We went to Samson today - the only uninhabitated island that you can easily access. When the tide is out you can see on the sea floor the walls marking out the fields that were used in pre-historic times when less of the islands were under water. Its a place which pushes me to try new sketching techniques. Yesterday I drew a neolithic tomb - it started as a representation but I it forced me to take the thing to a different level.

Buber obviously believes that it is in our nature to relate to other individuals - he pits himself against Heidegger and Kierkegaard on this point. He cites the example of a lyric poet alone on a high mountain ridge - where he feels compelled to write some lines of poetry. This self absorbed act assumes some "other" who might read/hear the lines. So creativity is "other oriented". Actually Stravinsky said he wrote for the assumed-other. For some reason I am not sure I go all the way with this - though its obviously a powerful argument.

I have almost finished Postmodernism and Popular Culture by Angela McCrobie which I only started yesterday - I shouldnt have been so much of a pig as to gulp it down in big chunks. I especially enjoyed the articles on Susan Sonntag and Walter Benjamin. I nearly bought a WB book on Baudelaire a couple of years ago - having read the article on him its turned into a must-have. He wrote about culture, modern-life, consumption - the usual stuff - but not from the security of an academic post. And he seems to have a Baudelaiream sense of the urban scene as a place where you could put into practice the fluidity of personal identity.

There are some other good references in McC to stuff written in the last ten years or so about the de facto fluidity of identity. So the sense of the stable and fully fleshed personality would be a myth - out of key with the experience of more people than we might naturally think. The teenage trauma of a forging identity isnt a passing phase but a permanent condition - its just that teenagers do it in a more avert manner with material and themes (eg Goth, Grunger) that is more salient. So everyone is to a greater or lesser degree a covert follower of Laforgue.

We are all fluxers now.

I tried a new exercise - a four note scale pattern that starts and finishes on the same note - total stretch a minor third. Play this as fast as you can on each step of the chromatic scale.