Does love sit cold until you put it somewhere?

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Fieldnotes #261

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In a time almost forgotten the rusty big wheel will spin onwards; rotating left then right until a faint buzzing 'click' hints at a new start, a new fashion for 'Diamond Jim' to wear like he means that kind of business - a way to unlearn centuries of pretended, dastardly, evolution I suppose. An ill-fitting bolt coils right, a sugar-spark lifts the groove and a melody is unleashed upon a knowing world full of Lévi-Strauss wonder. But how much time is time enough 'in the field?'. It is not so much the length of stay, one suspects, but more the memories that travel back with you in a beaten-up wooden box to a lonely due-South port. How best to convey and account for the rituals, habits and customs that become part of a wider identity that is first assumed and then ultimately taken-as-read? The senses are well-trained, hoping against hope, to absorb, consume, digest in a faded-blue notebook with the aid of a knife-sharpened HB pencil that tucks behind an ear that should know better: the sights, smells, tastes and a delicate velvet touch that can know few intimate boundaries. This calls for an emotive description that is much less Geertz and altogether more Douglas; the foods the odours, the language, the dirt... a required vividness combined with a sensuality and sense of place/belonging. Ethnography is indeed many things and 'easy' is not one of them; but privilege certainly is.

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Throwing Muses - 'Two Step' (4.35)

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News.

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