There are so many rules in my head regarding politeness and directness, delicacy and transparency, good faith and bad grammar, that a single simple email takes half an hour of something approaching physical pain.

(edit to add) sometimes i think really all i would like in life is to be able to write some sentences without wanting to punch myself, in general that would probably be some kind of boon, it would at least make me a little easier to live with all things considered.

The cat died, very early this morning, at the vet's: we'd left her there for a blood test, because for the past three days she'd been moping around, staying in one room, not barrelling up the stairs or jumping up to sit on beds or windowsills, barely eating or drinking - and then all in a rush she started collapsing, crying out, pissing blood. She was fifteen years old. Her name was Mew, and on the grounds that this was a dreadful name I'd called her Mishi for years, but somehow I kept backsliding to the common name. She was a tortoiseshell: little and pretty, noisy and self-possessed. She'd never sit on your lap for more than a minute, and only when you were sitting at a computer and trying to type. She liked to sit on delineated spaces, a towel on the end of a bed rather than the bed itself, a folded shirt on the ironing board, one particular arm of the bench in the garden. She used to wake my mother up in the middle of the night by climbing across her to drink from the glass of water on her bedside table, purring luxuriantly. She talked all the time: she would come into the room, announce her presence, miaow and miaow with seeming urgency, and then wander off to sleep somewhere. She demanded a tithe of every meal eaten in the house. She had white whiskers on one side of her face and black whiskers on the other side. She never learnt to use a catflap. She used to sleep on my bed, and sometimes even come when I called.

She was my favourite of all cats.

I meant to do a couple of things yesterday - work on a translation, maybe replace the inner tube on my bike's back wheel if feeling particularly calm. Instead I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

It's good-- I didn't love it as I did A Place of Greater Safety, but there's more action in APOGS, more grand sweeping happenings, a greater passage of time and more extreme characters, more extremes of ideology, more romance and more drama. To a simple, melodramatic soul like me, APOGS is hugely appealing: you coo, oh, Camille, oh, oh, Robespierre, and everyone goes to the guillotine except Saint-Juste it feels like and you feel savagely satisfied and sad*. Wolf Hall is politics, trade, religion: the ideological differences are more nuanced, questions of conscience and pragmatism, loyalty to ideas and religions and persons. A lot of it reminded me of nothing so much as Dorothy Dunnet's "House of Niccolò" series (I haven't read the Lymond ones)-- something very similar in the way Dunnet wrote Claes and Mantel wrote Thomas, their quickness with language and logic and ledgers, politics and trade, their backgrounds and battles and households and even their women. Slightly too similar. I'd fill in a thought of Cromwell's with something of Niccolò's: I suspect I came away with the sense that his textile-trade background had been more fleshed out than it was because my brain supplied details, or a general feel, from </i>Niccolò Rising</i>.

I feel sort of awful mentioning this, but it was with a growing sense of shocked hilarity that I read this interview in the graun with her the other week. Shocked hilarity because-- well, the ancient Greeks believed in this disease called hysteria, right, where a woman's womb starts wandering around her body causing phantom pain and suffocation and madness. And then you read about Hilary Mantel suffering terrible pain, and doctors thinking it psychosomatic and her mad and prescribing her things that give her severe anxiety attacks, and this turns out to be because of a disease where cells from the womb start appearing in the wrong places, and, oh god, that's... hysteria. Only real. How terrifying.

And now to translate, to translate.

* Historical fact is not a spoiler ok.

Things that do not get old: requesting books online, knowing that they're going to take about an hour to get to the a&a reading room, which means you can shower, get dressed, wander down and be there just in time.

HI DERE BL I ♥ U

tonight tonight, lambeth north's own horse bar:



let's dance, my dears, and freak.

I finished some exams on Wednesday! Then I had an all-day hangover on Thursday! Now I'm going to spend some quality time ON A TRAIN: I want to read "Grimey" Simey Reynolds' "Energy Flash" but even though the new edition came out in 2008 it appears to be available in no bookshops? Which is pretty shocking. I've sneered about SR's constant self-promotion of late and maybe I was wrong to. If your stuff's getting shifted off the shelves this soon after its publication, what else can you do except keep making noise in the hope that you'll hype someone into shifting it back?

Aside from cursing my sore head, washing up, and drinking coffee, I also saw PATTI SMITH yesterday. Patti Smith! She is simultaneously embarassing and amazing, like your best beloved slightly crazy aunt. As part of this role as yr aunt Patti she managed to get A Silver Mt Zion (missing one of the violinists?) sharing a stage with Geoff Barrow of Portishead - which is fine, you say, normal, expected indeed - and also Flea. Flea out of the Red Hot Chili Peppers! With ASMZ! best supergroup ever, where by 'best' i mean 'most likely to sound really good but then distract you into giggles every time you realise that Patti Smith has managed to convince Efrim Menuck to be in a band with Flea'. But yeah no surprises that ASMZ's general "sounds a bit like a hurricane" and Patti's poetry and folk-rockiness go well together even if it never quite gelled into abandon. Plus she did a song about the Iranian elections! Yr aunt Patti: topical!

Right right on with the day.

green green heavy metaphorical weather outside; all the rnb on spotify; SO MUCH PAPER TO THROW AWAY (er i mean recycle)

two days til i'm done~

1. I have a powerbook! it is like my old powerbook in that it's battered in all the same places, has the same replacement battery and the same 3 key that doesn't work, but fundamentally unlike my old powerbook in that it's running Leopard and has none of my old files on it. Well, okay, now it has the contents of my ipod on it. You know the mac hoonja-doonja TinkerTool? it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

2. I'm mid-examtime! They could be going worse, they could be going better, they sort of just-- are exams. I quite like exams, you know: there is no chance of perfection so one just turns up and writes in a straight line and goes away, even when they are horrendous there is nothing to be done about it, it is not like the guilt of writing and rewriting. The Japanese-language exams are over: next week's three are all essay-based.

3. I'm going to go and dig potatoes in the garden this afternoon! My caretaker, who lives here, is super houseproud and this year has been growing veg: yesterday afternoon he excitedly beckoned from outside my window and had me come into the garden to see: new potatoes! so fresh the skins fall off when you wash them! mmmmm potatoes potatoes all the time.

4. oh gosh i am so bored with revision.

As is the way of revision time, it's brilliantly sunny. I slept badly and eventually gave up and got out of bed at six-thirty, went for a little bike ride, made chocolate biscuits, took them to my 9am translation class. Next up: lying out in the sun trying to get my skin a little less pale, copying out the Heike Monogatari until my hand gets too suncream-sweaty to hold the pen. In today's section, dude dies of a fever.

Studiously filtering a thousand things out of your attention leaves your few distractions richer, stranger, more filling. The sky's been incredible, these past evenings. Music sounds better, at the moment, than it has for a while. I've been listening to the Electrik Red album (girl! pop!), Lindstrom's "Where you Go I Go Too" (space! disco!), Johnny Foreigner (messy! indie!), and the usual usual suspects, in the cool of my room; birdsong under the heat of the sun. I went to poptimism and was so happy to be dancing I haven't words even; I spent a day at my parents' house, reading poems and hanging out with the cat; I spent another day with friends from a few years back, talking about soul-selling, drinking pimms, eating szechuan squid in spicy chilli sauce ("refreshing", as the menu said). I sort of don't know any Japanese, but, you know, that's okay. Too late to worry now.

hi d00ds: if you have c. 2 minutes (probably less) to spare this fine afternoon, why not fill out this survey for my dear friend petronia. it is about giving money to bands and is really quite short!

in other news, er, um, there is no other news.

Reasons to listen to 1xtra more often than 'when i'm doing the ironing': Trevor Nelson's breakfast show has just alerted me to the existence of Swizz Beats' "Up in this club" - I'm sure poptimists must have discussed it already, but the utter befuddling wrongness was exactly what I needed to get me through that pile of shirts.

...and now I should really go to the library.

(it's the appeal of that first sick feeling of recognition as the track started-- I had it worse a couple of days ago, when meeting an old school friend in Cambridge: two verses into a song and I knew every word and had no idea what it was or even if I liked it. (it was brmc) (i had no idea i'd listened to that record so much) (the cafe had earlier been playing rubbish mathrock: guys, cambridge is weird))

If you do not want a group of protesters whom you assume to be violent anarchists to attack the headquarters edit: a branch of a bank - particularly a bank so present in the news as a symbol of financial-industry excesses - then do not form a police cordon just after the front of that bank so that the crowd have nowhere to go and nothing to look at except that bank's eminently smashable windows.

yours, just saying,

c.


p.s. about ten metres further into that crowd - where I was - it was totally chilled out and awesome, people mostly sat around and chatted, kind of cool picnic-occupation feeling. Being stuck in a police cordon is fine if it's sunny and you've got no particular place to go!

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. "In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th," the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining :(.

pinch punch, kids.

it's a gorgeous day, i'm one wisdom tooth less than yesterday morning, who's going marching?

Happy birthday, freakytigger!

This morning, I have decided, I am going to put my dissertation aside and GO FOR A WALK. perhaps I shall listen to freaky trigger and the lollards as pop as I do so! Or maybe I'll go somewhere nice and - finally - finish Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (which i bought about six years ago and just started this morning). sample paragraphs:

Nineteen sixty was the gap between two separate generations, the changeover, and the reason it was so bad was really that pop moves in very specific generation cycles: there is one breakthrough, followed by maybe three years of great excitement, followed by three years of stagnation, followed by a fresh breakthrough. Each cycle takes roughly seven years to run its course and 1960, of course, was the stagnant bit.
Seven years seems nothing but it's really surprisingly much. After all, one pop generation really only lasts four years, the time it takes to get from eleven to fifteen and, again, from fifteen to nineteen, and a seven-year cycle means that a whole generation gets skipped.

it's so... straightforward. *_*

in other news, i can't find any socks. <= this is how exciting my life is right now.

got into an argument, waiting for the bus, in the pennines, with richey edwards.

went out to do my wash and ended up making a snowman with the guy from across the hall, rolling balls up katamari-style, a cheery little dude with a belt of grass and a snowhawk, arms raised to greet the sun for when it rises.

There's a little bamboo plant at the end of the garden: the bright green of it, under the light, under the snow, is like a rebuke to winter. Snow on bamboo is the kind of thing you expect there to be poems about. o wait, i know some:

Shinkokinshū 667. On "snow heard deep in the night"
Gyōbukyō Norikane
Not yet light:
awakened from sleep in my bed
I hear
the bamboo by the fence crack
under the weight of snow.

673. At [the house of Yoshitsune], composing winter poems on place names, about snow in Fushimi village
Fujiwara Ari'ie no Ason
Even the road
I travel in dreams
Is cut off by the crack
of Fushimi village's jointed bamboo
under the weight of snow.


And in the grand tradition of emo tanka:

Shinkokinshū 670. Written on "Snow upon a lodge in the fields"
Fujiwara Kunifusa
As if to say: there's nothing you
can do about loneliness,
on the hillside
the pale leaves droop
under the falling snow.

from A Handful of Sand, 'the people i can't forget'
Ishikawa Takuboku
In the snow
here and there, I can see rooftops:
the chimney smoke wavers up to the faint-clouded sky.

ibid, 'when i take off my gloves'
Ishikawa Takuboku
test it with my hand, and the snow melts,
how cosy:
it sinks into my tired-out heart.

Went to see Lily Allen at the zodiac carling academy 02 Academy. I started to think - maybe it was because the sound was so bad - I started to think about Sleeper. Not the real Sleeper, so much as the idea of Sleeper, or the ideal of Sleeper. Here was a girl, a personality, all topical lyrics and bolshy pronouncements, surprisingly charming and charismatic, and here was her charisma swamped by the muddy mediocrity of the anonymous men she surrounded herself with. Maybe it was because the sound was bad. Or the balance was bad, at least. Her voice is like a bell, the round-voweled wide-eyed cast of it, and it was like a little bell half-heard over a sputtering exhaust pipe, the words at the ends of lines suddenly clear when the noise let up. Oh, this one's a mother's little helper type song, I think she just sang 'prozac'; oh, this one's about sudden sweet domestic bliss, I think, I guess, yeah it does sound like nu-Take That doesn't it. They're character songs, they're Britpop songs, the new ones could be twelve years old, but all the interest is in the lyrics and I just can't hear them through the guitar, and the guitar isn't even doing anything. It plays a set of chords in a particular way for one song; it plays another set of chords a particular way in the next. A song starts with the keyboard blurting out squidgy 808ish knockoff noises, she opens her mouth for a few clear notes before she's towed under by the wash of indistinct repeated chord, and you think, oh can't the guitarist just sit this one out? Can't the bassist pop out for a fag? It's as if she recorded some demos with a guy and a keyboard, and they were rudimentary and charming, and then she called out the band and they thought, well, can't improve on that then, better just play over the top. Here's my band, she says, say hi. No names, and that's appropriate: there's no personalities. They're there to back her up, to provide unremarkable accompaniment so she can peal out sweet vicious little detailed lyrics, smile through set gig patter on drinking and touring. They're all you can hear.



sorry about lack of comment replies, dudes! i am being super remiss at the moment.
here is a list o' yay:
1. cheese on toast, on my own bread: i have gone through an entire jar of mustard in two weeks.
2. new order, 'dream attack'. all of technique, but mostly 'dream attack'.
3. sudden moments of inspiration in the middle of lectures
4. i might be getting a laptop battery? it's pretty exciting ok
5. rediscoveries: fountain pen, buddha machine, eimantai for vocab learning.

number one on my list o'nay:
glasses completely lost i fear.

DEAR ANDREW WK,

EVERY RECORD EVER MADE WAS MADE ONLY TO BE COVERED BY YOU.

YRS FAITHFULLY

C

gakuen tengoku (ysi) (original on youtube)

Happy new etc! I hope y'all had excellent holiday times: myself I spent christmas with the family; post-christmas in the countryside incl visit to bexhill-on-sea's insanely beautiful pavillion; and the evening of new year's (and most of the next day) with atommickbrane, playing Zelda, drinking gin, eating toasted cheese, making pasteis de nata, watching select episodes of Nobuta o Produce. It was frankly an awesome way to see in the new year. We even saw a firework! One solitary firework! It escaped the herd of its fellows and exploded just high enough to be seen over the housetops, just for us.

Amount of mince pies made over course of holiday season: 100-odd (i just made twenty more this evening. it's like levelgrinding, only with shortcrust pastry.)
Amount of words written on dissertation: 0 (but i did read this great essay about how what takuboku's poetry really reveals is that he suffered from low blood pressure)

Did you guys know that kompakt-mp3 shut down? Maybe you are not as intent on its going-on as I: well, I say 'intent', I actually missed the closing-down-sale whatnot through inaction and, guys, the new site does not sell you ze mp3s, you have to go to beatport for that. On the other hand, here is an awesome release I totally missed: Matias Aguayo, Walter Neff, lead track all pokey bassline and handclaps and doo-doo-doos and yaaaaay aguayo supercutest of the chilean techno dudes. One of the tracks on it is called 'Carter MSP': what. no, wait, what.

Should I talk about albums I have enjoyed from this year? I seem to have spent the year listening to old stuff almost exclusively: my three most strong musical memories (which are not karaoke) of the year are:
1) ambushed by unexpected emotion on a train to the motiv8 remix of 'she's on the phone'
2) whistling 'jambalaya (on the bayou)' on my bike, toodling through the streets of bunkyoku.
3) having 'make out kids' in my head for a grillion years
Actually I just went out and bought Chris Brown's "Exclusive", and Ne-Yo's "Year of the Gentleman" in the sales, after a few spotify listens, so I will have to get back to you on those (beyond saying that 'Forever' has turned up every time i've listened to pop radio for any extended period of time - by pop radio I mean 1extra - and every time has brought delight, and 'Miss Independent' is a shuffling joy), but here are some sentences about some records, ( no particular order: )

By the daughter of Toshinari, from a fifteen-poem sequence at the poetry competition on love at Minase.

通り来し　宿の道芝　枯れ枯れに　跡なき霜の　むすぼほれつつ
toorikoshi / yado no michi-shiba / karekare ni / ato naki shimo no / musubooretsutsu

the grass by the path
to this hut you used to visit
withers and withers;
and the frost that leaves for no footprints
is freezing solid.


Is this poem
A) terribly sad?
B) dirty dirty innuendo?


(toshinari's daughter is totally my favourite shink poet btw)


Also, Kanye's '808s and Heartbreak' is flat-out fantastic. I'd been feeling sort of down about my 2008 in music, so, to mispropriate an old meme: ~*thank you kanye west!*~