I'm a student, 22, living in London. This is an online commonplace book where I write and share stuff.
email me: marginalgloss @ gmail dot com
Live video/audio feed of Anthony Gormley’s project in Trafalgar Square: randomly selected applicants doing whatever they want for an hour on the empty fourth plinth, 24/7. At the moment it just seems to be a man writing unfunny things on a blackboard but it’s oddly entertaining to have on in the background. Better reality TV than anything on TV? Perhaps, but I’m not sure ‘better’ TV is what we really want anyway.
There are two small dogs currently living in my house. One of them is small enough to fit through the cat flap, and if I forget to close the door to the kitchen in the evening, she will go out into the garden and sit very quietly in the dark at the end of the lawn with her back to the house, as if waiting for something. She will stay there until I go out and call her name. When I do, she happily follows me back inside. It is a mystery.
I could definitely become a professional housesitter, if all this falls through. I am conscientious, responsible, reliable. I am good with pets. I turn lights on and off appropriately. I open and shut doors and windows. I lock things. I do not have a criminal record. My telephone manner is delightful. I am clean and tidy, or rather I am capable of tidiness, or rather I can empathise with your tidiness. I will not have a party and I certainly will not advertise it on myspace. I will not be scared of the furnace in the basement. Please trust me: I need the money for my big business venture.
I will hire and direct a team of actors to play you and those living in your house whilst you are away. Physical resemblance will not be as important as their ability to adopt and not simply mimic your style, habits, mannerisms and superficial quirks — the rest will follow in due course, according to the time frame/payment plan you have in mind. They will sleep in your bed, eat from your table, do your homework. I will live outside the house and monitor their movements carefully. Dishes, towels, dirty clothes will be left how you leave them, keeping you in the style to which you’re accustomed without the tragic decay of finding everything precisely where you left it three weeks ago when you return. The black, shrunken clementine at the bottom of the bowl.
Once you return it really will be like you never left — except, perhaps, for that patch of pale grass where I pitched my little tent on your lawn.
Of course they all have some very interesting things to say but I got the strange sense from this report that their names are basically interchangeable. Which was perhaps the intention. Their intention or the blogger’s? I don’t know. Possibly both. It probably doesn’t matter. Wait. Where am I.
.jpg "Two self-portraits by the caricaturist Max Beerbohm, The Theft and The Restitution; the former depicts him stealing a book from a library in 1894, the latter is him returning it in 1920. I have no idea if he really did this or not, but it’s a nice story, oddly apt perhaps when one considers the profession of the satirist — always a young man’s game, one that begins with the ironic glance over a cold shoulder, a moral self-righteousness clutched close to the heart.
As minor misdemeanours go, I can hardly imagine anything so dishonest, selfish and thoughtless as stealing a book from a library. Even if it has crossed my own mind many times.")
Two self-portraits by the caricaturist Max Beerbohm, The Theft and The Restitution; the former depicts him stealing a book from a library in 1894, the latter is him returning it in 1920. I have no idea if he really did this or not, but it’s a nice story, oddly apt perhaps when one considers the profession of the satirist — always a young man’s game, one that begins with the ironic glance over a cold shoulder, a moral self-righteousness clutched close to the heart.
As minor misdemeanours go, I can hardly imagine anything so dishonest, selfish and thoughtless as stealing a book from a library. Even if it has crossed my own mind many times.
‘Certainly in the British imagination, the fictional ideal of The West Wing had long since supplanted any dim awareness of the organisational layout of that area of the actual White House. “The West Wing” has become shorthand for being on the side of right, a sublimely intelligent iteration of the struggle between idealism and realism in power. The Blair inner circle were West Wing nuts almost without exception, and we shall come to their borderline certifiable blurring of fact and fiction later. Suffice it for now to say that Tony Blair’s chief of staff, as Jonathan Powell liked to be known, once set up a Downing Street meeting with President Bartlett’s chief of staff — or, rather, the late John Spencer, the actor who played him, and with whom Powell was naturally overexcited to hold opposite-number talks.’
Good grief. Though to be fair, I would have been quite excited too.
Lawrence Sterne meets death, via life.
I would really like to know what that chart on the wall is all about. Also those boots. Also the multi-breasted lady under a bell jar.
I’ve been utterly bereft of things to write about here, so much as I am reluctant to talk about The Real World on here, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been up to the last few days while I haven’t been blogging. And you are going to smile and nod appreciatively from the sidelines.
On Satuday, Hyde Park Calling pt 1. Neil Young. The Pretenders were pretty good. I have a veggie burrito which is unspeakably delicious and incredibly messy. Fleet Foxes were very good but look a bit lost on the enormous stage. Poor lambs. At this ‘festival’ they have a curious sort of tent/pagoda which sprays you with a cool, faint mist that smells vaguely of disinfectant. You are by no means forced to pass through this but it is not unpleasant though it does make you feel a bit like a lamb to the slaughter. You can also buy a JD & Coke in a can. I eat 4 mini donuts and drink beer whilst waiting for Neil Young, who looks about a million years old and could use a hair cut. His black Gibson still has about the heaviest, filthiest guitar sound I’ve ever heard. He played mostly electric Ragged Glory-ish stuff but a few of the more famous acoustic songs too. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Cinnamon Girl still have massive weight live, and the four (!) false endings to Rocking in the Free World were a great laugh. There was a surprise appearance from none other than Paul McCartney, who bounced on stage for a cover of A Day in the Life, which climaxed which Neil ripping all the strings off his guitar in a blaze of feedback.
On Sunday, Hyde Park Calling pt 2. Bruce Springsteen. THE BOSS. But nobody else I really wanted to see very much, other than The Gaslight Anthem, who played a great set and brought the boss himself on for ‘59 Sound. Ben Harper and Dave Matthews Band were okay but I’m not a fan. I eat a veggie burger and two mini donuts which are freshly made and burn my mouth and so much better than yesterdays. Also the accompanying blue slushie was slushier than yesterday. Of course Bruce was fantastic. He still has incredible energy, if an unfortunate tendency to sermonise, but he played for over three hours: amongst others we got Badlands, Johnny 99, No Surrender, Rosalita, Racing in the Street, and the full power of Clarence Clemons on Jungleland. Drunk people everywhere afterwards singing can’t start a FIRE without a SPARK.
On Monday one of my friends came over to ask my parents some stuff about school. But that was only for an hour. Otherwise ???
On Tuesday I spent a remarkably productive day at the British Library working on my dissertation. It must be the air conditioning. In the evening I saw M. Ward at the Shepherds Bush Empire. He was pretty good, though I’m sure the gig wasn’t sold out. Fuel for Fire and his cover of Let’s Dance were absolutely lovely but he was otherwise mostly electric and I think I wanted more acoustic stuff. Also my girlfriend may have swine flu. But I don’t have it. So maybe I don’t. Does anyone on tumblr have swine flu yet? Surely someone must be blogging it by now.
Wednesday is today and I have done nothing.
Mirrors are not more wrapt in silences
nor the arriving dawn more secretive ;
you, in the moonlight, are that panther figure
which we can only spy at from a distance.
By the mysterious functioning of some
divine decree, we seek you out in vain ;
remoter than the Ganges or the sunset,
yours is the solitude, yours is the secret.
Your back allows the tentative caress
my hand extends. And you have condescended,
since that forever, now oblivion,
to take love from a flattering human hand.
you live in other time, lord of your realm -
a world as closed and separate as dream.
— Jorge Luis Borges
michael moorcock argues in today’s FT…
‘Then there were the places where London was simply not – a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. These parts of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing survived except the larger 17th- and 18th-century buildings such as Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And, of course, St Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. You had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your 18th-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.’
