November 26, 2015

‘I have a cold’; a cold has me’! This mantra kept going through my head during the night, as sleep remained evasive and I was thrown about the bed by fits of coughing like a demoniac by its host. I arose late, ate breakfast, returned to bed, and waited for the Lemsip MAX to arrive. Once it’d kicked in, the piercing headache and mucus coughing subsided sufficiently for me to get my first real experience of unconsciousness in two days:

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1.40 pm. Back to the pumps! Now to do the postgraduate bibliographies. Some Bach to lubricate the mind, enliven the soul, and mask the noise of a neighbour’s tree surgeon. The rural boundaries of the urban world experience their own unruly and aggressive sounds.

3.30 pm. Next summer, I need to write a ‘module’ for PhD Fine Art students, one that could be studied both at a distance and on site. (This was a one of those ideas that come to me with clarity when in infirmity.) It would deal with the philosophy and psychology of practice-based research, the problems of self- and para-analytical writing (the thesis element), time management, the concept of the artist-researcher, and notions of originality, among other themes. This would be a ‘module’ for the School’s students only. I don’t want to water it down into a generic provision that any creative researcher might attend. That would miss the point entirely.

Pumping over! Rest. More hot, honey drink:

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4.15 pm. Back to updating my CV and website profiles, as a prelude for fleshing out my university research profile. I always vow never to let my profiles fall being significantly. But I often fail to honour that pledge.

6.15 pm. Practise session 1. 7.15 pm. On with the profiles’ updates. Inconsistencies between versions of the same items on different databases abound. But sorting them out is part of my responsibility as the curator and conservationist of the works that I’ve produced: be they books, chapters, articles, conference presentations and originations, exhibitions, or sound works and performances.

More fluids:

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As HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), would say: ‘My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.’ Enough!

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November 27, 2015