Shameless Self-Promotion: New Momus Essay

a) As a service to humanity. b) To save the world. c) To bolster my self-appointed role as pompously pontificating all- purpose pantomime pundit.

In that order.

Bill

Yes Matthew it is the same here, unfortunatley right down to the farming. I'm sure Robin would have a take on this if he were treading the thread. One difference, all but a few are charmers up here. However it is still Northern California with the largest contingent of Green party voters, exiled leftists and their right-wing daughters.

The housing is bigger here but I find the most comfort inside, to me all this nature, seems...lonely.

Matthew, I get your point (2 years ago I'd have agreed, actually) but I think the whole *point* of globalism is that I can escape the singularity of the countryside (or, in my case, the semi-rural, semi- urban no man's land in which far more British people live than you'd guess from most of the print media). I've learnt an inordinate amount about how people from different backgrounds and disciplines function on forums like this, something I find has passed me by from bumping into people in London (no long-term relationship formed, nothing learned). Doesn't Momus end that essay by talking of the irrelevance of national borders and "my nation is the internet"?

Such a conception of the countryside is of course tempting, Matthew, and I've read enough on the subject to come close to it (Patrick Wright on this entire territory: GRATE), but ultimately it's irrelevant to the way people actually live: go to any of these places right now and you will hear the number one from So Solid Crew far *far* more than you will hear, say, Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. I am, at heart, a realist: I've killed my wandering Romantic heart to deal with the way things are, not the way some imagine them being. That conception no longer haunts me, because I no longer feel the weight of history other than as a tourist, a dilletante, not someone who feels he has to carry it around with him. I live invisibly inasmuch as nobody takes much notice when I'm out, wherever I'm out (the "Is your name Charlotte?" gang = the physical world's D**m*ntr*ll and equally ignorable), and that's how I like it.

The isolationism = aggression you talk about is a factor (used to haunt and frighten me before I got my current self-confidence, though looking back now I think of that fear as simply a byproduct of my depression at the time) but, for me, it's simply a counterpoint to the other ugly (metropolitan) extreme of success and money = snobbery. I can avoid the latter in London by working my way around those places where it will fester, and likewise I can here (actually, there is a *massive* difference between my own part of Dorset - working-class, often Labour-voting, huge influx of people from the rest of the UK, virtually zero foxhunting / Countryside Alliance axis) and the more Tory inland areas where I'd probably agree with Matthew).

On balance, I think Nathan Barley deserved the abuse he got from Oxfordshire farmhands in a TVGH entry some time back, though we are of course talking about two fictional caricatures, both as ugly as each other, and contrived as such, so not relevant to a daily experience which, in lieu of any other phrase that I feel defines it, I would call Superflat.

I knew that "Daily Mail Ruralism" (actually more Telegraph Ruralism as I understand it: the Mail is basically suburban) isn't your *own* conception, though on first reading it reminded me more of the High Romantic idea of "the deep country". My point was that it isn't everyone's conception, and it doesn't have that much relevance to the lives that most of us live internally.

Curiously enough, and relevant to this thread, "Folktronic", despite its cosmopolitan origins, seems incredibly relevant to *me* and the contradictions of my own life: this is the world we're *all* living in.

Matthew, you remind me of myself when I first posted on alt.fan.momus two years ago, with the same blend of intriguing ideas and clumsy overstatements (the latter isn't a criticism: I think you'll mature with time). However I think you're *completely* wrong that we only get a "narrow range" of people on the internet: there are certain places in London where you can choose only ever to see a narrow range of people, and likewise there are uses you can make of the internet to avoid ever meeting certain people. I don't: I can't imagine myself meeting a broader range of people than I've met online.

Ruralism = "simplicity and singularity": well, not necessarily, certainly not for me. But I can understand where such a perception can come from (check the afm archives circa September 1999!).

My point was that it isn't everyone's conception, and it doesn't have that much relevance to the lives that most of us live internally.
we were speaking in the context of the traveller, the globalist; i was presuming on the motives of those who choose country over city. which is a little unreasonable, but you know, that's a habit. but the simplicity and singularity really isn't my conception, i'm suggesting that as a motive. obviously modern rural is bound to throw up al the contradictions of Folktronic.

I've no doubt that the singularity and simplicity is a motive for many people: they exist, and not just on the right. How else to explain the back-to-the-land type in the Guardian "Soulmates" the other Saturday who "Dislikes technology" or the roots of the entire High Romantic thing that Patrick Wright has described so wonderfully these last 20 years or so? Matthew, Folktronic was *very* much on my mind, and I really should have mentioned it earlier in the thread: "Simple Men", "Protestant Art" and "Folk Me Amadeus" have me burning with contradictory ideas and thoughts on why I react how I do to what I do, but I can live with it because I see no reason to come to a definite conclusion (conclusions to debates = end of debates = DUD). The Incredible String Band were certainly in search of some kind of simplicity (or at least they were pre-ironic: "Waltz of the New Moon" is the most sustained seven-minute escape from all modern urban life in pop as I've experienced it) and Momus likes them. My relationship with "my" past is one of numerous edges, and most of them are hard for me to work out: what those still in search of singularity feel they grasp is most likely being sold and auctioned, like any other commodity, two clicks away from here. It's my interest in these ideas that gripped me about The Little Red Songbook sleeve notes and all Momus's subsequent work (of course I was a fan before but I connected *instantly* with the Analog Baroque and Fake Folk ideas more than I ever did with, say, Timelord).

After all, there is a direct and strong relevance of both Steeleye Span's "All Around My Hat" and 2 Unlimited's "No Limit" (arguably two records that have had some kind of influence on Folktronic) to the Conservative leadership campaign (a genuine chain of events, incidentally, and the sort of situation my mind thrives on).

Blimey, you can't get anything past Robin and his progressive ruralist media monitoring skeelz.