Summa: diary (September 7-13, 2024)

Is it what it is?

September 7 (Saturday). Birmingham. 9.30 am: I checked out of my accommodation and dragged my suitcase in a south-easterly direction to where I’d be transformed into the ‘guest’ of a delegate attending a professional conference, held at Aston University. I miss the conference circuit: the confusion and apprehension, the plight of the socially inept, registration, lanyards, that first cup of coffee and complementary biscuits, and attendees and organizers who greet one another enthusiastically as though they were old friends but, in reality, have never met before. Most of the delegates are self-employed editors and proofreaders who work from home in hermetic isolation for the rest of the year. Thus, on such an occasion as this, they’re ultra-sociable and astonishingly extrovert as they rub shoulders, gossip, and trade frustrating experiences about authors and publishers. I chilled in the lobby for the first few hours until the bedrooms opened, sat next to an Italian man who looked like Stanley Tucci and talked loudly into his phone and with the speaker on. One of his many calls was to ‘mama’, back in the ‘old country’, who was clearly irate. Maybe he should visit her more often.

September 8 (Sunday). 8.00 am: Full-English breakfast. So much better than at North American conferences, where only sticky doughnuts are offered. From my observation, the demographic of the delegation is as follows: Female editors and proofreaders out number their male counterparts by about 90:1. The women’s ages range from early 30s to 60s and beyond. Some are pursuing the profession full-time, others part-time to support their own writing, and yet others to supplement their pension, having retired from academia. As anticipated, the introverts are conspicuous. Having to engage the bonhomie of communal meals and the pub quiz must be an enormous drain on their psychic batteries.

8.45 am: Into the outer world of drizzledom, and on to the Bull Ring. The city was quiet; the shops still slumbered. I made for a watering hole, before attending Sung Eucharist at the Cathedral Church of St Philip. 10.45 am: The sound of many bells (again). Bell peels aren’t a sequence of repetitions — they aren’t ‘loops’ (short pieces of music or sound that are repeated automatically and consistently). Rather, they permute or change gradually and systematically. (It’s an idea I explored in a composition entitled ‘The Conversion of St Paul: Sample 3/Permutation 3’ on The Bible in Translation album.) I stood in the church grounds transfixed long enough to hear several changes rung while, with eyes closed, eccentrically conducting the beats with my hand. Nor are peels regular in the manner of ‘loops’. The mechanics of the pulley systems, the responsiveness of the bells, the sharpness and timing of each pull, introduce irregular fractional delays and unevenness into the sequence — which humanizes the sound.

In church, I sat down next to a woman who was blind and read from a Braille version of the service sheet. The Old Testament passage was taken from a prophecy promising that ‘the eyes of the blind shall be opened’ (Isaiah 35.5). In anticipation of the reading, we sang Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’, which includes the line: ‘Ye blind, behold your Saviour come’. I wondered how she assimilated that hope of restoration. Short of a miracle, the assurance would not be fulfilled in her on this side of the veil. More congregants arrived, hemming me in on either side. To adapt Stealers Wheel’s lyric: ‘Burne-Jones at the front of me, Burne-Jones at the back, here I am stuck in the middle of pews’.

4.oo pm: An ambulation around the campus. The anticipation of a new academic year is in the air. Some of the international students have already arrived, and are brimming with excitement at the prospect of studying and living in a foreign country. While I sat on a bench soaking up the sun and framing a photograph, a Pakistani man in his 20s thrust his phone into my hand and asked me to take a picture of him, so that he could send it to this parents and elder brothers. A twenty-minute conversation on the themes of family, love and loyalty, the necessity for man to prove himself, true wisdom, and the virtues of age and maturity, ensued. Back home, a fiancée of seven years standing waits patiently for him. He will marry her as soon as he graduates. This young man will go far, I anticipate.

September 9 (Monday). 9.00 am: While the conference delegates enjoyed their final day of discussing the history of the comma and its placement (or some such), I trundled luggage back to the car and the designated storage room at the venue, in readiness for transport to tonight’s hotel. Invariably, as soon as I step onto the campus tarmac a newbie international student will sidle up to me to ask for directions. Aston University should employ me as a senior Ambassador. 9.30 am: I returned to the city centre in search of a watch repairer.

As soon as I stepped into the Library of Birmingham, someone sidled up to me to ask for directions. Then, I twigged: my conference lanyard! I was still wearing it. Clearly, it suggested that I was someone official and in-the-know … wherever I went. The Library’s internal architecture has a Star Trek-cum-Guggenheim Museum ‘vibe’ (which is rapidly becoming an over-used word) — down to (or up to) the ‘Warp Drive’ assembly at the apex of the building.

Rarely do I sit among others reading and writing. It’s a community of minds and, these days, much coffee drinking. I recalled a rather eccentric librarian — notorious for having put a broom handle through Thomas Wright of Derby’s An Eruption of Vesuvius seen from Portici (c.1774-76), which hung in the Library’s stairwell at my local university — who would’ve blown a fuse at the practice. I caught up with family and friendly correspondence.

12.45 pm: I returned to the cathedral grounds and ate lunch in the sunshine. On my way back to the venue, I alighted upon The Angel Water Fountain. It’s set in the outer wall of the churchyard, having been removed from its original site in 1899 and repositioned in 1988. It has a curiously vulva-like orifice from which the fluidic refreshment proceeds (appropriately). No doubt such a connotation would’ve been lost on (or at least not publicly owned by) the Victorians, whose thoughts would’ve been directed heavenward and to the ‘water of life’ (Revelation 21.6; 22.1).

3.00 pm: Having dragged two suitcases from the venue to the Premier Inn, I checked-in.

Different floor; different room; but same desultory daubing. (Sigh!)

But a great view of the city, to compensate. 5.30 pm: Back into the city centre for dinner. I dislike eating out alone, almost as much as going to the cinema on my own. It looks a little sad, as they say. I make short shrift of it, and leave the eatery hastily. Eating isn’t an exercise in self-gratification. To my mind, intercourse (in that rather outmoded sense of communication between individuals or groups of people) is essential when participating is something either as simple as sharing biscuits or fine dining. Food is the loci of, and what feeds, satisfying conversation.

September 10 (Tuesday). 8.00 am: A preparation and packing for the voyage home. 9.30 am: A walk to the Jewellery Quarter, where I deposited my father’s wristwatch — which he’d been given for 25 years loyal service at his factory — to be repaired. The device is more valuable than I’d anticipated. All I got as an long-service award was a wooden Welsh love-spoon. The district retains many of its nineteenth and early-twentieth century industrial red-brick stores and warehouses. 10.45 am: Afterwards, I returned to the gold sellers area. These establishments have a nicely nefarious undertone. I wondered whether there were bits and pieces from the Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery in 1983 were still circulating in the gold-exchange system. What’s my ‘temperature’ got to do with anything? ‘Ah! But is your gold “hot”, sir (in that sense used by gangsters in the 1930s, to mean “stolen and on the cop’s radar”)?’

September 11 (Wednesday). Aberystwyth. 8.00 am: ‘The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house’ (Matthew 7.25). A morning unpacking clothes, archiving photographs and sound recordings, and updating blogs posts. Gradually, my mind gravitated to where I’d left off with the sound projects. But they’re for Friday. After lunch, I caught up with other author/artists’ blogs and research reading.

Remembering this day. I first visited New York City just 20 days after 9/11.

September 12 (Thursday). 8.30 am: Studiology. Diarism: apprising myself of forthcoming commitments. Then, it was back to the book and the overall structure of themes, and an initial exploration of the psychology of reading silently, compared to reading aloud. 1.30 pm: I began reading Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1992).

8.00 pm: A visit from an old English friend who is now an Irish cultural attache for Wales. He is in town for discussions about bilateral partnerships between the two countries with Aberystwyth University and the National Library of Wales. I’ve not engaged with Ireland in terms of research projects since the early 2000s, when I was involved in British Academy funded conference series on The Bible & Art. This was in collaboration between my university, the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Lampeter University (as it was called), and University College Cork. At the latter, several scholars, including Dr Siobhán Dowling-Long, were contributing to the field of the Bible and music. An evening of recollecting and politicking ensued.

September 13 (Friday). 7.30 am: Writing. An autumnal coldness has followed the rains. In the sunlight, the air enlivens. 10.00 am: Studiology. With the table-rig completed and tested I had, today, space to think about practice-based sound projects outside the perimeter of a (notional) performance/improvisatory framework.

11.00 am: A dismantling of equipment no longer ‘needed on voyage’. Get back to square one before building anew.

A number of outstanding questions and reflections still prevail upon me:

• The original and failed ambition to conceive a compact and portable performance rig remains a challenge;
• Could sound production serve as an adjunct to the Bible and sound book?;
• And what of the electric guitar: Does it have a place in the scheme of things at this present time?;
• If so, how can I avoid overt musicality?

In order to address the first point, I began conceiving of the most extreme position of the set-up: single source fed into a simple but flexible array of modifiers, the output of which will be captured on a portable digital recorder. A rummage in my ‘bits’ box for switches and relays. while coming across unlabelled bespoke units the functions of which are a mystery right now.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice