Jacob got me thinking with the progfem conundrums. I delved esp into The Sex Revolts by Mr and Mrs Reynolds / Press. How they wrote this without getting divorced - but maybe they did.

Ch5 is Brothers in Arms - Combat Rock and Other Stories for Boys - lots on the Clash which is not a topic I know much about and a wierd quote from a member of the Freikorps - hardly an endorsement - before we get onto some decent grand theory - Lacan - the kind of hard to handle French theorist the yanks misunderstood to get to postmodernism maybe. Certainly a big influence on current aesthetics and fine art theory. In a nutshell one response to the classic male trauma of separation and no external identity referent is a position dubbed "the eternal boy".

Our happy couple guides drop us next into Eight Miles High - chemicals Coltrane and some Rickys - before bouncing us onto U2 via Television. I had never seen the link between Tom Verlaine and Bono before but this maybe explains why I could hear TV in Joy Division yesterday.

Television "sublimate sexual tension into plangeant friction". The boys are back but they are also into group structures to hold themselves together in trying circs. As I mention Tom V was a hard taskmaster for Jeff Buckley [ The Sky is a Landfill] who possibly was a fluxier kind of bloke.

None of this is endorsement you understand - just some cultural positioning. You can also try (from another angle) 1980s debates on Beethoven and Schubert - but I defer to Andrew on this stuff.

The girls come at a different way according to Reynolds-Press. The final chapter is "All Fluxed Up: Rebels Against Structures" including J Mitchell P Smith R L Jones Y Ono Bjork. A few of my desert island discs in there. And I quote:

"Some of the most powerful music by women originates in confusion rather than certainty. These artists have worked within the problematic of female identity. Their aesthetic has been based not on subjectivity but on what Julia Kristeva calls a subject in process. Identity is seen as an open space rather than a structure, full of divided impulses and contradictory desires. So this torn subjectivity is expressed through language thats fractured and frayed that oscillates between incoherence and visionary lucidity."

Up here in my studio I happen to have both The Hissing of Summer Lawns (which I have been plundering) and "Rising" released by Yoko in the mid 1990s. She explains about experiencing the Tokyo firestorms at the end of the war and compares this with her experience in NYC:-

"The city is a warzone and now I have many friends around me who are facing slow death from AIDS.....I am living amongst suffering friends listening to them talk of their fear of death sometimes jokingly and at other times in anger. I live through their nightmares not daring to express my own."

Renolds-Press link Joni M and John Martyn under the rather glib heading "troubled AOR" - a shame when insight is spoiled by journalistic spite. More decently they bring in Dorris Lessing's Golden Notebooks quoting the heroine who writes:

"I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she is whole because they've chosen to block themselves off at this or that stage."

The big issue here would be whether its fair to say that these artists get to where they are now because they flout structure. Read for example John Cale's account of producing Patti Smith. Is Patti Smith's love of Blake evidence of someone who finds structure an escape?

On the other hand there is something subtle and fluid about Schubert's approach to sonata form which could have something to do with his personality and circumstance - something which is not just railing against fate or building castles in the air.

Plenty more refreshment in this particular well I think. Indeed those madcap musicjournos had me reaching for the Phenomenology of Mind and thinking about Tacitus and Stoicism. Maybe Hegel was right when he resolved the dialectic of Master and Slave into the recognition of the self concious being of some structural truths in common between itself and the external world.

Saw Westminster Abbey on TV tonight. I couldn't help thinking about the healing services they hold on the first Wednesday of every month at 12.30pm - or what is perhaps the oldest garden in England which you get to through the cloisters.

I also walked past the burial ground of St Margaret's Westminster - which is a few hundred yards west. The Abbey used to be on Thorney Island - created by the Tyburn - and I think this burial site must have been on the mainland. I think that it is the geomantic point of intersection but not the maze site. The maze could well be South East of there - I have been looking at Roque's map of 1748.

On that walk I dropped into a remainder shop and picked up a book of essays by Iain Sinclair for 99p which promise to be great fun. Sinclair links up with Peter Ackroyd and Nick Totton in their interest in poetry, geomancy and conspiracy. The opening track on the Serious Music CD arises from a brief venture I was in with Nick Totton and Paul Bell involving poetry and the Telecaster. The result was that the poem - Careless Love - got published with a dedication to myself - I think this is the only one of its kind. After that one how many more do I need? Another of the tunes from that venture ended up on the CD taking a section of the Wasteland (a pretty chromatic line) sung by Paul B's daughter Cathy. Originally it went with one of Nick's poems that I have forgotten the name of - but I got interested in the Wasteland again after reading Peter A's biography of T S Eliot and ended up with that setting.

Anyway in the index of Iain S's book I noticed there was a reference to J H Prynne who has taught Cathy and Paul W. It comes in a chapter which involves a visit to Old St Pancras church (on an island in the River Fleet originally) to look at the relics and some scurrilous suggestions about the death of a visionary South African doctor BOSS and UK compliance. The usual mixture in fact. Drop Nick T's name into Google and see what comes up. Material for a group structure perhaps.

On a more loyal note, my dog is staying with my sister - a Royalist and member of the Stationer's Guild. He and she will have been to see the Queen Mother's final journey down the Great West Road. [ I threw the paint can at the wall all over that track I put down last night. ]