Tuesday 24 October 2017. I read an speech by Ali Smith on the present importance of the novel. ‘We’re all exiles, and the novel is one of our homes’. She quotes Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight (1937), on the immigrant experience: ‘The roofs that you see are not built for you’.
The trouble is, London’s new roofs are not built for many of the natives, either. I stare up at ‘FiftySevenEast’, the soaring new block by Dalston Kingsland station. I wonder what sort of people will live there. Anyone who badly needs a home full stop, like the growing number of beggars around the station? Anyone who’s lived in London for years? Anyone at all?
**
Wednesday 25 October 2017. An update to my earlier entry. I remembered how computer printer paper once came as ugly perforated scrolls, with dots along the sides and mysterious green stripes throughout. I’m now informed that this paper was commonly used to print tables of numbers, so each line was more readable when the alternate lines were striped green. Contrary to Genesis, in the beginning was the number.
I definitely recall seeing literary manuscripts on this sort of paper in the past. It’s so easy to forget about old ways which are not quite so old. Typewriters and Tippex did not graduate directly to today’s A4 print outs, but it somehow feels that they did.
Spend late morning and early afternoon in the London Library. Richard Canning’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Firbank’s Vainglory crams an impressive amount of research into a small space. I’m also fascinated that Professor Canning once performed in an Oxford student comedy team, the Seven Raymonds, along with Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. There’s a connection there in terms of trying to do humour in a modernist way; Stewart Lee’s jazz-like repetition of whole phrases isn’t so far from Gertrude Stein.
I surprise myself by hitting this week’s PhD goal in terms of word count. And it’s only Wednesday. Then again, I did the same on the MA in the final weeks: hitting a state of despair at falling behind, but then following it with an intense burst of speeding up. New bouts of energy and concentration suddenly arrive, but from where? The reservoir of sheer panic, one supposes.
Evening: To Gordon Square for a seminar on writing abstracts for academic conferences. I’m given lots of feedback on my own tentative attempt at an abstract. It’s for a forthcoming conference in the nearby Senate House Library, on ‘Queer Publishing’. One thing I’ve noticed is that some professional scholars seem to submit clumsily written abstracts, confident that their name will get them included regardless. It’s difficult to imagine Zizek being unsuccessful with a submission. Academia, like everywhere else, has its celebrities. The subtext of this being, obviously, that I’d quite like to be one myself.
**
Thursday 26 October 2017. A Boots optician’s bill for £260. And that’s with the student discount. This is for ‘varifocal’ lenses. It seems my eyesight has taken a turn for the worse. The cheap option is carry two pairs of spectacles everywhere, one for reading, one for distance. Or I can fork out for the all-in-one varifocals. I don’t have a spare £260. What to do? Develop a squint?
Evening: To Gordon Square for two seminars. One is on critical theory, specifically Franco Moretti’s rather subjective but intriguing Graphs, Maps, Trees. Then there’s a lecture by the theatre scholar Aiofe Monks, on theatrical ‘virtuosity’ in relation to ‘bad art’.
We’re shown a video of a Michael Flatley show, in which the Irish dancer stages an interpretation of the Easter Rising through the medium of tap dance. It’s like the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ scene in The Producers, except that Flatley’s audience are cheering and applauding. My own audience, being PhDs in a classroom that once was Virginia Woolf’s house, are culturally rather closer to the Producers audience. We may not be shocked about the tastelessness, but we’re wincing and trying our best not to giggle.
This is one of the points of Dr Monks’s lecture. Being not just a scholar of theatrical forms but Irish herself, she talks about being a schoolgirl and watching Flatley’s star-making moment on TV in the early 90s, as in the ‘Riverdance’ interval act in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Back then, she says, this single TV appearance engendered a communal feeling of excitement for lovers of Irish culture and Irish dance the world over. Previously the dance style was purely amateur: now, overnight, it was professional, respected, and visible for the whole world.
But later on, and after gaining her education, Dr M went to see one of Mr Flatley’s Las Vegas-style shows, and found them trashy, ridiculous, even hilarious. Technically he’s impressive: no one would deny that he dances extremely well. It’s just everything else that irks: the corny production and the garish choice of themes. Such shows are, to an academic critic or to anyone possessing what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’, demonstrably Bad Art.
Except, of course, it’s also Successful Art, and that’s the problem for scholars. How can one explain why more fans of Irishness buy Michael Flatley tickets than they do copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses? It’s the same dilemma addressed by the critic Carl Wilson in his book Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. Wilson has to come to terms with the fact that Celine Dion (Bad Art) has sold more albums than most of the albums by the Beatles (Good Art). Wilson is Canadian, like Ms Dion, so there’s a conflict over national pride too. I imagine that if one’s an expert on Irishness in contemporary theatre, Flatley is the tap-dancing elephant in the room.
I think of Edmund Wilson using the term ‘Bad Art’ to describe HP Lovecraft’s horror fiction in 1945. Lovecraft’s work is now considered to be culturally important and influential. Indeed, Dr M wonders tonight if her problem – and any scholar’s problem – is just one of not enough time having passed. Were Flatley performing in the 1850s, say, his work would be far easier to judge in a cultural and historical context, away from questions of taste and cultural capital and the things that scholars believe are canonically Good or Bad. And one wouldn’t feel such an ugly sense of snobbery. History dissolves snobbery.
**
Saturday 28 October 2017. Trying to catch up with the world of films, I see three in three days. Tonight it’s Daphne at the ICA. This is a low budget drama set in contemporary London, in which a young, red-haired, middle class woman mopes and sulks around the city in a rather nice blue coat. Sometimes she lies on a sofa and reads books by Slavoj Zizek, though she doesn’t know how to pronounce his name properly (and I’m not sure if the makers realise this). There is one plot of sorts, involving Daphne witnessing a stabbing in an off-license, along with another concerning her strained relationship with her mother, as played by Geraldine James. But the whole effect is disconnected and unsatisfying. No theme or plot seems to have been put through even a minimum level of development. It’s as if they’ve accidentally released a collection of first drafts as a finished film. I come away in troubleshooter mode like this, knowing that the film could have been improved, and wondering why it wasn’t. The answer, I suppose, is that the makers were happy with the end product, and that it’s just me. It’s funny how taste can engender loneliness.
**
Sunday 29 October 2017. A delicious veggie brunch at Dalston Superstore with Kath G. It’s nearly Halloween, and the drag queen on the DJ decks has managed to add some zombie make-up to her usual palimpsest of panstick. It’s more accomplished than the common look I saw on the Tube the previous night: people whose costumes solely consisted of half-hearted skull make-up. Hastily scrawled black lines on white faces. The bare, grumpy minimum. ‘Who have you come as? ‘The Ghost of Fancy Dress Resentment’.
A Twitter game doing the rounds: one calculates one’s ideal Halloween costume by taking one’s own greatest fear and making it into a sexy version. I nominate ‘Sexy Manila Envelope’.
Afternoon: to the Rio for The Ballad of Shirley Collins, a new documentary on the Sussex folk singer, now in her 80s and living in Lewes. She retired some years ago, a move triggered by the strange loss of her voice after the trauma of her husband leaving her (which sounds like a folk song in itself).
This is a very well-made and thoughtful film, and lets its choices of what to see do much of the narration. A case in point is a glimpse at an MBE in a box, made without comment, along with shots of various objects on Ms Collins’s bookshelves and mantelpieces. One object is a box set of EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books. Because of my interest in Firbank, I tend to think of Mapp and Lucia in the lineage of camp English literature. Benson is more traditional than Firbank, but they share a love of female characters speaking in arch and campy ways. In Shirley Collins’s case, though ,it’s probably the books’ association with Sussex that appeals: Benson’s fictional ‘Trilling’ is based on Rye.
**
Monday 30 October 2017. To the Rio for The Death Of Stalin. The directior is Armando Ianucci, who is now a big enough comedy name to attract other big names: Michael Palin, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs. The presence of Paul Whitehouse as one of the Russian ministers reminds me of a sketch in a recent Harry and Paul special, where Mr Enfield managed to play Alan Bennett as Stalin and Jim Broadbent as a Russian officer. The odd thing about The Death of Stalin is that it seems to be trying to not have a style at all, probably because it’s funded by French investors. The comedy is mainly in the madness of the historical facts and in its broad slapstick, rather than the language. There are little nods to the style of The Thick of It (government staffers swearing a lot), while Jason Isaac’s thick Northern English accent as the head of the Russian army is surely a purely British joke. But otherwise the emphasis is on making a funny film where the humour will translate internationally.
In this way, it’s closer to The Lobster than The Thick of It: a film in English which comes across as translated from a foreign script. I later discover that the source material is a French graphic novel, so that must be at least part of the reason. The film is worth it for the sight of a respected stage actor like Simon Russell Beale ramming his formidable stomach against Steve Buscemi’s, as part of a drunken argument. The scene is slapstick and silly, and well beneath the talents of either actor, but it’s still funny.
**
Tuesday 31st October 2017. Halloween. I welcome the way this utterly American festival – which first seem to percolate over here with the film E.T. – has forced London shops to mercifully put back their Christmas branding until November. However, I have to take a Canute-like stand in one respect: I can’t yet call chocolate bars ‘candy’.
**
Wednesday 1st November 2017. I read the late Peter Hall’s diary entry for this day in 1977. It was his trip to Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood. The ceremony seems unchanged from the one I witnessed in July 2008, for my mother’s MBE. Sir Peter lined up in the same long, unbroken parade of recipients in alphabetical order, all to meet the same royal who stands in the same spot for a full hour and half. The royal is somehow able to say something interesting and special to each one of over a hundred people. In his case it was the Queen Mother, managing this feat in her late seventies. Like me Sir Peter H also records, ungraciously, that ‘we should have been given a drink’.
**
Thursday 2nd November 2017. To Gordon Square for a seminar on bibliographies, followed by a lecture on speech acts in the age of slavery. The seminar refers to Umberto Eco’s 1977 book How To Write A Thesis. Eco’s book now works as a historical reminder of the way things used to be for PhDs, in the days before computers. He advises students to create a bibliography using alphabetical cards kept in a box file, and that they should take such a box with them every time they go to a library. At first it seems easy to scoff at this vision of the bulky awkwardness of the past, but then today’s students are not exactly unburdened either. Laptops are still fairly heavy, and hardback books and thick pads of paper are very much in use. It’s not uncommon to see huge backpacks and wheeled suitcases in a university library. Despite all the advances in digital convenience, people are still physically weighed down by their work. Why isn’t the future easier?
**
Friday 3rd November 2017. With Ms Shanthi to Mangal 2, one of the many likeable and unintimidating Turkish restaurants on the Kingsland Road (I am easily intimidated in restaurants). I’d heard that this is Gilbert and George’s regular haunt, though Shanthi says they only come here on Tuesdays, and that when they do they use the back entrance. O, the mythologies of artists! Minutes after we sit down, in comes the alliterative duo themselves, greyer these days but still very recognisable, the smaller one wearing a furry Russian hat, even though it’s quite mild. Through the front door too. Shanthi glances over at them as we eat, and afterwards swears that they didn’t speak a word to each other throughout.
A younger, long-haired man comes into the restaurant with a paperback ostentatiously protruding from his jeans pocket: Iron John: A Book About Men. Everyone’s discussing the Trouble With Men as it is, what with the news dominated by tales of sexual harassment.
Then to the Rio for a rather more edifying tale of male sexuality. Call Me By Your Name is a sun-kissed, understated film about sexual obsession, set in the Italian countryside in the early 80s (Ms S especially enjoys the use of the Psychedelic Furs). A skinny boy in his late teens becomes attracted to a (very) grown man in his twenties, though the desire is complicated. The younger actor is remarkable. He is devoted to the part not on a tiresomely overdone and ‘actorly’ level, but on a level of focus and diligence which makes one want to work harder oneself.  I suspect everyone who sees this film thinks of two scenes towards the end, one with a long speech from the boy’s father (a character not unlike Umberto Eco), and one based around a phone call which brings me to tears.
**
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Tags: birkbeck, call me by your name, dalston rio, daphne, gilbert and george, mangal 2, phd, the ballad of shirley collins, the death of stalin
