Party pris

Those of you who get my occasional blogmail update would have been invited to the launch party for my book, Filthy English. I thought those of you who couldn't make it might like to know who did . . .

I have learned that the best way to put an invite list together for a party is to do it the same way you'd prepare a bride's outfit - or, as I point out in the book, write a sexy blues. You mix something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

So, among the trades and professions represented were: journalist (of course), ceramicist (and hat-wearer), tax lawyer, editor, receptionist, architect (a brace, at least), psychoanalyst (more than one, in fact - a complex of them, perhaps), actress (too evocative a word to be collapsed into the sexless actor), record producer (currently working with the Pope), photographer, parent counsellor, publican, Indian hotel owner, Iranian golfer, pre-school teacher (several, in fact - they were quite unshocked by the language), travel agent, artist (from Warsaw), charity lobbyist (from Fulham), record company owner (from north Acton), astrologer (from Kentish Town), sex writer (see previous blog posting), teacher, therapist, research scientist, Shoreditch building owner, cartoonist, dance student, school administrators (German, English), press agent (three, at least), charity manager, university lecturer (retired), builder, kitchen designer, magazine designer, pop musician (French, English, Welsh), art teacher (retired), paratrooper (veteran), jewellery maker (and bike-racer), caterer, printer (from Bermondsey) and stilt-walker (one, stiltless).

PS1 You'll find more details of the party here on my publisher's blog site.

PS2 The word in the picture is spelled out in fairy cakes. They were made by my daughter. The photo was taken by this lot.

PS3 The Independent ran a big hunk of my book. It's about swearing on TV. Read it here.

Next up Those filthy English songs, in full.

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

Publish and be ******. (Or maybe even ******.)

Not only is my book, Filthy English, now out and for sale in all bookshops (good, bad and smelly) but it’s even had good reviews. Here is the one in The Observer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/18/filthy-english-peter-silverton

Thanks to all of you who got in contact about hearing me on the Today programme. Now I know what a good number of my friends and acquaintances get up to before breakfast on Saturday mornings. The IPlayer link to that show is no longer available but here is a link to what I wrote about it on my (wonderful) publisher’s blogsite.

http://www.portobellobooks.com/Comment-and-Blogs/On-Swearing/Me-John-Humphrys-and-the-Clusterbeep

Next up That dissertation, finally.

PS The book cover is actually blue but the jpg came out this strange pink colour (on my laptop anyway). I’m popping out for some technical advice. Be with you again soon.

Close encounter of a personal kind, three

So there I was in the part of Kilburn that now calls itself Brondesbury, with a plate of barbecue and a glass of red wine. Listening to the conversation around me, I realised that I was surrounded by a partyfull of psychoanalysts.

Which led me to thinking about what might be the correct collective noun for psychoanalysts. Not a partyfull, that’s for sure. The thought of a roomful of them dancing to, say, mid-period grime or deep crunk is not an enticing one.

(What would be their collective musical taste? Bach, mostly, I reckon, and for the pop pickers among them, I guess late Bob Marley. Oh, and I’m sure nearly all of them have a copy of the Buena Vista Social Club.)

So, if it’s a murder of crows, what is it of analysts? An anxiety? A doubt? A neurosis? A regression?

I fell to talking about this with the woman sitting next to me. She was an analyst, of course. One or other of us suggested a couch of analysts.

She asked me about myself. I told her I was doing the MSc course. She knew all about it. I added that all I had left to do was my dissertation.

‘It’s due sometime in mid-August,’ I added.

‘August 14,’ she said.

How could she know the exact date when I couldn’t remember it myself? The question must have been clear on my face. She told me the answer: one of her patients was one of my fellow students.

A listen of analysts?

(To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Was she betraying a confidence? She didn’t tell me who it was but still . . .)

Next up Work, love, dissertation

Close encounter of a personal kind, two

It was a barbecue in north west London, a Sunday afternoon at a friend’s, with beer and baked meats and cakes. Sunny and relaxed in a lovely garden and a beautiful Victorian house.

Fortunately, I was more prepared for what happened than the person I encountered. The host was a psychoanalyst and — I knew — a friend to at least one of the tutors on my course. One in particular.

I saw this particular tutor as soon as I walked in. She recognised me, of course. But she took a few moments to work out who I was. Context is all. This was a kind of category error, an eruption of one part of her life into another. It made her feel awkward, I could see. So I moved on to the beer and baked meats.

A little later, I found myself sitting opposite her. She talked about the course, about the strains of Saturday morning seminars, of how the money wasn’t great. Mostly, though, she talked about the students. She was interested in them and concerned for them — or rather, us — in a way that was hard for a non-teacher like myself to imagine. She cared in a way I never would.

Then she asked me why I hadn’t turned up to several of her Saturday morning seminars. I think she said I missed two. Or that I’d only turned up to two. I’m not sure which. I can’t remember my answer. I do know, though, that I didn’t tell the truth.

Then her husband rescued me. ‘What is she like as a teacher?’ he asked. At this moment, of course, the whole patio fell silent and looked to me and my answer. My brain raced and raced and raced. A breath or two passed, maybe. ‘Charismatic,’ I said, telling a truth.

He was pleased. She was pleased. My wife was impressed at my unusual of deployment of tact.

Next up What happened next

Close encounter of a personal kind, one

Around the time I was doing my exams, a friend invited me to her final show for her art degree. Like me, she was a mature student and presumably making up for something she’d missed out on first time round. Or, rather, felt she had.

It was at Goldsmiths — which is where I took my first degree all those years ago. I’d driven past the building many times. It was on the way to my parents’ house. I’d even walked past it once, with a friend who was set on showing me the bright lights of New Cross. (We didn’t find them. Even the pub in which they filmed Shaun of the Dead was closed, shuttered, boarded, beerless.) But I hadn’t entered Goldsmiths since the day of my last exam.

I knew the art school had a spanking new building, designed by Will Alsop. I’d even got a look at it when I was taken in search of hip New Cross. So I assumed that the show would be in there.

It wasn’t. It was at the back of the back field — which meant I had to go through the front entrance. The way I’d first entered the building when I went there for an interview. The way I’d entered it every time I turned up for a lecture or seminar — which wasn’t that often. The way I’d entered it the day of my final final exam.

How was it? Odd. What was odd about it? That it wasn’t odd. It didn’t feel strange. It didn’t bring back memories. There was a new lighting system but that aside, it looked pretty much the way it did the last time I saw it. We turned right at the front door, then left and down the corridor which led to the side entrance to the main hall in which I had sat down and written my exam. The corridor I’d walked across as I left the exam for the student union bar.

What did I feel? Surprisingly little. I didn’t feel like a stranger or a prodigal son. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t exciting or comforting or even evocative. It was just . . . the way it was. It was somewhere that I once was and now wasn’t. As a part of my past, it seemed to have no connection with my present. That was then, this was now. Done, dusted. Resolved perhaps.

And the final show itself? That was not that different from way back when either. Lots of conceptual work. Goldsmiths was not big on painting then and it’s even less big on it now. The only major change was the amount of video work. Virtually every ‘piece’ had a video showing itself back to its viewers (and itself). Reflections of the way it used to be — even if only a microsecond earlier

Next up A close encounter at a north London barbecue

Testing, four . . .

So this year's exams? How did it go?

Well, it was different, in several ways. One, I'd done three-quarters of the exams last year so I only had three questions to answer. Two, to be honest, I'd done a lot less reading this year. Three, I was caught up in finishing my book.

So it was a kind of exams-lite. The revision wasn't so much revision as learning the stuff for the first time. I did my spreadsheet of past questions but it took so little time it didn't feel like it was making the contribution it did last year.

I can't remember exactly how much revision I did. It certainly wasn't as much as I did the previous year and I certainly didn't feel that anxious about the exams. I didn't exactly swan up to them but I did aspire to - maybe even pretend to. I definitely worked hard at concealing any furious below-water paddling there might have been.

Next up Two close encounters, one with my younger self