Lowered horizons

I'm finding it very weird not getting a sense of excited dread around 1.30/2 p.m.: the time when Donald Trump picked up his phone every morning and said something racist and/or untrue. There's no structure in my day any more. All the old certainties are gone. It's like an extension of my life as a football fan: it's the hope that kills you. All Biden has to do is not bomb anywhere (which he will, eventually) and he'll be greeted as the new messiah, like a Stoke City manager who doesn't get us relegated, eking out a string of 0-0 draws without a spark of life. It's a bit depressing to have such low expectations but that's where we are. Mind you, I wish my annual appraisal was conducted with such lowered expectations…

Some of us were talking the other day about Things We Miss. I realised that all the big stuff – concerts, hugs, family weddings, archive visits, conferences and the like – mean nothing to me, compared to the one thing I want. I want to sit in a flock-wallpapered local curry house and be served just one dish. A huge, pillow-like naan (chili and garlic by preference) so fresh that the hot oil on it glistens and steam puffs out of the bread bubbles. The sheer bliss of the heat, the flavour and the texture would cure all ills. 

Ah well, one day. For now I'm subsumed in marking, course administration and teaching. I'm deeply lodged in 18th-century literature at the moment Moll Flanders and The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy. They're a hoot - it's been wonderful re-reading free-wheeling books that feel like they were written on the wild frontier of a new genre and I'm relishing the opportunity to mess with my students' heads: wait until we get on to BS Johnson's The Unfortunates (and I'll know they haven't read it if they don't mention its one defining feature). Stylistically, I'm a sucker for prose which believes strongly in Capitalisation For Emphasis and believes that any thing and no thing require no hyphenation. 

Part of this novel course will be about the genre's development alongside capitalism, protestantism and the patriarchy, and partly about the way the novel had to adapt the shape of lives not determined by western male heterosexual bourgeois concerns - such as eventually not always leading up to a white wedding. Moll is titillating and moralistic: like Paradise Lost her sins are enunciated clearly and in great detail to subsequently demonstrate our weakness and God's Providence, but Defoe's clearly a bit worried: the preface mentions the 'Vicious Reader' who might be there just for the dirty bits rather than the moral education. Sterne – although an actual vicar – is a lot more relaxed. The only private reading I'm doing is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: 10 years after everyone else read it. I quite like the unerring and slightly ironically pedantic Augustan narrative voice and the novel's fantasy-world engagement with the spiritual and intellectual trends of eighteenth-century English culture, but it really needed editing. I know size matters in these kinds of novels, but you can have too much of a good thing. Still, multiple people I respect have told me to read Clarke's new book, Piranesi, so that's next.

Back to the marking…