The black river of himself.
The rain of his wrists
Is like bog oak,
The ball of his heel

Like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
Cold as a swan’s foot
Or wet swamp root.

—from The Grauballe Man, Seamus Heaney, 1975

le vache qui rit is laughing AT US not WITH US
12:25pm, 12 June, 2004: Discuss

(concept © tokyo rosemary)

feeble
10:23am, 11 June, 2004: like grumpy 40somethings explaining (to themselves) why a song they hate is at #1: “they” did it with “marketing”... (NC’s “extremely effective” here translates as “ultra-magical”). Stepping beyond Washington-centred parochialism for a moment, we find a slightly more content-ful interpretation, right or wrong: “It was as though the legacy of the Great Communicator’s era had suddenly been brought back to the foreground to show up Bush’s errors of judgement.” As in (sotto voce) ‘Remember those lovely times not-so-long-ago when we WEREN’T frightened, uncertain, confused, hated, in debt, quagmired, at odds with one another as a nation etc etc.’ Adult good-old-days panic as it manifests in a new generation, in other words: this has NEVER demanded that the Old Days’ Goodness be in any way factual. Of course this reading is liminal rather than explicit. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats: the uptight teacherly entity Tom Carson calls WPFL is (I think) at root really very frightened of the dreams of the mass constituency it so gracelessly (patronisingly) courts. It despises them for being locked into unreality: but isn’t this a sign of a deep yearning to break with the awful present?

road BACK from nowhere
12:17pm, 11 June, 2004
(carson via matos) (playlist via whatever)

1: Death Dies: Goblin
2: Jenny Is Feeling Bad: Mummy the Peepshow
3: Wax the Van: Arthur Russell
4: Bad Bad Boys: Midi Maxi & Efti
5: One Big Cycle: Dizzee Rascal
6: Where Are You Baby?: Betty Boo
7: Bad Girl: Bad Girl
8: Que Sera Sera: Doris Day
9: Birdy: British Sea Power
10: S’Now: Derek Bailey, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Calvin Weston
11: The Helicopter Tune: Deep Blue
12: Gemini Spacecraft: David Bowie
13: Toremoro: Asa-Chang & Junray
14: Bug: nrvststpilot
15: Southern Hospitality: Ludacris
16: Movement VIII, Commentaire III de Bourreaux de Solitude,
- - - Le Marteau Sans Maître: Pierre Boulez
17: Scientific: King Tubby
18: Oochie Wally ft.Nas: Qb’s Finest
19: I’ve Found a New Baby: Django Reinhardt
20: Should I Laugh or Cry?: Abba
21: Nobody’s Business: Billy Idol

(note to self: wear bottoms of trousers rolled)
7:52pm, 10 June, 2004: It’s Update Time at Sparks in Stone Lanes!! See the first stirrings of the if.... book in germinal homuncular form! And ditto ditto the Buffy piece ditto ditto sorto kindo!!

hop on pop
4:44pm, 10 June, 2004:
“Looking back to the period when our first book was written it comes as something of a surprise to realize how much social life, on which the traditions of popular art were based, has changed. For instance, no longer does one often come across a village smithy, or a wheelwright, a saddle maker, a local printer, and now even less a local baker. Few village shops now set out their wares in fanciful displays, such as the ironmongers of old...” Margaret Lambert & Enid Marx, English Popular Art, 1945; ‘Foreword to new edition 1989’, The Merlin Press.

Collectors Lambert & Marx were a doughty lesbian arts&crafts couple, historian and textile artist respectively, responding to pop (in classic arts&crafts fashion) as a story of loss and decline, from the charm and vigour of past times into the crass omnipresent ‘manufactured’ rubbish of today (where ‘today’ = yours or my Golden Age, of course). They were both I think in their nineties when this (much expanded) new edition came out: 15 years on, and it has the look and feel of an artefact three or even four times that age – the typeface is crabbed and daunting, the illustrations poor (especially the photos), the writing low-key and unassuming, all descriptive lists and no (overt) theory, but there’s a dogged and amused sense of – and a trust in – the vivid social energy suffusing many of the pieces they picture or describe, from the great carved giants and dragons of English civic pageantry, via 18th century celebrity actors or sportsmen or murderers in catchpenny Staffordshire pottery, to a small toy dog made of woodbine cigarette packets.

The story L&M are telling, or you could say the story being told through them, of the survival and indeed potent transmission of Something against the seeming grain of Something Else, is older and odder than arts&crafts (=indie) orthodoxy ever quite consciously recognised, even as modern (=chart or tabloid or TV) pop seemed to be dispersing it.

p97: “[Printers] also shamelessly pirated other people’s popular successes. Pierce Egan, author of Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, which appeared in instalments in 1821 and took the town by storm, complained of no less than 65 publications lifted from his work, and that, less than 12 hours after his own publication, Catnach* had a pirated version, price twopence, on the streets. It was a ‘whole sheet’, with 12 cuts, roughly copied from the original Cruikshank illustrations, but in reverse and with a little verse underneath each.”
[*Catnach = the notorious yellow-press printer Jemmy Catnach of Seven Dials]

CORRIGENDA
p60, 4 lines up: for “knitting” read “singing”
p70, 2nd verse: for “macking” read “making”
p.84, line 12, for “flour” read “water”
p94, 2 lines up, for “acuracy” read “accuracy”...

in a larger sense
12:19pm, 10 June, 2004: 16th US President = Goth (non-shockah)

20 years ago today(ish)
11:03pm, 10 June, 2004: Decades younger, Andrew Kopkind nevertheless died ten years before Reagan. Which is a pity: he was a great counter to the self-fulfilling gloom preferred by so many on the left. Skim down to AK’s 1984 vision of the future (ie NOW) if the Reagan project succeeds: as a measure of how it didn’t succeed after all, it’s a way to see how much wider open things are than we maybe think. His note abt why Reaganism won’t succeed—its duality, the contradictions which power it but also ground its falsity as a politics—can of course be extended...

the wig interpretation of history
12:41am, 9 June, 2004: I notice grauballe man’s hairpiece is of a type w.Dead Ronnie’s. This must have been my unconscious speaking to me: and sorry, I have no idea what it wz on abt...

telling error
11:32am, 9 June, 2004: Kortbein posted this, blind, yesterday — and I read it and grinned at Adorno's twisty insight and sour tough pragmatic materialism. Turns out it’s not from Minima Moralia at all, it’s from Human, All Too Human

choice of debacles
12:11pm, 6 June, 2004: After centuries at bitter intra-Islamic war w.one another, Sunni and Shia unite’n’fight the infidel invader *OR* Iraq becomes another (much bigger) Lebanon. Because these are (surely?) equally catastrophic for US (and Israeli) interests, Hirst offers them a bit too easily interchangeably, this worst-case or that worst-case, take yr pick, one or other slouching roughly towards the immediate horrible future. But if Tricky Miss History is in a good mood — admittedly not a likelihood i’d want to bet *my* farm on — won’t these two very VERY opposite outcomes cancel one another out? And if they DO, is that good or bad for the war“planners”? Bacon saved by continuing uneasy ambiguity, despite low-level crackle of threat?

[But actually the deeper point Hirst is making is this: the form that Western political intervention took has placed a microphone against EVERY crackle in EVERY uneasily ambiguous neighbourhood, and linked this into a region-wide loudspeaker broadcast system... Didn’t Burroughs once point out that you can start a riot with just two cassette tape-recorders?]

[[On the whole, the Western version of the prowar and the Western version of the antiwar argts seem to share a single conflicted two-limbed thought: “Wouldn’t it be BRILLIANT if genuine active popular politics sprang up HERE?” and “Wouldn’t it be GHASTLY if genuine active popular politics sprang up HERE?” But of course the ’heres’ very much diverge: geographically or culturally or (hardest to argue with) psycho-historically. Each side projects the two contradictory elements of its hope/fear dyad to those parts of the picture which suit its prior prejudice.]]

applications on background
10:16pm, 6 June, 2004: Or, author picks a v.fashionable week to have death and remembrance on his mind, seemingly. I woke up this morning wondering if I had anything to say abt R.Reagan (dcd), and discovered — in that abstracted, not-yet-woke-up sunday-early way — that I was silently repeating his name to myself, over and over, thus: “Ralph Reagan.” The ugly puzzle of everything has become a TV screen flickering in the background: I am hardly applying the whole weight of my mind to it.

I feel very scattered lately: ever more unfinished projects piling up, hopes and promises increasingly disconnected, trusting my poor overloaded subconscious to do the dogswork keeping it all together. Focus-as-escapism, like scooting off for six months to climb Everest. T said yesterday that the vibe of our whole family is that everyone is eternally waiting for someone else’s shoe to fall; it makes us attentive, it makes us cautious, it makes us gentle, it makes us — outside the closed loop of ourselves-as-family — incredibly self-absorbed and sometimes very distant.

I always meant to get my mother’s mother talking about her youth — what songs she loved as a child, how she met my grandfather (i know that: tennis!), the first film she saw (she always laughed when she found her grandchildren watching a black-and-white movie on TV: to her they were just absurd, outdated, colour was commonsense and modern)... — but in fact there was always something present to discuss or laugh at. Right into her mid-90s, she was more vivid than the lure of her past. Now I’d like to talk to mum and dad about stuff from long ago — what they thought about D-Day at the time (my dad in his early teens, my mother I think nine), say — but always there’s this week’s emergency, a crisis, a confusion or a terror to cope with, or instead a funny anecdote about the cat or the carers or the village, because laughing is part of the coping.

By my two grandfathers' examples (if not my two grandmothers', quite) I’ve now lived more than half my life. “Crawford, ever wary of desire, knew how badly he wanted to be wise. He knew that a middle-aged man can be so desperate for wisdom he may try to make some up, and how deadly that can be to a youngster who believes him. So he spoke carefully, and only of things he knew.”

I started reading Finnegans Wake this week, hunting for something. The first page I actually read as a kid, for intellectual showoff and swank among my peers at the time: I told geeta this, and that the page didn’t seem to have changed in the 30 years since i last saw it, and she laughed and asked if I had expected it to. Thing is, I had.

drumming like a noise in dreams
11:17pm, 5 June, 2004: “Mr Lacy always insisted that nobody could get more avant-garde than Louis Armstrong; his best work was anti-highfalutin and doggedly practical.” Not clear grammatically if that “his” refers to Lacy or Louis, so split the diff, it’s right either way. As everyone knows The Wire was named by its founder for a Lacy cut: perhaps of more current urgency, personal and global, a piece I never heard — The Woe.