feeding the five thousand » my ideal novel

I have been busy for the past few weeks preparing for my first year oral exam, which was on Thursday. The exam is the one that I think I may have mentioned to some of you, whereby I submit a list of texts broadly representative of British and American literary history and a panel of three (plus one observer) quiz me on it for twenty minutes each, so that the three time periods that they represent occupy an hour. I failed all three sections of this exam. When I got feedback from the examiners, (and all that follows is a melange of direct quotes) I was told that I came across as being very witty, charming, urbane, intelligent and glib. That I was all style and no substance - that in many cases they simply didn't believe that I had read the texts that we were talking about. Of course, because I am not stupid enough to believe that my examiners are stupid, I had read every text on my list. I got the DGS to admit that the impression that I gave to the committee was that I thought that I was a clever Oxford boy who could slide through this exam on his charm. That I was so charming that I had never really been pushed on anything before. Everything had simply fallen into my lap and I'd not had to really work for anything before. Frankly, said the DGS, they just wanted to see me sweat a little. But it is important that I understand that this isn't political, it really isn't, and everyone thinks I'm fabulous and golden and noone is out to get me, and it really isn't political, but they just want me to do it again. Discursive, bluffing, bullshitting, throwing questions back with modifications rather than just answering them: my style is parrying, apparently, and superficial - and evaluative rather than analytical. I seem to have been trained, they say, in a softer, more pastoral tradition.

On this last remark, which is, perhaps, the only substantive criticism that was levelled, I have been thinking a bit. And it occurs to me that I think that in general discussion, rather than in a context in which you actually have the text in front of you and are talking about what a sentence means and why, or what a particular piece of punctatuation is doing, I believe that a simple aesthetic judgment is almost always more defensible on the spot and therefore a more rigorous mode of discussing a text than to make some assertion about a text or body of texts without the ability to provide textual substantiation for that assertion. By which I mean: without recourse to textual empiricism for an evidential debate, I think that aestheticism coupled with a very flexible relativism and circumspect openness to other, differing aesthetic judgment, will always be the most valid, interesting, useful way of talking about a work.

So - I will be retaking the exam in the next month. I will knuckle under, suck it up, kiss the ring. I am not going to leave Stanford over this, and nor will it go on my record. But it is an instantiation of hierarchy that serves no end other than itself. No other student in my cohort failed this exam, and I hope that I do not flatter myself that I am not so distinctly the worst of my peer group that such a clear, nay, qualitative line can be drawn between my knowledge, manner, and intelligence and theirs. So I do, I confess, wonder: to what extent did I fail this exam because I have two degrees from Oxford? To say that I am unhappy, crushed and disappointed would be litotic. But there is nothing I can do about that. It might be a hoop to jump through, but if I don't jump through it I will not be able to jump through other, more meaningful hoops down the line, to whit passing my orals proper in two years, getting a PhD, or getting a job.

The irony of it all is that I was not trained in anything remotely resembling a softer, more pastoral tradition. I was trained in a way that, despite its flaws, attempted to imitate the Socratic tradition. And perhaps on top of that I simply ingested Blindness and Insight too deeply - took its epistemological lessons too very much to heart, and have attached too much importance to de Man's exhortion not to "confuse the rigour of the analytic procedure with the epistemelogical authority of the ensuing results." But soft it wasn't, and pastoral it wasn't. By which I mean, intellectually lazy it wasn't. And intellectually lazy I am not.

I haven’t written anything here for a while of any real substance, for explanations of which see every other life-gets-in-the-way post on the internet. I’m spending this Christmas in St. Louis with XXX and her parents, which is truly wonderful. Her parents are kind, genial, funny people, but spending Christmas with XXX has been the best present I could have asked for. I don’t care if it sounds cheesy.

[...]

I suppose part of the reason that I don’t write much here is that I don’t do much of my emotional thinking in writing any more – I do it by talking with XXX . When I do sit down to write something that isn’t a tedious email, or a piece of work, I’m more likely to struggle with some half-formed idea of a lyric poem than I am to update this. It’s loathsomely pop-psychologistic to say that, then, writing poetry is my outlet, (outlet for what? Narcissism? Self-promotion? Dimly-glimpsed fantasies of art? Who knows.) but it’ll do.

I spent the previous fortnight in England, with a week at my father’s and a week at my mother’s. The best part was seeing my sister and a few dear and much-missed friends from university. The parents were both rather depressed in their different ways. I’m trying to learn not to take that personally, or to imagine that it is up to me to solve their problems for them. It is a hard lesson to learn.

Really, I feel oddly suspended between studenthood and ‘real-life.’ I was nominated for membership at my father’s club – which is full of unspeakable cunts, needless to say – and they waggishly put my occupation down as ‘dilettante.’ I work very hard, but it isn’t work with tangible outcomes, or work that fits into any particular sector. Really, I suppose am serving what used to be called an apprenticeship. I am weirdly hostile to suggestions that what I do isn’t hard work, or that I am a ‘perpetual student.’ I think that these are pretty usual insecurities and that I probably don’t need to worry about them.

I had a ridiculous encounter in a cafeteria last month and have been since wondering what poise is – because poise seems to me to be an affected self-sufficiency that you learn to internalise. Someone blew up at me and I didn’t blow up back, although I did feel sick for half an hour afterwards.

I’ve had a pretty materialistic year. I’ve bought boots, shoes, jumpers, t-shirts, and jeans. I crashed my car twice (the second time reasonably seriously) but I’m ok. I keep forgetting to go to an osteopath. I steal a lot of music from the internet and keep in touch with my friends only sporadically. After September-October-November, I started a higher dosage of anti-depressants, and they continue to help me live like a functional human being. I drink an awful lot of coffee. XXX and I cook for each other most nights and watch a film, or the X-Files, or Buffy. We usually work until one or two in the morning. We take a lot of care of each other. I think we are hollowing out a space for ourselves. It takes a long time, and it feels like we have to push against a lot of stuff to make it happen, and I like it.

Bananas!

Be clear, I tell my students. Clarify. Rephrase this to make it active. The main verb is buried here - bring it out. There no main verb in this sentence. Take this out of the conditional. If this is what you mean, says so - don't couch it. But really, what good will it do them? I am just teaching them to condemn themselves faster and faster

I have limitations. That makes me sad.

So tired in the car today that I kept swerving onto line dividers coming up the 280. Efforts to find abrasive music on iPod only exacerbated matters.

I was listening to this album today and yesterday. I can only really describe it as French electro-house. The first two tracks alone are extraordinary - packed with references to Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73, Grizzly Bear harmonies, Daft Punk and Air homages especially prominent, also less clear stuff like Cassius (!) and old-school funk bass lines straight from Parliament and James Brown. Treatment of samples from Orbital, fascination with aural properties from Chemical Brothers. Huge beats and tunes from Basement Jaxx. More than anyone I've heard for a long time they are fascinated by the real quality of a sound - when you do this to a Moog and let it sit and dwell, what is the nature of the resulting noise - fluctuations are drawn out and made to carry harmonic weight. It's very French, very European LCD Soundsystem. Fuck you, they say - this is how we do it here. White noise and glitches thrown in from Squarepusher and unplaceable samples from DJ Shadow on out.

Something that they do that really grabs me is that they insert blocks of silence - silence made to sound like glitches. Huge gouges, effectively, cut into the texture of the thing (and texture is more than in most things the way to listen to Justice). It reminds me of Dr. John taking 5 whole beats out of a solo just to let his phrase sit for a bit.

Then I wondered - could you make music in which silence was the beat - say white noise punctuated by silences? But the problem is that you can't differentiate silences. They are not variable in pitch - silences are the absence of pitch, the absence of anything. They are a null. So you couldn't, because anything more than marking time would be confusing and undifferentiated - and of course a beat is always in tension with the time that it is marking.

Whenever I buy flowers I vacillate between horror at their expense and astonishment at how beautiful they are.

Now that they have been in the flat for a few hours I have stopped wavering and settled down at wonder - and thinking about carnations & Oxford; irises and my great-aunt, whose name was Iris and who gave my mother a pair of iris-coloured marmalade jars (one of which now broken); of roses and Valentines past; of freesias wrapped in shredded paper, sent by my sister and still in their buds - too delicate to show to anyone, I hid them away until they bloomed, like a conservative parent, only, successful; heather and summers in Scotland, and hybrid flowers, and my grandmother, who bred hybrid rhododendrons and how is now wasting away, forgetting, deep in Switzerland.

I wonder how long they will last.

Alas, this is beautifully put together, but it just isn't for me. Some things that are well-done that I wouldn't have thought I would like - like Britney Spears' Toxic - surprise me. Sadly, Baime falls into the category of things that I can and do admire without liking them. (Viz. Glinka, American Football, Tarkovsky, etc.)

The caraway and basil dominate here, along with the lavender and sandalwood, making it smell like a very expensive and gorgeously worked-out cheap fougere. Mind you, the astringency of the caraway is very classy. But still, overall, a very classy snooze.

(Actually, I do like Tarkovsky - I couldn't think of a third thing that I admire without liking. The logistical prowess of Nazi Germany seemed inappropriate for a perfume review in the public domain.)

Turkish delight!