Category: quotidiana

this week’s detritus

a reflection  so forceful at the centre of oneself that it feels sententious

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy.
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: You would not have doubted so
At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born

Edward Thomas – The Signpost

Ah well, I remember walking in the dark up the incline by the mill and thinking aged 17 ‘if it all stopped now I would be ok with that.’ A nonsense. But a nonsense I still feel.

Reading Robert Southwell’s Humble Supplication and its language is surgically applicable to our days:

Yet when they see your Soueraigne stile soe abused to th’authorizing of Fictions, that the Magistrates of your whole Realme, must generally soothe* things soe directly disproved by common sence, and contrary to their own and all mens knowledg, it cannot but be a torment to their Christian mynds…

*_soothe_. ‘To maintain or put forward a lie as being true’

Braudel from his Grammaires des Civilisations describes significant elements comprising the heavily used notion of ‘civilisation’:

La notion de civilisation, en effet, et au moins double. Elle désigne, à la fois, des valeurs morales et des valeurs matérielles.

And perhaps it is true that these go together. That is after all the argument of capitalism. In a discussion with a Marxist recently – fwiw I consider myself a part-time Marxist, the universally and correctly despised Laodicean in other words – that good Marxist said that people did not know what was good for them and needed instructing, a sentiment that increasingly I despise – telling people what they actually want is a disgusting habit, like telling people what they should like or enjoy. still, activities need to be co-ordinated to be able to live together.

Listening? Saw Avalon Emerson who was fantastic actually:

Johnny Blue Skies and the Dark Clouds is an immensely entertaining album:

he’s right to channel that ’70s sex-funk country style to tackle the current conjuncture, the US problem seems intensely psychosexual actually Matty Y

Two Great Songs for the Price of One Bike Ride

Took my toaster to be recycled at the Lambeth electrical recycling yesterday. On my bike. Up (v much *up*) into the rather weird Norwood/Dulwich suburban hinterland.

Sang Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot on the way back because i cycled past a red church on a hill:

All Saints, West Dulwich

Sang Political Confusion by Big Youth on the way there, because I was… recycling a toaster maybe?

Yes, I’m just going to be using this as a scrapbook blog of stuff why do you ask.

Homage to Jay

from Blast 1, edited by Wyndham Lewis (1914)

Largely indifferent to my hair, I went to cheap barbers most of my life. After an emotional crash a couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to spend money on a haircut, more money than I would usually.

I found a salon – it’s the only word – and although in part this was about asserting a new identity and look to try and do away with the immediate past, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted, and ended up spending more on the same haircut.

Certainly more than sixpence.

It was a good haircut though. It made me feel a little better and grew out well, and I’ve gone back ever since. In fact I had my haircut there just this morning.

The quality of the haircut has varied according to the person doing it.

But since I found Jay, he is the only one who can cut my hair. Jay is golden.

He is meticulous in his attentions, and carefully formal in how he approaches the different areas of my skull.

He pins up the longer hair on the top of my head with clips, and attends to the sides with his scissors and razor, so that in the mirror, with my widow’s peak pattern baldness growing more evident with every day, I appear like a corrupt or hapless middle-aged character in a Kurosawa film.

And most important of all, apart from a greeting and one or two efficient queries to do with my wishes, he says not a word.

As my haircut is not at all complicated, and in fact rather dull, it is impossible to say whether what I perceive to be the quality of the haircut is perceptible by others, though as in art, I suspect small efforts and details add to an overall effect without being perceived.

Increasingly I feel the value to be one of ritual however. The attentiveness and care, and the returning to an area to clip, cut and lightly grazed until it is satisfactory, is what comprises the value.

Like shoes, haircuts seem to me to have an intrinsic value greater than some other elements of style and presentation.

This is late 19th C bourgeois ideology, and while Wyndham Lewis’ interest is that of the modernist artist bringing formal processes of delineation, division and abstraction to the wild and incoherent Nature of the Romantics, the page in Blast represents an intersection of modernism with that late 19th Century bourgeois/imperial ideology.

Bless Jay. I live in fear of the day he goes.