What seems to be - increasingly - a weekly appointment. For a variety of reasons there just don't seem to be sufficient hours in the day once all the obligatory activities are factored in (washing, driving, teaching, collecting, shopping, cooking, eating, sleeping, not sleeping ...). Life reduced to pure function. Lamentable.

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In the salvaged hours ... reading: Ashbery (still) especially the selections of April Galleons in the later Selected Poems and his Rimbaud translations of The Illuminations (terrific). Writing: daily 'spoolings' which are to be typed up and worked into (eventually). Listening: The Stone Roses (everyone is excited that they're reforming - I'm excited that I've just heard their second album).

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Friday lunchtime: weird autumnal system shutdown: post Parent:Teacher conferences I was intending to go for a lunchtime drink with colleagues. Instead, I sat in the car in the car park and felt utterly exhausted with one of those over-the-eyebrow pile-driver headaches beginning. The very thought of a beer made my stomach churn. In such circumstances there's only one thing to do: go home & go to bed.

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Wales lose to Australia. France lose to New Zealand. & I lose interest.

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Phone calls. Pumpkin soup. L's birthday.

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Here's an interesting book: Listening to Noise and Silence by Salome Voegelin.

"The ideology of a pragmatic visuality is the desire for the whole; to achieve the convenience of comprehension and knowledge through the distance and stability of the object. Such a visuality provides us with maps, traces, borders and certainties, whose consequences are communication and a sense of objectivity. The auditory engagement however, when it is not in the service of simply furnishing the pragmatic visual object, pursues a different engagement. Left in the dark, I need to explore what I hear. Listening discovers and generates the heard."(4)

Each page throws up something of interest - questions about the relation of visual and aural 'meaning' (she prefers the Merleau-Ponty term of "non-sense"); the nature of sound; what it means to go for a walk and hear what surrounds you; what it means, indeed, to put a CD on. And - by extension - the nature of a poem: as visual text or aural manifestation.

Simultaneously, I'm excited and depressed: her name-checking of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Adorno in particular necessitates a serious re-reading of texts that have been on the shelves for twenty years. & the time required to properly engage with her ideas ...?

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Watching clouds a few weeks ago. Now simply listening.

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huneyed

(pwoermd for Salome Voegelin)

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This time next week I should be over in the U.K. staying until the Thursday. If anyone is in the vicinity ...