quotidian reality

I bought an external drive the other day: the lacie 250gb thing "designed by porsche" although, how much design can go into an anonymous grey box that makes barely perceptible whirrs when it gets really overwrought is something I am not qualified to speak on. Suffice it to say that it almost doubles my capacity and introduces my firewire ports for the first time to something other than dust. Would I be correct in thinking one can daisy chain powered firewire devices? That would be theoretically interesting. Anyway, I now have a way to work with larger projects on my laptop, with its measly 30Gb disk.

Today I'll be working on some stuff to do with a personal visual/textual database of book artists and people/stuff/films/events I find inspiring or important. It started out as an assignment in the methodology course, but- partly thanks to freemind- it has become an interesting contraption for me, and in a way a manner of conducting research, since many of my picks- Roni Horn...Isaac Julien...Bookworks as a publisher...were kind of fringe presences to me about whom I could have put forward vague feelings of approval but no opinions as such. I'm not sure I'll conquer this grey empire of cultural fogginess but I shall certainly generate a lot of writing. This is good because it shows I am Industrious and Serious About My Studies. It may be useful. At the moment I am considering a policy of doing whatever interests me (with some sense of guidance and steering) with the understanding that it'll do one of two things a) it'll become part of my PhD studies b) it'll get me kicked off the course: either of these two outcomes are potentially the correct one in the sense that they would reflect my preoccupations' suitability for this type of research (as if I knew what type of research it was) and my readiness to undertake it. I don't want to give the impression of being unable to take the rough parts of things on. I'm not declaring a policy, merely meditating the position, that, under a regime of total imaginative and research freedom, things would fall out in this way. The reality is much more guided, moderated and hedged about by both my own cognisance of my putative research and the guidance I receive in fits from others. I'm loosening myself from a sense of doom about it, and trying to reclaim my own interests. It would be impossible to visualise an outcome, I think, without knowing what one wanted. I must find this out, and this may mean thinking about other ways of achieving it. I'm not merely having "second thoughts" (although that's one way of putting it). I'm hoping that I'm giving my creative, research and compositional skills the freedom to find a better way to express themselves.