Posts
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
Friday, 26 March 2010
Monday, 15 March 2010
Oedipus at Waterloo
To the theatre again, the National this time. Somehow I'd managed to book tickets for a play that I'd not even heard of, let alone knew anything about: London Assurance.
It is, I learned, a mid-19th century comedy - fantastically, dizzily funny, too, in this version. Also that, according to an old Guardian article that I read after the event, it is 'the missing link between restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of manners'. Its writer, Dion Boucicault, was, like Wilde, Anglo-Irish - though hetero rather than homo and bigamous than monogamous(ish). In this production, the lead character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, is played as Oscar Wilde - fat and bisexual with a flapping handkerchief.
In fact, it's even Wilder than that. It's clearly an uncanny kind of precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest. It has a cigar-smoking, dominatrix of country wife called Lady Gay Spanker - who is a kind of Lady Bracknell on a foxhunter. It's about being one thing in the country and another thing in town. It has the same struggle with the meaning of identity:
Courtly: Will you excuse an impertinent question?
Dazzle: Certainly.
Courtly: Who the deuce are you?
Dazzle: I have not the remotest idea.
What's it got to do with this blog, though? Well, London Assurance reminded me that, for one of my essays on my MSc, I considered the Importance of Being Earnest from a Freudian perspective - as Oedipus Rex reconstructed as farce.
One of Freud's 'proofs' - or, at least, indicators - of the validity of his Oedipal theory was the fact that audiences were still going to see the Sophoclean tragedy two and half millennia after it was written. He reckoned this was because the motherfucking fatherkilling narrative dramatised universal fantasies and hidden desires. I suggested that the same could perhaps be said of the enduring popularity of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Still and all, though, there is no direct mother-son liaison in Wilde's play. London Assurance, however, centres - via the usual ridiculous and delicious complexities of farce - around the possibility of a young man desiring a woman who could well become his mother. Maybe that's why the laughter was so, so loud - an escape of hidden repressive desire. Maybe.
Next up The second of those four questions about Freud's validity and what I might or might not have learned on the course: determination and the place of free will in a Freudian universe
To the theatre again, the National this time. Somehow I'd managed to book tickets for a play that I'd not even heard of, let alone knew anything about: London Assurance.
It is, I learned, a mid-19th century comedy - fantastically, dizzily funny, too, in this version. Also that, according to an old Guardian article that I read after the event, it is 'the missing link between restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of manners'. Its writer, Dion Boucicault, was, like Wilde, Anglo-Irish - though hetero rather than homo and bigamous than monogamous(ish). In this production, the lead character, Sir Harcourt Courtly, is played as Oscar Wilde - fat and bisexual with a flapping handkerchief.
In fact, it's even Wilder than that. It's clearly an uncanny kind of precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest. It has a cigar-smoking, dominatrix of country wife called Lady Gay Spanker - who is a kind of Lady Bracknell on a foxhunter. It's about being one thing in the country and another thing in town. It has the same struggle with the meaning of identity:
Courtly: Will you excuse an impertinent question?
Dazzle: Certainly.
Courtly: Who the deuce are you?
Dazzle: I have not the remotest idea.
What's it got to do with this blog, though? Well, London Assurance reminded me that, for one of my essays on my MSc, I considered the Importance of Being Earnest from a Freudian perspective - as Oedipus Rex reconstructed as farce.
One of Freud's 'proofs' - or, at least, indicators - of the validity of his Oedipal theory was the fact that audiences were still going to see the Sophoclean tragedy two and half millennia after it was written. He reckoned this was because the motherfucking fatherkilling narrative dramatised universal fantasies and hidden desires. I suggested that the same could perhaps be said of the enduring popularity of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Still and all, though, there is no direct mother-son liaison in Wilde's play. London Assurance, however, centres - via the usual ridiculous and delicious complexities of farce - around the possibility of a young man desiring a woman who could well become his mother. Maybe that's why the laughter was so, so loud - an escape of hidden repressive desire. Maybe.
Next up The second of those four questions about Freud's validity and what I might or might not have learned on the course: determination and the place of free will in a Freudian universe
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Back on the chain-of-thought-gang
Something of a break since I last updated this, no? Why? Thinking mostly - wondering how to progress with this series of self-questionings, about Freud and why I did the course etc?
What gave me pause for thought were comments posted on my last posting. (You can look them up a little further down the page - and add your own views if you want.) They were smart and intriguing and worthwhile comments and questionings of what I'd written. They raised really interesting points, some of which I felt I could answer easily and others which I thought would inevitably raise other questions - which, in turn, might be best resolved with more evidence etc.
Which is what gave me pause (nearly a month of it) for thought. It wasn't that I wasn't willing to engage in the discussion and debate. I was fine with it. Relished it, in fact. As anyone who has known me for more than, oh, thirty seconds can confirm, I rarely shrink from an argument. As some gamblers will bet on raindrops progress down a wet window, so I'll easily slip into a debate on why that might be happening. Too easily, I guess.
And that was the trouble. As much as I itched to get into a nitty-gritty, down-on-the-mat, punch-them-in-the-kidneys 'discussion', I knew that, very soon, there would be no one left in the room watching or listening. It would alienate just everyone - except car-crash fanciers.
Which led to another problem. I thought the questions raised deserved to be answered. I didn't want to seem to be avoiding them. So . . .
That's why I shut up for a bit. And?
Rather than not answer the questions, I'll just not answer them on the blog. I'll do it either directly on the comments - which means you can have a look if you want but it's not in-your-face. Or, if I think it's too detailed/boring even for the comments section, I'll answer my inquisitors directly. (They are not unknown unknowns. They have previous. They are, of course, friends of mine.)
Meanwhile, I'll just plough on with answering my old friend's challenges here on the main page. Which is what I'll be doing next here. Well, almost. First, there will be a little something else . . .
Next up A visit to the motherfucking theatre
Meanwhile some diversionary moments . . .
DM1 The scent of a man
DM2 The magic of a woman*
DM3 The rottenness in the state of Denmark
DM4 Home is where you park your jetplane
* Despite her name, she's a Londoner, by the way - and a serious artist, too, of course. Which puts me in mind of those great chroniclers of modern manners, Chas 'n' Dave:
'I've been to the east and I've been out west
And I've been the world around
But I ain't seen none come anywhere near
The girls from London town.'
Something of a break since I last updated this, no? Why? Thinking mostly - wondering how to progress with this series of self-questionings, about Freud and why I did the course etc?
What gave me pause for thought were comments posted on my last posting. (You can look them up a little further down the page - and add your own views if you want.) They were smart and intriguing and worthwhile comments and questionings of what I'd written. They raised really interesting points, some of which I felt I could answer easily and others which I thought would inevitably raise other questions - which, in turn, might be best resolved with more evidence etc.
Which is what gave me pause (nearly a month of it) for thought. It wasn't that I wasn't willing to engage in the discussion and debate. I was fine with it. Relished it, in fact. As anyone who has known me for more than, oh, thirty seconds can confirm, I rarely shrink from an argument. As some gamblers will bet on raindrops progress down a wet window, so I'll easily slip into a debate on why that might be happening. Too easily, I guess.
And that was the trouble. As much as I itched to get into a nitty-gritty, down-on-the-mat, punch-them-in-the-kidneys 'discussion', I knew that, very soon, there would be no one left in the room watching or listening. It would alienate just everyone - except car-crash fanciers.
Which led to another problem. I thought the questions raised deserved to be answered. I didn't want to seem to be avoiding them. So . . .
That's why I shut up for a bit. And?
Rather than not answer the questions, I'll just not answer them on the blog. I'll do it either directly on the comments - which means you can have a look if you want but it's not in-your-face. Or, if I think it's too detailed/boring even for the comments section, I'll answer my inquisitors directly. (They are not unknown unknowns. They have previous. They are, of course, friends of mine.)
Meanwhile, I'll just plough on with answering my old friend's challenges here on the main page. Which is what I'll be doing next here. Well, almost. First, there will be a little something else . . .
Next up A visit to the motherfucking theatre
Meanwhile some diversionary moments . . .
DM1 The scent of a man
DM2 The magic of a woman*
DM3 The rottenness in the state of Denmark
DM4 Home is where you park your jetplane
* Despite her name, she's a Londoner, by the way - and a serious artist, too, of course. Which puts me in mind of those great chroniclers of modern manners, Chas 'n' Dave:
'I've been to the east and I've been out west
And I've been the world around
But I ain't seen none come anywhere near
The girls from London town.'
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Freud and the case for the prosecution, part one*
So, in the words of my old school pal, what do I think about the old boy now? Do Freud's thoughts and writings still have anything to offer me or anyone else? Having spent two years reading and discussing an enormous pile of his writings, what do I reckon? What have I learned?
My pal put the counter-case to me about Freud, organising it under headings, all of them starting with a D, the first of which was . . .
Distance
My pal wrote, of Freudian thought and practice: 'It can make people think too much of what happened long ago in childhood, and especially in their relationship with parents. Unfortunately, the events are fixed, and it's easy to spend too long blaming one's family and one's upbringing.'
My answer Yes, but.** There are two questions here, I guess. One, do our early years and relationships have long-term, central impact on our adult life? Two, if they do, can we do anything helpful with that knowledge?
One There is, quite clearly, ample evidence of various kinds about the impact of early experience. (Not that I'm excluding genetic factors, of course. There is ample evidence for them, too.)
The clearest, simplest evidence is probably from attachment theory - not Freud, I know, but he didn't quote it, I think, mostly because it wasn't around in his day. There's a thing called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).
It's twenty questions and lasts about an hour. Get a pregnant woman to answer it and you can predict with astonishing accuracy the emotional tenor and psychological make-up of her unborn child - as a toddler, anyway. If you want to guess how the child will fare as a teenager, you do the AAI on the prospective father.
Two Yes, but, again. Events are rarely 'fixed' - certainly not in the realms of our inner life. Our memories are many layered things - as experiments of all kinds show. We create and construct our past in much the same way as we create what we think of as our vision - out of the same rag bag of bits of sequential realities, memories, general knowledge, our innate drive to find patterns, our predictions and, of course, our desires. Which is why optical illusions work. They screw not with our eyes but with our perceptual organisational system. Our eyes' eyes, perhaps.
As eyes are not movie cameras, so our past is not a movie. Our pasts have a relationship to reality but it's a complex, tangential one. Freud had a word for this: Nachträglichkeit***. There's no accepted English translation for it. Mine is: afterwardsness****. The past is not so much a foreign country as a collation of reality and layers of memories and constructions - some of which will be based on memories which are themselves constructions.
Confused? We all are. That's the point.
Freud didn't think of analysis as blaming the parents. He wrote something like: neurotics (ie all of us - though more you than me, of course) suffer from memories. Not events, that is, but memories. To him, analysis was a kind of reality-testing endeavour - a matter of challenging the fantasies (and hence symptoms) by which we lead our lives.
So Larkin was wrong. It's not that your mum and dad fucked you up - though they may have. It's your memory of your mum and dad that fucked you up. Johnny Thunders was right, though: you can't put your arms round a memory. Well, best not to. That way, you can change your past*****.
Next up Determination - is there any free will in Freud?
Some light entertainment From an old pied noir 88er.
* There will be at least four parts, maybe more
** Still my default answer to too many things, I know. I try hard to remind myself to say 'Yes, and' instead but I often fail.
*** It sounds like a 50 Crown word but it isn't. It's quite standard German. They just like their words long. It's the way their language works.
**** The fashionable one in London Freudian circles is 'après coup' - borrowed from the French psychoanalysts who have been making a big noise about it since the 1960s. It's a rotten, inaccurate translation even in French, though. Whatever Freud meant it to be, it wasn't 'after shock'.
***** Time travel movies are, to my puckish mind, essentially populist Oedipal wish fulfilments. As action movies allow us to murder and mutilate (in fantasy) so movies like Back To The Future allow our secret inner world to vicariously flirt with the idea of . . . fucking (up) mum and dad.
So, in the words of my old school pal, what do I think about the old boy now? Do Freud's thoughts and writings still have anything to offer me or anyone else? Having spent two years reading and discussing an enormous pile of his writings, what do I reckon? What have I learned?
My pal put the counter-case to me about Freud, organising it under headings, all of them starting with a D, the first of which was . . .
Distance
My pal wrote, of Freudian thought and practice: 'It can make people think too much of what happened long ago in childhood, and especially in their relationship with parents. Unfortunately, the events are fixed, and it's easy to spend too long blaming one's family and one's upbringing.'
My answer Yes, but.** There are two questions here, I guess. One, do our early years and relationships have long-term, central impact on our adult life? Two, if they do, can we do anything helpful with that knowledge?
One There is, quite clearly, ample evidence of various kinds about the impact of early experience. (Not that I'm excluding genetic factors, of course. There is ample evidence for them, too.)
The clearest, simplest evidence is probably from attachment theory - not Freud, I know, but he didn't quote it, I think, mostly because it wasn't around in his day. There's a thing called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).
It's twenty questions and lasts about an hour. Get a pregnant woman to answer it and you can predict with astonishing accuracy the emotional tenor and psychological make-up of her unborn child - as a toddler, anyway. If you want to guess how the child will fare as a teenager, you do the AAI on the prospective father.
Two Yes, but, again. Events are rarely 'fixed' - certainly not in the realms of our inner life. Our memories are many layered things - as experiments of all kinds show. We create and construct our past in much the same way as we create what we think of as our vision - out of the same rag bag of bits of sequential realities, memories, general knowledge, our innate drive to find patterns, our predictions and, of course, our desires. Which is why optical illusions work. They screw not with our eyes but with our perceptual organisational system. Our eyes' eyes, perhaps.
As eyes are not movie cameras, so our past is not a movie. Our pasts have a relationship to reality but it's a complex, tangential one. Freud had a word for this: Nachträglichkeit***. There's no accepted English translation for it. Mine is: afterwardsness****. The past is not so much a foreign country as a collation of reality and layers of memories and constructions - some of which will be based on memories which are themselves constructions.
Confused? We all are. That's the point.
Freud didn't think of analysis as blaming the parents. He wrote something like: neurotics (ie all of us - though more you than me, of course) suffer from memories. Not events, that is, but memories. To him, analysis was a kind of reality-testing endeavour - a matter of challenging the fantasies (and hence symptoms) by which we lead our lives.
So Larkin was wrong. It's not that your mum and dad fucked you up - though they may have. It's your memory of your mum and dad that fucked you up. Johnny Thunders was right, though: you can't put your arms round a memory. Well, best not to. That way, you can change your past*****.
Next up Determination - is there any free will in Freud?
Some light entertainment From an old pied noir 88er.
* There will be at least four parts, maybe more
** Still my default answer to too many things, I know. I try hard to remind myself to say 'Yes, and' instead but I often fail.
*** It sounds like a 50 Crown word but it isn't. It's quite standard German. They just like their words long. It's the way their language works.
**** The fashionable one in London Freudian circles is 'après coup' - borrowed from the French psychoanalysts who have been making a big noise about it since the 1960s. It's a rotten, inaccurate translation even in French, though. Whatever Freud meant it to be, it wasn't 'after shock'.
***** Time travel movies are, to my puckish mind, essentially populist Oedipal wish fulfilments. As action movies allow us to murder and mutilate (in fantasy) so movies like Back To The Future allow our secret inner world to vicariously flirt with the idea of . . . fucking (up) mum and dad.
Friday, 5 February 2010
Final questions
A couple of months ago, I got an email from my oldest friend (or rather, the friend I've known longest - since grammar school days). He questioned what I'd got out of the course. Not that he was being sceptical, just quizzical.
He wrote: 'You've been immersed in it for two years, so do you shake yourself and move on, or find some of it has stuck?' In particular, he asked me about Freud: 'What you think about the old boy now?'
Obviously, I'd already had similar thoughts but his email went on to pose more questions with his usual acute directness. I always intended to have a go at answering them but I . . . wanted to get my dissertation out of the way first. Well, writing about my dissertation.
Now it's time to go back and come up with some answers - a kind of personal audit of the course.
So what I'm going to do is pose a series of questions from myself (and my ancient friend) and have a go at answering them, one per blog. Perhaps the actual questions will change as I go along but this is the kind of thing I'll be asking myself . . .
* Why did you do the course in the first place? Or rather, how do you now view what you said about your reasons at the time?
* Did you get out of it what you hoped to get out of it? Did your original wishes still add up in the light of how it panned out? In particular, in the light of the fact that the course was, after all, about the darkness and obliqueness of human desires - and the limits of self-knowledge.
* What did you learn about yourself (and others)? From the actual material of the course? From the doing of a course?
* So, Freud: what do I now think about the old boy? Do his thoughts and writings still have anything to offer? Or is it just a load of old Viennese whirl?
* And Lacan? What did I find when I looked in his mirror? And at the picture he kept in a cupboard.
* Will I now become a therapist? A lot of people ask me that one. Even more assume it as a fact.
* What did I really like about it? What didn't I like? Best memories? Worst memories? Etc etc?
A little time-wasting fun?
How about a little men's fashionwear? Or perhaps some guitar music?
Next up That first final question: why did I do it in the first place and was I being honest with myself?
A couple of months ago, I got an email from my oldest friend (or rather, the friend I've known longest - since grammar school days). He questioned what I'd got out of the course. Not that he was being sceptical, just quizzical.
He wrote: 'You've been immersed in it for two years, so do you shake yourself and move on, or find some of it has stuck?' In particular, he asked me about Freud: 'What you think about the old boy now?'
Obviously, I'd already had similar thoughts but his email went on to pose more questions with his usual acute directness. I always intended to have a go at answering them but I . . . wanted to get my dissertation out of the way first. Well, writing about my dissertation.
Now it's time to go back and come up with some answers - a kind of personal audit of the course.
So what I'm going to do is pose a series of questions from myself (and my ancient friend) and have a go at answering them, one per blog. Perhaps the actual questions will change as I go along but this is the kind of thing I'll be asking myself . . .
* Why did you do the course in the first place? Or rather, how do you now view what you said about your reasons at the time?
* Did you get out of it what you hoped to get out of it? Did your original wishes still add up in the light of how it panned out? In particular, in the light of the fact that the course was, after all, about the darkness and obliqueness of human desires - and the limits of self-knowledge.
* What did you learn about yourself (and others)? From the actual material of the course? From the doing of a course?
* So, Freud: what do I now think about the old boy? Do his thoughts and writings still have anything to offer? Or is it just a load of old Viennese whirl?
* And Lacan? What did I find when I looked in his mirror? And at the picture he kept in a cupboard.
* Will I now become a therapist? A lot of people ask me that one. Even more assume it as a fact.
* What did I really like about it? What didn't I like? Best memories? Worst memories? Etc etc?
A little time-wasting fun?
How about a little men's fashionwear? Or perhaps some guitar music?
Next up That first final question: why did I do it in the first place and was I being honest with myself?
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
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.
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.
Friday, 22 January 2010
Dithertation
And so, eventually, back to my dissertation - a story I started in a post back in October last year and never got round to finishing. Which is fitting, given my dithering over the dissertation.
(Those of you joining the story here should perhaps know that my original intention for dissertation was to write something about a psychoanalytic view of punk. No one had done it. I had direct experience of the subject. And, more cynically, I thought it had a reach beyond the narrow world of the analytic consulting rooms. Maybe I could even transform it into a piece of writing that I actually got paid for.)
So what is in a dissertation? In my case, eleven thousand words. To some minds, a lot. A hell of a lot, in fact. To other minds, not much at all. At least, that's what everyone told me when I discussed it with them. You're a professional writer, have been for years, it'll be nothing for you. That's what they all said. Friends, family, fellow students: all basically told me to shut up and get on with it.
Which is what I intended to do. My plan was to start getting thoughts and notes together during the first year. Which I did - up to a point. There was so much reading for the course, though, that I never really did that much. It always took second place. Actually, given my other commitments, it was a lot further down my priority list than that.
So by the time I eventually got round to arranging a meeting with the tutor, I didn't exactly have the biggest file full of notes and references. I just had a couple of possible ideas to present and the confidence to reckon I could blather on about them for a bit, fairly articulately and coherently.
So I blathered on a bit to my tutor about punk. She seemed, well, politely uninterested. She asked me, quite reasonably, how I could develop my thoughts and ideas. The implication was clear: you're dead-ending here, my boy.
So I told her about the other idea, the one about love and work. Fuller details are in the previous posting but the gist is that 'love and work' was - supposedly - Freud's response to the question 'What matters in life?' Taking that as a starting point, I'd tease out both the history of the phrase and the way psychoanalysis has had to say about love and work and . . . and. Or, at least, what psychoanalysts have written about those three little big words. Dissertations are nothing if not a big heap of quotes and citations.
My tutor perked up as I talked. She gave me some neat ideas and lines of inquiry - many of which ended up in the finished piece. She pointed out, for example, that psychoanalysts, by and large, talk a lot about the 'work' of the therapeutic endeavour but have little of any consequence to say about what most of us think of when we think of work - the job that we go to most days and which pays for the roof over our head, our food, heat and . . . psychoanalysis bills.
So I had my subject. She suggested some papers I might read and thoughts I might want to think and pursue. She encouraged me to be brave and not worry about my writing being unorthodox in academic terms. Rightly or wrongly, I took this to mean that I could put jokes in it. Not that I told her this. I certainly didn't tell her that, right from my first thoughts on the subject, I'd intended to open it with a lengthy joke. (It made it to the final version, too.)
All that was left to do was arrange a supervisor. She said: you just need someone to help you progress your ideas, right, not someone to help you with the actual writing etc. Right, I said. She asked who I'd like. I told her. She was a bit surprised but said she'd make the call. Which worked.
The only problem was that it was only possible to have one meeting before my supervisor, like all good analysts, headed off for a long summer break. Actually, it wasn't a problem for me. In fact, I was happier that way. I didn't want to be deflected from my own path too much. Like all writers, I just wanted to be told that what I'd written was good enough that pretty much the entire canon of English literature and letters could from now on be boxed up and put into cold storage.
So we had that one meeting, on a sunny lunchtime in north London - of course. I was given some more ideas for papers to read - and a good story about another cache of papers which were stuffed under another analyst's sofa. I went round the corner to one of my favourite Indian homeware shops, bought a couple of stainless steel bowls and went home.
All I had to do now was write the thing. Eleven. Thousand. Words.
Next up The writing of it
PS Some little rewards for making it to here. A card trick. A mouse trick. An explanation of what we are up to in Afghanistan.
And so, eventually, back to my dissertation - a story I started in a post back in October last year and never got round to finishing. Which is fitting, given my dithering over the dissertation.
(Those of you joining the story here should perhaps know that my original intention for dissertation was to write something about a psychoanalytic view of punk. No one had done it. I had direct experience of the subject. And, more cynically, I thought it had a reach beyond the narrow world of the analytic consulting rooms. Maybe I could even transform it into a piece of writing that I actually got paid for.)
So what is in a dissertation? In my case, eleven thousand words. To some minds, a lot. A hell of a lot, in fact. To other minds, not much at all. At least, that's what everyone told me when I discussed it with them. You're a professional writer, have been for years, it'll be nothing for you. That's what they all said. Friends, family, fellow students: all basically told me to shut up and get on with it.
Which is what I intended to do. My plan was to start getting thoughts and notes together during the first year. Which I did - up to a point. There was so much reading for the course, though, that I never really did that much. It always took second place. Actually, given my other commitments, it was a lot further down my priority list than that.
So by the time I eventually got round to arranging a meeting with the tutor, I didn't exactly have the biggest file full of notes and references. I just had a couple of possible ideas to present and the confidence to reckon I could blather on about them for a bit, fairly articulately and coherently.
So I blathered on a bit to my tutor about punk. She seemed, well, politely uninterested. She asked me, quite reasonably, how I could develop my thoughts and ideas. The implication was clear: you're dead-ending here, my boy.
So I told her about the other idea, the one about love and work. Fuller details are in the previous posting but the gist is that 'love and work' was - supposedly - Freud's response to the question 'What matters in life?' Taking that as a starting point, I'd tease out both the history of the phrase and the way psychoanalysis has had to say about love and work and . . . and. Or, at least, what psychoanalysts have written about those three little big words. Dissertations are nothing if not a big heap of quotes and citations.
My tutor perked up as I talked. She gave me some neat ideas and lines of inquiry - many of which ended up in the finished piece. She pointed out, for example, that psychoanalysts, by and large, talk a lot about the 'work' of the therapeutic endeavour but have little of any consequence to say about what most of us think of when we think of work - the job that we go to most days and which pays for the roof over our head, our food, heat and . . . psychoanalysis bills.
So I had my subject. She suggested some papers I might read and thoughts I might want to think and pursue. She encouraged me to be brave and not worry about my writing being unorthodox in academic terms. Rightly or wrongly, I took this to mean that I could put jokes in it. Not that I told her this. I certainly didn't tell her that, right from my first thoughts on the subject, I'd intended to open it with a lengthy joke. (It made it to the final version, too.)
All that was left to do was arrange a supervisor. She said: you just need someone to help you progress your ideas, right, not someone to help you with the actual writing etc. Right, I said. She asked who I'd like. I told her. She was a bit surprised but said she'd make the call. Which worked.
The only problem was that it was only possible to have one meeting before my supervisor, like all good analysts, headed off for a long summer break. Actually, it wasn't a problem for me. In fact, I was happier that way. I didn't want to be deflected from my own path too much. Like all writers, I just wanted to be told that what I'd written was good enough that pretty much the entire canon of English literature and letters could from now on be boxed up and put into cold storage.
So we had that one meeting, on a sunny lunchtime in north London - of course. I was given some more ideas for papers to read - and a good story about another cache of papers which were stuffed under another analyst's sofa. I went round the corner to one of my favourite Indian homeware shops, bought a couple of stainless steel bowls and went home.
All I had to do now was write the thing. Eleven. Thousand. Words.
Next up The writing of it
PS Some little rewards for making it to here. A card trick. A mouse trick. An explanation of what we are up to in Afghanistan.
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