Shaved off my beard, the first facial growth of mine that really deserves the title, before going out to the Art School Saturday Club ‘Joy1’. Indie stuff. It was quiet to begin with and I felt a bit out of it. But a saintly Italian girl came and invited me to sit with her and her friends.
They consisted of a German economist, an ex-sailor and his girlfriend of six years and another Italian girl. Both the Italians were from Florence university and had come on an exchange for one term to Glasgow University. The girl who had invited me over seemed highly intelligent and had recently been reading Jane Austen’s juvenilia! Her favourite author was E.M. Forster. She had read almost everything by him except Where Angels Fear to Tread — his Italy novel. Well, Italy is the background of A Room with a View but Forster’s concept of Italian spontaneity, masculinity etc was hatched in Where Angels… (How crass.) If it weren’t for this girl, whose name I have done her the disservice of forgetting I would probably have spent the evening shyly trying to work up courage to speak to someone, and failing. Instead I was amused.
The ex-sailor told me something interesting — when you go on board ship you are assigned a Sea-Dad. When you first go into a foreign port, you are ‘sold’ to a foreign prostitute. Your Sea-Dad arranges this. Of course your mates are unlikely to pick the most savoury women. This ‘losing your cherry’ as he called it, happened to him four times. He had been almost everywhere in the world except the Far East. He said the most valuable possessions on board ship are ‘dirty mags and commando magazines’. This is because no-one has room in their kit bags to bring them aboard. But he also said ‘anything with words’ presented one with bargaining power.
Met the choreographer Yolande Snaith.
Note dated today —
I still haven’t got the trick of these two doors, the one to the landing from the stairs, the one to the stairs from the landing — They’re very difficult doors, badly made locks with holes which do not guide the key neatly into the mechanism. Dear dear, how Freud. But I am actually speaking about the physical doors. One can sometimes approach them and be through in five seconds, other times, usually when you have two bags of shopping, and are wet, they take up a minute. Putting oneself in a trancelike state of calm and then failing to open the door usually brings on a paroxysm of rage. The reverse is occasionally true. One approaches the door belligerently and is baffled into a state of stoic acceptance/resignation. In either case one eventually gets through the door and performs whatever tasks necessitated the opening of the door. Then one returns2.
Novel note —
Eventually Babel lost what he perhaps had been trying to lose all along — consciousness.
I can’t find any mention of this. But an article about the Glasgow club scene in the Quietus contains a couple of nuggets. I’d always wondered who the DJ was. I remember them playing ‘Loaded’ by Primal Scream and it sounding great and fading into Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Crosstown Traffic’ which sounded even better. But ‘Loaded’ was only released on this Monday coming, so unless it was an early copy, that setlist must be from a later night. I’d also wondered if the DJ was Stuart Murdoch, later of Belle & Sebastian who — in some ways — haunt this time of young-Toby’s in Glasgow as a future presence, unperceived. But in the Quietus, Stuart says, ‘By 1990 I was burnt out as a DJ, so happy just to dance.’
He adds — ‘By the end of the 80s, with the Mondays and the Roses coming through, it was ok to dance again. Everyone was much more relaxed. Indie went to the high street and got mixed up with the whole rave thing. Then Andy [Andrew Divine] created his own little pocket up at the Art School, thank God! All the freaks came out of the woodwork.’
Andy says — ‘The first night [we ran] there were queues around the block, I think it was the night King Tut’s opened and Pale Saints were playing and I thought no one would come, but it was early and they came after. It was a huge success.’
According to setlist.fm this was 23 February 1990, so — if Andy’s memory is correct — I was there for the first night. As we’ll see next Saturday.
Translation, dated today.
Cocteau
Well, glory be! The Devil really does exist!
Once I was amiable, loved life and all it includes, even hateful women, but now it infects me.
Take some advice, my young admirer, and don’t imitate me, neither my mannerisms nor my dreams, what I do or what you think I do.
Remember, Death will even cheat at chess, seamy Death will sell strips of your bedding to your admirers, sacred Death will publish you on toilet walls.
But tomorrow, for me at least, it will have been worth it; tomorrow I am going to stun you, and everyone, stun the whole world, like the rocket once let off by the prudent unobserved boy, which tricked itself into constellation.
Adapted from Cocteau’s poem Oh!La!La!
This is still, along with ‘The Albatross’, one of my favourite translations.