Thinkige Kru 2

“You must be regular and natural in your habits, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.” - Flaubert

"I wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the spread across all the end-of-year lists of what is effectively (regardless of genre or sonic specifics) a new singer-songwriter ethos... recordings approached and analysed and felt largely as literary

Raoul Vaneigem is one of those thinkers whose thinkige had a massive effect on me for a while - and then dropped away almost completely as other influences came along and my thinking grew more complicated.

"At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

"[The young British] see standards as inhibiting.

Long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud.

TECH-NO Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

"What trifles constitute happiness!

“the things I detest, for instance: italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought.

John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction (1978) Merdistes!

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about Otherwise it can feel a bit forced If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you…

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die.

from T.J.

… a new millennium style of pop writing / rock criticism that is cautious about reaching for significance and concentrates instead on a kind of inventory of pleasures, which in turn involves a breakdown of a track into its components and constituent sourc…

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit" - William Blake (in antipathy to Joshua Reynolds belief that "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind" and…

“Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.” - Nabokov, Speak, Memory "I have no ear for music [...]

qualification when talking about anything aesthetic is a huge no no. never do it. everything has to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the shittest. nothing inbetween i once believed in that as an article of faith (when i was reviews editor at Sp…

"Properly, we should read for power.

Nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.

"As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how insignificant they are." - Peter Cook.

"There is not a single case in musical history of a composer being a century ahead of his time: the greatest composers have been perfectly comprehensible to the average instructed music-lover of their day" - Sir Ernest Newman, 1925 In partial reinforcement

a lot of stuff that gets retroactively adjudged to be ahead of its time, or farsighted... it isn't really. it's completely abreast of its time

... there is this corruption of sensibility that sets in after the first few decades as a music nut, where you get more of a buzz from contemplating shit music than good music.

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky.