Journey to the island of Pic Tocome

Yesterday, I said I was going to give examples of inadvertent errors — in the context of French penseur Derrida's appearance in Apple ad. I said it was probably left in by mistake from an early private draft.

I see similar things most days. I now get The Guardian delivered direct - which means it's there on my door mat every morning before I wake up. But it is, of course, an early edition. So mistakes haven't always been cleared away. A regular error is leaving the typesetting or subs instructions on the printed page. It'd be text boxes in Quark or something like that. They'd be using a template and there would be dummy words in the text boxes to indicate what should go there. 

Example? Invented in detail but typical and frequent in type. If a football match has kicked off late, there will be no result. Rather, on my printed copy, there will be words such as: Score to go here.

I do have one real example, though. It's not from the Guardian - where I did work for a while so I do know whereof I speak. It's from the Mail on Sunday - where I also worked for a while so I do . . . etc etc.

It's about a man named Roddy. He was deputy editor at the time. Being deputy editor of a major newspaper is much like being a vice president of the US. It's elevation without the fun of being able to actually do something important. So Roddy, among other duties, looked after the travel pages - which, if I remember right, came with the added responsibility that the ski writer was the son of Daily Mail's editor. Responsibility without power. A situation which makes it difficult to stay awake. Or stop heading off to lunch around 11am.

So there he is looking at a layout for a travel spread. Quick glance. Quick read of the display copy. Still hard to concentrate. Thinking of what he's going to see at the theatre that night — he was (and is) an extremely cultivated and charming and smart man. If a little . . .well, let me finish the story.

He has to say something. Like he cares. So he sees on the page what he thinks is the holiday spot being written about. And he comments on it. This is what he says: 'Pic Tocome. Excellent. Everyone tells me that's the island to go to this year.'

Only it wasn't, of course. He had just read the dummy phrase written in a blank box on the layout. It said: pic to come. That is, a photograph would be put there but it had yet to arrive.

Did anyone laugh? Come on. This was the Mail on Sunday and he was the deputy editor.

Did anyone point out his error? Ditto.

Did anyone tell him later? I just have.

Do I think it's news to him? Yes.

Tomorrow Euroswearing 2012 is back. Whose filthy mouths will propel them to victory in the semi-finals

Who put the bermp?

An old article of mine, entitled Who Put The Bomp?, has just been published in French. Hence the silly approximation of a Clouseau accent in the heading above.

It’s in a Parisian magazine, Feuilleton — a quarterly, I think, and something like McSweeney’s. This issue, Spring 2012, also includes, among many other things, a piece by Murakami Huraki, with illustrations by Robert Crumb.

It’s one of the best-looking wordy magazines I’ve ever seen. The design for my article/essay, which stretches over eighteen pages, is just gorgeous. The piece appeared twice before in English (The Observer and Mojo magazine) but it’s never looked this good.

Nor has it previously been graced by footnotes — eg explaining that a Geordie is ‘Surnom donné aux habitants de Newcastle’. Nor, dipping into false modesty, have I ever been flattered by a biographical note describing me as a ‘figure parmi les grands noms du journalisme rock anglais’.

So what is the piece about? It’s an attempt to answer the question in the title — which was posed in a minor 1960s pop hit written and sung by Barry Mann. He was the husband half of the Mann-Greenwich partnership — writers of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling etc etc etc etc etc (plus a few more et ceteras).

My answer runs to about seven thousand words and takes in not just Geordies but Manchester City fans, Baltimore, the building at the junction of Gloucester Avenue and Regent’s Park Rd, Elvis Presley and the early 16th version of spaghetti al burro e formaggio.

How did I make these links? You’ll have to read the piece. You’ll find the magazine here. It’s 15 euros.

Don’t read French and want to read it? Well, you could find an old copy of Mojo/The Observer. Or you could wait till I finish the book I’m working on (hard) and read a new version of it there.

How did I come to think of such a mad topic and write such a mad-sounding piece? Ah, you’ll have to wait for the book to find that out, too

Next My Springtime for Hitler moment.
http://www.boutique-feuilleton.fr/vente-au-numero-xsl-351.html

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) RIP

The great Magnum photographer has died just short of her 100th birthday. Here is an article I wrote about her a couple of years ago.

PP_May10_EveArnold

PS If you want to read more of my writings, on photography in particular, there are more in scribd. Try here. I'll be uploading more in the near future, including old pieces on a variety of subjects — though not music. For my music pieces, you need to go to rocksbackpages.com.

Tomorrow Those promised Xmas music sleevenotes

A punk burial, slight return

After I posted the bit about Tom, I sent a link to a friend who immediately passed it on to Tom's brother Jimmy — who, of course, was in Lost Trios and actually performed the song. And Jimmy replied almost right away and here is his reply . . .

It's not true that Tom wrote the line "shove me in a plastic bag and leave me on the pay-ver-ment-ah" (not street). It could be true that he laid claim to it, but the lyrics for this particular song were penned by Bob "Bob" Harding. Tom did actually give me a line when I got stuck on a lyric for another Alberto song "Dead Meat" and he supplied "eat your sister by mistake".
All the best
Jimmy

Which leads to two possibilities . . .

One, my memory is faulty.

Two, Tom's was faulty, perhaps florid.

Take your choice

Murray Sayle

January 1,1926 to September 18, 2010

Aw fuck it. More death. Another friend.

Like most people, I read about the great Australian journalist Murray Sayle’s death on the obituaries pages. I knew he was ill, of course. He had Parkinson’s. His wife Jenny had let me know and told me he was no longer at home but a little way away, in a nursing home.

Even the giants stumble and fall.

We worked together in the 1990s, when I commissioned and edited him for Night & Day, a Sunday supplement for the Mail on Sunday which was intended as an upmarket alternative to YOU Magazine — which, in going downmarket, had lost its lucrative, uptown advertisers.

I think Phillip Knightley* introduced him to us. Or rather us to him. We paid well — very well. And smart, fast, elegant and entertaining magazine writers are always much harder to find than all but those who’ve had to find them realise. I spent my days (and nights) making pig’s ears into, well . . . something better than dog’s dinners. (A good deal of editing time is spent unravelling and mercy-killing bad writers’ cliches and incomprehensible, mixed analogies.)

Murray was — with Phillip — one of the best. Although I knew the name and work, I didn’t know the breadth and range of his interests, life and appetites. He was a delight to work with. I loved his enthusiasm — not just for his own stories but for other people’s, too, and for technology. He was the first person I knew with a portable hard drive. On visits to the office, he’d plug it into a spare computer in the subs’ room and away he’d go, working his copy over and over. The subs considered and treated him like some kind of eccentric uncle. For me, he was one of those substitute fathers you pick up along the way — someone you can learn new stuff from.

I can’t remember all the stories he did for us but I remember a piece about female priests and several book reviews which weren’t really reviews but wonderful, brief essays.

In particular, I recall working with him on a shortened version of his New Yorker piece about the atom bombing of Japan. The original was, according to The Australian, his ‘greatest piece of sustained reporting’. Like all his work, it was full of odd but resonant details. I learned so much from him. He turned journalism into something approaching a sensory experience.

And I remember our lunches, of course. Not particularly alcoholic by Fleet St standards but certainly long. Murray liked to talk. God did Murray like to talk. Theories, observations, anecdotes, thoughts, gags spieled out of him. No quiet mouse myself, I think I may have contributed the odd question.

Gradually, through his spieling, I found out more about him. About his early years, working on a Murdoch paper. He was assigned to looking after the young Rupert when he first arrived in the office — or maybe that was Phillip Knightley’s job. I met his wife, Jenny — and spoke to her a lot on the phone when Murray was out and about somewhere.

I learned about his years in Japan. I’d been there, on a job, a few years earlier and had been told to look him up as he was the one who would make sense of it for me. I didn’t — too unconfident, I guess. I should have. Always generous with his opinions, he gave me answers to all the questions I’d had in my head ever since my visit.

Why, for example, do the concierges at Japanese hotels persist in giving you directions to places when they clearly have no idea where they are? A simple matter of face, explained Murray. That was the answer to a lot of my questions — though his answers were longer, far more detailed and always entertaining.

I learned about the wonderful documentaries he made with the photographer Elliot Erwitt — I’ve still got the wobble-colour VHS copies he made for me somewhere. I heard about his famous expenses claim, for a piece of sailing equipment — ‘money for old rope’.

I didn’t learn, though, that he’d also climbed Everest, crossed the Atlantic single-handed, unearthed Philby in Moscow and found Che Guevara in the jungle, like some modern day Stanley.

When I left the magazine, we kept in touch, via email, card and even the occasional phone call. He came over to give evidence at the Bloody Sunday enquiry. He’d written a report about it for the Sunday Times, claiming it was a deliberate assault by the British army. It was spiked and he resigned from the paper. You can find the piece and his later reflections on it for the London Review of Books. It’s worth reading — as is everything he ever wrote. (Though I’m not as keen as others on his Fleet St novel, The Crooked Sixpence. He told me it wasn’t very good and I think he was being as honest as ever.)

Annually, for the Chinese (Japanese?) New Year, a special Murray postcard would arrive. The format was always the same but it was a wonderful format. There would be Murray and his family — who, judging by their expressions, were actually fond of their father — posed, artlessly, in front of some object or place that he’d chosen to represent that year. If I remember right, for the year of the rat, the Japanese family Sayle shared the frame with Mickey Mouse. For the year of the cock, they were sat in front of a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I looked forward to them and wished I could think of something similarly witty to send in return. I kept them all — though I can’t put my hand to any of them right now. Then one year, the card didn’t come. I guessed, correctly, that he was ill. Then he was dead. I’m not the only one that will miss him.

* Phillip and Murray went way back. They were at school together, I think, in Sydney. Murray came to London first and when Phillip followed, he got him a job. They worked together at the Sunday Times. Phillip’s wife, though, was not so keen on Murray and the way he dominated any conversation. He was barred from their house. I think someone told me that Murray was the model for ‘the great bore of far-eastern journalism’ in John LeCarre’s Honourable Schoolboy. It might have been Phillip.

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.

Charlie Gillett 1942–2010

The first I remember knowing of Charlie was a review of Dr John's Gumbo album in Rolling Stone magazine. I'd seen Dr John play a few weeks earlier, at Brighton Dome, and loved it but hadn't understood what I was hearing and seeing. Charlie's writing made sense of it, by introducing me to Huey Smith and Professor Longhair — Stagolee and Billy, too, of course. It was a tiny glimpse of the world that I later found in his Sound Of City — for him, an MA turned public; for the rest of us, a one-man university of the arts. He was the Lewis & Clark of pop. He drew its first map — and kept on revising it.

Like so many others, I listened to his Honky Tonk show every, every Sunday. Its influence in shaping London music of the 1970s is impossible to exaggerate. It's where, I know, that Joe Strummer found Junco Partner — and probably his take on Stagolee and Billy, too. Always, always, Charlie's knowledge was lightly worn and rarely brushed with the slightest of disdain towards the less knowledgable.

Although our careers ran parallel for a couple of decades, Charlie and I only got to know each other in the mid-1990s. He had liked something I'd written and called me up to help him with the Encyclopedia Britannica pop music section. He was a delight to work with — even when he wielded the editor's knife. We'd even meet up sometimes. In particular, I remember an afternoon with him and his wife Buffy after they'd done a long, long walk along the Thames. Their mutual affection and support was a public embodiment of the strength and length of their marriage. Christ only knows how tough it must be now for her — after that terrible fucking illness, too. (Not that either she or Charlie would have ever used langauge like that.)

Next time Britannica called, he put them straight on to me, I think. I'm not sure how keen he was on them. They were certainly keen on him. When news broke about Charlie's death, Jeff Wallenfeldt from Britannica emailed me: 'Working with him was a highlight of my professional career. He was one of my heroes.'

Charlie and I would email each other episodically. Trawling through, I found this one I sent him a few years ago.

Dear Charlie
There I was in HMV in Oxford St. I see a sign. It says: The World Of Charlie Gillett. And I think: how fab is that. It's Charlie's world and we just live in it.
best
Pete

More often, though, Charlie and I would talk on the phone — every few months or so, till quite recently. Not for a bit, though. I'd been meaning to call but, well, I didn't, did I. Now I can't.

Next up More Freud

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.

Dis dissertation or dat dissertation?

In one of the very first lectures of my course, the lecturer said something like: 'Pay attention to the questions you ask and the thoughts you have now because very often they are what you will find yourself coming to when you do your dissertation.'

When she - I think it was a she, there were a lot of female lecturers, maybe a majority - said it, my first thought, of course, was: bollocks! How can she say that? The second was: well, she's been round this track before and she wouldn't say it if it didn't have history, would she?

So - for once - I did what I was told and thought about what I'd been told. What was in my mind? The lecture was about the aims of psychoanalysis. One thing mentioned was Freud's view of these aims. 'Love and work,' he said. That is, a capacity for both those two things was a working definition of both psychic health itself and the aims of his couch trip - by extension, all forms of talking therapies, too. Maybe, added the lecturer, Freud said this or maybe he didn't. No one seems quite sure.

I found myself thinking about this. My journalistic head asked: did Freud say it? if not, who did? There's a story there, surely. Maybe it would make a dissertation.

The trouble was that I felt I had already committed myself to a different subject for my dissertation. At the interview for the course, I'd been asked what I might be doing my dissertation on. Bit premature, I thought, but I said what had been on my mind: punk.

As someone who had been around punk as a writer, I'd long thought that there had never been much of interest written about its psychological character - let alone anything of substance viewed through the psychoanalytic prism.

There had been historical books and memoirs - I'd even written one myself. There had been sociological studies, feminist views and post-modernist structural analyses. God, have there been post-modernist structural analyses.

But there had been nothing specific on its psychology. The material was there and plentiful, I thought. The reconstruction of self by taking on new, often self-lacerating names - Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten etc. The fantastic - maybe even fantastical - anger. The dressing-up - ripped, torn, chains, self-mutilation. The rhetoric - dystopic, millennial.

Even more interesting was the fact that this stuff appealed so deeply to well-educated young men from comfortable backgrounds. The notion that punk was a working class thing was, of course, always so much, well, bollocks. Art class thing, perhaps. Working class thing, no.

More, I'd known some of the people first-hand and read many of the memoirs. I was struck by the painfulness and dislocations of so many of the main players' personal histories. There were a good number of familial suicides and alcoholic and junkie parents - enough that I'm surprised it's never drawn comment. There were also, of course, lots of alcoholics and junkies in the bands - and among the writers.

There was a lot of parental abuse, too - though not always presented as such. Johnny Rotten wrote about how his father broke his son's leg, twice. Once, by whacking his bed with a tyre iron. Twice, if my memory isn't tricking me, by running into him with a JCB. Both accidents, wrote Johnny.

I also remember seeing a lot of what I later came to know as self-harm. People burning themselves with cigarettes. One woman, in particular - a girl, really - slashing her belly with broken bottles, then claiming - without much conviction - that she had been attacked.

For my dissertation, I intended to explore the way the psychopathology of the punk 'elite' and its iconography found a home in the psyche of otherwise regular people - or, at least, the ones Freud elsewhere referred to as subject to no more than 'common unhappiness'. What echoes did punk's hysteria and 'madness' find in us all?

I think my title would have been a take on Richard Hell's t-shirt slogan: Please kill me now (the polite nihilism of punk). Or maybe on Leni Riefenstahl's Nuremburg romp: The triumph of the ill.

That seemed a good enough starting point to me. So when, over the first year, fellow students asked about my dissertation plans, that's what I told them I was doing. They seemed to think it was a good idea, too.

I did, though, sometimes also make a joke that my other idea was about love and work - no more than a joke really, based on an old gag about a pub sign painter and how you can get the word 'and' five consecutive times in one sentence. You can guess the rest.

Next up Dis or dat, I still have to write the bloody thing

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.

If the word fits, wear it

In the course of my writing my book on bad language (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009), my younger son bought a cap with a word on it. I told him that a cap with that word on it might cause problems for him in public, even in Primrose Hill. He gave it to his older brother.

A few months later, we were in New York and, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I took a picture of him wearing this cap standing outside the building in which that word was first recorded — in a popular song, anyway. It’s 55 5th Avenue and now home to the Yeshiva University law school. (See the picture here.)

Then I had another thought: what if the cap had ‘sexual intercourse’ on it instead? I sent the 5th Avenue picture to all of you who are on my blog update list and asked what you thought: would it be more or less offensive with ‘sexual intercourse’ on it. Not exactly a giant study but still several hundred people. The vote was 37 per cent ‘more’ and 63 ‘less’ – though ‘twice as daft’ said one. ‘Only by the tiniest of margins,’ said another.

Next up a psychoanalyst’s joke

The longest month

Having spent the last month on the final knockings of my book (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009), I've been completely blogged off. Now I'm back. I'll be posting regularly. Well, fairly regularly. First up, tomorrow, the results of the online poll about the language of my son’s cap. See you then — bright if not necessarily early.

The me-me meme

Often, though not always, I get my wife to read my postings before I upload them. Our offices are next to each other in the house. I email them to her. She emails back. Such is the modern work-home balance. Such is modern marriage.

My email wasn’t working properly when she sent her response to my last posting. So we had a face-to-face conversation, before breakfast. Such, too, is the modern work-home balance.

She: You know I always really like your blog.* But . . .** I wondered if that posting doesn’t come across a bit self-concerned.

Me: I know what you mean.*** But I’m torn. Some people tell me they like my blog best when it’s personal. Others that they’re more interested in it when it reaches out into the world.

She: That posting, though. Isn’t it a bit too much like those columns in the paper where someone writes about their own life, self-obsessively. It’s all so me-me-me.

Me: But those are the columns you read. I don’t. But you do.

She: Mmmmm.

And so to breakfast.

* A note for anyone ever having a conversation with any writer about their writing. Begin any and every conversation with something like this. Even if it’s a complete lie. Particularly if it’s a complete lie. If you don’t first tell them they’re wonderful, they won’t hear anything you say after that. Particularly if you’re about to tell them it’s rubbish.

If it is rubbish, tell them it needs a little work. Then start on your list of suggested changes. No matter how extensive the list, the writer will still be basking in the glow of that initial praise. Think of it as tickling a dog’s tummy. It works. Every time. I’ve written and I’ve edited. As an editor, I learned all about writers’ vanities. Mine included, of course.

** There’s always a ‘but’ after a sentence which begins ‘You know I always really . . .’

*** Defence is the last resort of offence.

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.

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.)

Tunnel vision

I’ve been in a tunnel. I did my exams, the first exams for about a third of a century. Three exams, nine papers in all, 45 minutes for each, hand-written.

All but one of my guesses about what would come up were right, even the one I wished I’d been wrong about. I predicted the Lacan and other Frenchman paper would offer a Hobson’s choice between a question on the one seminar I missed (‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ — discuss) and one I wished I had (Andre Green’s dead mother — what do you reckon?).

I went to an Andre Green lecture last autumn, at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, in Shirland Road, just down the road from what was, a lifetime or two ago, the Charlie Pigdog club, where I first saw Joe Strummer strum and drang, as a 101er.

I’ve no idea how long Green’s lecture lasted. A month? I phased in and out so it could have been longer. I’m told it was in English but my ears and brain indicated otherwise. I practised what analysts refer to as free-floating attention. I heard him say something about Melanie Klein. She died in 1960. That didn’t stop him being angry about her and all her works. I also think him I heard him say something about Lacan — dead these past 27 years. Lacan took a couple of sharp Green jabs to the brain-box, too.

It was the kind of evening that would confirm all the most negative views of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thought. It was tedious, tendentious, schismatic, pompous, drowning in its own jargon and delivered in a stage-foreigner accent. At best, I guess it was a kind of Camp Lejeune moment for prospective analysts. If you can survive an evening with Andre Green, after that anything life may throw at you will seem like a walk in the park.

So I couldn’t answer the Andre Green question — even though I knew the answer, in outline anyway. I just couldn’t forgive him for that decade in Shirland Road. He’s an old man, I know. I’ve read a really interesting dialogue between him and Gregorio Kohon, a north London Argentinian analyst. In it, Green is clear, insightful, bright, original, engaging. I’ve also read his own writing. It’s not. True, it’s not as hilariously terrible as Lacan’s but then what is?

Which left me having to answer a question on something I understood — I think — but had only ever read about. I can only hope that what I wrote wasn’t too stupid.

PS Green’s dead mother thing? His own mother did die when he was young but it’s not about that. It’s about deadened mothers placing that deadening in a child — who then grows up to seek out and recreate that deadening in other relationships. A kind of succulent presence of absence.

Still, that’s about all I can remember about it. And if that’s all I wrote, I certainly would have failed.

PPS Before posting this blog, I emailed it to my wife (in the next room). Here’s what she replied: ‘It made me laugh. But, do you want to make an enemy?’

Good question. What would it be like to have Andre Green as an enemy? I’ll tackle it in my next posting.

Linkstuff

This Lacan hotlink takes you to a photograph of Lacan with — deep breath — Pablo Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus (he's the one petting the dog). Which one's Lacan? I'll tell you next time.

This Lacan hotlink takes you to a painting. Why? I'll tell you that next time, too.

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.

Mockery

Ten days ago, at exactly 1pm, in a carpeted room just off Tottenham Court Rd, I sat down, a cup of coffee in one hand, a Pilot G-1 Grip in the other, and did something that, nearly thirty-five years ago, I promised myself I’d never do again.

I did an exam. Well, a mock exam. Well, part of a mock exam: one question rather than the full four, 45 minutes rather than three hours.

Still, it was an exam and therefore something I’d promised myself I’d never put myself through again. Exams, from the age of nine to twenty-one, term after term, year after year: enough! Yet there I was, in a room with eight or so others. Some of them looked more worried than me. Some didn’t.

So? So . . .

1. Just like everybody told me, my years of professional writing experience meant that I was used to putting thoughts into words quickly — and that my spelling and grammar are close to spot-on first time through. (Why I found it hard to believe them is, I guess, less a matter of scientific reasoning than for psychoanalytic investigation.)

2. Forty-five minutes is not very much time, even if you know a bit about the subject. It’s like writing an extended caption. A few hundred words and you’re there. There’s little room for shape, certainly none for anything but the briefest digression — or gag. It’s intro, substance, outro, re-read, pen down. No time for breath or second thoughts.

3. Last-minute revision still works for me. I did no real preparation, mostly because I was busy on other things. But, if I’m honest, it was also a deliberate thing. I worried that it would be truly, horribly, dispiriting if I did a reasonable amount of revision and then found myself stumbling for words and thoughts in the exam room.

So I did a little revision, a very little. I started at noon for a 1pm exam — 20 minutes at my desk, 15 minutes on the tube. I remembered from before that if you do that little revision, there is no point trying to cover everything or even very much. You have to place your bets carefully but boldly. There is no point in betting on red or black. You’ll know extremely little about everything — which you probably already knew anyway. You have to put the lot on one number. So I bet the farm on one number. I went over one thing only. (The changes in Freud’s drive theory 1915-1923, if you’re interested.)

It came up, too. (I may have bet boldly but it was hardly a stupid bet. It’s come up in every past exam paper I looked at.) I made a fair fist of answering it. I didn’t make too many stupid mistakes, I think — though I did realise later that I inadvertently killed off one of Freud’s sons, in the mud and gore of the Great War.

I’m promised feedback on it from the course tutor. We’ll see.


RIP Bo Diddley 1928-2008

I spent a little time in Chicago with Mr Diddley — as the New York Times always referred to him, with style-book formality, unfortunately, rather than genuine deference to his otherworldly grandeur.

Or rather, I spent a little time looking at Mr Diddley. He quite ignored me. His concern was his guitar and his Rock And Rye — a sticky mix of fruit syrup and whisky. I was just leaving a Clash tour to fly home. He was just joining it. It was at the Aragon ballroom. A wild, old place, all dolled up with all manner of inter-war art nouveau. The dressing room looked out on the El. The promoter, figuring punks liked dirt, supplied a couple of really worn-down, ageing, fishnetted prostitutes. I got fined for drinking a beer in a moving vehicle — I wasn't driving, just drinking.

I'm told by those who stayed with the tour that Bo never failed to give up his tour bus seat to his guitar and that every night he slept sitting up with his Rock And Rye in his arms.

Bye, Bo.

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.’