my life as aesthete

Book on my Christmas list

Its the nicely titled ‘Riding with Rilke’ by Ted Bishop. Here’s (what I think is) the opening paragraph:

It wasn’t a mid-life crisis: it was mid-life money. I had inherited some cash and was desperately afraid I would do something sensible with it, like put it on my mortgage or into mutual funds. So I bought a Ducati Monster. I had the fall term off and planned to go to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the improbable location of the best archive in the world of British modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and T.E. Lawrence. Then I got a travel grant from the Ransom Center. They didn’t say how I had to travel. September would be perfect for a ride.

Good eh? As the reveiws say, a book about biking for people with an A level in English Literature.

University life

Here’s two photographs. One is of a part of Cambridge University (Cambridge is where I live) and the other is of one of the (many) Middlesex University Campuses in North London (I work for Middlesex Uni but not at this campus).

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You Have to try to guess which one is which.

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The last night of the Proms

I looked away, I felt sick. I was watching David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, with typewriters turning into ghastly monsters dripping foul fluid. After the end late tonight, I turned on the radio to blow away the nightmare images and I hear …. Jerusalem. Its the last night of the proms ‘as always the national anthem is the climax of the last night of the proms’, the commentator says. I can’t believe it is over already, with its horns and conductors and stamping of feet. For many years, on and off, I had marked the end of the summer with that last night and this year it just slipped by, I discovered it too late for the spell to work on me.

Rhythmic Thrust at Man in the Moon

Youth from Hills Rd Sixth Form College in Cambridge and probably other places converged on music pub Man in the Moon the other night for a fest of strangely retro bands, among them Rhythmic Thrust which includes my entire personal progeny. Youth nowadays seem unprejudiced and eclectic when it comes to the music they listen to – and are seen listening to. RT has a kind of early Pink Floyd sound. rthymic1.jpg

Here’s other gigs at the Man on the Moon.