Archive
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004

Links page
Click here

Monday 12 September 2005

I've been spending too much time alone: at work reading drafts of students' dissertations; and in downtime studying Chinese and desultorily working through books on the publishing industry. The consequence of this isolation is listlessness and staring into space. Natalie is doing an overnight shift tonight, so I'm alone in the flat. She phoned earlier and asked 'Are you happy?' I wasn't happy or unhappy, I was just blank. Over the next month there will be a lot of dissertation marking to do - can't say I'm looking forward to that massively.

At least saturdaynight was sociable, Sarah's leaving party. Sarah seemed more sanguine about going to China, and was wearing a red silk dress. We saw Alice, Henry, Matt and Pip, and caught up a little with all of them, though not really enough. They said they'd come to the next Scarla O' gig, which would be nice.

I haven't been listening to much music recently, but Ruth copied Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005) for me, and now I can't get out of my head the bit in the first song where they quote 'Close to Me' by the Cure. I seem to want witty, literatre, whimsical songwriting like this at the moment - though having said that I played the first Ash Ra Tempel album at home this evening and its two intense wigged-out twenty-minute sides were just what Herr Doktor Krautrock ordered. Also listened to British Sea Power, Open Season (2005). A few great choruses and a lot of unmemorable chugging too. But its melancholia suited me at the time.



Wednesday 7 September 2005

A collection of nonsensical subtitles from an appallingly back-translated pirate DVD of Star Wars IV: Revenge of the Sith has been making me laugh more than anything in months. It seems to have spread pretty far and wide already, but I'm posting the link here anyway for benefit of others like me, often the last to know.

Our band Scarla O' played the Comedy on Oxendon Street last night, and acquited ourselves pretty well, or at least such seemed to be the consensus. We also invited a certain amount of affectionate ridicule, which is probably a good sign. Ruth pointed out, not unreasonably, that our frontman Bill had 'taken more than his fair share of Bowie pills'... but Bill himself would be the last person to disavow the sway of the Thin White Duke. And talking of pallor, Ruth also apparently commented to Natalie, during our performance of 'Everybody Loves Sunshine', that we 'could all do with a bit of sunshine' ourselves. And finally, again according to Ruth, I only 'stopped looking terrified after about the third number'. In truth, I never really stopped feeling scared, especially, for some reason, over the notion that the drumstick would suddenly fly out of my left hand (just the left, not the right). But I only fluffed a few fills, and my timing was generally solid, so definitely a good start to what will no doubt be a global sensation within under a year.



Monday 5 Septembr 2005

Unexpected phone call this morning from Sarah. She wanted to catch up and to talk about moving to Beijing, where her boyfriend has been made the new editor of the Beijing edition of a well-known London listings/lifestyle magazine. (They've done a few Beijing issues already, one of which I read while I was over there last month, but apparently the owners think it needs a shot in the arm.) I perhaps reacted in slightly the wrong way by enthusing wildly, when really I think Sarah is quite nervous and worried. She's trained as a journalist herself, and has been kept as a researcher and occasional contributor by the Sunday Times for a while, but doesn't have any work out to go to herself in China, and is probably wondering what good it's going to do her, beyond the initial novelty. I told her there were loads of opportunities in China at the moment, especially in Beijing - with the economy growing by 8% a year (as we hear in the news every frigging day, er, like today, for example), and China liberalising its trade rules since WTO accession, and a huge market for Western goods and services, how could there not be? But she probably doesn't quite see it that way at the moment, and I can't say I blame her. Beijing's population is somewhere between 15 and 18 million - you could feel quite lonely in a city like that when you're boyfriend's got an exciting, high-pressure job, and you have no work and don't know anybody. Lost In Translation, anyone? Sarah even said, somewhat plaintively, 'I'll be coming home at Christmas, at least'. Well, it looks like my work might be sending me out there too for a few days next month, so at least I'll be able to pay Sarah a social call, maybe, and introduce her to a few friends in the expat community (which sounds bad but really isn't). I think in six months' time she'll be wondering why she ever thought twice about it.



Saturday 3 September 2005

Something quite unexpected happened today. After completing the outline for a lecture that I'm writing, on print culture and publishing, I was taken with the desire to start blogging again. Perhaps academic study and journalising are somehow indissociable for me.

So this is the first entry for the new blog. I'm calling it La Mosca - 'The Fly' in Spanish. I've liked the word 'mosca' ever since I saw it in a Spanish dictionary earlier this year, and deduced (all on my own!) that 'mosquito', the etymology of which I'd never stopped to consider before, must mean 'little fly'. At the time Bill was thinking of changing the name of our band, and I proposed 'La Mosca' to him, but fortunately, because it left the name for me, he decided to keep Scarla O'. I like in particular that la mosca suggests, obliquely, the idea of being a fly on the wall. Whether I'll manage this remains to be seen. The previous blog, Blogwell's London Journal, of which this is really just a continuation, tended to be more personal than observational. But observational is what I'm usually aiming for, even if I rarely achieve it.

One of the reasons why I abandoned BLJ four months ago was just that it was taking up too much of my time. And now I notice that I still write - or rather, edit - agonisingly slowly. You wouldn't believe this, but I'm been sitting here writing this entry for at least half an hour now. I usually try out any one sentence at least three times. When I kept a diary as a teenager, in ridiculously neat handwriting in a dull-looking page-per-day desk diary, I would compose the sentences in my head before writing them down. I seem to have lost that faculty now.

So what happened in this mosca's tiny world in the four months that it was away? A few small things. Nat and I moved to Walthamstow. I joined the afore-mentioned band, Scarla O', as drummer. I went to China on holiday, got back all my Chinese, and took a lot of pictures. Many things have remained the same. I am still the administrator, with minor academic duties, for an MA course at a university in London. I like my job, even though much of it is tedious and repetitive - my colleagues, and the students, of which a new contingent is just about to arrive, are interesting people, and I get to work in an academically and culturally diverse environment but without the stress of being a full-time lecturer (which I've tried, and it didn't agree with me at all).

One thing I'll try to avoid in this blog is posting something every day. Trying to do that helped kill off BLJ. So here's to irregularity and infrequency - two much underrated qualities in the regularised, overly toilet-trained world of digital literary disburdenment.