The bear hit the mark early in the day with Papa was a Rolling Stone � I read somewhere that Norman Whitfield would steal riffs from George Clinton . Great guitar fills � wah wah watson? Bear also pulled Give Me a Reason quite early on. Paul called from Brill to relate the artful way he got back from Germany at the weekend. Silence prevailed pverhead.

It looked like a good day for Badiou so I dived into Ch3 of Gillespie which opens by citing one of my favourites � Ian Hacking on the discovery of chance. G begins to explain what it means for numbers to be a form of being. Thought is a multiplicity � we have a multiplicity of thoughts. For B zero exists but one is shakier � a state called the destitution of one � one exists as the result of an operation rather than in its own right. But infinity also exists in the fundamental way that zero does. It transpires that in set theory a core assumption required is that the empty set exists. This set is the one to which the number zero applies.

G from here heads off into the foundations of mathematics for a bit � and emerges with the a couple of concepts � a situation and a presentation. Situations are presented to us. A situation is a presented multiplicity � in some instances a multiplicity that cannot be counted. Two important conclusions emerge � every multiple is a multiple of multiples. Counting as one is the only system through which multiples can be counted as such . Both these conclusions strike me as tricky if not tricksy. For my money G is a bit too fleet in moving through Badiou�s thoughts at this point. Chapter 3 is certainly a mighty chapter � but that�s what I thought about Ch5 too.

A colleague has promised to send me a DVD of last week�s BBC4 ND concert. I played the first CD from the Shelagh McDonald complete works. The ITCOTCK CD didn�t arrive although the same colleague told me he heard them play in Hyde Park and still remembers his reaction in terms of what on earth was that?

The Kris Menace remix of Its All True does indeed introduce some menace. I am waiting for her l atest single to finds its way to LFM.I switched from LFM to a podcast of soulful house which I�d been sent a link to. It rolled past quite easily, just occaisionally becoming a bit too relentless.

I started on Ch 4 yesterday afternoon but only made it half way through � its about truth and the way it develops from events. I was sufficiently baffled to try a lecture by B himself from the net. � the philosophical problem of truth concerns its appearing, its becoming. Truth begins with the decision to say that an event has taken place. Truth is uncompletable. Forcing is the powerful fiction of a completed truth. The example is Galileo making the hypothesis that all nature can be written in mathematical language. Saying �I will always love you� is also a forcing. The potency of truth depends on the hypothetical forcing and is always a question of infinite anticipation. The desire for the omnipotence of truth is the root of evil. This last proposition seems to be particularly hard to grasp.

I came across a paragraph on Gillespie�s life and learned that the book on Badiou started life as a PhD thesis at Warwick University at the beginning of this decade.

Mark Pavey mailed from somewhere in Wales. As it was getting dark, the bear chose Shelagh McDonald�s Odyssey with its visionary playing by R Thompson. Also Astral Travelling by Pharoah Sanders � then Coco Montoya with the Bluesbreakers.