The sun has been white-hot; perfect weather for hiding in air-conditioned cinemas. Though, as I found out, this is something of a minority view.

Saw Avengers Assemble at the Muswell Hill Odeon. First screening of the afternoon, and I was the only person there. The film is enjoyable enough, though I felt rather acutely that it wasn’t made for the likes of me. I have a low tolerance level for big glossy fight scenes and battles, and was rather hoping the choice of director, Joss Whedon, would mean such scenes would be broken up with lots of snappy quips and self-aware banter; that was really what I went to see the film for. I’m a big fan of his work in the Buffy and Angel TV series, and enjoyed Serenity, his last film as a director.

As it turns out, though, the Avengers film does rather expect the viewer to be less of a Whedon fan and more of a Marvel fan, and particularly a fan of the recent Marvel films like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, none of which I’ve seen. However, Tom Hiddleston as the villain Loki is particularly Whedonesque: arch in a fun way,  hammy but in a knowing way. It seems slightly unfair that a team of superheroes has to fight a single supervillain, as it means the screen time for each hero is necessarily reduced, while Loki gets to do scenes throughout. Though it’s no spoiler to say that the goodies beat the baddie, in terms of attention the baddie ultimately triumphs.

Then the next day to see Barbaric Genius at the Odeon Panton Street. First screening of the day, but this time there was another sunshine-dodger in the cinema. And I enjoyed Barbaric Genius about twice as much as Avengers Assemble too: it’s rather more my sort of thing. A low-budget,  feature-length Irish-made documentary, it tells the story of John Healy, a London-born Irishman who survives an abusive childhood and years of sleeping rough in London to become – unexpectedly – a chess champion and then an acclaimed author. His late 80s memoir The Grass Arena is hailed by some critics as one of the greatest autobiographies full stop. But then the rags-to-riches story goes into reverse. He falls out with the publishers (Faber), they force his book out of print and – the film alleges – he becomes blacklisted by the London literary establishment. He writes other books, but no publisher will touch them.

One theory is that, despite his writing talent, Healy’s background and class prevents him from properly connecting with the city’s very middle class literary world. But although the film is very much on Healy’s side, it doesn’t let him off the hook. In the film, he mocks the cut-glass tones of the woman who phoned him to say he’d won the JR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.  A publishing chief who doesn’t come across well is contrasted with a perfectly kind woman at Faber who liked him as a person – even when he was making threats of violence – and tried to protect him. A young man at Penguin also comes out well: in 2008 he reads The Grass Arena, and gets it republished as a Penguin Classic. The point is made that a good book deserves to be read, and once an author has proved their worth, their unpublished work should at least be given a chance.

Seems strange to note, but the technical quality of Barbaric Genius is actually superior to Avengers Assemble, at least in terms of the screenings I attend. The Avengers flick is in 3D, and I’m frequently irritated by bits of fuzziness and out-of-focusness that appear on the screen, presumably some sort of 3D side-effect. Perhaps it’s the Odeon Muswell Hill’s fault, or it’s to do with having to wear my own glasses underneath the 3D specs. Either way, it affects my enjoyment of the film, and I make a mental note to seek out 2D screenings next time. The novelty of 21st century 3D films has well and truly worn off. Not only does 3D add little to the filmgoing experience, but in cases like this it makes the experience worse.

That said, I’m looking forward to seeing the new Great Gatsby 3D, because it’s just the sort of film that one expects to not be made that way.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past… INTO YOUR FACE!”

Yesterday (Tues 22nd): Took the exam for my degree course, marking the end of my first academic year. Although I’ve no previous exams to compare it with, I feel like I did okay, at least to get a basic pass. I get the results sometime in late July.

Answered questions on Jekyll and Hyde and the Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair graphic short stories in It’s Dark In London, with references to From Hell. Particularly pleased that I had memorized the Bible verse which mentions the founding of the first City of Man (Genesis 4:17). My only worry now is whether I properly justified the use of such tidbits. It’s so tempting to crowbar any memorized quotes  into one’s answer regardless. Ah well, it’s done now.

I’m now experiencing the strange aftermath of blankness that comes with finishing exams, not felt since I did my GCSEs in the 80s. It’s a dazed sense of ‘now what?’, made more dazed by the sunny weather. In fact, the moment I came out of college the weather suddenly changed from cold and damp to too hot and sunny, with no time spent in-between. Very apt for Jekyll and Hyde.

Celebrated in the evening with drinks at the Boogaloo, in the company of Ms Ella L. We talked about another common post-exam emotion: knowing you can get back to reading books for pleasure again. I have a reading list for the second year, but as that’s not until October, the pressure is somewhat off. First up on the pleasure pile is Clayton Littlewood’s new book, Goodbye To Soho.

Coming up for me: DJ-ing at the Last Tuesday Society on Saturday, then a trip to the Bafta Awards on Sunday, then a day out to visit my parents in Suffolk. However, as tempting as it is in London to spend one’s time idling, socialising and consuming the work of others, I do want to work on something of my own.

***

In Marks and Spencer today. The forthcoming Queen’s Jubilee has meant there’s union jack branding everywhere: sandwiches, cakes, drinks. M&S are even selling a ‘Rule Britannia’ door stop.

Final day of revision. Birkbeck Library today is packed with  students, all in the same boat. It’s the height of exam season, and it can be hard to find a seat in the library, even at 8pm in the evening. Torrington Square is full of red-trousered boys (seems to be the fashion) with armfuls of books.

Lots of  ‘Good luck!’

or, later on in the day:  ‘I can’t believe that question…’

And it still is real books they carry about the campus, along with their laptops. The trolleys for books to be re-shelved look like they’ve been there pre-internet, and they’re still under heavy use.  I think one reason is that even though a lot of research can now be done online, there’s still plenty of academic texts that just aren’t available digitally, at least not for free. It can also be healthier to work from a book alongside a laptop, if only to give the eyes a break from the screen. The classes themselves are still paper-heavy, too, with A4 ‘hand-outs’ given out at most lectures and seminars. I’ve seen some students do their lecture notetaking on iPads and netbooks, but the majority scribble away with pen or pencil.

Today might be a watershed for the history of paper books in Britain, in fact, as Waterstones have announced they’ll be selling Kindle e-books in their shops. Quite how this will work will be interesting (special machines in-store?), but it’s an inevitable step, now that e-books have started to take off. To be able to buy Kindle books without having to give money to the tax-avoiding giant that is Amazon can only be an good thing.

Here’s an interesting article by the author Linda Grant, in favour of Kindles as a device, but uneasy about letting Amazon hog the market. She makes the point that books are mainly written on screens now, so why is it so strange to want to read them on screens too?

***

My exam is tomorrow morning at 10am. The last time I took an exam, Margaret Thatcher was in power.

Three days before the exam, and my revision has hit a predictable level of intensity.  I’m now pretty much living inside the exam texts, to the point where I have the books and laptop with me in bed at night, and I just keep working until I literally fall asleep mid-sentence. Come the morning, I wake up, still surrounded by the laptop and the books, so it’s straight back into the revision. It’s an immersion of work. But I actually like this approach, and particularly enjoy the luxury of being able to work in bed. ‘It’s not laziness, it’s being like Proust!’

I’m not writing this in bed, by the way. I’m at my desk, fully dressed & showered & shaven (a detail one feels compelled to add in these days of working-from-home beardiness), plus shirt & tie and suit, because I had to leave the building to buy groceries.

Current grocery of delight: Twinings’ herbal tea selection box: ‘Mixed Berries’. Five different flavours, five tea bags each. My recent stomach pains turned out to be due to a food allergy or intolerance or general unhealthiness. So I’ve been trying to wean myself off dairy and caffeine and gluten and excess calories as much as possible, and these herbal teas  actually provide a level of sweetness and pleasure that makes the abstention worthwhile.

***

Current petty language bugbear: the usage of  the qualifying adverb ‘famously’.

As in, say: ‘Proust famously wrote in bed.’

The implication is that the writer assumes the reader knows this particular fact. If the reader doesn’t know that Proust wrote in bed, the use of ‘famously’ is at best, debatable, and worse, redundant.

And if the reader does  know this fact, the statement feels cheap and shallow, even desperate. The writer is saying ‘Not only do I know this fact, but it’s important to add that I know that it’s well-known.’

Why is it important? And how do you define ‘well-known’ anyway? Who is this General Knowledge, and what time is the mutiny?

(And I think of the time when I was in a room with Pete Doherty and Peter Blake, and I overheard a young man from Mr Doherty’s party asking Peter Blake who he was, and I thought of my parents, who may not know who Pete Doherty is, but who definitely know who Peter Blake is, and I think about how this matters, and to whom it matters)

(And I think about the people who sign into comments boxes on the Internet, purely to add ‘who cares?’ And I think about the solipsism of the Internet, and how that’s affected discourse)

(And I think of the common Twitter phrase ‘Is it me, or…’ And what that means)

In fact, I think it all comes down to wanting to connect, and the fear of feeling alone. Well, cheer up! Someone is reading your sentence, in a world of texual saturation! You have already made a connection! So you can drop the ‘famously’ – it makes you look needy.

Fame connects. But it doesn’t connect uniformly. So ‘famously’ in this sense tries to assume what cannot be assumed. At worse, ‘famously’ panders.

Where ‘famously’ can be used is in the other sense, as in ‘excellently’. As in ‘getting on famously’.

But I’m worried that the other usage is becoming more, well, famous.

Into my last week of revision. One of the many rewarding things about studying English literature at Birkbeck is that the lecturers have often written introductions to the books. Today I was going over my lecture notes on Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde – the lecturer being Roger Luckhurst – and re-read the Oxford Classics edition of the text, which has an introduction and annotations by him too.

Today: I look at the London Library’s 1886 edition of Jekyll & Hyde, available for members to borrow. The book was first published in January of that year, but the library’s copy is not a first edition. Or even a second. Jekyll & Hyde was such a bestseller – such an instant myth – that the book hit its sixth edition within a few months. How strange to think its original appeal was as a crime mystery as much as a gothic horror: the revelation that Dr Jekyll IS Mr Hyde is the twist ending. Now, of course, the twist is more famous than the original story. But the Stevenson text always feels fresh,  however much one re-reads it. There’s the business with the two doors, the flat in Soho, and the innuendo over what exactly it is that Hyde gets up to (as played on by Wilde in Dorian Gray). But what impresses most of all is the sheer innovation of the text, blending genres, creating levels of disorientation, anticipating Modernism and psychoanalysis, inspiring The Hulk; all this, and Stevenson carries it off in a mere sixty pages.

***

The other day: I bump into Darren Beach on the tube, who tells me about his new concept music blog One Below Ten. The idea is that every entry is about a pop single that made it to Number Eleven in the British charts; so close yet so far to becoming a proper Top Ten hit (which really matters to those to whom it matters). The first subject is ‘Michael Caine’ by Madness, which I’m rather fond of. Still odd to think that the very mannered and gentle lead vocals are not by Suggs but by Chas Smash, the same man who shouted ‘Hey you – don’t watch that, watch this!’ on ‘One Step Beyond’, in rather a different style. But then, as Mr Beach says, Madness were a different band in 1984:

http://onebelowten.wordpress.com/

***

My friend, the charming glam rock god David Ryder-Prangley, has just moved in next door. By coincidence, I’d been listening to a track by KISS, of whom I’m not a massive fan, but I know that Mr DRP is very much an admirer. It’s because I’m preparing a DJ set for an event to celebrate Sebastian Horsley, and the song – ‘C’mon And Love Me (Alive! version)’ is in the late Mr H’s list of his favourites. Like a lot of those sort of bands, I may not be keen on the music, but I fully approve of the glamour.

Day spent revising graphic novels and psychogeography for the exam. I’ve also been reading about ‘Hauntology’, a Derrida term reclaimed by Mark Fisher to use instead of psychogeography, for instance when describing Laura Oldfield Ford’s book, Savage Messiah.  He uses it along with Simon Reynolds  to denote a theorised ‘end of history’ trend in music as well as writing: ‘mourning for lost utopias’.

Article by Andrew Gallix on hauntology

***

Candid photo of me taken by Travis Elborough at the Aubin Cinema the other day. I’m in the middle of talking to Alex Mayor about, oh I don’t know, ‘failing upwards’ or some such Whit Stillman quote. We were about to watch Damsels In Distress, the new Stillman film.

I like the photo, even though it’s my Not So Good Side. I never did learn to fully love the constellation of little moles on my right cheek. Always thought they look vaguely like a join-the-dots puzzle of Bonnie Langford. I even went to see an NHS plastic surgeon about them, once, when I was about 20. He pretty much laughed me out of the room, saying they weren’t worth worrying about.

And yet… One thinks of standards of acceptable facial imperfections. In fact, it reminds me that Analeigh Tipton, one of the main actresses in Damsels In Distress, has a faint  scar around one side of her mouth.

What’s unusual is that not only has her scar not been covered up with make-up (as I tend to with my moles when properly being photographed), but the director, Whit Stillman, often seems to focus on it, lovingly, as if making a point. It’s like a sweeter version of that much maligned cinematic theory, the Male Gaze. Ms Tipton is already extremely beautiful, and the scar stops her being boringly beautiful.

A little bit of Googling reveals that she started a career in modelling, but was soon dropped by her agency. Because of the scar. ‘So many people in the fashion industry were like, ‘We’re so sorry that happened to your face.’ 

One thinks of Cindy Crawford making a trademark out of her mole. Why is a scar worse?

Still, up yours, fashion.

A very flattering email. A gentleman tells me he’s had quotes from my lyrics done as tattoos on his hands and arms. Four Dickon quotes, alongside ones by T.S. Eliot, Baudelaire, William Burroughs, and Richey Manic:

Left hand: ‘My crime is being myself’
Right hand: ‘My punishment is staying myself’
Left arm: ‘I don’t want forever, I just want a little now’
Right side of chest: ‘Steep yourself in yourself’.

***

Managed to get the gender essay in on time, though I don’t think it’ll get as high a mark as the previous one. I still have a tendency to forget I’m meant to be playing at being a literary critic and analyst rather than a researcher. I think I sample too many text books, not knowing where to stop, though thankfully I know when – not missed a single deadline yet. Thing is, I feel I’m not yet qualified to be able to take up my own position on such a massive subject, whereas for the subject of the last essay – the film Finisterre – I knew could identify a few things that the academics had overlooked. Still, I think I’m getting better at the harder subjects.

That’s the last essay for this academic year. Have now moved onto the revision for my first exam, held on May 22nd.

***

One tidbit of trivia about gendering literature: ‘chick lit’ was originally coined as a reaction to ‘lad lit’ in the early 1990s, as in Nick Hornby’s early novels. Unlike ‘chick lit’, ‘lad lit’ didn’t succeed in attracting the audience it was targeted at. Despite all the themes of eternal boyishness, of football and record shops, Hornby’s novels were mostly bought by women.

Though I rarely regard myself as stereotypical male in many respects – whether as an asset or a weakness – I have to admit I do the male thing of not reading enough novels – and not finishing enough novels. When men read printed matter for leisure at all, they are thought to read more newspapers and non-fiction.

Well, the mayoral election certainly put me off newspapers for a while. I picked up an Evening Standard on the day of the count. It was full of the most absurd bias towards Boris Johnson, and negativity towards Ken Livingstone. It even seriously discussed whether Johnson could be the next Prime Minister.

When I came out of the polling booth last Thursday, I spotted the actor John Simm in the cafe outside. He played the villainous Master in Doctor Who, and in one episode manages to be elected Prime Minister of Britain by using a satellite network to telepathically brainwash voters.

Over a million Londoners voted for a man who has difficulty combing his hair. As they say on the internet at the moment, ‘just saying…’

Wednesday: Last research day spent in libraries, for the essay on gendering literature. I seem to have developed an unusually sensible inner voice for the essay process. It tells me exactly when it’s time to stop researching and start knocking the first draft into shape, while still allowing for time to do further drafts and polishing. The most important thing about this voice is that I appear to be listening to it.

Also today: I meet Charley Stone for lunch in the café in Russell Square. The café is old fashioned and non-franchise, something which is getting increasingly rare in central London. There are rumours the Olympics are going to shut down whole squares like this, making them into temporary media bases for the duration.

Charley and I chat about My Bloody Valentine, whose remastered Creation back catalogue seems to be finally coming out next week, four years late. She mentions an interview with Kevin Shields where he talks about the remastering in highly technical terms, at least for the average musician. But of course Mr Shields is no average musician:

http://www.pitchfork.com/features/interviews/8809-kevin-shields/

Evening: To the Aubin Cinema in Shoreditch – Zone 1’s smallest single-screen cinema for new releases. Very comfortable it is, too: they give you foot stalls in the front row, so you can pretty much lie down. Also present: Alex Mayor, Travis E, Emily B, John Noi.

We see Damsels In Distress, the new Whit Stillman film. I’m such a huge fan of his debut, Metropolitan, and loved The Last Days Of Disco, the last film he managed to make, which was about fifteen years ago. Damsels isn’t up there with those two, I feel, but it’s as good as Barcelona, his mid-90s film. Same uniquely old-fashioned and deliberately stagey dialogue, same bookish quips about broken hearts, but not quite enough character depth and narrative flow compared to Metropolitan and Disco. Still, I laughed a lot, which is usually a good sign for a comedy. And as films about US college students speaking in stylised retorts go, I far prefer Damsels over The Social Network. Damsels has its faults, but more than makes up for them with sheer charm. Plus there’s a glimpse of a class on Ronald Firbank, always a good thing in my book.

Mayoral election tomorrow. It is upsetting to think that thousands of Londoners might vote for a right wing Mayor once again, mistaking a buffoonishly inept but entertaining dinner party guest for a capable governor of the most complicated metropolis on earth. Still, one must remain optimistic. It’s not as if Boris Johnson will vanish from public life if he loses – he’ll be back guest presenting Have I Got News For You within days. Which is really why the celebrity-obsessed voted for him last time, after all. And where he should have stayed.