Iain Cameron's Diary
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2006-01-04 - 6:45 a.m.

I got back to Leantown on Monday evening - the flat is still in one piece. Generally 2006 is not making a brilliant impression so far - obviously early days etc. Excellent programme last night on BBC2 about the political imagery of Live8/London Olympics/bombs/G8 - which has to be the defining week of 2005. In parentheses - big ones - I remember that this was the week that I put the AV of 10 Short Stories together. I need to find a way to place to put this on the net - I suppose it has become an epitaph to a particular way of thinking about projects.

I read something between Christmas and New Year about the link between modernism and violence. The extreme violence of Nazism and Stalinism wasn�t an accidental contamination of the modernist project with more primitive excrescences - it was part of the package and in the same way fundamentalist terrorism is a modern phenomenon - sharing various continuities. We are slipping back into an early-modern phase - the fundamentalists are like the late 19C anarchists - and the main objective on the international stage then as now is securing natural resources. James comes back from Russia this Friday - this term he is studying the role of intelligence services in 20C history. He seems to be quite enjoying the slim volume I got him for Christmas on this subject.

On New Year�s Eve we went round the M25 about 90 degrees in an anti-clockwise direction. The tradition is that you have to bring a game to this party and mine was about couples - Aristotle/Jackie - Dante/Christina - Beatrice/Benedict - Cage/Cunningham. The hostess teamed up with Mrs C and between them they cracked it thereby securing valuable prizes. In Mrs C�s case this was a paperback on Ian McEwan�s Saturday which I picked up on the last day of 2005 in Tesco�s for three ninety nine - the imprint date was 2006. I was rather impressed with getting a prize at a NYE party so sharply on the turn of the year. (At the party I had a short but informative chat with someone who knew the custodian of the guitar relic at the end of the 70s.)

I dipped into Iain Sinclair�s book about the M25, particularly the segment we visited. He is mainly concerned with Churchill at Chartwell and the contrast with Palmer at Shoreham. (Palmer is one of Mrs C�s favorites - Sinclair says that he was a 19C Anglican fundamentalist.) Sinclair cuts off the extreme SW segment preferring to go across Epsom Common rather than (say) to the point where the M25 crosses the River Mole - but he has some interesting things to say about Epsom (where Mrs C spent her childhood) especially the Wells and the Salts. I hadn�t realized that Epsom started the spa craze in the England and that it was going strong in the 17th century. Leamington is the other end of the craze - two hundred years later.

Talking of the 17th century and water in Surrey, Mrs C and I walked from the house to Stoke lock on the River Wey. Stoke lock was opened in 1654 and was the first lock on the Wey Navigation. The navigation path gives a completely different perspective on the landscape of course - its own sense of place.

I have finished Feenberg�s book on Heidi and Marcuse. Roughly the drift is that between the two of them there may be a better way of thinking about technology but F doesn�t quite get there. His book from the mid 90s on Alternative Technologies has arrived and I have started dipping into it. The final chapter is about the Japanese Heidi - a figure who is completely new to me - and who seems to have brought the idea of �place� into a zen-influenced philosophy of being. The link with Sinclair is that �place� isn�t just a geographical idea but it is culturally saturated. I think there is some of this in Tacita Dean�s new book about place as an organizing principle in late 20C art and obviously Sinclair has made a career of this.

Over the holidays I spent a lot of time on the score of Berg Op 1 and I have ordered the parts for Op 5. I have also disinterred the recording of Schoenberg Op 16 for which I also have the score and the Boulez recording of the complete Webern - Webern wrote a lot more aphoristic music than the other two.

I thought for a moment over the hols that Fender had reintroduced the Bullet - one of their most uncommon junior guitars - but I think at the moment this is just a Strat body with a single hum bucker.

Interesting interview with Jackson Browne in The Word - I hadn�t realized that John Landau (Springsteen and MC5 producer) produced The Pretender.

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