Blog

  • On reflection

    The formal articulation of so much mental garbage does tend to leave me thinking I’m being rather silly. I mean, you’d think that at my age I would remember that the best solution to being unproductive/unfulfilled/unexcited is just to get on with it. A dream this morning, clearly grown from my concerns of the past…

  • Persona

    Last Tuesday, I was in a pub with a colleague from another university, and was eventually joined by a circle of friends from my own university (most of whom have blogs, by the way). We had fun, I was rather giddy (saying some tacky things, but I have friends all over the world who are…

  • Brief Encounter

    A bit startled, and disappointed, by the film Brief Encounter (1945). The original one-act play (Still Life, from Coward’s Tonight at 8:30) is so utterly wonderful – melodrama perhaps, but such spare, precisely written melodrama, where every character is completely outlined with just a few deft strokes, and the whole story progresses so delicately and…

  • Old Songs

    [Los Angeles, 1991] Late again, and the woman at the desk is pleasant about it, but I will lose time from my appointment.  The tanning salon is an increasingly important convenience for me, it clears up, however temporarily, the waves of red lesions across my arms and torso.  And I look rather dashing with a…

  • Two places at once

    The past few days of depression: it might be worth acknowledging something that might not be evident from this blog – that I have been here before, and for long periods of time. In fact  the blog is not only about recording/reflecting that anomie, that hopelessness, which has become so normative over the years; but…

  • The Shape of What It Means

    [Los Angeles, 1991] I am in the waiting room, going through my outline and list of readings for the degree exam in musical aesthetics. First is Cooke: naïve, but he made a good shot at figuring out the basic problems. If only he weren’t such a dilettante – he works his arguments right up to…

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