Month: August 2020

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to heal … break down … weep … refrain from embracing … lose … cast away … rend … keep silence’ (Ecclesiastes 3.1-7). WFH: DAY 124. 7.30 am: Here we are again. I’m alive; and that’s quite something. This is a ‘day…

‘Can noise, too, be a teacher pointing to Silence that is the ground of all? Is noise also (like everything else that exists) a spoke leading to the hub that is the Centre of us all?’ (Martin Laird, The Sunlit Absence (2011)) Yet do I remember the time past (Psalm 143.5). WFH: DAY 123. 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am:…

WFH: DAY 120. 7.30 am: 8.15 am: A communion. 8.45 am: I prepared for a day of postgraduate tutorials, marking, and ‘potching’ around in the studio (recording, modifying, and editing). 9.30 am: The first of the day’s MA fine art tutorials. Currently, there’s a complex of deferrals, resits, and resubmissions taking place under the university’s Covid-19 regulations. In between tutorials,…

August 23-24: Saturday was set aside for eBay sales. There comes a time when sound equipment that hasn’t been used in years needs to be sold in order to finance new and necessary devices. All gains are ploughed back into the land. Each effects processor and preamp embodies a history of its usage. On Sunday, following a magna-clean around the…

‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’ (St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God (1259)). WFH: DAY 118. 7.30 am: The clouds moved swiftly from south to north, as though fleeing from calamity. ‘There will be windfall!’: 8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Studiology. This morning, I’d assemble the extracted sub-samples from the…

WFH: DAY 116. 8.15 am: Preparations for Clearing. I’m always a little anxious that the ‘webclient’ portal won’t recognise me. Not that it never has. (My neuroses are very specific.) Our marketing and admissions teams are excellent: informed, clear communicators, courteous, and professional. 10.00 am: Kick off! Participation in my capacity as a departmental advisor is rather like being a…

WFH: DAY 115. 8.00 am: A communion: The ‘A’-level debacle has evolved into the Clearing debacle, as universities now seek to perform the miracle of pouring a quart into a pint pot. Government is supposed to solve problems, not create them. Michelle Obama’s critique, yesterday, of the Trump administration could equally be applied to our own leaders’ performance. The want…