That Friday feeling

Hi everybody. Apologies for the relative radio silence today.

It's been busy. The first thing I had to do today was finish shortening and cleaning up the paper I've co-written on jazz in some contemporary British novels. I've loved writing with someone else: the pressure not to disappoint or let down a friend (especially a much cleverer one) has provided the spur that I, as a congenitally lazy ass, really needed. It's been great looking at the same words and two of us coming up with different ways to understand them too. But today was about editing: we were way over the limit, so we had to cut. I was dreading this bit: how would my partner feel if I presented her with a draft in which all her bits had been radically shortened? I know I'd hate it. But gloriously, I couldn't tell which bits she'd written and which were mine for the most part. She uses more commas and I use more colons, but that was about it. So we cut and honed and hammered until we were there. Then I had to learn an entirely new referencing system (Chicago Notes and Bibliography) and change every single reference. And then wrestle with RefWorks, the referencing software. In the end though, it's done and we've agreed that we'll do it again, for which I'm profoundly grateful. I was expecting a painful session in which a red pen and a literary walk of shame would be my only reward.

After that: I've interviewed a potential MA student and now have two brand new lectures to write for delivery on Tuesday (5 hours of lecturing without a break). One is on the post-Romantic hero in contemporary fiction, and the other is Derrida for Media Studies and Cultural Studies students. Gulp. Monday's out because it's my grandmother's funeral (did I mention that her brother died a few days ago too?) so it looks like the weekend will consist of me scratching my head and breaking off hourly for a glass of freshly squeezed horse glands. I should do more tonight but all the ideas I had yesterday have magically morphed into barely-literate and gnomic scribbles. I'm too tired to transform them into coherent ideas now – instead I'll be back in the office tomorrow.

While doing all this, I've had the office mostly to myself and allowed my Twitter stream to dictate the music I listen to. So a mention of Mogwai got me listening to their early stuff, followed by Labradford, then (as it was Valentine's day), Love, then Majorstuen, a wonderful Norwegian folk group, then some John Taverner. Here's a blast of each:



This is Mogwai's 'New Paths To Helicon'. They pioneered instrumental quiet-loud-quiet post-rock, following in the footsteps of Slint and Labradford. I saw them twice: once in Stoke supporting the Manic Street Preachers in the mid-90s, and last year. I was the only one in the crowd at Stoke there primarily for Mogwai: everybody else stood there with hands over ears mouthing 'what's this shit?' because it hadn't been on Chris Evans's Breakfast Show or whatever. Then last year in a tiny, lovely Birmingham music-hall they made the most beautiful, challenging noise, but behaved like spoiled children having temper tantrums. Nobody forced you to be a band, sell tickets and have fans guys: at least pretend to enjoy it. It's better than working in an office!

Labradford were around in the 90s, but I never managed to see them sadly. Like Mogwai, they lurch from ethereal beauty to pummelling aggression and back within seconds, though the older band's purpose is that little bit more elusive. Here's a fairly late one by them:



Love were also-rans in the 60s: too many chaotic fallings-out, drugs and changes of direction meant that their seminal Forever Changes wasn't the huge success it should have been. Here's the heart-breaking 'Alone Again Or':



Majorstuen just make me happy. I think I heard them on Radio 3 and immediately bought their album. I don't know whether they're the cutting edge of Norwegian roots or retro. I don't particularly care either. But they are yet another reason to move to Norway. My favourite track starts at 17 minutes.



Finally, a sublime Taverner arrangement of the ancient Westron Wynde song used by several English Renaissance composers as the basis of mass settings. Never mind the theology, feel the beauty.



Obviously other things have caught my eye today. In case you're wondering, I'm both outraged and unsurprised by: the Sun's front page; the Tory minister who declared that gay couples are incapable of caring for children; further adulteration of meat.

More Reckons next week, when I'll also be live-tweeting two family funerals.

This certainly doesn't happen every day

Usually, I'm a modest man with (as Winston Churchill snidely said of Clement Atlee), 'much to be modest about'. But today, indulge me for a moment:



Why such levity? 

I just got a note from the editor of an international journal which has accepted a paper what I wrote. One of the readers called it 'superb' and she said:

Excellent piece, by the way. I'm proud to be publishing it.

This is not normal. I find writing very difficult. Well, not blogging, obviously, but I really do find research and academic writing stressful and expect to be laughed out of town whenever I try any. There's always more to read, everyone else is so accomplished and I always feel like an interloper. 

But not today. Though obviously the words 'they're just being nice to you because you're so useless and they didn't have enough submissions' are thundering around my cranium.  

Too dumb to live

Sometimes students come in, distraught, having missed a deadline because they got the date wrong. Some of them are liars, but most of them have made a genuine error. I'm usually sympathetic but have to tell them that the system doesn't allow for human error. We academic staff don't have control of the submission mechanism and can't give extensions. Quite often I think to myself 'the date is on the module guide and the assignment brief: sort yourself out'.

No longer. The next time someone comes in with this tale of woe I will move heaven and earth to help them. Why? Because it's happened to me. In a move of stunning stupidity, I read a submission date for my Travel in Wales journal article as January 15th rather than January 5th. Was it because I wasn't wearing my newly-acquired spectacles? Or because I have another chapter deadline on February 15th? Or because I am, in the final reckoning, a moron? Whatever the cause, I've been working steadily away confident that I'd make the deadline. Indeed I was feeling rather smug that my new academic rigour and determination was going to get me there a day or two early unlike some people (in some fields extra time is always given as part of the submission ritual).

What to do? I've sent the most grovelling and apologetic email ever written to the editors begging for extra time and apologising profusely. The heart raced and the face was red as I prostrated myself humiliatingly. It's all I can do: hope they show mercy and keep writing. This is one of those occasions on which there's no scintilla of light, nobody and nothing else can be blamed. It's just me, being a dick. I've always loved this Douglas Adams line: 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past', but it's not funny today: I've let down my academic peers and announced to them that I'm unreliable. Not good at all.

If there's any good coming out of this at all, it's that I'll be a little more understanding to students in the same position. But that doesn't make me feel one iota better this morning, I can tell you.

Update: the lovely editors have forgiven me and given me until the 15th. So relieved. Now to make it the best paper ever. I don't think I'd ever live down an extension which led to a rejected article…

The life cycle of an author

I don't do creative writing: nothing to say and no literary talent. But friends do, and they're all very good. Publishing, however, is difficult.

Here's artist Tom Gauld's explanation of the short story writer's career:

The terror of the blank page

It's that time of year when I have to get writing lectures on books I've either never read, or haven't read for a long time. I also have to get on with doing some research, which is how I'll get a better job elsewhere.

Unfortunately, my mind freezes at the sight of the blank page - something with which students may be familiar when starting essays.

We aren't alone: this is a quotation from Swann's Way, volume one of his massive Remembrance of Things Past:

And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a malady of the brain was hindering its development.

Are you Staring at my Performative Quotation Marks? (Or, What Academics Do)

When I'm not writing exciting lectures about East Francian vowel shifts (wait till tomorrow, Intro to Lit 2 kids), I'm tackling the big issues in literary studies.

I'm not alone. Some fearless intellectual voyagers are pondering the fundamentals (you might say the colon) of our craft. What treasure do they find?

Quotation marks are ‘queer’, both denoting authority and authenticity, and questioning the status of what passes for natural. They mark performance, although post-structuralism has exploded such distinctions as natural and performed. Most of this section is a study of the lyric and danced memory routines of Bill Jones, whose poses are the physical equivalent of quotations which trouble the distinction between first and third persons and equivocate history, truth, sincerity, sexual identity, and any single ideological position. This equivocation is particularly embodied in the following Joycean and performative chapter, rich in formal experimentation and literary and critical allusion in its play on ‘sem;erot;ics’ and ‘colon:zat;ions’. The final chapter, ‘Cyberpunktuations’ represents the ultimate transformation of the punctuation mark into a visual and affective performance. Electronic communication is ironically one of the most tangible and graphological in its transformation of punctuation marks into emoticons.

Comments open for your scorn… I understand this stuff, and I still think it's, well, not much cop. (Much of it won't be news to you students either, as you all seem to be very much 'post-punctuation').

WTF? LOL: FAIL!!!!

Hello. Relatively quiet today, as I've got enormous amounts of marking to do, and had a Very Serious Meeting about whatever it is that we're meant to be doing here.

Anyway, some bright Web 2.0 sparks have decided that we have collectively failed as far as reading goes. Because none of us are capable of detecting nuance, tone or mood from the written word, they've invented a special symbol, or massive flashing signpost, to indicate sarcasm - the SarcMark

It's obviously what I've been waiting for. It abolished all that pesky ambiguity that we've wasted our time with. If only Jane Austen had known about this, I wouldn't have whiled away summer afternoons explaining to my students that when she wrote 'it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife' (Pride and Prejudice from memory, ladiesngennelmen), she was being sarcastic or perhaps ironic, or even playful, but probably not overly serious anyway.

Clearly the new version would run something like this:

Rich blokes want birds, innit!!LOL!!!

I know that sometimes you, dear reader, fail to appreciate my humour, but that's because you're stupid I'm not very funny. There hasn't been a sudden failure of print or readers. Words on screen don't suddenly lose power because of where they are. So all in all, well done, SarcMark designers. What a brilliant idea. You guys are brilliant and your idea will be on every keyboard within a year.

Hate writing essays?

Don't despair: your teachers do too, as my colleague's latest post describes! Having gone back to do a Poetry MA at another place, her terror of the blank page is inducing sympathy for students.

I agree. I did a BA, an MA, a PhD and finally a PGC in HE, so writing large chunks of text is very familiar, but never pleasant: research is the fun bit, but shaping coherent thoughts for a superior reader is terrifying. Of course, I do it several times a week to provide lectures, but nobody marks them. I suppose that going back to this kind of discipline is useful - it reminds us of the difficulties and complexities of what we're doing to people…

Writing Tips

This is wise, and true:

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

From a longer piece by screenwriter Josh Olson. The last sentence is the most important.

Tricksy postmodernist git

Cynical Ben has spent most of the last week setting up a variety of blogs under pseudonyms. It now appears that they are all part of a new genre of writing - a novel of sorts consisting of characters' telling their parts of the story on their own blogs. He's provided a central site from which you can access the various facets.

I'm seriously impressed - the concept is fascinating, the characterisation's good, and it makes use of the possibilities of the technology. What do you think? Leave your comments on his site(s).

Despite being Least Worst Best Man at his wedding (alongside Neal and Mr Radford Sallow's young friend Daniel), I'm increasingly convinced that Cynical Ben is simply a sock-puppet for legal eagle Jo Judge.

Update - according to Loose Ends on Radio 4, the overlap between a book and a blog is a 'blook'. Revolting.

Author! Author!

Cynical Ben has had a story published on Rainy City Stories - underneath his steely, cynical exterior is the puppyish soul of a creative type. Read it here. It's a masterpiece of compression.

Uh huh her

It's time for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award (for bad sex in fiction, so you can't nominate your exes). I always enjoy the sight of aged soi-disant heavyweight authors and powerful men getting their mojos working in public. They're too powerful to be edited boldly, so they spill their literary seed onto the page and expose only their own tedious, and usually tediously mechanical, imaginations to the mockery of the crowd. There's a simple rule - get your friends to read it. If they laugh, cut it out (or off). 

Thomas Pynchon's entry (sorry) is particularly egregious (last one on the page), though Updike has won it before. This year, I'm rooting (sorry again - it's catching after a quick browse) for Alastair Campbell's All In The Mind. But perhaps he can't help it, as the former 'Riviera Gigolo' of Forum magazine fame, to which I'm not linking. 

Bastard

My friend Cynical Ben has started a blog. He's a man with a lot to say, very little of it warm-hearted, so I knew he'd be good at blogging. I was right: he's got the right blend of wit, learning and top writing skills to be successful. I am, naturally, hugely jealous and slightly ashamed of my own efforts.