the long moths of boredom

Straw Poll

2006-04-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Is this a very funny joke or a real-life version of that "I'm not gay but if i was I'd be really, really dedicated to it" story that was in the Onion a year or so back?

Mothers Against Noise

You decide.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2006-03-31T14:09:00.000-08:00

Hi. It's Friday night and I'm taking advantage of a rare empty house...to read my last chapter out loud and start fiddling around with ideas for an introduction. I'm 24 years old...but strangely content.

This will probably only reach the people who I know from back home (which might be a somewhat presumptuous way of beginning a paragraph, as I don't know if any of them read this), but this reminded me of our long-lost acquaintance Paul Bennett. From the Nicky Wire-esque heading to the inclusion of Homage to Catalonia- we can presume it's on his sixth-form reading list, presumably Of Mice and Men didn't make the cut- this is the bookshelf of the kid who has It All Figured Out. I remember the angsty youth reading out Nietzsche's aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil to an indifferent, or at best baffled, study centre in the days of Friday nights at the Castle Taverns and Ginger Brown gigs.

I will write a proper apology one day to attone myself for using this page as a pedestal from which to unfairly savage other literary blogging, but it will have to wait. For now, I'd like to imagine the discussion the kid has with his father at Sunday lunch:

Dad: You'll change one of these days son, everybody does. Don't worry, you have plenty of time to grow conservative. It's good for the young to experiment.

Son: DON'T FUCKING PATRONIZE ME!!!! (Storms off upstairs to listen to Pete Docherty's "band").

The End

J

Hmmm

2006-03-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

From Amazon:

Customers who bought books by Paul Celan also bought books by these authors:

John Felstiner
Brian Massumi
Hilary Spurling
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Terry Pratchett

Who knows?

happy 70th post, moths of boredom

2006-02-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

Over Christmas, my mum (who has just joined one of those online video rental things that lorc has been raving about) asked me what films I'd like to see. I thought for a minute, and said "Polanski's Macbeth", which I remembered loving when I was a GCSE student. Typically, the film didn't turn up for two weeks, which was- you've guessed it- the day I had to go back to Norwich. So my chance to engage with a fragment of my educational past was delayed. Now, however (fingers crossed) I've ordered the same movie for a fiver from Amazon. Within five days I will be able to see:

- a very young Keith Chegwin riding a horse
- Francesca Annis pretending to be mad and walking around naked
- the bit my teacher kept on freeze-framing where the guy gets an arrow stuck in his head
- the bit where MacDuff chops off MacBeth's head
- the cynical ending where Donalbain goes to the witches
- the weird merkins that the witches wear

What I actually mean is that I think I'll see these things, because I'm not altogether sure that any of them were actually in the film.

Jx

2006-02-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

I don't have enough mates in the (ahem, splutter) "Blogosphere" to inflict this on (or do I?) but here are my responses to Lorcan's questionaire:

Seven things I must do before I die

1: Find a hat that doesn't constrict my cannonball head (or make me look like a Mekon).

2: Tune a guitar by ear.

3: Come up with a completely outlandish romantic gesture, ie. bigger than skywriting.

4: Go to a week-long party with whoever turns out to be our generation's equivalent of Oliver Reed and Keith Moon. Dine out/ bore grandchildren with tale for rest of my life.

5: Start liking flying.

6: Be on Newsnight Review at least twice. The first time I'm going to be Emin-drunk, the second time I'll be sober as a judge and deal with the other panellists' wry remarks really casually. A superannuated Clive James will be so impressed with my performance that he'll buy me dinner afterwards. Over steak and claret, Clive will hand me a treasure map featuring incredibly complicated instructions, telling me that "it's a job for a younger man". The following adventure will become the subject of an award-winning travelogue, which will subsequently be adapted into a film starring someone who's a child actor at the moment but will have grown up by then.

7: Do all the outdoors stuff I've been shirking for the last couple of years, including the Appalachian Trail.

Seven things I cannot do:
1. Drive a car.

2. Act reasonably 100% of the time.

3. Click my fingers/ whistle (these count as one.)

4. Get rid of my "eye-bags".

5. Stay in at night without worrying about people having a good time without me.

6. Dance the Gay Gordons.

7. Stop being sarcastic

.
Seven things that attract me to a city:
1. Cool metro.

2. Well-named trainstations (Good: London, Paris, New York. Bad: Glasgow- too pedestrian.)

3. Cheap and delicious food.

4. Bars full of rumbunctious, friendly, outlandish people without airs and graces. London does not score highly on this account, whereas Newcastle does.

5. Sense of community and everyday life visible in city centre (cf the markets and charity shops in central Budapest).

6. Relative obscurity- Trieste, San Sebastian, Norwich

7. General joie-de-vivre- Barcelona, San Sebastian.

Obviously, you don't find all of these in the same place.

Seven things I say:
1. Who's making tea?
2. Fuck, who's ringing?
3. Can I pay on card?
4. Maybe...I'll have to see...
5. What's for dinner?
6. Wasn't like that in the war.
7. fucking hell

Seven books I like:
1. Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
2. 1992 Non-League Football Year Book by Tony Kempster
3. Collected Stories of M.R. James
4. Concluding by Henry Green
5. The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet
6. Germinal by Emile Zola
7. This Sporting Life by David Storey

Not necessarily my seven favourites though.

Seven movies that I’ve loved:
1. Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom)
2. The Rock (Michael Bay)
3. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy)
4. Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg)
5. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)
6. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
7. Ivan the Terrible Pt.1 (Sergei Eisenstein)

Top of my head, again.

Jx

wake me up when we cross the county line

2006-01-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

Back in the Vale, weather always on the cusp of ice or post-rain that you never see fall, frosting and unfrosting. Dales to the West, up towards the watershed and the river brim full, Moors to the East. Lumps on all horizons. In the Vale are silos rising from flat fields and farms, some of which are all-but abandoned and occupied by a breed of person much like the "squatters" you find in H.P. Lovecraft. Dusty rooms full of unpriced antiques, windows that look out onto yards strewn with hay. Arterial roads and railways and villages with quiet pubs that have Sky TV on in the corner, out of town garden centres frequented by couples who listen to Jim Reeves in the car on the way home.

borders...

2005-09-05T07:10:00.000-07:00

One thing I've noticed about the response to the devastation of New Orleans (see Dumb Riffs) is how the boundaries between the so-called "United" states have been emphasised in the media. Reporting has made the movement of peoples between Lousiana and Texas (for example) a pseudo-international issue. This must mean one of two things, or both:

1- That our collective consciousness isn't prepared to allow for the possibility of such a thing happening in the "developed" United States so we're carving off sections of it to create areas (or countries of excess). It doesn't compute with our realist fiction of America.

2- That the White House is twisting the media arm in order to elicit the above response.

J

heat

2005-08-31T04:07:00.000-07:00

It's pushing thirty in Norwich today. Whenever it does this, I find myself in the not overly air conditioned library, forgetting the greater part of my vocabulary and ability to think in an organised manner.

Last night I read Chris Paling's book A Town by the Sea. I really, really wanted to like it so as to make a big noise about the Booker shortlist omitting difficult fiction (James Meek's The People's Act of Love was, annoyingly, a huge disappointment). But I'm not really sure about it as yet. In many respects it does what I've been wanting British fiction to do for a long time, which is jack in the contemporary referent in favour of a more stubborn, abstract chronotope*. It has the same approach to motive and subjectivity as the early nouveau roman and an enterprising approach to mythomania that implies a hostility towards the cod psychology that characterizes most so-called literary novels at the moment. There is, unfortunately, too much of a dependence of Sebaldesque melancholia 'n' memory themes that writers still seem to be employing half-heartedly. There are passages of beautiful writing but it often descends into whimsy of the sort that results in would-be novelists suffering schoolyears of torment. I don't know, it's better than most contemporary stuff I've read lately.

We'll see on that one.

jx

* I recognise that in writing novels that date fast, contemporary writers are critiquing a culture of disposability. This disclaimer doesn't accomodate the fact that it's incredibly frustrating to read the likes of Nick Hornby/ Martin Amis/ Ian McEwan clumsily attempting to deal with a millieu that they seem to be separated from by the very virtue of their critique.

Academic Writing is...

2005-08-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

...like pissing with the toilet seat down first thing in the morning and trying to get it all in the pan.

Marooned in the library, musing on the barely-existent parallels between my attempts to finish a rough statement of intent by five o' clock and England's quest to bowl out Australia by close of play. I'm not a cricket fan, really, despite having been brought up in Freddie Trueman country. But I'm a sucker for displacement activity. Hey, writing about my fondness for DAs has become one in itself- I'm at two removes from the SOI now. Shit. It's always like that time I wrote my English coursework in sixth form: all day on the beer, started at two in the morning. But I pulled it off.

When the SOI is finished, I'll post it so someone can tell me it's already been done.

More displacement now, because it's been a while since a Moths reading list:

In Italy...

Alexander Trocchi- Cain's Book. This was alright, I guess, but I wish I'd read it when I was sixteen or something.

Henry Green- Concluding. Read this again and still don't know what the fuck I'm going to write about it.

Collette- Claudine at School. Not just for titillatory purposes- the above is also about a girl's school and it seemed worth comparing and contrasting.

Celine- London Bridge. Celine is great but if I wanted to read all of this I'd have needed more time. Unbelievably dense, atmospheric, often vomit inducing. Effluvia features heavily.

Am currently reading The People's Gift of Love by James Meek, in a stable-doorish attempt to rectify my ignorance of everything written in the last ten years (except Ian McEwan novels). I haven't decided about it yet: the themes are very appealing (cannibalism, gulags, Russian castration cults, the Trans-Siberian Railway and so on) but it's got a fairly Led Zeppelin-esque approach to metaphor and a cast who are, frankly, hamming. Am waiting to read The Town By the Sea by Chris Paling, which I've finally got my hands on but can't open until I've finished the Meek because I'm trying not to be a dick and finish some books occasionally.

Anyway, the non-show must go on.

jx

Fucking Hipsters (Pt 120,000)

2005-08-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

I just found this photo of myself with a weird halo that looks like it's made of barbed wire. Please visit the Teknikov website and leave cryptic messages for Chad on the board.

We're playing our first gig in London on the tenth of September for a Guided Missile club night. Grizzled Norwich veterans KaitO will also be playing, as headliners. Advance warning: I will probably be real grumpy after the show, so apologies to anyone who has the misfortune to speak to me.

jx

Miss me too? Probably not...

2005-08-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

The startling return to form of Moths associate jiminyminerry homunculus (sorry Lorc, I could never spell it) has shamed me into popping my head over the parapet again and proclaiming "never again shall I be so fucking lazy". Atcherly, I haven't been keeping up to date because I had forgotten my UEA password after my unfortunate affliction by Diary Loss*. I feel like a newcomer at UEA- I've only been here around four times in the last two months. Computer Mouth* is afflicting me already.

Anyway, shortly after I wrote the angry piece about what the media have inevitably called 7/7 I decided, for a variety of reasons, that I must flee the country. I wanted to go to Genoa but the famed incompetent who works on the desk at the Norwich National Express office could only figure out how to get me to Milan. That man has been the bane of my life (he said, melodramatically) on a number of occasions. Anyway, it meant that I had to go to Milan. Usual Moths form would require a misjudged attempt at in-depth analysis of Italian culture but I wouldn't presume to be able to treat the matter with more accuracy than Tim Parks' A Season With Verona.

I stopped for a couple of days in Milan, gawping at the Heidi Klum/Flavio Briatore-alikes on the Via Montenapoleone. I made pilgrimages to supermarkets, pizzerias, grim arterial roads (as Parks will attest, Italians don't "do" suburbs too well) and the Giuseppe Meazza stadium at San Siro. Though I feel a political obligation to "prefer" Inter to FatSilvio's AC they have a history of signing incomprehensibly useless players (Paul Ince for one, not that I'm bitter) and, in the Herrera period, introduced Catenaccio. When staring up at the ground, I completely forgot that Inter even played there. Come to think of it, I didn't see a single Inter fan the whole time I was in Milan.

Perhaps I could digress here and use Inter Milan as an example of a psychological phenomenon I observed a couple of years ago. If anybody knows what I'm talking about, please don't hesitate to contribute their own experiences of its occurence. It goes something like this: you're comfortably aware with the existence of something for years, just letting it plod along its own course (the fact that its generally something inanimate or abstract doesn't really matter). Then you stop and think about it, and it becomes the strangest thing in the world, and you don't know why. Nothing is inherently strange about it apart from its being there. Examples:

Inter Milan
Northampton (the town)
That bit in the middle of France
Dundee

Answers on the bottom, please.

Anyway, after Milan I went to Lago di Garda's Northernmost point, Riva, and wandered around looking at people who were rich to the verge of inanity. Many Germans and Austrians. I took a trip to Italy's largest modern art museum which is, charmingly, located in a hard-to-access townlet up in the Alps (Rovereto). I climbed a mountain before Sunday lunch. The place made me feel very melancholy, as if I was WG Sebald or something. Peruvian pan pipe music started to bring tears to my eyes, and I missed Jenny, and I was hungry for most of the time.

I went all the way to Trieste after that, which is on the Balkan rather than the Italian peninsula, almost in Slovenia. I tried to pass off my visit as a literary-cum-spy movie homage but I think I just wanted to see how far I could go before falling off. The South appealed, but a seventeen hour train journey to Reggio in forty degree temperatures put me off. Border towns live up to their reputations as uncanny places, which is all I can put into words for now. In Trieste I met Ilija who was a Croatian-German-Italian, camping out indefinitely while looking for a job so he could bring his wife down. We got drunk and ate salami on one of the long moles jutting out into the harbour. He had strange business to get up to in Serbia, which confused me massively and I still haven't completely understood.

The journey back to England was enormous and I felt like crap all the way until the Starits of Dover, when a chicken curry and Mars Bar straightened me out. I picked Jenny up in Norwich and we headed up to Oban in Argyll (that's in Scotland, non-UK and Southern readers) to rendez-vous with my dad and his girlfriend. We spent a week eating fish, looking at fish and talking about fish, and got drunk a few times in a pub that reminded Mary of the Admiral Benbow in Treasure Island. On the way back to Norwich, we stopped off at my mum's place for a few days and I finally got to make a tit of myself in front of Jenny at a football match and show her around Newcastle.

On the final day I received news that my application for AHRB funding had, against all reasonable odds, been accepted. This was exceptionally good news and I can now, at last, dedicate myself to doing important things like reading the first three pages of library books and writing on Moths. Expect increased service...

Jxxxxxxxxxx

* a condition supposedly eradicated by post-Thatcher medicine
* a disease you can read all about in some old posting I'm not diligent enough to link to

Confused?

2005-07-08T02:58:00.000-07:00

I fucking well am.

Everyone knew it was going to happen eventually. The police, government, security services and so on made it incredibly clear that London or another major city would be subjected to a terrorist attack of proportions that anyone below the age of sixty (at least) would be unfamiliar with. We'd watched it happen in several other "major" European capitals: Madrid, Moscow, Istanbul. As the newsreaders say, it was never a question of "whether".

Developing any kind of sophisticated reaction to events that we have, up to this point, been insulated from by the prophylactic effects of the media is obviously going to be the goal for the British chattering classes. Some have a head start- it's not hard to imagine the headlines for yesterday's events being prepared shortly after the bombs at Atocha. The language that people have used to approach the situation in its immediate aftermath has been appropriated wholesale from the politicians and inhabitants of New York. An outsider might almost pick up on a palpable sense of relieved pressure: a reservoir of trauma has been dammed up behind the non-happening of the event which was always expected.

But a response that deals in linguistics or trauma theory is too emotionally distant given the proximity of the situation. There is a tendency to rush out the professors (left and right, Chomsky and Fukuyama) and initiate debate before the fires stop burning. Now is the time to consider an appropriate emotional response to the attacks.

There appears to be something approaching a consensus (on the internet at least) that what happened was somehow our "fault". "We've" been sucking up to the USA, "We've" been dropping bombs on Iraqi children. The answer to this is, of course, no "we" haven't. I would venture to say that even the individual hands pulling the triggers aren't responsible. In a value system in which everyone is expected to be in a beatific state of "just doing my job" and is subjected to the prevalent moral climates engendered by brand individuality that encourages only the simulacra of debate ("vote for employee of the week! we've put the internet in your restroom!") one's powers of ethical arbitration are wasted somewhat.

It seems that we compensate for this political catatonia (and I wouldn't call it apathy. It's not as if everybody sat down together sometime in 1989 and implemented a mutually agreeable and indefinite period of H&M tailored, Starbucks-scented nonalignment) through guilt- guilty pleasures or guilty feelings. How often do you hear someone say to you "I know it's shit, but I like it..."? In this case, it seems that people are too self-conscious about the ramifications of anger to reach for that particular emotional crutch and henceforth take the burden upon themselves.

I have felt angry. I feel guilty when I observe the actions of our government (and that of the United States) in some of its international affairs. However, I refuse to subscribe to the Guiltianista viewpoint that this country is incapable of contributing positively to the international community. I'm old enough to remember Bosnia and Kosovo, two embroilments that were ethical imperatives despite our dithering and slightly half-assed way of getting involved. I'm also not completely sure that deposing the Taliban was the worst thing we could have done at the time. Once again, the execution of our "regime change" was far more dubious than its guiding imperative.

My main concern is that people don't begin to feel en masse that they brought these events upon themselves. Middle class guilt (international version) is as painful to watch as fish dying. I think that some forum for catharsis (anger and sorrow) has to be tolerated and not condescended as a kneejerk response. Cold intellectualism is an arrogant denial of the self and others.

New Feature

2005-06-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

More mothsy venom to spice up a dull summer's day. The new feature follows on from a conversation that Jen and I had last night. It's called....

LINKS TO BLOGS BY LIFEHATING AMERICAN PSEUDS...

http://geography3.blogspot.com/

Check her not taking W.H. Auden's hint...

jx

And then it was summer

2005-06-02T10:12:00.000-07:00

Jesus, I'm getting pretty slack with this. I've been drinking five cups of sugary tea a day since I was about six/knee high to Tony and, with the added problem of heavy confectionery consumption, have the attention span of...let's talk about something else. Perhaps a pros and cons list. Cons first, 1-2-1-2 until all the good things and bad things are paired off in what we used to call a crocodile.

CON: I've just sent my first chapter to my supervisor. There's a huge reliance on Lacan's later ideas in the third section. I've never read the later Lacan. FRAUD. Now I must attempt to locate the correct section in Ecrits- and understand it- in a single week. I might have to check out the ever-reliable "...For Dummies" section in Ottakars.

PRO: I really enjoyed writing the rest of the chapter. Getting up at seven, heading up to campus, grabbing a coffee and reading idly for a couple of hours before going home and getting down to it. My head's been bursting with books.

CON: The bills are mounting up. Loads.

PRO: I've just begun moving my stuff into my new house (1,000,000,000,000 times better than No. 4 Ally Road). There's two sitting rooms.

CON: I've got a hangover (a bit).

PRO: I've allowed myself a couple of "idiot" days because I've been working my arse off. I spent lunch drinking Kronenbourg in the Playhouse garden then went home and listened to Source Tags and Codes by ...Trail of Dead. Album of the week.

CON: I can't go and see ...Trail of Dead (and hang out with Conrad) in Cambridge for the very un-rocking reason that I have a work do that day and I promised to go along.

PRO: But that would be a little bit like running away to join the circus, wouldn't it?

CON: Darlington didn't get in the play-offs, Man Utd won fuck all, Norwich got relegated, Celtic let the league go to Mordor on the last day of the season, Liverpool won the Champions League.

PRO: Hartlepool got dicked in their play-off final.

And maybe a reading and listening list...

LISTENING...

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead- "Source Tags and Codes"
Sleater-Kinney- "Dig me Out"/"S-K"
Neu- "Neu 1"
Black Sabbath- "Paranoid"
Antipop Consortium- "Arrhythmia"

READING...

Henry Green, "Blindness"
Alan Burns- "Europe After the Rain"
Ann Quin- "Berg"
Franz Kafka- "The Castle"
Joseph Conrad- "The Shadow Line"
Stevie Smith- "Over the Border"
HD- "Collected Poems"
Jacques Derrida- "Spectres of Marx"

and other stuff.

PLACES I WANT TO GO BUT CAN'T RIGHT NOW...

The Orkney Islands
Paris
Trieste
Barcelona
Cornwall
bed
the pub

Girl, come back soon....xxxxxxxxxx

Jx

Music survey

2005-05-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

Karl sent me this. It's a bit like "Home Entertainment" in the Guardian's Friday supplement but you're only allowed to talk about music. I understand that you're supposed to then forward the survey to five mates (like a friendship cake: does anyone else recall this troubling phenomenon?) but hardly any of my friends have these blog things. Maybe Chris does, I don't know. And Jenny does. But that's only two. Anyway...

Total volume of music on my computer: between 1.5 and 2 GB

The last CD I bought: I'm not absolutely sure. The last CD I actually unwrapped was "Burnt Mind" by Wolf Eyes. They do this noise terror thing but I can only listen to that sort of stuff when I'm in a mischievous frame of mind. In between ordering that from Amazon and it turning up I got the last Black Dice album, the first Le Tigre album and "An Electric Storm" by The White Noise, a British experimental group from the sixties who made records out stuff they found in the BBC sound effects department. People who like Broadcast, Add N to X and Stereolab will be on familiar ground. Actually, I suspect that Broadcast are actually a concept group doing a kind of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" thing with this record.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: Like Karl, I can't really pin this down so I'm going to do five songs that remind me of the summer I left home.

1: "Suicide" by Spacemen 3. On the live version Sonic Boom shouts "this is for Alan Vega and Martin Rev" and there's a huge echo on his voice so it goes "Rev..rev...rev....rev.....rev......rev" as this Vox organ drone starts to well up around him. I listened to Playing with Fire a lot that summer, and got stoned. Just like seventeen year-olds are meant to do.

2: "Xmas Steps" by Mogwai. Both versions, and me on Ron used to have a heart attack every time that door noise happened in the EP cut. Listened to this all the time building up to seeing them at T in the Park, where they were fucking amazing and ended up with about nine people on stage. I lost the ability to speak for quarter of an hour. Sad bastard.

3: "A Man Called Sun" by (The) Verve. I don't know why but I feel like they're a "guilty pleasure" nowadays. Back then nothing seemed untoward about shoeless hippies fragging out a la Jim Morrison and trying to sell me ludicrous anthropocentric concepts such as this. It always came out at parties.

4: "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground. I couldn't get enough droney rock at the time, and it made me feel well cool. I think this is shortly before I had a period of believing that you didn't need any other records as long as you had Psychocandy by the Jesus & Mary Chain. Fortunately, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club came along to make the whole thing look very tired and I discovered keyboards, drum machines and chord changes.

5=: "Living in the Ice Age" by Joy Division. On which Stephen Morris sounds like a drum machine. Although Curtis was undoubtedly singing about something bleak and impenetrable (Gogol or Gulags, generally) I could never get the image of mammoths moving around in time to this out of my head.

5=: "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine. I reckon this is on lots of lists like this. Like, everyone thinks "man, that'll be the sucker punch. MBV are criminally overlooked". Then you realise that they kind of aren't and have been misappropriated by loads of shite groups who bandy their name around to justify any load of incoherent crap (see Death in Vegas, Scorpio Rising). Anyway, I was only seventeen and had never heard anything like it. Sounded great drunk.

Other records from this period..."Two Step" by Low, "Breadcrumb Trail" by Slint (another obvious choice), "Under the Western Approach Road" by Pilotcan, "When we Reach the Hill" by Black Heart Procession, that whole Super Discount compilation by Etienne de Crecy, "Sweet and Low" by Fugazi, "Outdoor Miner" by Wire, "Stereodee" by Mogwai.

Ah, nothing like a good old reminisce on a Monday morning to fuck up the rest of your day.

Jx

may

2005-05-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Teknikov played a busy Marquee last week, and I forgot how to make beautiful harmonic tunings on the guitar. Some people seemed pleased though, reasonably edifying. I have to admit that I was quite disappointed (to the point of getting into an utterly foul mood) with the result. More work needed.

Back up in Yorkshire for a couple of days but have made the decision not to venture into big bad Richmond due to time restrictions. Apparently, my mother and stepfather are contemplating a move back to this Alpinesque retreat after a few years in the no-man's-land of the Vale of york and Mowbray. If they do, I can use holidays to reacquaint myself with my teenage leisure pursuits, which include:

- visiting the tractor beam bookshop. There's a few second hand bookshops in town- it's no Hay-on-Wye but you can always pick bargains up. My most frequented outlet was the little place near the castle, which I would always visit on an inexplicable impulse. On arriving, the Mackem owner (who appeared to know very little about books, but was a master in salescraft) would position himself between you and the door and not move until you had an armful. Despite having been forced into buying nearly everything I've bought in there, Mackem-guy's sales have formed the nucleus of my bookshelf..."Germinal", "Brighton Rock", TS Eliot, Levi-Strauss all first came my way in Richmond Books.
- The Coffee Bean. Dirty cafe where we could smoke fags as teens. Our (football team-mate) Glen bought it and used it as a gallery for his neo-expressionist interpretations of the fields near Billy Banks Woods. Then he sold it and went back into painting and decorating, allowing for the acquisition of the joint by some mean old harridans who charge me £1.50 for a cuppa.
- The daytime drink. Nine pint afternoon sessions were the scourge of my life (seriously) from 16-19. These experiences lead me to believe that cinemas and well-stocked municipal libraries are essentials for all settlements.
- Lame fugues. Walking out of the house prepared for nothing but a trip to the offy over the road and returning six hours later having traversed ten miles of rough country. Not quite Albert Dadas but still quite unusual.
- Being able to walk home from the pub, leaving enough energy for a late-night lame fugue.
- smoking tabs on Castle Walk and appreciating the scenery/thinking of Norwich.

Back in town tomorrow for supervisor meetings/ finding out if I have a teaching job or not. Yikes.

Jx

Reading List

2005-04-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

Well, here's a list of the books that I've managed to grind through over twenty pages of in the last few weeks...

Rex Warner- The Aerodrome. A soupcon of Kafka, a snifter of Isherwood, a distinct hint of Orwell...
Louis MacNeice- Collected Poems. Cheer up, big man. At least you don't have Auden's jowells.
Artur Machen- The Terror. I shat myself. Sorry if this is ugly, but it's true. You probably wouldn't.
Helene Cixous- Angst. I haven't read very much of this, but at least it lowers the testosterone count.
Iain Sinclair- Landor's Tower. I believe this is what the reviewers call "crackling prose". Haywire.
Sigmund Freud- various. Please help.

some other stuff I can't think of right now. Some Derrida? Ah, Of Hospitality. It made my head hurt. Any good stuff about ruins would be appreciated, too.

Records, many of which appear to have been borrowed from Nathan Barley...

British Sea Power, Broadcast, The White Noise, Black Dice, Antipop Consortium, The Birthday Party, Le Tigre, Pink Floyd, Fugazi, Royal Trux/RTX, Ultramagnetic MCs, Wolf Eyes, DNA, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gram Parsons, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Violet Violet, PiL and a bunch of other stuff.

Okay, time for more barwork

jx

Thursday

2005-04-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

About as succint an evocation of today as I can manage. I didn't manage to write up the rest of London and now it's been confined to the superglued papershredder that passes for my memory. Anything I write now will not necessarily conform to the same temporal sequence as that of the recent visit to Capital City. We did go to an exhibition of Lee Miller's life-loving, titillatory, invigorating portraits at the NPG. I did buy some records in Rough Trade. We followed the Whitney Sinclair up to Hoxton Square, down through Shoreditch to Spitalfields and then across the Square Mile to Saint Paul's. As usual, we staggered around Soho with aching limbs, pressing our noses up against the windows of Patisseries baking cakes for the Groucho Club and French bakeries.

I've been writing my chapter on Loving over the last few weeks, reading up on ruins and neutrality and various explications of the uncanny. About 4,000 words so far, with another 2,500 to come over the weekend if all goes according to plan. Saturday I'm heading up to Lincoln (with some trepidation) to watch Darlington and meet up with my brother and Ron. I'd link to some of his journalism- somehow, he's scribed a little for When Saturday Comes and Four Four Two- but those who know him understand that making any kind of effort is so anathemic to him that he'd probably be offended.

A couple of nights ago I performed with "quiet big band" Roberte (no website as yet) in the music centre at UEA. It was fucking intense, especially letting a single tone decay for about four minutes at the end. Normally I find myself trying not to laugh or yawn in these circumstances but on this occasion all I could do was stare into the unlit crowd. Applause broke tension. We were supporting the avant-garde (is this still an acceptable term?) violinist Tony Conrad (probably has a website) who plays big drones and microtonal "rrrreeeeeesss" on modified instruments. The night before we went for dinner with him. I'm sure i'm not the only person in the world who'd find sitting in Pizza Express on St. Benedict's Street talking about, and I quote, "the most popular weapons in Glasgow" with a sixty-something former associate of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sonic Youth and Gastr del Sol a little bit strange. He was very sarcastic, playing up to my immature stereotype of New Yorkers. Good laugh, though.

guten tag

jx

(Lazily titled) London #1

2005-04-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

So, despite the fact that (thanks to the Brains-type figures who press all the wrong buttons in out IT department) I lost a few words, I concluded that I was close enough to 3,000 words to take the weekend off. It was time for a London visit.

Unfortunately, we decided to prepare for our trip by caning wine (white, rose), beer and chinese food, resulting in no sleep until three in the morning. The alarm went at half six. It was a miracle when we staggered onto the train just before eight a clock, bleary eyed and (in my case) stinking of booze. I think it gets caught in my teeth. They'd mucked up the seat reservations so when I got to the place I was meant to be sitting there was a posse of middle aged City fans on a field day to Crystal Palace. We sat down behind them as they cracked open the Stellas.

Somewhere after Romford the coffee kicked in and I began singing "London Loves" by Blur.

At Liverpool Street we tried to begin walking up to Trafalgar Square, but then deemed it too much of a dautning task and retreated to the underground. We emerged fifteen minutes later at Charing Cross and spent a while trying to find the National Portrait Gallery, before realising that it was quite a large and not entirely discreet building stuck just behind the National Gallery...

SkyNet

2005-04-15T10:55:00.000-07:00

How to ruin yr day:

1- write lucid, incisive prose. In fact, the best you've written all year.
2- find out the computer you're working on is fucked.
3- lose it all.

Kids- always save your work.

Everyone in the computer centre is now under the impression that my permanent mode of being involves thumping screens, kicking chairs and swearing (what's that? It does?)

FUCK

Jx

An "Aweful" Purchase

2005-04-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Aweful, November 26, 2003

Reviewer:
Kyle Stewart (Georgia) - See all my reviews

This series is horrible beyond all conception. Tolkien overbloats EVERYTHING to the point where it's absolutely ridiculous, and I loose tract of the plot amidst unimportant details. Quite frankly my only thought is I DON'T CARE WHO EVERYONE'S FATHER IS, IF YOU WANT ME TO KNOW THEN WRITE A PREQUEL, JUST TELL THE STORY IT IDIOTIC BRIT! I don't know how someone who wrote something as good as "The Hobbit" could produce this junk. I think what happened was he had a bunch of notes left over, and wanted to cash in by writing a sequel, so he threw all the details he had onto a shallow plot, but sense it was to complicated to be called "dumbed-down" like most money-making sequels noone could attack it. And it was so complicated people have been trying to convince others for decades that they're intellegent because they can understand this book, but since noone understands it, noone can test them to see if they really do or not. Anyway, if you want a complicated plot you can understand, read "Dune" by Frank Herbert.

Question:
- Does Kyle know there are already TWO prequels to Lord of the Rings?

The rest of the argument is far too elliptical to follow.

Kyle: you are the Moths of Boredom reviewer of the week. Should anyone wish to reward his achievement, I've accidentally pasted in his e-mail address at the top. All prizes should be appropriately cerebral, as Kyle is a very "intellegent" young man. Not some "Idiotic Brit", right?

Jx

Finally, a satisfied customer!!

2005-04-14T04:29:00.000-07:00

Today's Amazon review is a little more positive... witness this rousing reception for George W. Bush on God and Country by, well, George W. Bush.

a book for the ages
June 23, 2004 Reviewer: A reader

This was the best book I have ever read. It will stand the test of time and truly be on everyones shelf before this century is over. Bush will always be the man we loved and trusted. Thankfully, this book will rewrite our society to a better tomorrow.

Books can write?

Jx

Today's unhappy customer...

2005-04-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today's reviewer is Matt Gordon of Wiltshire. Can you guess what he's returning to Waterstones?

Dull, dull, dull dull dull., February 25, 2005

Reviewer: mattgordon from Nr Bath, WILTS United Kingdom

Not only does this book fail spectacularly to live up to the hype it recieves, but whilst doing so somehow manages to condone human sacrifice, rape, murder, torture and genocide.

Beware of exposing children or the infirm to these questionable morality examples.

Some chapters also are so far fetched as to be unbelievable. Examples of the whole world being covered by water (where did it all go?), to the feeding of 5thousand with fish in breadcrumbs (not even a decent recipe included) and the laughable zombification of the main hero are neither explained in any depth nor reassesed or apologised for when later chapters blatently cotradict them.

Add in a few spurious claims such as a 6000yr old earth and an infinitely large assimilating bad guy (kind of like the Borg off Star Trek) and this book manages to fail despite its obvious potential.

If you want a decent cult novel with morality metaphors and a philosphical and deep main herpo i would strongly reccomend The Dice Man.

Edgy and provocative? Or sixth form philosophy? I just can't decide...

Jx

more disappointed customers

2005-04-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

Next up...Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler...

The Wind Beneath Multiculuralism's Wings, March 9, 2005

Reviewer: the_dalry_lama from Dalry, Near Beith

It surprises me that a lot of liberals and left wingers don't seem to like this book much, because the only reason most of us put up with the distortions of fact, biology, history, and society that these left wingers promote is because of this book. Yes, that's right, Hitler, despite himself, was the greatest friend the Jews, Blacks, liberals, feminists, socialists, and communists ever had.
Around about the 1930s, Jews were widely distrusted in the West, Blacks were treated like big brawny children, while the commies were penned into a truncated remains of the old czarist empire. Along comes Hitler and 30 years later, all Hell had broken loose.

Hitler, by his cruelty and incompetence, basically dragged down the perfectly respectable idea that White European civilization should dominate the World. It was no coincidence that following his disastrous impact on the World, the Jews had the sympathy to found Israel and dominate the media in the USA and other countries; the Communists rapidly expanded across Eastern Europe and Asia, and infiltrated Western academia; the Blacks won their independence, which they squandered as quickly as a welfare, or got their Civil Rights, which just made it much harder to explain their continued failure; and the absurdity of liberal multiculturalism, which puts the stone age on par with the rocket age and endlessly attacks White European civilization was enshrined as a new World religion.

All this is thanks to Adolf. Although he was a man of obvious political genius and had some good ideas, I think his inhuman extremism, lack of a sense of proportion, and poor strategic sense, damned us to the present, PC, multicultural Hell. For this reason, despite its historical interest, I can only give this unlucky book one star.

"liberal multiculturalism, which puts the stone age on a par with the rocket age"?? Eh!? This racist propaganda writes itself!!

jx

Mothsy Bonus

2005-04-12T02:47:00.000-07:00

It's also worth checking out this list of inspirational albums, particularly the comments about Britney...

jx