The National Anthem

In which our hero discusses religion, enlightenment, and anal rape.

actually, discusses is not quite the right word: it presupposes you can argue back. you can of course, that’s what the comments are for. but, you know.

at the start of this module i’m doing, we were asked to write a definition of ‘enlightenment’, or rather, to summarise three definitions chosen from wherever we wanted. i picked one literary/cultural definition, one historical, and one, just to mix things up a bit, from ‘a dictionary of buddhism’. anyway, we were discussing the fact that in Robinson Crusoe, what is generally referred to as ‘the first novel’, Crusoe is a man driven entirely by economic motives – profit, in other words. the novel is a perfect encapsulation of ‘enlightenment thought’, and how the individual became seen as the basic unit of society, rather than the family or the village community. how, in essence, capitalism started. if man is no longer defined by his status as part of a community, but by his status as an individual, then there are no allegiances, it’s every man for himself. anyone can become president of the united states.

as you might be able to tell by the last sentence, i’m thinking in a rather tongue-in-cheek way about the motives of the Enlightenment and its thinkers. to summarise, for those who haven’t had this drilled into them by a selection of history teachers: Enlightenment thought = man is able to achieve near perfection, through the reform of society to exclude tradition, superstition and ‘imature thought’. they kept a place for God, because they’d have been censored otherwise, but the tenets of Enlightenment are secular in all but name

the trouble with the ostensibly noble ideas of Enlightenment is that it was largely a European phenomenon. Crusoe’s island was supposed to represent man (Crusoe is designed as a universal representative) stripped of ignorance and superstition, free to achieve the absolutes of intellectual, social and economic freedom – a blank canvas. But Crusoe doesn’t see a beautiful tropical island, rich in colour and lush with life. instead, and this is one of the things that troubles me, what he sees is something to profit from. he doesn’t see a beautiful hillside, he sees a stretch of land to be terraced, ploughed, and sown with seed to grow wheat.

What the book suggests is that this representative of the new society – and it’s a society that we still live in today – is stripped of all the trappings of the previous 1700 years of cultural development, and as a result becomes a creature unable to live in the company of other humans, and who sees everything in terms of exploitation and profit. and what’s worse, he is not a greedy man, he’s just trying to survive. if we are to survive as a race, the book suggests, we must abandon all thoughts of community and sociality, and be driven by economic gain.

now, this has set me thinking. as far as i am concerned, organised religion hasn’t been relevant to our society since the Reformation. people realised that to commune with God and to have faith didn’t require a Church to pray in. before the Reformation, the Catholic Church was so integral to the founding and continuation of society that any attempts to remove it would require – well, did require -  a war that ravaged Europe for near a century. when people were presented with the notion that to have faith in God, and to live an everyday life did not require the incense, priests, icons, damnation and hellfire of the Catholic Church, then organised religion began an irreversible decline in relevance. why do you need a church when you can pray at your bedside at night, or on your knees facing Mecca, or on the way to catch the bus in the morning.

well, there’s a simple answer there – you need the church because you’re not Robinson Crusoe, and neither is anyone else. we can’t live on profit alone. man is a social animal and we need to be with other people. particularly, since we spend so much time putting up a front and shielding our emotions, it is a huge and neccesary catharsis to do something as personal as praying, performing the actions of your faith, in a group of other people all doing the same. the vicar, or the priest, or the mullah, might as well not be there, if their only job is to represent the Anglican Church, or the Catholic Church, or the Prophet, and to tell those present that their (and only their) church is what allows one to truly communicate with God.

but it’s not of course. going to church is a community action. you go to see people and chat to people and gossip about them behind their backs, and eat the stale biscuits and drink the tea, and chat to the Vicar about his trip to Mali to visit deprived children. you don’t go there to pray, or at least, you don’t need to.

everyone believes in something. that is as close as i will ever come to laying down a certifiable fact. everyone believes in something, because to not believe in something higher, lower or other than the everyday world would mean one had ripped aside the shroud, stared into the abyss and seen one’s place in the universe – one molecular speck in the vastness of infinity – and that is not something humans are capable of doing. Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in God, but he believes in Darwin with more fervour than a cathedralful of ordinary people believe in God. everyone believes in something. you may not believe in God, but you ascribe what you cannot understand to quantum mechanics, or a butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings, or to ‘these things just happen’

so organised religion may be irrelevant – turn the vatican into an art gallery, get some use out of it – but the community that it engenders is more important than ever, especially since we live in a society founded upon the principle that man can perfect himself by believing in profit alone. there’s no Universal Church, where anyone can come, and sit, and pray, or read New Scientist, or salaam to Mecca, or rant and rave about Genesis and Darwin, or drink a really good cup of tea and find the last chocolate biscuit in the tin – but maybe there ought to be. the Quakers are about as close as it gets. i hear they do a good line in biscuits.

oh yes, i mentioned anal rape. we watched a film for Aesthetics today, a french film called Irreversible, starring Vincent Cassell and Monica Belluci. you’ve probably seen or heard about an American film called Memento, where the scenes of the movie are shown backwards? well, this is the same, but considerably harder to watch. for one thing, the camera swoops and spins and flies around, but never cuts – every scene is a long take. for another, the second scene – the penultimate one, chronologically – is twenty five minutes long, set in the claustrophobic, red-lit interior of a gay fetish club, and features one man’s arm being snapped at the elbow by someone kneeling on it and pulling the hand, and then that same man, the one who did the arm snapping, has his head smashed to a pulp by a man with the bottom of a fire extinguisher. the camera never cuts away. you see the whole thing. for the whole 25 minutes, by the way, the music in the club is a low-frequency undulating hum calculated to make the audience feel nauseous.

several scenes later – or earlier – Monica Belluci leaves a party, in a skin-tight, skin-coloured dress and not much else, takes the underpass to cross a busy Paris street. a man and a woman come into the other end of the underpass. they argue, and the man starts viciously beating the woman. Monica Belluci intervenes, the woman – a prostitute – runs away, and the man proceeds to threaten Alex – Monica Belluci – with a knife. he rips her dress off, forces her to the floor, and with his hand over her mouth, anally rapes her. when he’s finished, he rolls off her. she gasps and coughs, because she’s been screaming herself hoarse behind his hand. he waits for her to get to her knees, then kicks her in the face – a long, rugby-conversion kick, with a small run up. when she gets up again, he does it again. then he sits on her back and slams her face repeatedly into the concrete floor of the underpass. the camera never cuts, you see everything. probably the very worst part is that in one corner of the screen, as she’s being raped and screaming, an indistinct figure walks into the underpass, pauses, looks at them, looks back, and leaves.

it’s a charming little film. actually, a few scenes later, there is a long section where Cassell and Belluci roll and roam about their apartment, naked, and discuss everything in the world, in a perfect, perfectly French Cinema dialogue – covering every topic that comes up. they were husband and wife when the film was shot, and it shows – they’re absolutely comfortable with each other.

anyway, the reason i mention this film, apart from its effect on my general mood today, was that it raises interesting thoughts about the nature of revenge. because the scenes are played derriere-votre-face, pardon my french, you see the consequences (Cassell leaving the club on a stretcher, his friend in the hands of the police), then you see what caused those consequences, the horrifying bit with the fire extinguisher (the sound of metal hitting wet meat and bone is not a pleasant one), and later what caused Cassell and his friend to go into that gay fetish club, all madness and rage. all i’ll say about the implications the film puts forward about revenge is that after wildly questioning everyone in the club, the man that Cassell tries to fight and Pierre bludgeons to death is a stranger, and the real rapist is standing behind them while they do it, with a slight grin on his face.

Effigy

Okay, well, now i have something to write about – the two things mentioned at the end of the last post, and a few others besides.

So, work experience at the bbc. even though i had to be there disgustingly early, it was great fun and i can definitely see myself doing it as a career – the journalistic side, rather than the technical side. i learned to use their desktop software, reading news wires and emails and all sorts of exciting thingybobs. the atmosphere in the newsroom was slightly more relaxed than i was expecting, but then, this was only regional news – but still, there seemed to be a number of people doing extraordinary things that weren’t always directly related to the lunchtime or evening broadcasts – the girl behind me on one side was doing something that appeared to be keeping tabs on all the local politicians and their press-sheets and whatnots, while the lovely if rather intense chap directly behind me was looking over old programmes from the sixties, seventies and eighties and recording them, if they were relevant, into the main server – and interestingly, checking them for any copyright material – there was a piece he came across while i was there, from the early nineties, about some coastal erosion, and he had to put a big red mark against it in the archive log because the copyright fee for some of the underwater photography was £750 a minute. imagine being a rookie and making *that* mistake.

The whole thing was pretty exciting – sitting in the gallery and watching the show go out, with four people all talking (in some kind of code) at once, and one guy who’s whole job appears to be counting down, and the poor presenter has all that going in her ear all the time, and has to filter out everything that doesn’t apply to her, and still look composed and sane. mad shit. but yeah – i can definitely see that (the journalistic bit – not presenting) as a career. let’s see, huh.

What else happened. oh, my laptop died – the graphics chip melted or something – so i have a shiny new one, much better, for less money, on which i write this very blog. it cost me £39 pounds for a very nice man to take it away, do more or less exactly what i did to it, to ‘fix it’, bring it back, and no sooner had i written him a cheque and he’d driven off, than the screen went all purple and green again and it died. so there you are.

The Romsey Show was on Saturday, and was a huge success, as usual. fantastic weather, hundreds/thousands of people. i went all middle class and bought lots of cheese and pork pies and cider and so on, and some nice thick socks. there’s something that the show brings out in me that i love, it’s almost approaching patriotism – not that strange, St George’s flag waving, barely-concealed-xenophobia that daily mail readers pollute the concept of ‘England’ with, but a genuine and deep-seated affection for a country, and a way of life, and a people that got left behind a long time ago. sometimes i do worry, you know. the world moves faster and faster, and we don’t think. we don’t stop and actually think about the consequences of our actions. humanity skims from one narrowly avoided disaster to the next – Terry Pratchett calls it ‘the catastrophe curve’, and i think we skim closer than ever to the point of falling off. part of me is morbidly hoping that what in my head i persistently refer to as ‘The Collapse’ happens in my lifetime, so i can experience it, and recover from it, and find out what sort of person i really am. situations like you see in the movies or in videogames, with the total or partial collapse of civilisation, fascinate me.

we had this discussion fairly early on at Rootes, a couple of years ago. What would it be like if The Collapse happened overnight, and we sixteen, H Block First Floor, were the only people (as far as we knew) left alive? consensus was reached fairly swiftly that Sam, the smelly sociopathic Marxist, would be given a crowbar and our hearty good wishes, and shoved firmly out the door to face the headcrabs on his own. but beyond that, i wonder who of the fifteen of us would be the leader, and how things would work out. films like Children of Men always inspire daydreams about what i would do in that situation. in the event of the zombie apocalypse, you can be fairly certain, i would take the samurai sword that sits meekly in the corner of my room and it wouldn’t leave my hand until i was (relatively) safe. but i’m not sure if i’d be one of those leader-of-men types. maybe.

bah. enough musings. another time, folks. xx

White Tooth Man

well, at least that’s better than what the other title was going to be. about two songs ago, i started writing a blog post under someone else’s name, who’d foolishly left themselves logged in.

I’ve got the place to myself tonight, and my my, hasn’t it been a while. i did some writing earlier while watching radiohead live at reading (very good, lots of neon and wibbley electro bits, and a fair bit of jonny greenwood sitting cross-legged on the stage fucking about with a sampler/theramin crossover doodad), and now, here i am, bloggering.

i suppose i haven’t talked about somerset. that’s the trouble, i get so far behind that i forget details. this was a couple of weeks ago – i and nine others headed down into the wilds of somerset to frolic, drink cider, read poetry, bung ourselves into rivers and generally feck around. it was wonderful. i drove, along with another guy, and i also cooked all week and got a good foundation down for a recipe book with some well appreciated things, i may even post the recipes up here at some point.

frankly though, i’m struggling to find things to write about. nothing much has happened. i’ve bought a lot of books for next year, i’ve failed to do much work for my dissertation, and as a result i’ll need to get my arse in serious gear over the next couple of weeks or failing that, go up to leamington earlier than i was already planning and hide in the library until it’s done. sigh. still. work experience with the bbc later this week, and the romsey show the week after that – win. i’ll write again when i’ve got more to say. sorry if you wasted your time reading this. x

Airbag/These are the days

you’re right, it has been a very long time, hasn’t it. not much has happened.

(i was told off the other night for saying ‘not much’ happens in my life. to me, it’s just stuff. other people, apparently, find it interesting. i can’t think why – it’s not their life. there’s only so much interest one can dedicate to things that happen in an entirely different world.)

so, to me, telling you, not much has happened. to me, for myself, plenty of things. i got a job, i got a car. the job is hard work, and the hours are long and inconvenient, and as much as i like the work and the people, i won’t be working there for very long, because when i’m under pressure, i fuck up. no, that’s not the case. to clarify – when i am under the pressure of time, i fuck up. when we have five orders in, that’s an average of twenty people all paying around twenty pounds each for their starters and main courses combined, and i’m making twenty starters and preparing the vegetables for twenty different main courses, and i’ve got to do it in a non-sequential order, mixing four different starters here with rice for this, new potatoes for that, green beans for the other and salad for something else, and then back to starters, and help another guy who is only my subordinate by a matter of days and several years’ cooking experience do whatever he’s supposed to be doing, and i’ve got to do all that in about two minutes per order, then i start fucking up. pressure of expectation, not a problem. but time is a thief.

but today, and tomorrow (times of day be damned, it’s still wednesday) i have a day off. no work, no nothing. only what i want to do. driving around, doing what i please. except it’s not what i please, of course, because life isn’t like that.

yeah, it’s going to be one of those posts.

life isn’t like that, or i wouldn’t be sitting here, in my living room, at currently twelve minutes past two in the morning, listening to radiohead very loudly and

not listening to radiohead any more, because the gods of spotify have singled me out for special punishment. i’ve so far listened to two songs and three adverts. that’s motherfucking perverse. that’s not how the ratio works. back on to radiohead now – but if this song ends and i get another advert for a band that the market research people think i might like, (florence and the fucking machine. stop throwing yourself around the stage, get some singing lessons and get a fucking grip),

what was i saying.

listening to radiohead very loudly, when i should be in bed. but i came home from southampton, fucked about for a bit, ‘hopped in the car, went up to asda for some shopping, and hopped back in the car to go home’, in the words of my brother,

testing. the song has ended. AHAH! straight on to another song. still, by rights, i should be advert free for another four at least.

put my shopping away (a very me shop. a bottle of white burgundy, two bottles of ale, one of turkish lager, two bags of salad, some radishes, bread, cheese, a joint of gammon, some ben and jerrys – half baked, since you ask -  and some broad beans) and sat down, with v for vendetta in the background, editing and uploading about a third of the WSC reviews. put my laptop away, sat and watched Vanilla Sky, which turns out to be a really good movie. i’d heard mixed reviews, but i’m always up for a good dose of headfuckery and scantily clad penelope cruziness. all good.

and now, sitting here, writing this personal letter to you, whoever you are, and feeling, after a glass and a half of wine, like i ought to be all maudlin and wittery. but actually i feel okay. nervous about some things. a long car journey when i’m used to doing half hour hops at the most. and i’m still not that great a driver. i fuck up easily, going too fast. having to overcompensate, which i shouldn’t have to. but, everything seems so slow when you’ve driving at sixty or seventy for half a mile, doing the other half at thirty feels like crawling on your hands and knees. tired of work, and wishing they’d understand i didn’t sign up for a full time job, and that i don’t have to give a reason for not wanting to work a particular day. and that i don’t, really don’t, want to work. it’s something i do because i have no choice, and i really don’t have to be grateful to them. so don’t smile at me and patronise me, and treat me like a benign but wayward child, that just needs managing, steering, to do what they want. they, you, the people who run this pub. you are there for my convenience. not the other way around. there is no working relationship. for the moment, i work, and you pay me. soon, as soon as i have been paid enough, i’ll quit, at a moment of my choosing. you’ll complain, and haggle, and persuade, and wheedle, short staffed, under pressure (of expectation, not time), under a lot of strain, selfish, and so on. and i will say, sorry, don’t care. thanks for the pay packet. bye.

i don’t care. and it probably is selfish, and i probably ought to feel bad about planning, even now, to drop these people in the shit. but i don’t care. they’re just people, who as far as i’m concerned exist to give me money in return for something that, in a way, i rather enjoy.

this has turned into something of a rant. my apologies for the breakdown of grammar, spelling, syntactical comprehension and society. maybe it is one of those posts. enough. i’ve made it through the first eight songs of OK Computer with five adverts, only one of which has been a condom advert. five ads, eight songs. i remember when i started using spotify, it was about one advert to ten songs. i suspect a plot here. gradual phasing in of more ads per song. hmm. wikipedia does not confirm.

This is an insert, because i always start lines of thought and never finish them. the car – it’s a blue rover. it has four wheels, an engine, and gets me from place to place, which is more or less all i ask of it. it does other things too, like play music with the bass so loud it makes the windows rattle, and steam up in cold weather, but those are just extras, i didn’t pay for that. my brother. as he said, when he rang me, unexpectedly and wonderfully, in the middle of the vegetably aisle at asda, this must be the first time we’ve spoken on the phone for a year. the last time i saw him was early july, just after my last post, in london, for lunch. before that, christmas. i don’t see the boy enough, and that’s a fact. i also, as Nick reminded me, don’t see my dad enough. and because he’s my dad, bless him, he doesn’t complain, but i miss him sometimes, and i know he misses me. so i’ll go and see him tomorrow, and i’ll make sure we actually talk about things instead of just sitting on different sofas watching tv.

i’m actually on my own at the moment. mum and julian are in Dorset, and they’ve taken the cat with them. Dad’s in his flat, spending all day watching the Ashes and doing i know not what because i don’t spend enough time there. Fi’s working hard, worrying about resits, and living her own life. sometimes our lives interweave, and those are wonderful times. but sometimes they seem very seperate. who knows.

but it does get lonely, sometimes. as much as i say, to myself and to anyone who, in the wee small hours of the morning, will listen, that i like being on my own, and i like being away from my mum and her boyfriend and all their banal ramblings, and that i like living on my own, sometimes, i’d like to live on my own with somebody else around.

enough now. i’ve done stuff recently, but honestly, i swear to god, it hasn’t been that interesting. i’ve watched movies, eaten sandwiches, drank drinks, played videogames, swept, mopped, sweated and chopped a hell of a lot of parsley. i made a lot of lists, had to erase one (which broke my heart) to make room for another, of things which are a lot harder and less pleasurably to achieve. and i’ve got too much to do, and not enought time to do it in. time is a thief.

(the title was originally just ‘airbag’, the first song off Radiohead’s third album, OK Computer, which i can’t recommend highly enough. if you think Radiohead is dreary shoegazing music, you’re very, very wrong, and it would be nice if you found the time to listen to the album when they stopped being good and started being really, really fucking good. the second half of the title is the song i’m listening to now, around the time of writing the insert paragraphs.  having finished OK Computer, i moved on to another album i discovered around the same time, back in the early 200os,  Jamie Cullum’s Twentysomething. almost as good as i remember, which is rare.)

She Moves She

It’s nice to run into old friends, and newer ones, every now and then, especially by surprise. tonight i did a bit of itinerant waitering, barlording and a lot of washing up at the gym round the corner – an odd place to do the above activities, but the chef there sometimes does steak/curry/seafood evenings, this one being a seafood evening. the food is evidently pretty good, because the night was booked out a couple of months in advance, and it all looked pretty nice. anyway, the other two people doing the waitering were the chef’s son Lewis, who despite being roughly sixteen, dislikes Linkin Park (can’t blame him) and sings along to Take That and Bobby Womack while working. almost certainly a screaming madam in the making, but we’ll see. the other was an old friend from college, a girl who i’d known through my friend Ollie, and who i’d always got on pretty well with, even when i didn’t really like most of her friends. we shared a love of Dire Straits, Steely Dan and old funky music generally. and the other person i ran into was G, having dinner with her parents, which was nice. she kept collapsing into giggles whenever i asked them if they wanted any more drinks or if everything was okay. can’t blame her really, i tend to go a bit Jeeves when i’m waitering.

but yes. job hunt still in full force. car hunt over, insurance sorted, so i’m going to pick it up tomorrow afternoon. i’m not that confident on dual carriageways etc, but fine on the roads, and i pick it up pretty quickly, so i’m looking forward to being mobile, and having to pay a whole different lot of money, for petrol instead of train fares etc. i’ll try not to crash. that would be nice.

i…don’t really have a lot to say, actually. i try and blog about important issues, or social wierdities, but i’m a lot more tired than i thought i was, both from work and from actually, shock horror, going to the gym. so i shall leave you with the following – spotifind Four Tet, and read the sPeak Your bRanEs blog over there on the right. it’s very entertaining. goodnight. snore.

09:52

yes, i know, the title is also a time. but it’s still a song title, from an album full of times-as-song-titles by an Icelandic composer called Olafur Arnalds, whom i insist you Spotifind right away. and yes, that is a new word.

hello my deary darlings, hasn’t it been a while. well over a month. sorry. i really ought to go back and recap everything that has happened to me since i last wrote, but it would take for-fucken-ever, so i won’t. here instead is a brief summary: i avoided revision for a bit, then i did some revision, then i did some exams, nearly all of which went better than i expected. then i came home and had a beer. then i proceeded to fart around at a practically olympic level from then (last tuesday, my girlfriend’s birthday) until now, my birthday. i drank a lot of beer, smoked a few joints, and pottered hither and yon trying to herd reviewers for the Student Cinema, which is so far proving to be a moderate success.

so, now, on with current events. i have in my notebook the title of a poem, one of the refrain lines, and a series of suitable rhymes for the key word of the refrain. the title is ‘The Feast of Fools: a Villanelle’, and the refrain is ” ‘if i ruled the world’, she said.”

if you don’t know what a villanelle is, go and look. but ‘Do Not Go Gentle’ by Dylan Thomas is probably the best modern example. i wrote one before, http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfpq3pk3_0dghgf4cn , just as an experiment, and in terms of form it turned out pretty well, i think. hopefully this one will be okay both in form and content. but i don’t have an already-written-and-discarded free verse poem to start from this time. we’ll see. i haven’t written anything, blogs, poems, stories or anything for a long time, and now that i’ve got the whole summer ahead i’m hoping the muse will strike me with her pointy feathered sticks once more.

what else is happening. oh yes. it’s my birthday. i treated myself to breakfast at cafe rouge: a croissant and a hot chocolate with the paper, and then scrambled eggs on toast with a glass of kir royale with the crossword, which i failed miserably at. i got most, if not all of the top right hand corner wrong, and then failed on the sudoku. i’m out of practice, clearly.

met my dissertation tutor to discuss what i have to do over the summer – read a lot of books and watch a lot of films, surprise surprise. a summer like any other, but this time i’ll have some responsibility, and this time, this fucking time i’m not going to waste a second. all grown up now. time to get moving. time to leave some things behind.

A is for Action

just a warning: this post is likely to be extremely long, moderately irritable, and jammed to the gills with inconsequentiality.

so, yeah, it’s been a while. i’ll see if i can go chronologically, and if i forget things i’ll do another post tomorrow. here i sit with some water, some chocolate, a paper plate of Madelines, those delicious little morsels which have been unfairly tainted in the minds of some by their apparently causing Proust to go off on perhaps the world’s longest tangent (four volumes! four fucken volumes! get the fuck out of bed and have a wank. jesus.), and yeah. trying to relax myself, basically. err. what happened. essay the first happened. nothing too painful. i already had the plan and quotes etc, so it went okay. i got a first for another essay while i was writing it, so that cheered me up.

my short term memory is extemely poor. i can’t remember what happened before last tuesday, but on tuesday evening a motley selection of us went out to a pizza place for James’ birthday. good meatballs, decent beer, moderate company. what am i saying, i love these people. some of them, anyway. they all have good and bad points, but a few of them – there were thirteen there, and i’m talking about perhaps four) are just fucking gems of human beings. i’ll name no names, for modesty’s sake, but they’re just excellent people, people i genuinely enjoy spending time with. sounds unfair on the others, and i don’t *not* enjoy their company, but there are little niggles, aspects of personality or character flaws that get to me a little, which these other four don’t have.

next…uhh. ohyes… wednesday was one of those days of loosely organised chaos that the English department, not savvy at the best of times, does ever so well. it was the options market, which involved first of all me utterly failing to subtly leave the main options talk about Shakespeare, a compulsory module for straight English students, when i realised it didn’t apply to me. i was in the front row of seats, and quite close to the middle – i had to dislodge two other people to get out the end of the row, and every seat that flipped up made the most incredible noise. not subtle, at all. the guy giving the talk actually paused to let me leave. anyway, after that slight incident, i went up to the english department to sort out what was what, get the right form, give it back, get another form, read it, give that back, get the first form back again and generally fuck about for half an hour or so, striking up quite a friendship with the unexpectedly cute and young department secretary – all the previous ones having been decidedly on the frumpy side of fifty. after a certain amoung of dithering, i settled on a top three of modules, and then had to get another form (cue a redux of the getting the wrong form sketch detailed above) because i read the module options printout and saw the world’s most amazing module, called, for some reason best known to the module convener, Reeling and Writhing. didn’t have an awful lot to do with the content, which was….oh, i’ve wittered about this enough on the group thread, and nearly everyone who reads this is on there anyway. suffice it to say, we read lots of Homer, Ovid, Herodotus, the Bible, look at lots of paintings based on mythology, study the intertexts of various myths, and then (and this is the best bit) write 300-500 lines of poetry based on our emotional response to what we’ve read. i literally cannot wait, i want it to be september right now. sigh.

thursday, not much during the day. a friend’s birthday barbeque in the evening. i met a girl who pretty much embodies ‘Rah’ but, surprisingly, i didn’t take an instant dislike to. perhaps because she appeared fairly dizzy and sweet-natured, perhaps because she was just incredibly *nice*, but partly because i couldn’t help suspecting that underneath it all, she had a slightly self-critical attitude – i felt like she was very self aware. another very dear friend of mine had a fall on some distinctly H&S-baiting ground, and i spent a bit of the evening chatting to her and doing a spot of calming-down – although considering what could have been, she was heroically calm. i know people from back in the old days who would have made themselves the entire focus of the party over a slight flesh wound. it was nice to actually sit down and chat together, frankly, because she’s one hell of a person and i haven’t actually had a chance to properly talk to her in real life – late night facebook chats don’t count, even if they do go on til three am without any lulls – something that used to happen a bit in the old days but which i’ve got out of the habit of.

it’s interesting to see how people move on. this late night chatting business has got me thinking. i used to talk to my friend Ella on the phone at least three or four nights a week, and while i wasn’t her best schoolfriend, being a year above her and at a different school, we clicked really well and were…confidantes, i suppose. we talked about *everything*. i can’t be arsed to go into the whole history, i’m tired enough as it is, but we drifted apart because we turned out to be quite different people, in the end – and because our various mutual friends fell out and caused havoc, and, probably, because we were both a bit too lazy to put the effort in. oddly enough, i think we’d get on better now than we did before – we’re much more similarly in outlook, if nothing else. she’s in france, on a year abroad, and appears to spend her entire time doing cabaret shows and acting along to the Rocky Horror picture show. she also appears, through the university of Paris, to know another old friend of mine, Maddy, who i’ve known since god knows when and…i don’t know, there’s an odd class of relationship. i have it with two or three people, all kids of my dad’s colleagues – it’s sort of like distant family. I’ve known Maddy, and Izzy and her sister, for so long it feels like they’re my cousins, and even though we barely speak and we haven’t seen each other for years, and are living completely different lives, we could bump into each other in a coffee shop tomorrow and still get on like a house on fire. even when i was at school, and Maddy and i kept completely different circles, we’d get on really well on the rare occasions we talked, and it made me wonder why i didn’t make more of her friendship. Izzy likewise, although she was the year below. we went on holiday together as kids, for god’s sake – how people drift apart.

ugh, wittering. i don’t know, i find myself vaguely dissatisfied tonight. probably because the essay i handed in today was a complete crock – no proper introduction or conclusion, i didn’t answer the question (which i’d written)… the story i was writing about, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, is irritatingly difficult to analyse, or rather, to express one’s thoughts in terms of. and i haven’t spoken to Fi properly for a couple of days, and i know she’s having a rough time of it, but i miss long, rambling phone calls. to be rectified soon, i hope.

i’m just getting irritable with small things, like John’s obstinacy and ignorance-based cleanliness fetish. hopefully i’ll be less pissed off soon, because god help everyone around me if i’m like this til exams.

i haven’t written about James’ birthday party (nothing much to tell, but a few interesting details) or compiled, as advertised, a list of “Fantasy” books even normal people ought to read, (the top three, which is all i have so far, runs: 1) The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, 2) The Dark Tower by Stephen King, 3) the Bas-Lag books by China Mieville – read them all, now. drop whatever you’re doing, get the books, read them, and enjoy your new outlook on humanity and the universe), or about visiting Ross in hosptial, but i’m tired, and i’m (probably) going to go to bed with some Ray Bradbury, or possibly Sherlock Holmes, and a cup of tea, and see you all on the morrow. enough for now. xx

(nearly 1500 words! writing double that for an essay was like pulling teeth, and this happened in about twenty minutes…sigh…)

Suddenly the Trees are Giving Way

Another apt title, for there has been Progress!

i’ve been writing this story, on and off, for a long while now. at first, it was going to be a supernatural story, with angels and devils and war between heaven and earth, and all sorts of musings on the nature of religion along the way. i wrote an opening chapter, where a man wakes up with no memory of who he is or where, and receives several confusing phonecalls, and then gets attacked and nearly killed, and having killed his assailant, escapes and is tracked down by a representative of one of the sides. i also, as is my way, wrote another chunk of a much later chapter, set in a pub in Dublin, which was one of the nastier things i’ve written, partially inspired by a girl i saw at the same hotel as us in Turkey the year before last, who was painfully, sickeningly anorexic. if you ask nicely, i’ll let you read it, because i worked on it a lot, and i’m quite, well, proud isn’t the word, but it’s close. it’s sort of a shame that it’ll never fit into anything. ho hum.

anyway, enough reminiscences of long-lost scraps. i had a bolt from the brilliant blue one day, around the beginning of this year, and lots more bits fell into place. it became a detective story, all the stupid bits about angels were expunged, and so where the phonecalls, but the bit about the man waking up with no memory, killing an assailant and then being tracked down and as it turns out, briefly kidnapped, by a representative of what turns out to be the ‘wrong’ side, stayed, and then, having adjusted and refitted and smoothed a few edges here and there, i made it the first chapter. and then started writing chapter two, which deals with the actual beginning of the story because, as made natural sense, the first chapter was actually chronologically near the end of the story. yeah.

anyway, over a long time i wrote the second chapter, and then a big chunk of the third. and then stalled for a bit, because frankly i had no idea what happened next, other than a few vague, colossal ideas surrounded by a fog of plot points.

and then, suddenly, this evening, having very little else to do, i sat down and said, i’ll do a bit more writing. so i went and made a pot of what turned out to be completely foul tea (really disgusting – tasted of nothing much and smelt of gone-off seafood) and sat down and…well, just read the third chapter over. and then stared at a point about ten inches to the left and two inches below my computer screen for, ooh, ten minutes. and then i pulled a pad of paper towards me, scrabbled around for a biro, and without really thinking about it, covered two sheets of A4, both sides, with the entire plot of this novel, in fine detail. i’ve got it here in front of me. it’s completely bloody indecipherable, of course, but it works. it fits, and there are some really juicy conspiracies and ‘trust no-one’ moments and disappearances and, oh, my god. i’m so looking forward to writing this. although, of course, this is about the worst time it could have happened, because i’m supposed to be writing essays and revising over the next eight weeks or so, and i suspect this is going to take more of my time than it should.

but i’ve got there. i’ve got the plot of my first novel. yes.

can’t wait.

What Else Is There?

sometimes this song title thing doesn’t really work. sometimes it’s scarily prescient. for example, City Expanse, a fine example of British Hip-Hop by Lewis Parker, was the title of the last post, which was at least partly concerned with the adventures of a young man in the countryside which he doesn’t get to visit very often. not an exact fit, perhaps, but not bad. this post, which will be both short, and largely concerned with material objects that have recently come into my posession, which is a sesquipadelian way of saying ’some things that i bought’, is entitled ‘What Else is There’, an equally fine song by the Norwegian low-fi artists Royksopp. properly titled it would be ‘What Else is There (Thin White Duke Mix)’, but the existential questions about materialism implied in the title are quite enough without bringing David Bowie into the, ahah, the Mix.

there must be something about being down here, or maybe it’s just blogging generally, which makes me affect a particularly fruity and pompous tone, slightly wodehousian, that makes me sound, as dear old Albert would say, like i’m pissing brandy and crapping plum pudding. i wonder.

so yeah, like i said, a short one, because i wrote half-an-essay’s worth last night (or a whole essay, for certain beautiful, red-haired female lawyers amongst what i laughingly call my readership. *this little flag indicates that a joke has been made*) and two blogs in as many days is quite enough for the time being.

so, to Bridport Market, one of the finer examples of it’s kind. the main street, East Street, has lots of food stalls, along with all the sort of stalls that turn up at every market in the world ever, selling miscellaneous household things that no one could ever want, a few books and of course, of course of course, the utterly ubiquitous Big Pants Stall. you can see the advertising now: ‘Feeling low? Depressed? Life at it’s lowest ebb? If things can’t get any worse, you may want to consider sealing and confirming your situation by buying your underwear from a market stall, instead of a reputable dealer’. lovely.

where was i? ah yes, East Street has all the food, which is excellent in its own way, particularly the burgers from Manor Farm, who are just up the road from us here, and whose cows make such an unforgettable bloody racket at strange times of day. which leaves South Street (i’m sure you can see a pattern emerging here), where there are something like fifty little stalls. To a man, they sell the most wildly varying collection of junk imaginable. there’s a chap who has three tables in front of him jammed to the gills with what appear to be drawers, which have clearly just been removed from their chest and brought down in the car, absolutely filled with old doorknobs, tools and strange, esoteric bits of brassware. there are dozens of these strange stalls, crammed with all manner of strange and wonderfully useless crap. i love it with all my heart. idly wandering and browsing through buckets of old silverware in search of an absinthe spoon, or even just a nice piece of something shiny. an old brass inkwell here, a walking stick there, a warming pan filled with carved wooden rabbits here, a dreadful painting in a delightful frame there. it’s one of my favourite places in the world, especially when the sun’s shining and there’s two beardy blokes with a fiddle and some kind of strange elastic plucking thing making a fabulous racket somewhere in the distance. just, wonderful.

anyway, i was attempting to be relatively restrained and not buy everything in site, but there were a couple of choice titbits i had to have. firstly, a beautiful walnut-wood, long-stemmed pipe – like Gandalf has in Lord of the Rings. it’s completely brilliant, and the best thing about it is that it’s utterly useless – when am i ever going to smoke a pipe? i might bung some weed in it one day and give it a puff, but beyond that, it will never be used. it’ll just sit there and i’ll see it occasionally, and put it in my mouth while i write something dashing and delicious. wonderful.

i also bought a copy of The Bostonians by Henry James. looks good so far, but there’s a limit to the amount of icy, sharp social commentary i can take, so i’m attacking it in short sections. but the best, vying with the gandalf-pipe for my favourite purchase of the day, was a pair of beautiful journals. one i’m going to keep myself and write only perfect things in, in brown or purple or green ink, all handmade paper and painted covers. the other, smaller, and with a thread to bind around it, has a strange indian god-figure painted on it, and lots of sanskrit, like the first one. i’m going to give it to someone – haven’t decided who – as a present. whoof.

and then i came home and made a roasted vegetable tart and rhubarb fool. and drank too much cider, so i nearly fell asleep watching The Dark Knight.

a good day, all round.

(which always makes a tiny part of me a little bit paranoid, knowing as i do that ‘the gods do not build a man up without the express intention of bringing him down’, as Herodotus says. there’s always a payoff, somewhere along the line. maybe it’s already happened, or maybe it’s still coming, like a descending note. we shall see.)

and on that ominous note, i shall leave it. if you have been, stop it at once.

xxx

City Expanse

sorrysorrysorry, i didn’t realise my witterings were of such vital interest to you all. i’ve been told by three people to blog more, so, here i am, blogging more. on the subject of blogging, i’ve also been told that the previous post sounds ‘a bit obsessive’, so, fair enough, ignore it. oh, and some randomer told me i was ’such a loser’. charming feller.

In Dorset at the moment, in a little room in the corner of the cottage which i’ve decided, actually, that i like a lot more than the one i usually sleep in, despite the other one having an enormous double bed. this one has lots of shelves filled with my dear brother’s offcast books, with lots of lonely planet guides to american cities, lots of plato and virgil and the like, and a complete set of green-leather-bound Dickens.

(‘excuse me, are these Charles Dickens real leather?’ – ‘they’re real Dickens’ – ‘i need to know if they’re real leather because they’ve got to go with the sofa. everything else in my house is real leather. how much are they? look, i’ll give you sixty pounds’ – ‘are they leather-bound pounds?’ – ‘what?’ – ’sorry, i have to have leather-bound pounds to go with my wallet. goodbye.’)

anyway, yes, nice, poky, well furnished and cosy room in a dorset cottage, looking on to a garden with a well, and a fishpond, and a shed which i will shortly be converting to house a fish/meat smoker and a cider press. a-mazing. a garden which i will, at some point this weekend, be supplementing with a small bed of thoroughly esoteric and little-used herbs, like lovage, chervil and borage, to consume forthwith and so on. i do get some deliciously River Cottage urges while i’m down here. brings out the guardian reader in me.

which reminds me, as we stopped at a service station on the way down here, i was wandering across the forecourt (a word i’m quite fond of, for a reason i’m not quite sure of) in my usual airheaded, dangerous-to-traffic manner, and a middle-aged woman walked past me and went to pick up a paper from those strange grey newspaper things they have at service stations, the ones with the one-size-fits-all rectangular receptacles for the papers, you know, the one where the Telegraph never quite fits because they’re still obstinately using broadsheet size paper, as if being utterly unable to unfold and then refold your newspaper on public transport without the aid of several bystanders and a team of sherpas is somehow a mark of quality. well, that grey thing. as i was going into the shop, having already briefly scanned the front pages, i’d noticed that two of these receptacles were given over to the Daily Mail. fair enough, i though, maybe they had a bulk lot delivered, or it’s a popular paper amongst the people who regularly drive the A35 between Ringwood and Dorchester. i noted their usual hysterical headline, some frothing insanity about student passports that would no doubt upon further inspection prove to be both factually shaky and in places completely made up.

that’s a long paragraph, so i’m going to start a new one, and here it is. so yeah, having noted the position of the DailyHateMail and the relative position and relative paucity of the Guardian (of which more later, if i remember) looking a bit lonely in the top corner, i was about to enter the shop in perfect peace of mind, to commence the purchase of a bottle of water and a pristine bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, when this woman went past me and bent over and, oh no, i saw her in slow motion reaching for one of the grey receptacles containing the Mail. so of course, i looked for further clues. ah, yes, pastel coloured top from White Stuff or Cotten Traders. ah so, sleeveless Puffa type thing. hello, carefully coiffured (spelling?) mousey hair, enormous sunglasses perched perilously on top. of course, a tan achieved through a careful few days in the sun in, ooh, one of the less crowded greek islands, they’re lovely this time of year.

looking further back, i spotted the car. quelle surprise, a toyota Rav-4. not brand new, but new enough, got to keep up appearances. sunglassed husband at the wheel, thirty years of married hell and frustration bubbling away just below the surface. kids in the back, probably already contaminated. i bet there’s a dog behind one of those wire frame things in the back, making the whole car reek of that terrible, vomit inducing smell that no dog-owner can ever see what everyone else is making a fuss about.

all this was in a fraction of a second’s glance, of course. i wasn’t actually standing and staring at her and listing all these things. but i just wanted to grab her and shake her, and say for god’s sake. drop that, that shitrag. drop it. save your children the mind-bending horror of seeing it lying around the house, maybe even reading it. being infected by the firmly-held principles and beliefs of that fine organ.

no. no more. i don’t want this to turn into a Daily Mail rant. it’s not neccesary. they practically satirise themselves. enough now.

as for the Guardian, i would first like to offer a qualification. i buy it chiefly for the G2 section, and even more chiefly for the crossword. that rather wheedling excuse out the way however, it is true that in terms of political and social stance, as well as cultural position, i stand closer to the Grauniad than i do to any other newspaper. if we take it as read that the only real choices for anyone with half a brain are the Guardian, the Times, the Independent and, i suppose, if you force me, the Telegraph – the tabloids (into which morass i lump the Mail, much as they might squawk and squeal about the injustice) being slightly less informative than the toilet roll they are destined to become, and the FT being rather, well, specialist (which makes it sound like a porn mag, oh dear) – and, well, if those are the choices then here’s my ninety pence, grab me a Guardian while you’re in there and you can have the sudoku. i read the Indie every now and then, because my dad gets it for the crossword and the sports pages, and i always come out the experience feeling like i’ve been subjected to a charity mugger who was in a really bad mood and needed to harangue somebody. it’s like being shouted at for twenty minutes by someone with lots of piercings and a ‘ban-huntingdon-life-sciences’ sign. it’s not that i don’t agree with what they’re saying, it’s just a bit, well, aggressive.

as for the times, well, part of me feels i ought to read the times because it fits with my rather dandyish, old fashioned self image. but, but but, i absolutely refuse to buy anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, for the same reason i wouldn’t pay for a sky subscription, contribute a review to RottenTomatoes, or, hopefully, have anything to do with his empire. no doubt i have, do, and will continue to do so on a daily basis without realising, but heigh ho. hypocrisy ahoy, as usual.

hypocrisy is unavoidable, i’ve found, so please take it as read that i’m very well aware that i’m as guilty of it as the next man. just bear in mind, if you can, that i do my best not to be. i do my best, but i doubt i’m very successful. sigh.

and i suppose, on the subject of the guardian, that i like the lifestyle that it promotes, even though i don’t see myself as a typical guardian reader, in the truest, Private Eye sense of the phrase. that’s another justification. It’s alright that i read the Guardian, because i also read Private Eye. so that’s alright. i like the sense of humour, the self-satisfied smugness, the yearning for the River Cottage life felt by London-centric yuppies. but it’s all cut with a dose of biting schoolboy satire, so that’s okay.

and on that note, i suppose, River Cottage feeds back to me, here, in a cosy bedroom in Bridport, Dorset, not a stone’s throw from the stomping grounds of the man himself, and i’ll soon be getting up and popping into Bridport Market, to buy a leg of hogget (year old lamb, to you non-River-Cottage types – it has a better flavour) and all sorts of other lovely comestibles, and also looking for the galvanised dustbins i need for my smoker, which are a complete bitch to get hold of. i’ll probably write a short post again tomorrow, because i’ll almost certainly find a nice book, or waistcoat, or walking stick, or trinkety thing or piece of junk in the market and feel the need to come and tell you all about it, you lucky people. tchah.

xx

Oh, i forgot about the Telegraph. Fuck the Telegraph.