"What laws do these rebirths, rediscoveries, and occultations too, obey, the distancing or reevaluation of a text that one would naively like to believe, having put one's faith in a signature or an institution, always remains the same, constantly identical to itself? In sum a "corpus," and one whose self identity would be even less threatened than one's own body [corps propre]? What must a text be if it can, by itself in a way, turn itself in order to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, in a time that is no longer that of its productive source (and was it ever contemporaneous with it?), and then again repeat this resurgence after several deaths, counting, among several others, those of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction? ... The web very quickly becomes indifferent to the animal source, who might very well die without even having understood what has happened. Long afterward, other animals again will come to be caught in its threads, speculating, in order to get out, on the first meaning of the weave, that is of a textual trap whose economy can always be abandoned to itself. This is called writing ... "

('Qual Quelle: Valery's Sources', Margins of Philosophy, p 278, Jacques Derrida)

...

For a mixture of reasons I'm rereading Derrida which means re-encountering all the traces of my previous readings all those years ago. So dense are the annotations, underlinings & all too-evident misunderstandings that I resort to photocopying pages & then going back through with an eraser (rubber, if you prefer - gets the prophylactic effect) to enable a virgin page, as such. The ironies latent within each of these actions will be all too evident.

It occurs to me: has this entire Blog been an elaborate detour to these 'original' well-trodden paths? (I'm thinking of all those web metaphorics I wove in the early posts).

& Derrida, of course, the pwoermdist avant la lettre with his differance ...

Sooner or later, I suppose, John Fahey was going to cross my path. I'd had his name at the back of my mind for a while now & this morning I saw a copy of A Young Person's Guide To ... also entitled Sea Changes & Coelacanths. Irresistible - especially with the cover art. I get it home, listen to a few tracks & discover it's very much late period Fahey & not what many of the hard-core fans regard as the 'real stuff'. Undeterred, I head for the Mediatheque (where else?) & flip through the racks. Nothing. Odd. Until I notice on the window ledge - home to outsize items - this sumptuous set of his early years recordings. It's as though I was meant to find it.

CD1 is playing now - & there's some fine music. Tracks such as The Transcendental Waterfall are extraordinary even for someone like me who knows little about Blues guitar playing & the subtleties he's working with the tradition. Above all it is the entire context in which Fahey is starting to make this music - as the booklet explains, a time when so little was available & you had to root it out for ourself. Fahey's first hearing of Blind Willie Johnson stands as an epiphanic moment equivalent to Frank Zappa's finding of a Varese record in a dump bin. & the Zappa parallel extends further with Fahey's resolutely home industry methods & single-mindedness.

Made my day.

... "the nuance of vacancy in room, or landscape, the unseen presences that human use and cultivation create."

Among the books I haul back from the latest visit to the UK is this - Selected Art Writings by James Schuyler ed. Simon Pettet - & which was just too large for the letter box & thus entailed a visit to the depot at 8am on Friday morning to collect. A minor inconvenience & - in any case - with sentences like that who cares?

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Also of note: the voluminous Brian Catling novel (novel?! yes, novel!) The Vorrh. Thanks to Nelly for the tip off.

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Once again, I return from the land of my birth ever more bewildered & disenchanted.


1.
Crossing a road I get blasted with a horn for no apparent reason other than I have the temerity to walk from one kerb to another. The driver grins maliciously as I turn to remonstrate. Why?

2.
The local Post Office opens 15 minutes late & despite an obvious queue there is not a single word or sign of apology. Rather, looks of if-you-don't-like-it-mate-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it?

3.
Buying newspapers now seems to be accompanied by the automatic request of whether you'd like some other item despite having said - very clearly - "just this, please". To take it out on the cashier would be unfair. The problem runs far deeper: the dehumanising effect of commercial training. Have they, in fact, embedded a micro chip or SIM card into employees? The crazed imaginings of Philip K. Dick are ever more prescient.

3.
The very same newspapers are full of the rise of UKIP, an effect largely explained by their 'populist' policy on immigration. The Sports sections are given over to eulogies of Sir Alec Ferguson the retiring Man U manager. No one seems to see the irony: British football teams being largely composed of non-British players, owned by billionaire businessmen with scant interest in any local fan base. The 'national' game is now a travesty.

4.
E. asks, in all innocence, why there aren't any bakeries near Grandma's. It's a seemingly trivial question that goes right to the heart of things. Why not indeed? (While here in Belgium we have three within walking distance).

5.
On Thursday afternoon I count six cold calls in the space of about three hours. Apparently there is no way to filter them as they come from call centres outside the UK. It is even pointless to argue or shout at the presumed caller: the 'voice' lacks an identifiable speaker, the message is programmed. My mother says that they often ask if my father is there - that's particularly galling.

What's happening? And why is no one complaining?

pwoermds / mhuthic / nhuth

mhuthic (n/v)

1. An umbrella that has sprung into notice. 2. Misinterpretations of the scrotum. Or similar odour. 3. To nick or notch the banana. 4. A proverbial type of rapid growth: soft, pulpy, down-curving. 5. To expand and flatten (out) an auk. 6. Air imitating. 

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nhuth (n/v)

1. After, before, since, yet, etc.. Repeated for emphasis. 2. A single syllable. Very slightly greater than. 3. Threads, wires or the like relating to hypnotism. 4a. The desert of the interior. 4b. The centre from which never again. 4c. A bed of frozen snow. 4d. The sphere that may be so stained. 

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A couple of weeks ago now, in a moment of recklessness, I lashed out on a new mini hi-fi* - nothing really expensive, of course, but something of a luxury given there is one in the living room & the various radios & computers & iPods & iPads that have accumulated around the house. But the point is: this was for the bedroom.

One of the compromises you accept in marriage & subsequent Dad-existence seems to be the inevitable relegation of "your clutter" (ie stacks of CDs) to elsewhere and pleas of "can you turn it down ... the girls are trying to sleep" etc.. Where once, life was a one room Crusoe-like island & music a type of fortress against irritating co-tenants or consolation for yet another solitary night, day, week, month ... recent times have seen music consigned to headphones or ear buds.

Anything for a peaceful life ...

So to suddenly hear music in three dimensions again has been nothing short of a revelation. The proportions of the bedroom relative to the power of amp & speakers seems exactly right. Downstairs the music disperses amongst the kitchen clatter, fridge hum, goings on. Here, however, CDs I thought I knew sparkle again. I hear all sorts of subtleties that the headphones & iPods just don't deliver. (As now, track 9, 'Lament' off Miles Ahead - utterly ravishing).

What fun! & yes, the pile of CDs is back.

______

* if you're wondering - a Sony CMT-MX700Ni they'd knocked 50 euros off (presumably because it won't take the new iPod connection. Who cares?)

pwoermd / lhuth

lhuth (n/v)

1a. The integument of being. 1b. The appendage of comprehending. 1c. The carapace of forgetting. 2. Of things, an archipelago. 3. Also (without article) to enclose armadillos. 

pwoermd

oedopus



(for Gary Barwin)


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"The front rows were a woodpeckerish blizzard of Judas kisses, blood enemies forced to prod stiff lips towards cold cheeks. Toothless foxes sniffing at dead chickens. They were all there: from the well-rehearsed formaldehyde rigidity of senior royalty to the public faces of smug and comfortably suited former cabinet colleagues, along to be sure she was really in the box. To broken bullies blinking back tears under an unruly thatch of eyebrow. To the shameless court of right-opinionated entertainers still at large. To ennobled perjurers, medal-snaffling athletes, arms dealers, coup plotters, financial bagmen, wounded veterans, and such morally compromised foreign dignitaries as could be persuaded to take a mini-break to springtime London."

Thus, Iain Sinclair on the Thatcher funeral in the new issue of the LRB. The unofficial Poet Laureate sings loud & clear for all to hear. Get your copy now.

Not having ever flown a plane ... yet I imagine it must feel rather good - as the pilot -to hear the wheels finally make contact with the tarmac as you touchdown after a long haul flight. A heady mixture of exhilaration & relief.

Much my feelings today as the students emerge from their final exam with smiles on their faces. The questions were open & fair & enabling - which is all one can ask.

It's been a two-year journey & we've landed safely. Unfasten seat belts. Phew.

What they got up to during the flight - well, that's their business ...

Ever had this experience of reading a book in which there is a bookmark some twenty pages in & the corner of page 205 turned down & noticing that certain lines at various intervals have been discreetly marked with a small dot implying some kind of importance & knowing that it was you who inserted the bookmark & turned down the page & marked those lines for future reference & yet, for the life of you, cannot remember either having done so or the vaguest recollection of why or even - worse still - the dimmest recollection of the narrative ...?

Senility beckons.

pwoermd

oysteroid


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pwoermd / kazhuth

kazhuth (v/n)

1. To chuckle a wind. 2. To peep a going down. 3. A small anchor dropped at a distance (the sound of). 4. A short spasmodic shrub. 5. Entirely consisting of during. The earliest of these. 6. In the name or for the sake of blue gums. 


(with apologies for the interruption in the series - lhuth to zhuth to follow shortly ...)