8.30 am. Having upgraded to Mac OS Maverick Yosemite, I can no longer make a Bluetooth connection between my MacBook with the external amplifier. (My prediction, last week, was correct.) No doubt the companies wishing to connect their devices thus will gets their heads together and issue an upgrade.

10.30 am. A visit to Occupational Health situated in the Human Resources offices at the university’s Science Park. I detest the term ‘human resource’; it serves only to depersonalise and commodify university employees. The offices are, similarly, impersonal and inhumane. Observations (from ‘The Black Notebook’ (Jan. 2, 2008 – , 181-3 )):

I’m sit among boxes of boxes, corrugated flat packs, and clear-plastic bags of shredded paper / old, dented filing cabinets form a partition between ‘them’ (the office workers) and me / the place feels like a cross between a Job Centre and a doctors’ surgery — doubly unsettling, in other words / I overhear one side of telephone conversations, and chit-chat. Someone says: ‘I’m a bit narked, to be honest’ / someone else asks: ‘Are we getting a bus to Conwy?’ / tame framed prints of the Welsh landscape on the walls, alongside white-boards and shelves of unkempt photocopy paper / why would anyone print on deep tangerine copy paper? / I, the visitor, sit in semi-darkness; the office workers, in the light / reason the metaphor:

11.20 pm. An impromptu pastoral meeting followed by an invited tutorial. 2.00 pm. An MA tutorial with one of my students who is turning a corner, followed by a rescheduled BA painting tutorial at the close of the day:

Principles and observations from the day’s teaching:

• Some students stay in the race, persevere, and achieve academically in spite of insuperable personal or contextual difficulties. It is they, and not the most gifted, necessarily, that incite my greatest admiration.
• A lack of self confidence is more likely to stymie our progress in the discipline than a want of technical and conceptual proficiency.
• We habitually position ourselves along lines between two opposed/supposed opposites: abstraction – figuration; determinacy – indeterminacy; Avant Garde – academic; esoteric – populist; colourist – tonalist; loose – tight, and so on. What would a map that integrated those plotted polarities look like?
• Sometimes the best you can do for an art student is to point them towards another artist.

7.30 pm. Matt. 19.10: my process-verse for the day. In the background, I played the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire (1973) – the album that changed my whole outlook on jazz and rock, freedom and structure, and intellect and spiritual devotion, and the possibility of their meaningful integration. The music’s fusion of ecstasy, conviction, facility, and beauty is almost unbearable.

9.45 pm. Practise session 2. 10.50 pm. ‘The night watch’: I inspected the PowerPoint and formatted the text for Thursday’s Art/Sound lecture.