame I didn't know earlier about
the Virgin Megastore's 'Perfect Gifts For Mother's Day' promotion, which
I only caught sight of this evening while shopping on Oxford Street. Lead
item in their eye-catching display is... the new Jennifer
Lopez album Rebirth. (Click on link for photo of Jennifer wearing
more eyeliner than Robert
Smith of The Cure.) Although this album is no doubt a crappy, contract-fulfulling
concoction of pisspoor tunes and desultory vocals, I think you have to admire
the sheer crassness of the retail manager who first thought of that connection:
J-Lo, middle-aged mums, strained filial relationships, Mother's Day, Rebirth.
Ker-ching.
Meanwhile I've finally laid my hands on a copy of Konono No.1's Congotronics,
which is every bit as marvellous as I hoped it would be. Recorded at probably
less than a millionth of the cost of the Lopez opus, yet, I imagine, approximately
a million times better, it's a delightful, rejuvenating, delirious mix of
electric thumb pianos, eccentric percusssion, whistling, chanting, Afrobeat
melodies and what will sound to many Western ears like strangely distorted
echoes of acid house riffs. There was a satisfying buzz about it in the
record stores I went to as well - the world music department at Virgin told
me they'd just been listening to it before I came by, and the nice bald
bloke at Rough Trade (where I bought
my copy) said he thought it was 'excellent - really, really good'. Positive
review in today's Guardian
too. Let's hear it for African experimental music.
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Thursday 3 March 2005
The British Blogs Top Ten
- how have I managed without it? I've always loved lists, in a shamelessly
Hornbyesque way, and now here's one telling us (perhaps inaccurately, but
it's good enough) which weblogs the British public have taken most to their
hearts. Or, in the case of Andrew Sullivan at number one, which British
blogs have cracked America. In preparation for the sixth form conference
at the ICA next week, where I'm giving a presentation on blogging, I've
been familiarising myself with the top twenty. It's like discovering the
singles chart as a kid - half the time you're thinking 'how did that become
popular?', the other half it's 'how come everyone knew about this and I
didn't?' You have criticisms: there isn't a single blog that isn't flawed
or even deeply irritating in some key respect; I'd like to see less crap
humour, and more genuine wit; and the schizophrenic relationship with mainstream
media can be rather tedious. (If you don't like it, don't read it.) But
all this adds to the fascination. It's a pity British Blogs Top Ten
is already out of date, and won't be maintained, though you can understand
why, given the amount of research it must involve. But Europundit
offers to post a regular chart of top European blogs, and most of those
will be UK-based. Is there an American chart, does anyone know?
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Wednesday 2 March 2005
Amazed to read in Time Out this week that Marc
Almond has now recovered sufficiently from the motorcycle crash that
almost killed him last October to be DJing again, albeit with a little help
carrying his records. He appears at Pearl
Necklace in Camberwell on Friday. Singing might take a bit longer: 'I've
been told it could be a year before I can perform again, before I get my
voice up to standard and my confidence back.' After the accident he was
in a coma for two weeks, and although the only physical sign of injury is
a dent on the side of his head, psychologically he's still far from mended,
and the stammer that he had as a teenager has returned. 'I was determined
not to be a victim, and not to let this affect my life... I get very despondent
some days. I get very angry. I throw things at the wall. But I'm determinded
not to give up', says Marc. It sounds like the DJing is doing him good:
'It gets me out there. It stops me being so reculsive. Even before the accident,
I was in danger of becoming a hermit.' Keep getting better, Marc. (More
news available from BBC
website.)
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Tuesday 1 March 2005
Since it began looking more and more certain that we'll be moving away soon,
I've already started missing the street I've lived on for almost ten years,
with its not-particularly-impressive-but-still-it's-a-street-market street
market. Is there a recommended way of saying goodbye to a neighbourhood
you've loved?
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Monday 28 February 2005
Our flatmate Rohan has just finished two weeks' jury service at the Old
Bailey. The trial was for attempted murder. The accused were four young
men living on a council estate in South London. The victim was a middle-aged
man from the estate, who was shot in the back of his head, and will now
be a vegetable for the rest of his life. He has a wife and two children.
It turned out that this man, while parking his car, had accidentally damaged
the bumper on defendant A's car. Defendant A had felt 'dissed'. But rather
than deal with it himself, or just let it go, he paid his friend, defendant
B, to kill the bumper guy. Another friend, defendant C, knew what they were
planning, but failed to report it. Defendants A and B tried to frame defendant
D, having stolen his phone and used it to plan the shooting. A and B were
given twenty-five years each. The penalty for attempted murder has just
been increased in the last few weeks, so they were unlucky. C was given
three years. D was acquitted. Rohan told me about some of the bizarre aspects
of doing jury service, such as everyone having to leave the room together
when someone goes out for a cigarette. I'm curious and would like to do
it myself - but perhaps not for such a depressing crime.
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Sunday 27 February 2005
The Africa Remix
exhibition at the Hayward Gallery is wonderful. When you walk in you're
greeted by a totem-like tower made of stuck-together petrol tanks, one
of which is cut away to reveal a visa document pinned up inside. You think
about oil, migration, religion and everyday life. Every piece in the show
is similarly suggestive. Many are playful, such as the five-minute video
of an Algerian woman's belly and hips as she puts on red, white and blue
sashes and belly dances with jerky irony to the French national anthem.
Some are more frightening, like the nightmarish installation on a stretch
of red sand, with allegorical animal-headed figures representing an exploited
labourer and the landowners, businessmen and their dependents who feed
off him. I'm totally sold on this Africa
05 thing now.
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Saturday 26 February 2005
The mortgage broker who fixed me and Nat up with a mortgage last week
tried to flog me four types of insurance today - buildings, contents,
payment protection, and life assurance. I wasn't having any of it, not
even the basic buildings insurance, which was overpriced. But that didn't
stop him trying. At first he used gentle persuasion. But after twenty
minutes he was telling me he thought I'd be 'mental not to get it'. When
I came back home there was an email from my mum saying that my grandad
(who is helping us buy the flat) 'thinks all insurance is a rip-off, and
he's right. People I know who work in the business freely admit this.'
I felt quietly relieved that I hadn't given in to the salesman. At one
point I almost had, just because I felt sorry for him.
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Friday 25 February 2005
Visited a small company called Future
Laboratory, who, from a small basement flat in Whitechapel, try to
identify and interpret cultural trends and then repackage and sell the
information on to larger companies such as advertising agencies. I went
with Ruth, who was worried that it would be like Nathan Barley.
She decided after a few minutes that it wasn't. In fact, nothing could
be less similar - instead of aggressively trendy dysfunctional males acting
like idiots in warehouse spaces, Future Laboratory consisted largely of
cheerful, well-adjusted, intelligent women talking, laughing and shuttling
between the living room and the kitchen. Perhaps that is the future?
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Thursday 24 February 2005
A letter from theatreland
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7 December, 1973
Protocol puts
me in a difficult position in regard to Monday, 17th December because,
as you know, I always like to appear in "penguin" for
first nights in this Theatre. However, on that evening I have to
take cocktails with the Czech. Ambassador and, of course, they do
not "dress", as it were.
Accordingly, I regret and beg leave to inform you in advance, that
on the occasion of your Company's opening night this year I shall
be (a) late, and (b) improperly dressed.
Douglas Craig
Frederic Lloyd, Esq., OBE
Bridget D'Oyly Carte Limited
1 Savoy Hill
London W.C.2.
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I suppose I could get into trouble for 'publishing' this letter on the
internet, as it's only about thirty years old and therefore still within
copyright - and, who knows, the author may still be alive. But I thought
it needed to be seen. I found it this afternoon in the Sadler's Wells
archive at the Islington Local History Centre, which I was visiting to
see if one of our students might be able to do their internship there.
Left alone for ten minutes, I randomly opened a box marked 'D'Oyly Carte
1970s', and it was there that I found Mr. Craig's letter. It was typed
on thin, almost transparent paper - a carbon copy. (O unfamililar
concept, in these days of computers, though of course still alluded to
in the 'cc' box on email software.) It made me think of Topsy
Turvy, Mike Leigh's excellent film about Gilbert and Sullivan
- and also of how it could almost have been written at any time between
about 1885 and 1985, as long as typewriters themselves, and perhaps also
as long as the camp theatrical language of mock stuffy gentility that
the letter adopts (though arguably that language still survives). The
Sadler's Wells archive is extensive and largely unsorted. Someone's going
to have fun going through it, if Mr.Craig's letter is anything to go by.
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Wednesday 23 February 2005
Before switching on the TV this evening I'd never heard of the fabulously-named
Tyler Brûlé, the founding editor of Wallpaper*,
who is now presenting BBC4's The
Desk, a weekly half-hour media update. Tyler Brûlé:
can that name possibly be real?
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Monday 21 February 2005
Sally's birthday at The Drunken Monkey, a dim sum bar on Shoreditch High
Street. We had a great evening, even though it was a Monday night, and
Sally seemed happy. It snowed outside for part of the time, and one of
Sally's friends went out and brought back a snowball to give to her. A
guy from another party on the other side of the bar looked and acted exactly
like one of the characters in Nathan
Barley. The food was delicious, although the MSG almost gave me an
allergic reaction.
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Sunday 20 February 2005
Rare phone call from brother, asking about our move.
Otherwise just marking students' essays, which has taken many hours, but
is all done now. It's been interesting. Reading the students' work has
made me more aware of the breadth of their interests, and has changed
my idea of the kind of course I'd like to teach next year. Up until now
the plan has been to write a series of lectures on the publishing industry.
But I'm realising that it makes little sense to focus one one industry
when whole point of the degree is that it looks at the cultural and creative
industries collectively and comparatively. So, instead, inspired partly
by one or two student essays I read that looked at how marketing can play
a part not just in selling but in the creative process (especially with
highly commercial products), I'm thinking of a course called something
like 'Artist, Industry, Text', which would examine when and how artists
and texts (using both terms in the broadest sense) either comply with
or resist marketing imperatives. Methodologically it would combine industrial
politics with textual analysis. One of the students wrote about Radiohead,
whose 'anti-marketing' campaign for Kid A was much more effective
than a conventional marketing campaign would have been. Another wrote
about Zara, who, by not advertising, similarly go against the grain of
standared marketing practice. I like the idea of a course that could equally
be about a novel, an album, or a shirt.
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Saturday 19 February 2005
Something new that looks pretty good, via the lead review in this month's
The Wire: Konono No.1's
Congotronics, an album of Congolese dance music played on electric
thumb pianos and makeshift percussion. Not out until the 28th, but in
the meantime, there's this video
clip...
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Friday 18 February 2005
Went to see La Nina Santa
('The Holy Child') with Cara from my Spanish class. An easy way
to describe it would be as a cross between Almodovar (who is one of the
film's executive producers) and Ingmar Bergman - like Almodovar, it centres
on sexual transgression and its emotional fallout, but it leaves melodrama
and camp aside in favour of more Bergman-like psychodrama and naturalism.
The story is set in Spain in the 1970s - late Republican Spain, a stifled
yet also wilful place - and is about a sexually innocent yet curious Catholic
schoolgirl and the frustrated doctor who takes advantage of her. I hadn't
been expecting it to be at all challenging (for some reason I thought
it would be similar in tone to Y
Tu Mama Tambien or Krampack
- not that it would be exactly fair to describe either of these as unchallenging
films), but I felt virtuous for making the effort. Cara resisted more
than I did - she explained afterwards that her parents used to take her
to films like this every week when she was younger, hence her love of
blockbusters and musicals now - but she conceded in the end that it was
good to have been worked a little. Afterwards we had a drink in the fifth-floor
bar in the huge Waterstone's on Piccadilly. It had the kind of upmarket
ambience that normally makes me feel uncomfortable (and I believe it used
to be part of a posh hotel or something), but since to a former bookseller
like me nothing that's built into a bookshop could ever be truly upmarket,
I felt reasonably at home, and enjoyed hearing from Cara about her PhD
plans. Nice view of Big Ben and the river as well.
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Thursday 17 February 2005
Where is that snail that was here earlier? It can't have gone far. At
least my ditch is warm. The stars above glint like that bitch Mrs Kidare's
sharpened teeth. Same as yesterday. When will it end?
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Wednesday 16 February 2005
The limits of my universe have been shrinking recently due to overwork.
I don't really have very much to say, and I'm unstimulated by my surroundings.
Yet I'm committed to the discipline of writing here every day. This could
be either very dull, or the occasion for some increasingly sub-Beckettian
murmuring. Or both.
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Tuesday 15 February 2005
'Bob', who has been leaving sarcastic comments on this weblog recently,
is someone I used to work with. We now exchange rude emails with each
other from time to time as a way of making our days mildly more interesting.
All very childish, I'm afraid.
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Monday 14 February 2005
Too much to do at work. Paralysis setting in.
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Sunday 13 February 2005
Took my mind off the new flat by spending the day marking essays. Can't
remember what any of them were about now....
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Saturday 12 February 2005
After fortunately not very much in the way of estate agent-related shenanigans,
it looks like we'll be moving to Walthamstow in the spring, onto the same
road as Alison and Ross, and just round the corner from Morgan and Faith.
Depending on how you look at it, our dream home is either a nice two-bedroom
first floor flat in a quiet neighbourhood, not far from a nature reserve
and with a gentle back view over playing fields, or it's an overpriced
bottom-rung-on-the-property-ladder in plain old suburbia. I don't really
care, though - I think it rocks. It has a huge front room with a tiled
fireplace, and out at the back there's even a neglected narrow strip of
earth that one day might become a garden. The only problem is that the
kitchen is the size of a cupboard - but then the one we're used to is
one and a half cupboards, so it's no great sacrifice. Any doubts I might
have had about moving to the end of the Victoria line from the freakishly
cheap place in SE1 that I've rented for the last ten years were swept
away, when, after looking at the last flat on the list, I walked back
to the tube station at dusk through Walthamstow market. All of London's
riches seemed to be there, animal, vegetable and mineral - though mostly
vegetable. And the market traders had much better lines than ours do on
Lower Marsh. 'No, not good enough, love? Want a job?' The new place isn't
quite a done deal yet - we have to arrange a mortgage, and frankly I'm
terrified that in the meantime someone is going to get in ahead of us
- but the offer is made, and it's been accepted. Celebrated with a bottle
of white wine and some Carribean food, bought from the the market. Hard
to sleep for the excitement.
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Friday 11 February 2005
Friday (very good).
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Thursday 10 February 2005
Racehorses.
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Wednesday 9 February 2005
Wednesday (good).
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Tuesday 8 February 2005
Tuesday (better).
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Monday 7 February 2005
Monday.
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Sunday 6 February 2005
More sinophilia. On my way home from some book shopping on Charing Cross
Road I bought a tin of sweet and crunchy water
chestnuts in Chinatown, and later added them to a rice dish I was
making. Natalie wanted to know more about them, so we looked them up in
the excellent Deh-Ta
Hsiung's The Chinese Kitchen (1999), and read that they are
'the rhizome of a sedge that is cultivated in paddy fields all over China'.
Also useful to know that 'Children who have swallowed coins or other metallic
substances are often given [them] as a purge'.
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Saturday 5 February 2005
Learned from a student's essay that in the 1980s Frederic Jameson
went to China several times to lecture on postmodernism. Would love to
know more about this. Nothing on the internet about it....
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