Saturday 18 January 2014. The last of three weeks where all I’ve really done is struggle to stay on top of college assessments, alongside doing the reading for the regular classes. It’s just been essays, and coughing a lot (typing this up on the 12th day of a cold).
Sitting here to write up my life, I bemoan the distinct lack of a life. Sometimes a diary can work as a warning. One feels the need to explain away the time gone by. Yet so much of it can be taken up by utter mundanities. One night this week was dominated by my having to re-install the right driver for my computer printer. Not the greatest of nights ever lived in the history of literature.
There is also The Tale of The Missing Ryman’s Receipt, the details of which I shall spare the reader, but suffice to say it guzzled a disproportionately higher amount of hours than any small piece of paper has a feasible right to.
There’s so much in life which shouldn’t be work, but ends up becoming work. All too easily, an errand can become an epic. Beowulf has nothing on stationery receipts.
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Sunday 19 January 2014. The current essay is on Dorian Gray. Many discussions of Wilde’s novel quote a particular letter of his, replying to a reader. The letter must have been a very minor thing to Wilde, yet it’s been used ever since as one of the great comments on his novel.
It’s a letter to Ralph Payne, of 50 Ennismore Gardens, London. Postmarked 12 February 1894.
‘Dear Mr Payne… [The Picture of Dorian Gray] contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps.’
There is a missing character from this line-up, though: Sibyl Vane. It’s tempting to suggest that she is what Wilde hoped not to be – but did become. The artist who gives up on their art when life (and love) gets in the way.
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Monday 20 January 2014. Class text for tonight: the strange fashion for ‘it-narratives’ during the late eighteenth century. As in entire novels about the supposed life of inanimate objects. ‘The Story of a Thimble’, and so on. These were, it seems, just as popular as Pride and Prejudice at the time. Less so now. No Penguin Classics editions, so we have to read PDF scans of first editions, complete with all the letter ‘s’s looking like ‘f’s.
Tuesday 21 January 2014. I often wake up with a song playing in my head, a random selection from one’s iPod of the mind, forever on shuffle mode. Today it’s ‘Talking About A Revolution’ by Tracy Chapman. I have no opinion either way on Ms Chapman’s oeuvre, and indeed I am not aware what she thinks of mine. But let history pay witness: her inoffensive folk-pop outing from the late 80s has risen unbidden this morning from the crevices of my mind, and will not away.
In dutiful Proustian mode, the song has also dragged up, seaweed-like, various associated memories: the debut album it was on, ‘Tracy Chapman’, being everywhere when it came out – summer 1988. Our family owning it on cassette. Me staying in a Ludlow youth hostel, the woman on reception playing it loudly in the background while I check in.
But an unkind joke also pops up too, from an Alexei Sayle TV show, commenting on the lyrics of the song.
‘Poor people are gonna rise up and take what’s theirs…? No they’re not!’
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Thursday 24 January 2014. Class texts: Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers and Salome by Oscar Wilde.
‘I’d like this class to be more of a seminar than a lecture,’ the tutor for 21st Century Fiction says, optimistically.
Although I’ve read the book and made lengthy notes, I’ve forgotten that this isn’t enough. You also have to boil your insights down into a few concise, seminar-ready soundbites that tutors want to hear. As it is I’ve spoken up a lot in previous classes. I don’t want to be known as That Sort Of Student, the kind that puts their hand up only for the tutor to say ‘Somebody else?’ So I feel it’s okay to keep quiet for this one.
Only one other student pipes up, who is a lot less concerned about annoying the others than I am. She is an older Spanish woman who has a tendency to go off into long, rambling monologues. Her conclusion tonight is: ‘And that’s why I think he wrote this – to make money’.
Still, at least she read the book. As it turns out, when the exasperated tutor finally grills each of us in turn, most of the class haven’t been able to finish the novel – probably due to all the essays they’ve had to turn in this month.
The art of being a good seminar student is tricky, though. You’re meant to contribute, but at the same time be concise and stick to the point.
The same problem often happens at public Q&As. Many audience members don’t realise that a question needs to be taut and pithy rather than an overlong thesis that they want to broadcast to the world. If the rest of the room is sighing heavily, that’s the time to stop talking. And yet, sighing heavily is still no good if you’re not going to say anything yourself.
* * *
The most discussed TV show this week is Benefits Street. I’ve not seen it myself, mainly because it’s a series rather than a one-off documentary. There’s always an element of fiction in one-off documentaries as it is, but in a series the artifice to fact ratio has to be much higher. The main message of such a series is not ‘this is how life is’ but ‘tune in next week’.
The illustration side of news and topical TV is always fascinating, though. There’s the strange world of stock photos (‘a lion, not this one, escaped from a zoo today’), while local newspapers often have articles over, say, pot holes in a road (which is fact) alongside a photo of the person doing the complaining, crouching next to the pot hole (which is fiction). I think about the setting up of such photographs: lighting, wardrobe, hair and perhaps even make-up must be concerns too, never mind holes in the road. ‘Can you look more cross?’
Tags: another fool judging a tv programme they've not seen, classes, isn't baby I love you by the Ronettes an amazing record?, no life for Dickon, passing off deleted scenes from essays as diary entries, piping down after piping up, poor richard powers, poor tracy chapman, the art of speaking up
