Everyone is home this weekend. James is getting ready to go to Moscow at the end of the month and Vita is revising. The house is still a bit disordered. Vita have moved into the front bedroom but hasn�t cleared out her old bedroom. I had a go at consolidating all the piles that are in the main bedroom � its not as bad as it sounds because interesting stuff floats to the surface like the 1986 album �The Magazine� by Rickie Lee Jones � also Mick Beck�s album Start Moving Earbuds. The car I have at the moment plays both tapes and CDs which is useful.

I mailed Gilbert about where we are on developing the Cambridge Concert idea. I am going to be there in the week after Easter for a day and a bit and I am hoping that I can get move the idea on a step or two at that point.

I also exchanged some e-ms with Trisha from the Bishop Simeon Trust � she got ill in South Africa and is just now recovering. I covered the CC idea and the Lullabyes project and also following up something she wrote about one of the AIDS activists in South Africa who has just died.

I looked at the KK stats as usual � roughly speaking each individual user looks at 4 pages on average. The most popular page is the News and after that the Musicians and the rock photographs. But when you do the analysis its obvious that people are coming into the site with different angles � a lot of the references are from Google image search and as I think I mentioned Derek Ridgers is the most sought reference. With Badly Drawn Boy big in the news at the moment its obvious that having a name photographer unique pic of that star on the site will pull traffic. Other people come to the site to find out about specific musicians who are part of the �collective� � others come to look at the HIV-AIDS issues.

I thought I saw a drop in volumes at the start of the week. Basically I had stopped posting Iraq material � because I wasn�t sure of what my editor angle was. In fact it has been such a dramatic week that I think everyone has been wrong-footed. I try to avoid posting pure �news� as I can�t see the added value in it. Anyway after a bit of reflection I came up with the following perspective.

The site has really done well with the whole Halliburton-Cheney issue. We had the initial ITT up and picked up quickly on the Senate interest. This story is very much still rolling and there has been some very trenchant comment from NE US local news sites some of which I have posted. I the new �blog� game I think there is a role for being a niche wholesaler of stories. Our set of Links � which includes leading Democrat sceptics, the DoD, the Whitehouse is actually pretty powerful for anyone who wants to dig. In the current climate you can hook this role back into the main site objectives.

The PR issue of the Peace is going to be won or lost on how well the US is able to be seen doing the right thing and not caught doing the wrong thing. Not doing the wrong thing includes a lot of important stuff like coming through on the AIDS funds promised in the State of the Union speech without messing it up with some barmy Neocon caveats on no condoms. There is the whole issue of Funding the Global Funding � although it is tarred with a UN banner it is actually the world�s best chance of doing something on AIDS Malaria and TB.

Finally there is the issue of how major global US brands manage themselves. Analysts are warning off harming brand equity by too close affiliation with patriotic values � that just has to be good business sense when you look at the hit that global US values have taken in 2003 at the hands of the Neocons. But there is also a positive local brand option � see the KK story about how Coke are moving to provide ARV treatment for workers in their African plants. The whole business alliance on AIDS/HIV is potentially a very positive thing � you only have to look at the way the Gates Foundation is putting strategic money into Indian projects.

Anyway turning some of this over in my mind I decided to have a crack at an editorial policy statement for KK News post the fall of Saddam. Its up under today�s date in the News section of www.kwase-kwaza.org. Do go and have a look at it.

One of the things that floated to the surface was a critical collection on S Plath. I started to look at the references to Prof S Rose � I had read a colour supplement thing about her � maybe she comes from West London � I can�t quite remember.

However she has written some �post-ish� stuff on SP which I think might be quite good. Roughly you start with a �death of the author� proposition and say � it has to be a mistake to read the poems as clues to the suicide. This must narrow the range of interpretation too far and indeed the poems are bigger than that.

So you need an alternative account of how the poems are working � and this can be constructed (according to SR) from a vision of identity and fragmentation. You can see the best poems a new approach to the expression of subjective identity and indeed playing with multiple perspectives � at every level of poetic technique. At its simplest you could say that this makes SP the poetic progenitor of Tracy Ermin and the Britartists. Come to think of it her use of the Holocaust might stand comparison with eg the Myra Hindley portrait. The two certainly provoke similar reactions.

Now of course my contention is that the SR-SP thesis has to apply to the interpretation of Drake works. The most constrained and pointless way to read the songs is as postcards from a late Romantic life � even though some superficial links might make that tempting or easy. The point (as Robin has shown) is that the songs are structurally innovative and compressed.

As such I would say that they fit very closely into Adorno�s theory of how valid composition works in the 20th century � that it discovers a structural means of expressing the position of the artist in an unfavourable society or set of social relations. So the critical agenda is to read the songs as innovative expressions (say) of the existential issues which we know interested their author � but to look for the metaphors at every level within the work � not just in what the words happen to say.

To really push the issue you could on a Plath-Drake-Britart canvas, highlight the surface �glossiness� of some of the material in each of these three domains � the early Plathian works where she tries to hard, Bryter Later and the elements of Britart that derive from Pop Art - high surface finish.

This notion comes to me partly from reading Lester Bangs on Blondie. He has a really interesting section where he compares Debbie Harry and Patty Smith � the point about Britart is that it manages to do DH and PS simultaneously � which partly explains why the rest of the world turned round and said �Blimey that�s smart�.

So you get simultaneous � cool distancing and irony/art as barrier to the self� and also �momentary commitment to the Pollockian surface� woven into a new artistic whole.

If that is an artistic mode which surfaces in the 1990s it might explain the continuing popularity SP and the rediscovery of ND. Possibly this also explains why the material can sustain Gilbert�s reinterpretations.

AND ANOTHER THING. I was thinking of 12 notes and patterns within them � how you cant escape 1 and 5. If you number the notes from 0 to 11 and start (say) on the 0. To get through all the notes you can either add 1 � to give 0 1 2 3 4 etc. OR add 5 (round off to the remainder) to give 0 5 10 3 8 1 6 11 4 9 2 7. There isn�t an alternative � even number steps only give even numbers. Using 7 gives the 5 sequence in reverse and 3 just cycles without covering all 12 numbers. (11 is the same as 1 backwards). So 5 has a very special property

You can get further if you use a pattern like �Step 1 add 6 Step 2 subtract 1 then add 6 and so on�.� That would give

0 6 5 11 10 4 3 9 8 2 1 7