Thursday 24th March 2016. I notice that there’s been a fashion development among young men, or at least the sort of young men who seem to think of themselves as fashionable. It’s now not enough to have bushy beards, along with hairdos that have a slicked-back quiff on top, while closely shaved at the sides. Increasingly, these men also have their earlobes physically stretched and distended, in order to insert a large circular ear stud.

Sometimes this earring is a wide and hollow ring, which makes me think of the woggles used by cub scouts. At other times the hole is filled with a piece of black solid plastic. In which case it makes them look like they’ve been attacked by a bad loser in a game of draughts.

Part of me wants to ask them why they do it. But then, they could equally ask me why I bleach my hair blond.

Taste can be so mysterious. At least these woggle-eared boys have the excuse of fashion. It’s the eternal priority of the young – to rebel against their elders, but conform with their peers.

* * *

Friday 25th March 2016. To the Odeon Panton Street to see Bridge of Spies. Directed by Spielberg in relatively compact mode. He eschews big casts and big messages and just gets on with telling a story clearly and fluidly. It could well be a classic film noir from the 1950s, were it not for the occasional f-word. Mark Rylance’s Russian spy is quietness and dignity personified. What with the depressing events in Brussels this week, it’s good to see a mainstream war film that concentrates on such things as basic compassion, preservation of life, and human liberty, without passing judgement on beliefs. And Rylance’s catchphrase of ‘would it help?’ works as a succinct piece of life advice, full stop.

* * *

Saturday 26th March 2016.

A day trip to Cambridge. Mum’s idea, though a foot injury prevents her joining me on the day. I’ve already bought the ticket, so I go up anyway. I’ve travelled so little in recent years that it can only do me good.

The beauty of the colleges and quads still impresses, with the screen and tower of King’s College taking the breath away in particular. Standing by the chapel door, I feel tempted to burst into a rendition of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, but resist. I walk along the river. Lots of daffodils on the Backs, behind Clare College. A few brave tourists hiring punts (punters, I suppose) despite the wind and drizzle.

Kettle’s Yard is closed this year, so I spend a good few hours in the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is having its 200th anniversary. I find the lavish neo-classical architecture of the main entrance hall as inspiring as any of the exhibits; crammed with statues and gilded friezes, and now restored to an immaculate state. My favourite paintings turn out to be Gwen John’s The Convalescent (the painting equivalent of an Anita Brookner novel), Moreelse’s Allegory of Profane Love (the painting equivalent of an Angela Carter novel), Stanley Spencer’s Love Among The Nations (surely a contender for Most Hugs In Art), William Nicholson’s Flamingoes, and several Canalettos of Venice (more clean-lined architecture).

* * *

I buy the last print edition of The Independent. Its sister paper, the Independent on Sunday, bowed out the previous weekend with a rather nice detail in its masthead. Some of the letters in the words The Independent were highlighted to spell out The End.

The newspaper is still going to continue online, but as some of the readers’ letters indicate, this isn’t the same experience at all. Many people still like the physicality of paper, as evidenced by the popularity of free newspapers. It’s paying for news in any shape that seems to be increasingly resented.

The Independent website, like any commercial news site, has to pay for itself by cramming the screen with ‘clickbait’ content and adverts that break up the middle of articles. The end result is more ‘networked’ news, made to fit into the wider ocean of the Web, and then made to keep the reader clicking away on the website. The reading experience can only be more restless, diluted, even craven. There is a risk of diminishing concentration, and diminishing contemplation.

The last issue has lots of articles on its history, including one by the editor responsible for one particular story that made the newspaper stand out early on. In 1986, not long after the first issue, the Duke and Duchess of York had their first child. While the other British papers went with the usual lavish royal baby coverage, the Independent took a stance and listed it in its News In Brief column, a mere couple of sentences.

Also learned: the paper hadn’t made a profit since 1993. When it started, there was so much money swimming around – this being the mid 80s – that writers could double their income by defecting there from The Times or The Telegraph. By 2015, according to DJ Taylor in The Prose Factory, the Independent was paying some writers at lower rates than it did in 1986.

I leaf through the pop music reviews and read about the debut album from Zayn Malik, ex-member of One Direction. The review takes an unexpected slant:

‘The world needs Zayn Malik more than ever now, given the ghastly events of earlier this week… Though how much counterbalance, in terms of the wider public image of Islamic culture [he] can offer to such brutal, random killing remains debatable. But given Malik’s position as possibly the world’s most popular Muslim, there’s suddenly much more riding on his solo debut album than there was a week ago.’

‘Much more riding’ on it? Whatever one thinks about One Direction, it seems a bit much to expect their solo albums to address the aftermath of Islamist terrorism.

Still, if one applies the Bridge of Spies question to the Zayn Malik album – would it help? – the answer is: yes of course it would. In the sense that all art helps in some way. Or should help.

Sunday 13th March 2016. I’m reading a new study skills book aimed at dyspraxic students, The Dyspraxic Learner: Strategies For Success, written by Alison Patrick. It’s full of very clear and useful advice for coping with a myriad of dyspraxia-related problems, the majority of which really do seem to apply to me. There’s an intriguing literary reference; according to the book, Jane Eyre contains what is thought to be literature’s first dyspraxic character. In the boarding school scenes, early on in the novel, Jane befriends Helen Burns, a passive and solitary girl who spurns games, has trouble concentrating, and seems to be in a world of her own:

‘Her sight seems turned in, gone down to her heart: she is looking at what she can remember, I believe, not at what is really present’.

In the classroom, Helen turns out to be a talented student, always ‘ready with answers on every point’. However, she also has poor organisational skills, bad posture and dirty fingernails, and it’s this that gets her whipped by the teachers for being a ‘slattern’. Rather sadly, she scolds herself too:

‘I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn my lessons; I have no method; and sometimes I say, like you, I cannot bear to be subjected to systematic arrangements.’

These are all now regarded as classic dyspraxic traits. Though I’ve never been whipped with a bunch of twigs, I suspect that sort of thing would have happened to me in a less enlightened century. And I’m sure there are people who’ve harboured thoughts of doing it to me more recently, too.

* * *

To the V&A to meet up with Fenella H: a very welcome bout of socialising, at a time when I feel rather more removed from the world than usual, either bound up with studies or struggling with various ailments.

We arrive at 11am on a Sunday, just before it gets too busy, and so have the pick of the three ornate café rooms. We dither over which Victorian aesthetic we prefer: the majestic and imposing Gamble room, the cosy blue-tiled Poynter or the subdued, green-panelled Morris. In the end I decide to go for the Morris, not because I’m in a particularly William Morris-sy mood, but purely because it has the fewest crying babies.

We stroll through the Fashion section of the permanent collection, then upstairs to the new (and free) exhibition on West End and Broadway shows, Curtain Up. Lots of set models, costumes and props from the likes of War Horse, Matilda, The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time, and Sunday in the Park With George. For a display on A Chorus Line, there’s a kind of installation with lighting effects: one walks through a mirrored corridor with a dance practice bar, over which a row of shiny top hats hang in the air.

* * *

Tuesday 15th March 2016. Evening: I walk through the new-ish Blackfriars Thameslink station, where the platforms span across the whole width of the Thames. As they’re enclosed in glass, the structure plays with paradoxes of indoors and outdoors, of movement and stasis. One can get on and off a train while standing above water.

After the rush hour, the place can be very empty and quiet, perhaps because the station’s Thameslink status confuses tourists (it’s not part of the Tube, but Travelcards still apply). Suddenly there’s a burst of sound: a female soprano, presumably a busker, sings an aria unaccompanied – though I can’t tell where she is. Her voice echoes all over the long, eerie platforms, turning the whole of Blackfriars into a kind of bridge-shaped megaphone. Intrigued, I ran up and down various stairs and balconies on the South side of the station, trying to find the singer. I feel like a Thameslink Odysseus. After running into several labyrinthine dead ends (two myths for the price of one) – I find the singer standing in a corner of the new embankment, by the pedestrian walkway. She’s blonde, and is wearing a red felt top hat. I want to tell her how far her voice is carrying, and how eerie and beautiful it sounds up on the platforms, particularly when there’s hardly anyone else there. But she’s in mid-aria. I put a pound in her pot, mumble ‘thanks’, and go back to catch my train.

* * *

Thursday 17th March 2016. To the Vue Islington to see Room. The lead, Brie Larson, won Best Actress at the Oscars, as a mother kept prisoner in a suburban shed, while raising her son. I read the Emma Donoghue novel some time ago. The film is a very faithful adaptation, except for the novel’s device of having everything filtered through the five-year-old boy’s perspective. Here the boy has plenty of voice-over narration, but otherwise the perspective is the usual external one of the camera. A straightforward treatment, replicating the book’s three distinct sections: grim urban horror (life in the room), gripping thriller (the escape), then the aftermath in the world outside. As with the novel, I found this last section less satisfying than the previous two, but the performances of both the mother and the boy are memorable.

* * *

To the first floor of 43 Gordon Square, for the last seminar of the Birkbeck term, and the last class on the Contemporary US Fiction module. We finish with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, a novel I’ve had on my To Read shelf for some time. It’s made up of a series of stand-alone stories, linked by a set of characters at different stages in their lives. The ‘goon squad’ is time itself: the implication is that the characters are victims of the world’s changing ways, as much as they are victims of getting older. The perspective changes from character to character with every section: a person referred to in passing in one story may become the main character in another. There’s some stylistic tricks too, the most unusual one being a story entirely told as a Powerpoint slide show, with the same SmartArt diagrams familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft Office. Here they’re used to describe the relationship between a 12-year-old girl, her parents, and her autistic brother.

The Powerpoint story ends with several diagrams of pure data, illustrating the brother’s obsession with pauses in rock songs. It’s a little like the A-level maths question at the end of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: irrelevant to the story, but it’s what the character would do. One of the slides is completely black, which I read as a wry reference to the all-black page in Tristam Shandy.

After the class, I join a few of the students at the IOE bar for pizza and drinks. There’s been some sort of local student protest. Earlier, during the class, we heard some indistinct chanting as the protest passed through Gordon Square.

A barman tells us he’s worried about ‘the rioters’. No such rowdiness here, even on St Patrick’s Day (the Pogues playing dutifully on the hi-fi). Just lots of students sitting around drinking and chatting peacefully.

On coming back from the bar I pass one table and notice a megaphone among the pint glasses.

* * *

Friday 18th March 2016. To the Odeon Covent Garden (£6 with NUS), for Spotlight, which won the Oscar for Best Film. Like Room, it’s a conventional moral drama, focusing on the victims of abuse rather than the perpetrators. In this case, it’s the real-life victims of child molestation in Boston’s Catholic community. The notion of blame here, though, is extended to ideas of collusion, whether it’s people who knew about the cases and covered them up, or people who knew but didn’t think to investigate further. The film has a very old-fashioned feel to it, mindful of not just All The President’s Men (the newspaper setting) but Judgement At Nuremberg: an ensemble piece where the actors serve the story entirely, and the story is told seriously and clearly. Is it the ‘Best’ film? Not compared to Inside Out or The Falling or Carol or Appropriate Behaviour. There’s no innovation or boldness of ideas whatsoever: it’s just a good, well-made, informative work that covers an important issue. A ‘fair enough’ film.

Tuesday 8th March 2016. Starting research on the next essay, which is due at the end of spring. I’ve decided to properly examine the connection between Menippean satire and selected contemporary US fiction, after taking the cue from Margaret Atwood’s review of Eggers’s The Circle (see earlier diary). I had something of a Eureka moment when finding an article which equated literary camp in the Firbank style (one of my pet subjects) with the Menippean genre. I think the former can be more usefully viewed as a sub-genre of the latter. They both use a similar approach – they both draw attention to surfaces, and in a playful way.

* * *

Thursday 10th March 2016. MA class at Birkbeck. This week we do David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, his last book of stories. Some of it I find hard going, particularly his long, drawn-out sentences with endless clauses. Vonnegut’s advice to ‘pity the reader’ didn’t apply to DFW. The story about suicide, ‘Good Old Neon’ now has an unavoidable autobiographical side to it. Funny how Wallace satirised brand culture so much, yet he became such a recognisable brand himself, with the long hair, the Lennon glasses, and the Axl Rose bandana. It’s certainly a distinctive look for a novelist.

I watch the news of the US presidential campaigns, and I wonder how much of Donald Trump’s success is down to his strong look, too. I think about him and Boris Johnson, and wonder if it’s to do with funny blond hair and a sense of being from a different planet. People are now bombarded with so many images every day, only the odd-looking can truly leave an impression. Weirdness is now a platform in itself. In which case perhaps now is the best time to launch some sort of new public career for myself (not politics, though).

* * *

Friday 11th March 2016. To the Leicester Square Odeon, for one of the smaller screens hidden at the back of a branch of Costa. This is where all the new films in London go when they’ve been out for a while, just before they come out on DVD.

(going by adverts, DVDs are still being made and sold, despite the closure of many entertainment shops, and the rise of Netflix. The new poster for the Carol DVD advises you to buy it at Sainsbury’s).

Along with the Prince Charles and the Odeon Panton Street, the smaller section of the Leicester Square Odeon is a Last Chance Saloon for those who like cinemas. I’m keen to mop up the rest of this year’s Oscar-winning films, so I’m here to see The Danish Girl, for which Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress. Justifiably so: she’s one of the best things about the film. She plays Gerda Wegener, a real-life bohemian painter in 1920s Copenhagen, whose husband Einar underwent one of the first examples of sex reassignment surgery, and became Lili Elbe. Though, as it’s been pointed out by those who know the full story, the film isn’t always faithful to the facts. The cause of Elbe’s death, for one, is rewritten to suit the film’s narrative arc.

There’s a promising scene early on, where Gerda is working at her canvas, with a cigarette holder clenched in her mouth. Despite this she is still able to deliver a lecture to her nervous male sitter on the importance of the female gaze. Ms Vikander’s performance in scenes like this is one of liveliness, individuality, humour and nuance. Mr Redmayne, meanwhile, goes through Elbe’s changes from husband to woman with one unchanging emotion: Pained Martyrdom. He means well, but does the acting equivalent of walking on eggshells, not so much overly mannered as overly self-conscious. I wonder if he was hampered by realising that the wider climate of trans issues has changed, that people want to see more trans actors in such roles, and that this whole film now feels curiously out of date. One working trans actor, Rebecca Root, has a small part in the film as a nurse. But even she has said in interviews that she hopes The Danish Girl will be the last major film about trans lives without a trans person in the lead. It’s an issue that isn’t going away.

This week also saw the public coming-out by the Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski (after some odious doorstepping by the UK Daily Mail). Her co-directing sister Lana Wachowski transitioned a few years ago, and is listed in the Danish Girl credits for helping Eddie R with his performance. The trans journalist Paris Lees and the trans pioneer April Ashley were similarly brought on board. But of course, performance advice is not the same as writing the script or directing the whole film. April Ashley has since commented that Eddie R’s performance verges on a dated, pantomime idea of femininity: he ‘should not be dropping his eyelashes every two minutes’.

I’m convinced The Danish Girl will become as out-of-date as those early attempts by Hollywood to depict gay characters, such as the 1960s film The Children’s Hour. Back then, a pro-gay narrative could only be put before a mainstream audience if it meant scenes of emotional agony, tearful admission and an untimely death. Then as now, the road to compromise is paved with good intentions.

The film’s director is Tom Hooper, of The King’s Speech fame, which also rewrote history. But like The King’s Speech I have to admit The Danish Girl still works as a lavish and visually engaging costume drama. It does look wonderful, with its locations shot from very carefully composed angles, the better to resemble the paintings in the story.

* * *

Saturday 12th March 2016. To the Tate Modern for the exhibition Performing for the Camera. This has rather an ambitious brief: the relationship between photography and performance, from the invention of the camera to the present day. Even narrowing it down to images by artists must have been a headache. By its own nature it can only be a series of examples. The final room is so inevitable it curates itself: new artists who use selfies on Instagram to construct little fictional narratives. Cindy Sherman did the ‘fictional selfie’ thing much earlier, of course, and it’s good to see she’s given her due here. But it goes back to the 1920s too, with Claude Cahun’s androgynous self-portraits, and Duchamp in his drag persona, an image which made the cover of Mark Booth’s 80s book, Camp. Bowie was on the back.

I like the Yves Klein jumping-into-space photo, here presented with the two images it cunningly combined – one with Klein jumping above a gang of men holding a safety net, and one with an empty street. The join is utterly invisible, a 1960 version of Photoshop. It blurs the lines between illusion, hoax, and art. Elsewhere, Ai Weiwei drops a Han Dynasty vase, in three horrifying stages.

There’s lots of 80s Warhol here too. A 1986 copy of NME shows Warhol and Debbie Harry sitting with a home computer, for some reason (is one needed?). I love AW’s photo of Keith Haring body-painting Grace Jones. This is also a neat reference to the exhibition’s photos of Yves Klein’s 60s ‘happenings’, where women would roll around in paint as part of a public performance, while a string quartet played. Actually, going by this exhibition, 90% of 1960s happenings seemed to involve nudity.

The whole exhibition radiates with the idea that performing for the camera is essentially a fun thing to do, even when it’s art. The camera click still has the essence of novelty, whatever the age. For all Klein’s trickery, the creation of a posed photo is magic enough.

Wednesday 2nd March 2016. I listen to a Radio 4 documentary in the Archive on 4 slot: Skill, Stamina and Luck. It’s an account of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks of the 80s, and of the wider history of interactive fiction before and after them.

Pure nostalgic bliss for me, as I was an avid fan of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, 1982) and the many books that followed it, all published by Puffin Books. As the documentary points out, the books sold in huge amounts at the time, often beating Roald Dahl in the children’s bestseller charts.

In 1982, aged ten, I already knew that the ‘go to page 142’ format existed, what with the Choose Your Own Adventure series and others like it. I think the first one I encountered was a picture-based game book for small children, inspired by the maze scene in Jerome’s Three Men in A Boat, titled Three Men In A Maze (by Stephen Leslie, Transworld Publishers, 1977 – I have a copy today).

The Fighting Fantasy series was the first to add a proper gaming element, though, with dice to throw, battles to win, and SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK scores to maintain, each of these crucial words always in upper case. I wasn’t so keen on the battle side (and so never graduated to a Warhammer phase), and I was useless at painting Citadel Miniatures. But I loved making annotated paper maps of the little worlds in each of the books, with notes on how to solve them – ‘walkthroughs’ these would be called now. I was so proud of my map for Steve Jackson’s House of Hell (1984) that I sold copies of it to school friends.

One specific memory is queuing up at a Puffin Show at Chelsea Town Hall, April 1985, to get a signed copy of the latest title, Ian Livingstone’s Temple of Terror. They would always be called something like that: The Alliteration of Awfulness, The Preposition of Scary Noun, The Place of Stuff. I must have been first in the signing queue (such was my ardour), because I can distinctly remember Mr Livingstone telling me that Temple of Terror was not yet published, so I was getting the very first copy sold. I don’t think Temple of Terror was one of the classic titles, but if I’m ever called upon to reveal my Secret Geek Credentials, that’s my main card.

The Radio 4 documentary also revealed that there’s been a recent book on the history of Fighting Fantasy: You Are The Hero, by Jonathan Green. Part-funded by Kickstarter, naturellement. I’ve just treated myself to a copy, and am getting all kinds of Proustian rushes. ‘If you want to eat the madeleine cake, go to 24…’

* * *

Thursday 3rd March 2016. Evening: MA class at Gordon Square. This week’s novel is Erasure by Percival Everett. Quite hard to get hold of. The last UK edition from 2004 seems to be already out of print. Rather ironic, considering it’s a satire on literary ambition. In Everett’s story, a struggling black academic, raging in frustration at the absurdities of the world, deliberately writes a lurid, stereotypical ‘ghetto’ novel. This accidentally becomes a hit, forcing him to adopt a pseudonymous ex-convict persona in order to satisfy the public’s desire for the ‘real thing’ – as in their perception of ‘real’ blackness. Quite a timely week to do this book, given the controversy over the Oscars. Plenty of arguments with no easy conclusions, other than Everett’s book is impressive, and uproariously funny at times. He certainly deserves to be better known over here.

* * *

Friday 4th March 2016. To the ICA to see Hail Caesar! It’s the new Coen brothers film: one of their lighter, quirkier comedies in the style of Burn After Reading, as opposed to the darker likes of Fargo or No Country For Old Men. This one is set in the world of early 50s Hollywood, the era captured in That’s Entertainment, when actors’ whole lives were owned by studios, when fears of Communist threats were rife, and when mainstream films were at their most colourful and escapist. There’s extended clips from loving pastiches of such films, such as Esther Williams’s aquatic ballets, or Gene Kelly’s song-and-dance routines in sailor suits, or westerns that were really excuses for rodeo stunts and singing cowboys. George Clooney spends the whole film in his Roman centurion costume, having been kidnapped from the set of the title film, a lavish Biblical epic in the vein of The Robe.

Ralph Fiennes proves, again, that he really should do more comedy, while Tilda Swinton does her ice queen bit yet again, this time as a pair of identical twins turned rival gossip journalists. The plot is all very unlikely, and it does feel that it needs a rewrite to give it more of a sense of direction. But it also feels that to do so would mean cutting out so many enjoyable set pieces. In that sense, the film is a piece of indulgence, albeit made with the suspicion that the audience will be fine with such indulgence. Because it’s done as gleefully as this. I certainly enjoyed it.

* * *

Saturday 5th March 2016. To the House of Illustration in King’s Cross, for the exhibition Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comics. It’s billed as ‘the UK’s largest ever exhibition of the work of pioneering female comics artists’. The House of Illlustration’s main exhibition space comprises just three gallery rooms plus a video screening room, so expectations of ‘large’ do not initially spring to mind. But as is often the case with the HoI shows, each room is so crammed with comic art, with lots of shelves of graphic novels to pick up and browse, that the time needed to take it all in can’t be so different to a blockbuster Tate show.

The message of the exhibition is simple: women have made comics too, and there’s more female creators than one might think. But the show also posits the theory that all female creators contribute to a distinct role in culture, like Mother Earth: the ‘Creatrix’. What’s certainly true is that the show proves how women have drawn every possible genre of comics and sequential art, often with their gender kept quiet or even deliberately hidden (in that JK Rowling way of a girl’s name being thought to put off boy readers). Until today I hadn’t realised that the Victorian character Ally Sloper was co-created by a woman, Marie Duval.

Some favourites in the show: an account from the US Saturday Evening Post in 1960, describing the working day of Dalia ‘Dale’ Messick, creator of the 1940s strip Brenda Star – Reporter. ‘The hi–fi is on full blast… if the music is appropriate, she jumps up and does a rumba. In meditative periods, she chews gum with popping sound effects.’

I also enjoy the exhibits by Tove Jansson (pencils for a Moomins strip), Posy Simmonds (an original page for Tamara Drewe), a strip by Kate Beaton, and one by Laura Howell, a contributor to Viz. Ms Howell’s strip is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in any medium: ‘Benjamin Britten and his Embittered Bitten’.

The only shortcoming is that other people seem to have finally found out about the HoI, so the rooms are much more crowded than they were at my last visit. Oh, the dilemma of wanting to tell the world about a favourite place, while hoping that not too many people actually listen to you and go there.

I once heard of a Time Out restaurant critic who said that a handful of really nice restaurants in London never made it into the magazine. The rumour went that the staff deliberately kept these heavenly places quiet, so that they could still secure a table. It’s like the way Jehovah’s Witnesses advertise a version of paradise that nevertheless only comes in a limited edition.

Thinking about it, Time Out is now like The Watchtower in another respect. Another free handout of suspicious provenance, one of the many unasked-for concoctions of staples and hope, thrust ceaselessly into the faces of commuters each evening, as they rush to catch the Tube to eternal damnation. Or Euston, as it’s currently known.