Elvis: the best of books, the worst of books

Another bit of my Essential Elvis manuscript that didn't make it into the final version was my list of the best Elvis books. The list was in the first edition but in a far briefer form. 

So, over the coming days (maybe weeks), I will be posting here on what I reckon are the best Elvis books.

But first . . .

Johnny Ramone's list of the best Elvis books. 

The late Ramone brother kept extensive lists in notebooks. Here is his Elvis book top ten.

1. Last Train to Memphis (Peter Guralnik) 

2. Careless Love (Peter Guralnik)
 
3. Elvis Up Close: In the Words of Those Who Knew Him Best (Rose Clayton and Dick Heard)

4. Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations From the Memphis Mafia (Alanna Nash)

5. That’s Alright Elvis (Scotty Moore and James Dickerson)
 
6. Elvis: What Happened? (Red West and Steve Dunleavy)

7. All About Elvis (Fred L. Worth and Steve D. Tamerius)

8. The Elvis Encyclopedia (Adam Victor)
 
9. Down at the End of Lonely Street (Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske)

10. The Elvis Atlas (Michael Gray and Roger Osborne)

More Johnny Ramone and Elvis . . .

His favorite Elvis songs  . . .

1. Don't Be Cruel, 
2. Can't Help Falling In Love, 
3. Baby Let's Play House, 
4. Viva Las Vegas, 
5. Are You Lonesome Tonight? 

His favourite singers . . .

1. Elvis
2. Bing Crosby
3. Roy Orbison
4. Gene Pitney
5. The Everly Brothers

His favourite Elvis movies . . .

1. Loving You

2. Jailhouse Rock

3. King Creole

4. Viva Las Vegas

5. Follow That Dream

6. Kid Galahad

7. Love Me Tender

8. Kissin' Cousins

9. Elvis: That's the Way It Is

10. G.I. Blues

Here is a little film of Johnny's Elvis room.

So did the Ramones ever cover an Elvis song? It seems not. For sure, there isn't one on the quite wonderful Ace records compilation, The Ramones Heard Them Here First. They did, though, do this quite wonderful version of a Tom Waits song . . .

Next You'll be able to see how my favourites compare with da brudder's. Hint: the first one is not on Johnny's list.

Meantime . . . buy the book.

Vicky Christina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part two*

Like everyone, I lost Woody Allen somewhere along the way. Can’t remember when. Probably in the early/mid-1990s, maybe earlier. That apart, I remember seeing a bit — on cable — of the one about Wimbledon. There was a murder in it, I think. It was so bad that, well, I can’t even be bothered to summon the will-power to finish that comparison.

So to his Vicky Christina Barcelona. I’d read and heard that it was a return to form. Yes, I know it’s a couple of years old, at least but . . . see above. I saw it was on cable. I missed it half a dozen times or so. Then I told myself: no, you must watch it. So, for once, I made myself sit down at the start and stay there till the credits.

Well?

Not well.

To understand what I write next, you probably need to have seen it or have me provide you with at least an outline description of it. Again, I can’t be bothered. Work it out yourself from the title: two girls, Americans, Spain. Add what you know of Woody Allen’s work and you’ve got a good idea.

So . . . there are only two possible explanations/readings of this film** . . . Which I will start explaining/reading in the next post.

* How many parts exactly? Well, more than two, it seems. I’ll keep you posted.

** I’d been reading*** a certain amount of Zizek and so found myself somewhat influenced by his stand-up philosophy.

*** When I write about ‘reading’ Zizek, I don’t, of course, mean reading in the sense of opening a book, studying it, finishing it. No, I mean reading newspaper interviews with him, glancing at the cover of a photocopy of his 1989 essay Which Subject of the Real? that’s on top of a Really Useful box in my office and rewatching his wonderful Channel 4 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema. Well, some of it.

Towards a future post . . . Go here, paste in some text (your own, mine, a writer you like) and it’ll tell you which famous writer’s style it’s closest to. I’ve done mine. Hence the forthcoming post. Only not till I’ve finished with Woody Allen and Freud on football.

The writing of it

And so to desk. I did finally write my dissertation, about which I was surprisingly anxious - which might be a hint as to why it's taken even longer to write this blog about it.

I . . . well, I did all the usual things I'm sure everyone does when they have a dissertation to write.

* They sit reading and reading and reading their way through a pile of stuff, most of which looked like a good idea when they first looked it up/printed it/downloaded it but which now starts to seem increasingly irrelevant/tedious/marginal.

* They write an intro which starts to seem tendentious/over-written/unclear/boring.

* They go away to another part of the country, lie on another sofa, reading more books and papers - between going for walks and making phone calls.

* They feel bored.

* They keep going.

* They come back to London and start writing - in between doing all those other things in life that suddenly seem so urgent.

* They finally have something on paper - which seems . . . fantastic/boring/axiomatic/irrelevant/second-hand.

* They go away again, read some more - walk some more, go out to lunch some more, worry some more.

* They finish it. Well close enough to finish it that they think they better show it to someone - particularly because they worry that they perhaps took the tutor's encouraging them to be brave maybe too far. But the supervisor is now long gone.

* The tutor who encouraged them recommends someone else to read it, a former student who (to their relief and gratitude) tells them it's not complete rubbish.

* They do the final tweaks and polishes. They print it and get it bound the way they have to - something that, of course, takes longer than they anticipate.

* They arrive to hand it in with three minutes to spare. They are told by the administrator: 'You will be disappointed to know, Pete, that you are not quite the last . . . Best title so far, though.**'

* They wait what seems like months but is no more than six weeks or so. They get a Saturday morning phone call (or was it Friday) telling them they've passed.

Next up So was it all worth putting myself through all that studying? What did I get out of it?

** Which was . . . 'Love and work. Love. Work. And. Sex, ambition and hate, too, of course. Oh, and desire, sublimation and play. And and. And the spaces in between.' I'll send you a copy if you're interested.

School’s out

It’s over. In the words of Alice Cooper (and the playground rhyme that inspired him), no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.

That’s it. It’s all over bar the mark. I’ve done the seminars, the essays, the exams, the dissertations. Somewhere down the line, I'll get the piece of paper to prove it.

Meantime . . . I took an extended summer break from this blog — even longer than I intended, frankly. I will now, though, be posting fairly regularly. In particular, I’ll be writing about the course and stuff I learned on it — about psychoanalysis, yes, but also about people (in which category, I include myself, at least some of the time).

So . . . forthcoming attractions include:

Dissertation writing — as viewed from a lifetime of writing

Exams — what’s a grown man sitting at a desk scribbling furiously with a pen

Drugs — should I have taken neuro-enhancers?

Chance encounters of a psychoanalytic kind — a barbecue of analysts (where? in north west London, of course)

Sunny Goodge Street — what I’ll miss about the course

Then and now — a (brief) return to south east London and finishing with academia for the second time

Typography — me and IKEA

Lacan and le con — what the French psychoanalyst kept in his cupboard

See you soon.

Back to school

Summer’s over. Time to return to school. I’ve re-enrolled. I’ve paid my £2000 plus change. I’ve got the schedule. I’ve got a new UCL password. I’ve logged back on to PEP. And I’ve got my exam results.

Ah, the exams. I just looked back at the only posting I made about the exams and see that it was long on atmosphere and emotion but short on facts. Things like the number of exams and where they were done etc. I reckon I’d like to know if I were you. So . . .

I’m doing an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies at UCL. I’m doing it over two years. Most people do it in one. We all have to do the same work, I just get longer to do it in. We have to write two essays (5,500 words), one dissertation (11,000 words) and sit exams — twelve papers over three days, 45 minutes per question.

That’s the entire sum of the written work. Everything else is reading and seminars. I’ve written (and whinged) about the volume of the reading before. I’ll just mention that one of my fellow students decided to weigh the reading before she flew home to Marin County. She’d thought of taking it with her, I guess, for reference. So she checked it in case she got stuck with a hefty overweight surcharge. She would have been. It weighed two stone.

That’s not all the reading. There are no books counted there. Nothing read online or in the library. Just the photocopies of each week’s reading. Two stone. Thirteen kilos. A toddler load.

The exams count for a lot, though — 45 per cent of the marks. I guess it’s a way to stop people cheating. If you don’t get it, you can’t spiel away in the moment. So it’s hard not to take the exams seriously. Obviously, my grades will make no difference at all to my life outside the course. In fact, they’ll count for nothing anywhere outside my own head. Which is the point. I’d be lying — to myself — if I didn’t admit it was important for me to do well. (I’m not after a surprise denouement so I’ll tell you now, I have done well.)

It was very odd, sitting in a room for three hours, scribbling away by hand. I hadn’t written that much by hand that fast for maybe thirty years. I was drained at the end of the three days. I needed a break.

So I took a break. I haven’t done any course reading at all over the summer. The only psychoanalytic stuff I’ve done is some reading for my book about what psychoanalysts have to say about dirty words and I went to a psychoanalytic debate last Friday. It was a real world heavyweight title thing, a drag-down knock-out, bloody affair with a clear points victory to the challenger. It could really turn the game upside the head. I’ll explain more in a future posting.

The people doing the course in one year started a couple of weeks back. Because I did so many units last year — partly by miscalculation — I’ve got very few seminars this year. Just six or seven between now and Christmas.

The first is this Friday, on Melanie Klein — for which I haven’t done the reading. It’s sitting there in a pile on the floor of my office, glaring at me. But I’m ignoring it. It’ll have to wait its turn while I finish my book. That’s what happens, I guess, when you get good grades: confidence. I’ve got more important things to do right now. Melanie Klein can wait.

Austen powers

So I haven’t posted for a while. So it’s been the summer, alright. So I was on a break from the course. Plus I got a bit raspberryed and could hardly walk for nearly a month.

The competition? The winning answer is in the comments on the Competition posting. It was Jane Austen. That’s right. I’ve never read a Jane Austen book. Scoop got it right. If he or she emails me with address details, I’ll get the prize together.

There’s also a comment by Maudie lamenting my non-reading of Jane Austen. I must say, though, I’m not yet persuaded by his/her argument that I should read Austen for her accurate portrayal of ‘the total tedium and frustration of women's lives’. That sounds more like a strong argument in favour of my non-reading of her.

The competition is really, I suppose, a variant on the after-dinner game called I’ve Never — a version of True Or False. You make a statement that starts ‘I’ve never . . .’ Read a Jane Austen book, in my case. Then the others have to guess if you’re lying or telling the truth.

I’ve played it. It’s very, very easy for it to turn socially awkward, though. Too often, people just don’t get it. They can’t figure out the level to pitch at. They say things like ‘I’ve never been to the moon’. Or ‘I’ve never eaten zebra’. Or ‘I’ve never been to Northampton’. Things that are impossible for anyone, things that are probably true for most people, things that you really couldn’t care whether they were true or false.

It works best with people you know well but not too well. My best line is ‘I’ve never been to Los Angeles’. Which is true. But, given my music writer history, no-one ever believes me. I’m not sure if I believe myself.

Competition

It’s been pointed out to me, by Jane, that I never actually told you the name of the canonical English author whose works I have not read in their entirety.

My reasons were entirely dishonourable. I’m not sure I want to forego the many opportunities life gives me to comment on this author’s work — wittily, engagingly, originally, I hope,

Still, Jane was persistent and so I have decided to reveal the-name-of-the-author. Again, my reasons are entirely dishonourable.

I have no intrinsic problem with dissembling — what adult does or can? I don’t, I think, even particularly mind being thought of as a cad or even perhaps a liar — as long as people understand that my lying is straightforwardly self-serving, not the inconstancies of the merely forgetful or the destructive, wearisome inventions and projections of the unselfknowing fantasist. I just don’t like feeling the feeling that I get from feeling that some of you might feel that I’m a cad or liar.

So, I will tell you the-name-of-the-author I haven’t read. Or rather, things never being that simple, you will tell me who I haven’t read.

It’s a competition, with a prize. Post your answers as comments to this blog. I promise to play fair.

I think there are enough clues in the original posting so here they are again:

* I’ve seen the films and TV shows etc. So I know all the plots, themes, characters etc.

* I’ve read other books (and seen other movies and TV shows) from the same era.

* I know the history of the period — some of it anyway. I know what time dinner was served then, in which order courses were served and where the chairs were placed. I’ve read EP Thompson’s The Making Of The English Working Class. I’ve seen Sharpe on TV.

The prize? Jane suggested the author’s collected works. Fair enough. It’s a deal. (She did suggest, too, though, that the author was Ian McEwan. It’s not. Though I’m not sure I’ve read any of his books either, not even the one he ripped off from a Dirk Bogarde movie — see how easy it is to comment accurately and relevantly on the profoundly unread.)

The Bourgeois and the Wilde

I was wrong. My family, my friends, my fellow students, the course administrator: they were all right and I was all wrong. I worried about my essay, at great length and in obsessive depth (see my blog of April 24, The student on the couch). I worried that it wouldn’t be academic enough. I worried that it had too many jokes in it — there were two, possibly three, in the first paragraph. I just worried.

But my worries, it seems, were all in vain. I came back from a few days away, in Cornwall, to an email with the words ‘Essay feedback’ in the subject field. And the feedback was that my essay was fine. I passed. I’m pleased. And everyone I’ve been worrying at is relieved.

If you want to know what the essay title was, look here. It’s the second question of the second section, the one that starts ‘In the light of what you have learned . . .’

I wrote about Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest and Louis Bourgeois’ Passage Dangereux in terms of the Oedipus complex. I’ll send you the whole thing if you want. Just email me.

Further contributions to the understanding of stage fright: what do psychoanalysts have to say?

When I wrote something about stage fright (Feb 20), I didn’t look to see if psychoanalysts had had anything to say about it. Now I’ve finished my essay, I had the time to look.

Why do psychoanalysts reckon performers sometimes get themselves fritted into non-performance? I found two papers which outlined all the various theories.

Both were by Glen Gabbard, a New York psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and academic. One was written in 1979, the other in 1983. Both begin with quotes from songs: the first from the Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, the second from The Chorus Line’s The Music And The Mirror.

Like a good academic (and author of The Psychology Of The Sopranos), Gabbard read everything there was to read on the subject and summarised it for us lazier people. He found various ideas and theories about stage fright:

* It’s linked to anal erotism.

* It’s like blushing — gratification and punishment are combined in one symptom.

* It’s linked to guilt about early voyeurism — of the parents having sex, if only in the future performer’s fantasy world.

* It’s frozen self-regard — ‘narcissistic intoxication’ with oneself. (I really don’t get this one: narcissistic intoxication is scarcely unusual in performers: in fact, it’s more or less standard: the Madonna Complex maybe.)

* It’s castration anxiety — which the performer’s previous performances have failed to cover up.

* It sets in when the performer worries that the audience can see right through to his infantile sense of omnipotence.

* Performing is a secret attempt to recreate the perfect, idealised world of complete union with the mother — in the womb, perhaps — and the stage-frighted performer is worrying the audience will realise this is what he’s up to.

* A racial memory of being the outcast, ‘the stoned man’ is evoked — a Jungian one this. (By the by, in my — fairly extensive — experience, most performers are stoned men, after breakfast anyway.)

* It’s a flasher thing. ‘The performer is torn between the desire to expose his genitals to prove he is a fully-equipped sexual creature and the fear that the onlookers will find his equipment laughable.’

* The performer is a child. The audience is the adult. The child knows he is being childish and is terrified the adult will realise it.

* It’s linked to envy. ‘Performers tend to be an envious lot.’

* It’s linked to guilt. If I have something, it means it has to have been stolen from someone else. So I feel guilty. So . . .

* It’s narcissism.

Well, maybe. There are various variations on a basic theme there. There’s certainly something deep and uncontrollable going on with stage fright. I’m certain that it has meaning and that it’s a current reading of something historical — as that thing-of-the-past is re-read and reconstructed by the performer.

One idea I thought was a good way of expressing something that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s spent time with musicians or actors. According to this view, performers are ‘mirror-hungry personalities’ — driven to look for approval and ‘sustenance for their famished selves’. They try again and again and fail again and again in ‘their desperate efforts to shore up a damaged self-esteem’. Even temporary success on stage only raises the prospect of future failure. So they fright themselves into inaction — which, at least, elides the possibility of failure.

Two last things. One, a witty line from Gabbard. ‘The childhood wish to romp about in the buff and display one’s genitals for all to see is revived in the act of performing.’ Again: think Madonna etc etc.

Two, a clever line from Gabbard, which resituates stage fright into the kingdom of the positive. ‘Perhaps it is fortunate that few performers ever completely master stage fright, for an intangible sense of communion between the performer and his audience might well be lost as a by-product of the mastery.’ Simple really: no possibility of failing also means no possibility of succeeding.

On re-reading

I maybe shouldn’t admit to this but I will anyway.

The other day, I was doing some reading for my course, a chapter from a book. As I read, it seemed familiar — no, not quite familiar, more like somewhere between the understood and the known. Now and again, I’d find myself thinking: I’ve read this before. And I’d think of climbing off the sofa where I was reading and walking up the stairs to my office to check on my reading log*. Then the next sentence would seem novel and fresh and I couldn’t be bothered to make the journey.

I must have been three-quarters the way through it — and this wasn’t a short, easily read chapter — when I eventually realised that I had read it before. I wish I could tell you exactly what made me realise it but I was so embarrassed at myself that I went into a state of what I can now think of as psychic blushing.

Maybe it wasn’t a sudden realisation, maybe it was a gradual evolution. But, whichever it was, there was a state change. One moment I was a person doing something for the first time. The next I was a person doing something they’d already done before. Or rather, one moment I was a person doing something they’d already done before and the next I was a person knowing they’d done something before. It wasn’t comfortable.

I decided: incipient Alzheimer’s. Of course. I thought: you stupid fool, you are too old to go back to university.

I went to my office and checked. Yes, I had read it before, about six months ago. There it was in the file, highlighted and annotated. I noticed one little thing — though I didn’t grasp its significance till later. I’d marked quite different things first time round.

Some time later, when I’d stopped blushing and trying to hide from myself, I thought again about my forgetting. I found myself thinking about those different marks. Had I really understood it that badly on first reading? I went back, looked again at those marks and highlightings. I realised that they were different for a reason. I’d read it for a different unit on the course so I was reading it through a different pair of — metaphorical — glasses.

More than that, I was a different person. The I that had read it first time was not the I who had read it the other day. Things had changed. I’d read more. I’d learned more. I grasped more, more quickly — on this subject at least.

I thought of two Frenchmen. Rimbaud: j’est un autre (I is another). And Pierre Bayard, psychoanalyst and author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (see Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading, February 29, 2008). Here, I decided, was a fine example of what Bayard suggests is the utility of not-reading. Or rather, regressing to a state of having-not-read. By forgetting, I had made it possible for me to slip the conceptual bonds of my previous understanding of the text. My suppression of my original reading had facilitated the creation of a new text. I was now not just its reader but its writer, too.

I had freed myself from myself to be myself: the core conceptual aim of psychoanalysis some would say.

So maybe I wasn’t so senile after all. Or maybe wishful thinking is an early indicator of senility.

* Actually, all my reading is logged on a custom database I built — which is why I know exactly how many papers etc I’ve read and how many I’ve finished (see Studying by numbers, April 29, 2008). But I’m much too embarrassed about that to tell you. I am proud, though, of its colour scheme.

Studying by numbers

Time, I thought, for a (slightly obsessional) report on how far I’ve got so far. At the end of the autumn term, I did a reckoning of what I’d managed, in numbers. I posted it on January 11. Here’s an update, till the end of the spring term. The total since the start is in brackets.

28 (65) Seminars attended
2 (2) Seminars missed
2 (4/5) Seminars late for
4 (4) Films watched (part of the course, early Sunday mornings)
2 (2) Dissertation presentations attended
1 (1) Essays written
36 (113) Books, papers, etc read*
28 (79) Books, papers, etc finished
13 (13) Extra books and papers read (or skimmed) for essay
2 (4) Parties invited to
1 (2) Parties attended
10 (16) Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
2 (1) Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
3 (22) Mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
4 (0) Espressos bought (to drink in seminars — I’d had enough mochas and cappuccinos for a lifetime)
1 (1) Tuna baguettes bought from Eat
1 (1) Chicken baguettes bought from Eat
6 (6) Ham and cheese baguettes bought from Eat**
c10 (c30) Pre-dawn starts (less than the first term only because it’s been getting lighter earlier)

* I think there is an under-reporting error here. It certainly felt like I read an awful lot more than that this term.

** I tried the other varieties but settled on the ham-and-cheese, Wittgenstein-style. Arriving at a country house for the first time, his hostess asked what he would like for dinner, Wittgenstein replied: ‘I don’t mind what I have to eat as long as it’s the same as yesterday. Always.’

The student on the couch

I’ve just finished my essay, the first piece of writing I’ve had to do for the course, the first piece of academic writing I’ve done since, well, since Gary Glitter was a chart-topper and Margaret Thatcher was the education minister.

I won’t tell you what I wrote about. You don’t have the time, frankly. I read the question aloud to one friend and, by the time I’d finished reading it, we’d buried him and on our way back to the house for a cup of tea, a sausage roll and just-a-small-one-to-take -the-chill-off.

Instead, I’ll just tell you how hard I found it. Moan, more like it. Unlike my family and everyone else I’ve told about it, you can’t walk away while I’m talking . . . though you can click away, I suppose. Oh, well, goodbye.

So now none of you are left, I’ll have a little chat with myself about it. I’ll put one of me on the couch and the other of me on a chair, stroking my chin. There’s a regular section in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis called the Analyst At Work. I’ll think of this as the Theoretical Psychoanalytic Student On The Couch and use the IJP format, in which the one on the couch is P (for patient) and the one on the chair is A (for analyst).

First the analyst sets the scene . . .

Peter is a 53-year-old-writer who has been coming to see me for 53 years now. For this paper, I’ve chosen one recent session. As usual, he is dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. He could do with a haircut. Currently, his presenting problem is — he says — writing his first essay. This is not the first time he has brought this kind of issue to our daily sessions. I perhaps should make the point here that not all my interpretations and comments are strictly orthodox.

P: I had no idea how difficult it would be writing an essay. I shouldn’t have done the course. I should’ve stayed in bed.

A: You’re a professional writer. I’m sure it will be fine.

P: That’s what everyone tells me. I don’t believe them.

A: They’re probably right.

P: You, too?

A: Tell me, what exactly is the problem? Or rather, what do you think it is?

P: I know I can write. See, that last sentence made sense — this one, too. I know I did the reading. I know I got it in on time.

A: Was that a problem?

P: Only the normal problem. Three printers went wrong on me the day I had to hand it in. All attempts to email it failed.

A: So why are you so worried? The worst they can do is fail you. What’s the real problem?

P: That I’ve somehow got it all wrong. I know it was clear and made sense, had an argument and some references — though I’m not sure if I got the citations quite right. They weren’t obsessive about citations in my day.

A: Mine neither. Anything else?

P: They’re really tough and fussy. One word over the limit and you get a five per cent penalty. The full-time students have already done an essay. One told me hers came back with marks all over it about things like bracket placement in the references.

A: Sounds like a sub’s job to me.

P: Abso-psycho-lutely. I’m hiring one next time.

A: So, again, what’s the problem?

P: So I’m not sure it’s what they want. I worry it’s not ‘academic’ enough. know there’s an ‘academic’ way of writing things. Someone I know started an MA in military history and got into endless rows with his lecturers whenever they raised that post-modernist stuff they do at universities these days. He gave up in the end and dropped out. I’m not daft. I’m quite happy to bend their way. I’m just not sure how to.

A: Are you telling me the truth here?

P: Possibly not. I suppose I could have bent further their way.

A: So why didn’t you?

P: I guess I was worried about what you’d say.

On not-writing

It’s been some time. I’ve been busy. See picture above. See the (tidied-up) pile of stuff for writing an essay. See you tomorrow.

Even further considerations on Reading and not reading

When writing about How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard (see below), I intended to tell you about the major English writer whose works I have managed to not-read, with great success, over several decades. Not that this not-reading has in any way restrained me from commenting on the writer and all their works — of which it might be fair to say I have not-read in their entirety.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I have read the opening sentence of one novel. Then again, it depends what you mean by read. I know for certain I’ve heard it spoken and I do, I think, remember seeing it over someone’s shoulder. Perhaps I also checked it in a dictionary of quotations when I wanted to play with it in my own writing.

I did, however, possess a copy of one of the other novels for a while. I’ve no idea why. I may have bought it — unlikely. I may have stolen it — if so it must have been in error. I certainly never intended to read it. I didn’t even think much of the painting on the cover. If I’m entirely honest — well, as honest as I can try to be, given the circumstances — I may actually have skimmed the introduction. May have.

Nonetheless, I am completely confident that I have a pretty accurate, balanced and nuanced view of both the author and their books’ status, relevance, strengths, weaknesses and historical significance — perhaps better than some who’ve actually read them all cover-to-cover. How, I hear you think, can I possibly say that? For three reasons.

One, I’ve seen the films and TV shows etc. So I know all the plots, themes, characters etc.

Two, I’ve read other books (and seen other movies and TV shows) from the same era. I know the history — some of it anyway. I know what time dinner was served then, in which order courses were served and where the chairs were placed. I’ve read EP Thompson’s The Making Of The English Working Class. I’ve seen Sharpe on TV — even if my most striking memories of it are that Sean Bean’s uniform was green, that his sidekick had an Irish accent and that one show featured Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts.

Three, perhaps most importantly, I’ve heard lots of interesting, different people make interesting, different comments on all interesting, different elements and views of the author and all their works. Some of them may even have read some or more of the books themselves — not that I have any way of knowing whether this is so. By listening to these other apparently well-informed people, though, I stopped myself being blinded by my own knowledge — a much harder thing to do if you’ve actually read the books.

I have incorporated all this author’s books into what Bayard calls my virtual library. I just haven’t actually had them stamped out. Accordingly, I see no reason why I, as a non-reader of those books, shouldn’t be as free to comment on them as those who have merely read them.

Perhaps freer, says Bayard. He sees books’ true worth as repositories for projections of bits of ourselves, our histories, our thoughts, our feelings — and what we learn from considering those projections. ‘It is ourselves we should be listening to, not the “actual” book — even if it sometimes provides us momentum — and it is the writing of self that we must pursue without swerving.’

And again: ‘In the end, we need not fear lying about the text, but only lying about ourselves.’

PS As I said at the start, I intended to tell you honestly about my non-reading of this major English writer. I was going to tell you their name. Then, quite casually, in the course of telling my wife about Bayard’s book (long before I’d finished it, of course), I happened to mention the extent of my non-reading of this particular author. She was shocked, into silence. The extent of her shock indicated to me that I should follow her lead and retreat into silence. So, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you who it is I’ve not-read with such attentive inattentiveness over such a long period.

I was, I must say, though, stunned by her silence. Obviously, she thought: this man is a liar, what other lies has he told me over the years? But there must have been more to it than simply that, surely.

I couldn’t work it out. I can’t work it out. I’ll have to think about it. Let me get back to you.

Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading

I’ve just finished a wonderful book. It’s called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Actually, I haven’t finished it. I’ve only read some of it, plus a review — in the Sunday Times, I think — and perhaps the online blurb at Amazon.*

Which is exactly the point of the book: that most of what we call reading is actually non-reading. We skim. We skip. We forget what we’ve read. What we do remember we often remember quite wrongly. (If I understand right, this is what Freud called nachtraglichkeit and what certain modern psychoanalysts call apres-coup, according to the entry in A Child's Dictionary Of Psychoanalysis anyway.)

Even when we’re reading the same book as someone, we’re actually reading a different book. We all recast what we read (see, hear, eat, etc etc, too) according to the shapes of our minds and inner worlds. When people talk to us about a book we happen to have some recall of, their version of the book rarely accords with our memory. They might as well be talking about a completely different book. Of course, the fact is they are.

How To etc is a lucid and simple book, with a subtle, intricate argument, proposed by Pierre Bayard, a French psychoanalyst with a taste for Mark Twain** and Oscar Wilde.

Along with Louise Bourgeois’ hilariously violent cages and couples, it’s quite restored my faith in French culture. In particular, it introduced me to the wry wit of Paul Valery, a chair of L’Acadamie Francaise. His accession speech seems to have focused on praising his predecessor’s writing while acknowledging that he, Valery, had never read a word of it. In fact, Valery went further, suggesting that this non-reading probably made him the best judge of its worth. He seems to have been right, too.

Accordingly, I have now acquired, in Valery, a new favourite French writer. I have also made a belated new year’s resolution: never to read any more Valery. That might only complicate matters.

* True when written but not now. I finished it about three-quarters of the way through writing this blog. Finishing it did, though, add one significant thought. That if all worthwhile writing is a kind of disguised autobiography, so all creative reading (and non-reading) is, too. By reading (and not-reading), we create and develop our own story, our own self. So reading really is a kind of writing. So, earlier French writers were wrong in asserting the death of the author. We are all authors now, even if only through our creative non-reading (and reading).

** Intending to quote Bayard’s quote of Twain, I looked it up online, for speed. This is what Twain said: ‘I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.’

Or rather that is what that source said Twain said. But there was no source given and it wasn’t quite how I remembered it. So I looked it up in the book itself but couldn’t find it. There’s no index so, without reading the whole book again, I can’t be sure if it’s there or not.

Wondering if I’d mixed things up, I looked into another book I was reading, The Stuff Of Thought by Steven Pinker. And there it was. Or rather there another it was. Or perhaps another Mark Twain — Pinker’s Twain as opposed to internet Twain. This is what this Twain said. ‘When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon . . . I will remember [only] the things that never happened.’

Allegedly wrote? Yet the square brackets and the elllipsis in the quote imply a real source. But while Pinker’s previous quote from Twain, just one line earlier, has a numbered reference, this one does not. It is orphaned, cast adrift from its homeland — which might or might not have been in Twain’s brain.

Thus we have a quote I remember from one book which is not in that book but in two other places. One, the notoriously unreliable, slippy world of the internet. One, in another book — where the words surrounding it create insuperable contradictions. It is given the appearance of real, grounded existence — according to the standards of academic quoting. Yet it is denied the standards of academic referencing. It is presented without history: its birth certificate has not just been hidden from the reader, its non-existence has been elided. Its status is deliberately made unclear. Who wrote it? Who knows? Certainly not Pinker. He’s told us as much.

Also, I recall that the author (or rather, the possible author) himself was not the man he said he was, having also separated his identity from his birth certificate, with a pen name which originates in the author’s Mississippi dream life (it indicates two fathoms of water) but also contains an inherent self-unfolding joke. Mark Twain: Write Double.

And the subject matter of Mr Write Double’s quote (or rather of both his quotes) is the vagaries (or vicissitudes, if you want me to come over all Freudian) of memory, of how we create and recreate pasts as the present changes.

Psychoanalysis by numbers

And so back to school. After nearly a month’s break, the new year of study starts with five seminars and one film screening over three days. Time to take stock, draw up some accounts.

My first degree in psychology left me feeling I’d learned little about the human mind — let alone my own — but it did instil in me a deep respect for the power of numbers. Even if you did as little work as I did, you couldn’t help but come away with a decent grasp of statistics and what they can tell you.

As far as I’m concerned, correlational studies are one of the great scientific advances of the past 150 years, from John Snow figuring out how cholera worked to Richard Doll linking smoking and lung cancer. They’re why I take statins for my high cholesterol and why I argued so hard to get a friend of mine who had breast cancer to take tamoxifen rather than rely on homeopathy and aromatherapy. (She’s taking it. Thank God. Or rather, a patriarchal projection of our infantile selves.)

So here, in numbers, is the story so far.

37 Seminars attended
0 Seminars missed
2/3 Seminars late for
0 Essays written (none due yet)
77 Books, papers etc read (includes preliminary reading)
51 Books, papers etc finished
2 Parties invited to
1 Parties attended
6 Alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
1 Non-alcoholic drinks consumed with fellow students
19 Caffe nero mochas and cappuccinos bought (to drink in seminars)
c20 Pre-dawn starts
2 Post-midnight finishes (I’m old)

Music to crunch by

On reading and being
unable to read

It’s reading week. I always thought that was one of academia’s little jokes, an ironic gloss on what the rest of us call half-term. Either that or self-deluding pomposity. I certainly never used it for reading. Nor did the lecturers. They were either writing papers or chasing first year students. (Mostly, they caught them.)

Now I’m not so sure.

Last Friday afternoon, I found myself outside on the pavement, with the smokers. It was a damp Torrington Place afternoon. It was cold. I didn’t really know why I was there. I wasn’t even smoking. (I do occasionally.) I think maybe I’d intended to get a coffee, but I’m not sure. It was the 15-minute break between that day’s second and third sessions, between Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud Reading Seminar 6 (2.15–3.45pm) and Ferenczi 1 (4.00–5.30pm).

As the Freud seminar finished, I’d put on my coat, left my notes where they were, taken the lift to the ground floor and turnstiled myself out of the building with my student ID card. It was a purposeful journey, clearly. I knew it was the right thing to have done — or, at least, the thing I wanted to do. But it took me some time to work out what I was up to.

We — four or so of us on the course, males mostly — stood and talked, briefly, about the seminar that had just finished. It was on Freud’s theory of dreams. A couple of us said we just couldn’t agree with Freud’s idea that all dreams are wish fulfilments. There was something tentative about the way we said it. Later, I decided that could well have been because we were wondering if such open questioning of Freud so early in the course was a little presumptuous. A premature attack on the father of psychoanalysis even. (If I didn’t entertain such musings, I really wouldn’t be paying attention, would I.)

Then we talked about what we nearly always talk about when we talk about the course — the reading. It’s not just that there’s a lot of it, though there certainly is a lot of it. You can see for yourself, if you want — and get an idea of what some of it’s about, too.

I just counted it up. The preliminary reading totalled thousands — literally — of pages, including an 800-page Freud biography. (Don’t tell anyone, but I haven’t finished it yet.) There were a dozen or so other books, including one by one of the lecturers. I put that one to the top of my list. It was out of print. There were also details of the first term’s Freud reading and a gentle suggestion that we might like to start on it in advance. This listed 18 papers. The Interpretation Of Dreams alone is 627 pages, give or take a preface or ten.

Not that I was complaining. Or could complain. It was a challenge I’d gone looking for, not one that had come looking for me. It was just . . . well, a lot of reading. And it kept on coming. Since the course started, in late September, I have read two more whole books, chapters from another nine books and at least sixteen papers. I haven’t actually read every word of all of them, of course, but I’ve done my best.

Which is a lot better than the best I managed the first time at university. Having established in the first term that I could do very little reading and still get good grades, I took this as an opportunity to do no reading at all for the next two years.

Not that I didn’t do any reading. I did. Lots. A friend tells me I once told him that I did nothing at university except lie in bed, listening to Chuck Berry and reading Marx. This isn’t quite true. I also studied, for example, the complete works of Little Richard, the Rolling Stones, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Lou Reed, Noam Chomsky, Elizabeth David, Diane Arbus and Louis Althusser. I investigated the basement clubs, dancehalls and drink outlets of north London, by night mostly. I perfected my mental map of the tube network. And I conducted drug trials in which p=1 and there was no placebo control group. All in all, scarcely a waste of educational opportunities, surely.

But course reading. No, that I didn’t concern myself with — not until the last two months anyway when I crammed my way to a 2:2, much to the fury of some of my more diligent classmates. I really was a terrible student. I can’t remember going to a single lecture in the last year. I tell people that they tried to expel me twice but failed as I never once looked in my pigeon hole in the whole three years. I’ve told that story so many times that I’m no longer sure if it’s true or a joke I made up. (I know for sure the pigeon hole bit is true so maybe the rest is, too.)

Second time round, though, I’m not that snotty, contrary slack-a-bed. I’m turning up for lectures. I’m doing the reading. Now there’s a word: reading. It depends on what you mean by reading. I have looked at all the reading we’ve been given, honest. But have I actually read it all? No. Not for want of trying. I’ve worn out half a dozen highlighter pens. I’ve become a friend of the pre-dawn darkness, to be found on the sofa come breakfast time, still millimetering my way through Joseph Sandler’s Dimensions of Psychoanalysis or some such.

But I haven’t read it all. I’ve managed a lot of it, but not all of it. I don’t think any of us has, actually. I did what my daughter told me to do. (As a 2007 graduate, her advice has a relevance and quickness that my three-decade-old memories don’t.) Do what everyone else does, she said, read the introduction, the ending and skim the rest. Then she flew off to south America somewhere.

So I tried skimming but it didn’t work. There were too many unfamiliar notions and words — some of which were used in a specific, technical way that was new to me, some of which had been oddly translated from the original German and some of which, though seemingly in English almost certainly weren’t. Quickly and painfully, I discovered that you really can’t skim something you don’t know a good deal about. You can only effectively skim something you’re already familiar with. If you can’t, at a glance, separate the significant from the irrelevant, you’re left floundering. And floundering with words was something unfamiliar to me.

Like most writers, I’m one of life’s natural readers. Words were the way I found myself and my place in the world, from as soon as I could talk. I taught myself to read before I was four, from the letters on the Frigidaire in our Somerford Grove kitchen. I was a cornflake packet and sauce bottle reader.

As a journalist, I came to pride myself on being a quick study, capable of absorbing — and understanding — loads of material very rapidly. Then regurgitating it, fairly accurately. But this was something else. Not all of it, by any means, but enough of it to worry me. Regularly, I found myself in that uncomfortable place where you find yourself at the bottom of a page with only the scantiest notion of how you got there from the top. So you read it again. And sometimes it sticks. Or you turn the book upside down and try it that way. Sometimes that works, too. Sometimes, you go for a walk instead.

Sometimes, though, I even found myself thinking longingly of the blissful, easy hours I spent earlier this year making my way through a manual for MySQL — it’s a database software thing. And, eventually — on the way back from my afternoon jaunt with the pavement smokers — it was that memory which led me to the light. The first time I tried to read the MySQL manual, I decided that, appearances to the contrary, it had to have been written in Albanian. That was the only possible explanation of why I could make so little sense of it. But then, after a few months working with the software — or, to be precise, working with someone who was actually working with it — I made my way back to the manual. It still wasn’t exactly like reading the Frigidaire name plate but it made sense and I could follow it, in my fashion, if not my expert colleague’s.

So now I knew why I found myself on the pavement. I was there because I really, really needed a break from all those words I was struggling with and the way they filled that fifth floor seminar room till the air itself was looking to relocate somewhere less crowded. Some cold air and some secondhand smoke later, I was ready for Ferenczi 1. I hadn’t finished the reading, it’s true, but I’d read the intros, the outros and skimmed the rest. Good enough. That was the pass mark Winnicott set for mothers. Which is good enough for me.

And I’d learned what to do about the reading. Keep reading. Read and read again. Wait for the words to cohere. They will.

Now it’s reading week. So I’m reading, right? No. I’m writing. Maybe tomorrow. It is half-term after all.



In memoriam

Tony Soprano 1999–2007

‘The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night he rants and rages at the stars.’

Vince Everett: ‘It ain’t tactics, honey, it’s just the beast in me.’