No way is noble

Days roll by and I’m at a loss as to whether or not I should chart them in all their mundane detail.

John and Del left this morning to again look for places and were at their lowest ebb yet. The housing situation in Watermouth is worse than ever and John in particular seemed very down.

Ade came back last night from his few days in Bournemouth with a “sore cock” (to use his own words); he and Del and John don’t get along particularly well and after D. and J. left this morning, Ade was still lounging on his mattress in Barry’s room. Someone suggested that the three of them should share an £85 per week house advertised in the Herald, but this met with a poor response from him. I don’t see that he really has the right to refuse at this moment in time.

A feature in today’s Union News claimed that the compulsory year in the States has been scrapped for this year’s 1st year American Studies intake. The Union is fighting it all the way, but it’s obvious that if it’s not scrapped this year, then it will be next year. I’ve got in just in time.

Since last Wednesday at Masquerades, I’ve felt very satisfied with my prospects. It’s quite amazing how cold the Art History idea has become with me, and I think it’s just as well because it would be too late to change now anyway. Guy’s enthusiasm rubbed off on me I think.

Last night Barry, Guy, Lindsey and I went to the opening night of a new club, Roxy’s, held at the L.A., a well-known gay disco. I walked all the way to Shelley’s on Queen’s Road on the seafront but she was out so I trudged all the way back and found the others already there.

Roxy’s was free to get in before eleven; I was ushered in to an elaborate glittering foyer, complete with fountain, and found myself surrounded by a couple of characters who looked as they’d auditioned for a part in The Adams Family. Roxy's was quite impressive inside, with two bars, split level seating and spectacular lighting for the dance floor. It was crawling with the trendy post-punk crowd, crowns of dyed, spiky hair jostling for the attention, black, black everywhere.

I was in black too.

Across from us two seedy and forlorn looking men in tacky suits were deep in animated, intimate conversation. Someone called Guy a hippy, which annoyed him, and after this he was full of contempt for the place and the people. They are just a bunch of very conventional extroverts. “Experimental is conventional, conventional is experimental. And no way is noble.”

This applies to the Sanctuary and Roxy’s gang who’ve substituted the predictable uniformity of a more sophisticated kind for the Farahs and wedge-cut anonymity of the Saturday-nite soul-boy crowd. And the sickening thing is they all believe they’re being so different. “Art is not dictated by what coat you wear.”

I would do well to listen to this and practise what I preach.

The girls who lived at Jervis Terrace over the summer made an appearance, and Miles Beattie raced between us and the dance floor while Barry and one of the girls fell into a long conversation. Barry's band dominates conversation at the moment, and it gets a little tedious listening to their prophecies. Ade was saying when we got back that he “cannot wait” to get up on the stage, and I can see both he and Barry really getting into it.

I’m in the throes of starting several books, among them Colin Wilson’s The New Existentialism and The Magus. I also want to read some more Nietzsche, and the chapter on N. in Lukacs The Destruction of Reason. All this and course work too? Probably not.