An Anniversary

I suppose, this being a blog and all, and it being my birthday today, I'm supposed to inform you, the reading public, that it's my birthday. Well, it's my birthday. It's at this point that I'm lead to reflect, of course, that having made it this far, I suppose I should carry on.

Gorging

Reading the feature on music's 'Unofficial Channels' in the new Wire, I found myself nodding sagely at Simon Reynolds' description of "the MP3-fiend's binging", quoting from Johan Kugelberg in Old Rare New: "Falstaffian gluttony... eating at the biggest buffet, heaping and piling exotic foodstuffs not only from all around the globe but spanning history, on your plate". I recently had to transfer all of my music files to an external hard-drive, having literally filled my internal HD with 50GB of "noxious build-up". Of course, I don't, and haven't, listened to all of this music. Despite the fact that, apart from time spent reading poetry, eating, and being at lectures and seminars, all my time is free, I seem somehow to listen to even less music than when I was working full-time, and perpetually exhausted, and that which I do listen to I seem to only listen to with half an ear. Theoretically speaking, I could blame this on the fact that I don't have that many CDs with me (23 out of over 200 at home), and don't actually really like wearing earphones all the time; but, after all, a number of these CDs I've listened to perhaps once since I got here three weeks ago. Meanwhile, following Tony Herrington's mention of Cecil Taylor tapes, I've downloaded something in the way of a day's worth of avant-jazz in the past 3 days, and have so far only listened to this Brotherhood of Breath set (and yes, it's excellent.) Back home, when I left, every square inch of room was buried in a snow-drift of CD cases, second-hand paperbacks rescued from charity shops and Holdenhurst Books, years' worth of copies of Plan B and The Wire. It seems that, even if the capacity for intake is curtailed, the wish for things to consume (admittedly better things on the ethical scale), (mainly to make up for the non-existence of other facets of life) remains undiminished.

I've just discovered that my uni library has copies of The Wire going back to 1992. You know what I'll be spending my Sundays doing.

Can We Say 'Irony'?

"The idea that mass existence cannot properly be called life had a strong appeal for D.H. Lawrence, the major English disciple of Nietzsche, whose works he first came across in Croydon Public Library in 1908."
--John Carey, Intellectuals And The Masses (emphasis mine).