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.

Looking that gift CD in the mouth

Putting this year’s Xmas CD compilation together, I realised that my formula is becoming more and more developed — perhaps formulaic, even. Whichever it is, here are the rules I seem to go by . . .

Rule one There must be some Elvis. This year’s is a posthumous duet. There’s something oddly fitting about Elvis being so prolific since he died. Also, as some of you might know, at the time of his first post-death spotting, in the Stapleton Hall Rd branch of Tesco, I was living just around the corner.

Rule two There must be a track from Phil Spector’s Christmas album. This year, it’s Darlene Love.

Rule three The first track must be a familiar one. See rule two.

Rule four Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about sadness, loss, separation and inevitability of death. See: Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Blue Christmas.

Rule five White Christmas must be in there somewhere. The only son of its author Irving Berlin died on Christmas Day. (See rule four.)

Rule six Many, if not all, the best Christmas songs are about family — its realities as well as its fantasies. See: Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas), Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight).

Rule seven Modern Christmas offers an embodiment of the global hegemony of Anglo-American pop music. See: Noel Blanc, Merry Christmas Polka.

Rule eight Christmas is also a time for self-surprising sexual revelations. See: Christmas Tree, Handsome Santa.

Rule nine There should be unfamiliar versions of familiar songs. See: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight), Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

Rule ten There should be at least one quite unfamiliar new(ish) tune. See: A Change at Christmas (Say It Isn’t So), Christmas Tree.

Rule eleven There should be a track that is familiar to the point of nausea yet which can be refreshed back to its original joy by being placed in new company. See: All I Want For Christmas Is You.

Rule twelve There should be something deeply ethnic. See: Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play.

Rule thirteen There should be something deeply English. See: Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play.

Rule fourteen There should be something by Bing Crosby or Johnny Mercer. Failing that, something by their oftentimes associates, the Andrews Sisters. See: Merry Christmas Polka.

Rule fifteen There should be one or more example of the wonderful world of US black Christmas pop. See: Winter Wonderland, Hot Christmas, 8 Days Of Christmas, Christmas Blues, 'Zat You, Santa Claus?

Rule sixteen There should be wit. See: Handsome Santa, Beatniks Wish, Hot Christmas, 'Zat You, Santa Claus?

Rule seventeen There should be some country. See: Blue Christmas, Little Drummer Boy.

Rule eighteen There should be a surprise, something that people would generally decide they hated before giving it a decent listen in the right company. See: All I Want For Christmas Is You, Children Go Where I Send Thee.

Rule nineteen There should be something that sounds like it was recorded in a cornflake factory. See: White Christmas (Sugar Boy Crawford).

Rule twenty There should be something by a girlie indie singer with an off-putting name and shtick which is nonetheless surprisingly enticing. See: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Not Now But in the Coming.

PS In the original draft of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, the next line was 'because it may be your last'.

Next up (perhaps) That dithertation.

A Christmas gift for you (and you and you and you)

Some Christmases I manage to get a proper CD compilation together and mailed to people. Last Christmas and the one before, I did just that.

Some Christmases I run so late putting it together, I get no further than a beta version to hand out on Christmas Eve. That’s this year.

So here is this year’s playlist. If you’ve got a CD, now you know what’s on it. If you haven’t got one and want one, try posting a comment on this posting. Even Santa sometimes comes late.

1 White Christmas Darlene Love
2 Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Death Cab for Cutie
3 Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) The Smithereens
4 Happy Xmas (War Is Over) John Holt
5 A Change at Christmas (Say It Isn’t So) The Flaming Lips
6 8 Days Of Christmas Destiny's Child
7 Christmas Tree Lady Gaga (ft. Space Cowboy)
8 Merry Christmas Polka The Andrews Sisters
9 Beatniks Wish Patsy Ray & The Beatniks
10 Hot Christmas The Elves
11 Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Aimee Mann
12 Not Now But in the Coming Katharine Whalen
13 Noel Blanc Jean Sablon
14 White Christmas Sugar Boy Crawford
15 Children Go Where I Send Thee Daryl Hall And John Oates
16 Winter Wonderland Allen Toussaint
17 The Little Drummer Boy Johnny Cash
18 'Zat You, Santa Claus? Louis Armstrong & The Commanders
19 Please, Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) Sean Na Na
20 Blue Christmas Ernest Tubb
21 Christmas Blues Ralph Willis
22 Merry Christmas Baby Elvis Presley & Gretchen Wilson
23 All I Want For Christmas Is You Mariah Carey
24 Handsome Santa Marah (ft. Zuzu Petal)
25 Conclusion Of Symondsbury Mummer's Play Symondsbury Mummer's play

PS So, you might well ask, what happened to the posting about my dissertation that I keep promising. Well, I guess it’s now become a dithertation. Pretty soon, too, it’ll be part of a new year’s resolution thing.

Next up (Tomorrow, in fact. Honest Injun.) An explication of a kind about how I put this CD together.

Knees-up, Mother Freud, knees-up, Mother Freud, how about a knees-up? Knees-up, knees-up, knees-up, knees-up, knees-up, Mother Freud

So, to answer your question, Flea, why didn’t Freud go to his mother’s funeral? Particularly, as the year before her death, he wrote, in condolences to a colleague whose mother had died: ‘the loss of a mother must be something quite remarkable, not to be compared with anything else, and awaken excitations that are hard to grasp.’

What excitations, you ask? I don’t know. Hard to grasp? Perhaps the usual elision that awoke in Freud any time he came near to discussing his own undergrowth. We do, though, know he recalled seeing his mother naked on a train — in her sleeping compartment, nothing untoward.

It happened on what the Encyclopedia Britannica describes as the ‘fateful overnight train trip when the family moved to Vienna’ — his father’s (mostly fruitless) attempt to improve on his life in the tiny Moravian town of Freiberg (now Pribor in the Czech Republic).

He was four years old at the time — though, when dating his later, profound train phobia to this encounter with the topography that Courbet’s painting categorises as L’Origine du Monde, he remembered it as happening when he was two. A not insignificant change, to my mind — both in his life story and to his Oedipal theories.

Why did he say he didn’t go to her funeral. He told his brother he didn’t like ceremonies and, besides, he was iller himself than people thought (with the cancer that would kill him, nine years later). He also contented himself with the thought that at least he didn’t die first so she was spared the pain of his death. I think there was some vanity going on. He really, really didn’t like people seeing how he looked with his mouth prosthesis and the way it affected his voice.

Still and all, not going to your mother’s funeral? I think he was even more honest than he realised when he wrote to Ernest Jones about ‘the growth in personal freedom I have acquired’ since her death.

And so to today's Advent goodies . . .

One If you want to know how to swear in ASL, watch this.

Two There is a section in my book, Filthy English, about Jackie Wilson and Lavern Baker's . . . alternative version of Think Twice. Now I've found this cute picture of the two of them together.


Three As there are rules for a bride's outfit (old, new, borrowed, blue) and a cocktail (sour, sweet, strong . . . *), so I have developed rules for creating Christmas (plus Hannukah) CD compilations. The first rule is: there must be Elvis. Here is the Memphis manchild performing a posthumous duet. NB Pop experts will notice that something has been excised from this recreated version — Elvis shouting 'Play it dirty!' On a Christmas song.

I would, of course, shown off my new YouTube skills by embedding it but that's blocked for this clip. But not for . . .

Four The other week, someone who was talking to me about their personal life said: It's not rocket science, is it. I said: Yes, it is actually. It's rocket science that isn't rocket science. It's people that are rocket science. Then, in a quite different context, I was pointed in the direction of this clip. Which is: a double pendulum. Which is: a physical demonstration of chaos theory (the butterfly effect) by which the tiniest change in the starting point can very quickly produce extraordinarily varied outcomes. Which is: a pretty damn good analogy for the complexity of human beings bumping along with each other.




Next up Dat dissertation (finally)

* Something like that anyway and certainly nothing to do with the 'cocktail rule' about VAT rate for composite items with differing VAT rates — book plus CD, for example.

Free gifts

It being the time of year that it is, I thought I should make out like other bloggers do and give you stuff — links etc, that is. I briefly — very briefly — considered a whole advent calendar of goodies but settled — realistically — on just putting a few in here.

I've already gifted some people Bessie Banks' studio tapes and Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago. (If both of those two things don't quicken your pulse just reading about them, you wouldn't have been interested in them anyway.)

Here, though, I offer, for this ninth day of Advent, a few little things. (Also, I get to display my eventual and tardy mastering of embedding YouTube postings.)



First Many of you might already have seen the Taiwanese TV news recreation of the Tiger Woods event. But it's surely worth another look. If you haven't seen it, think Grand Theft Auto. Wouldn't it be great if all TV news was like this? Who wouldn't want to watch a recreation of the Brown-Blair Granita dinner? Or what went on that night at OJ Simpson's?


Second In another part of my life, I write about legendary photographers for Professional Photographer magazine. This month, the editor got me to put my index figure where my words are and arranged a spot for me in the photographers' pit catwalk show in London Fashion Week. See how I dealt with it. (It's where the image above was taken.)

Third The Word magazine published a piece of mine about my book, Filthy English, and invited me in to talk dirty with them on their monthly podcast. Which four of us did, for an hour. It's got a parental advisory on it. The comments on it (which are many) contain excerpts from the Troggs tapes ('why don't you just fucking do what you fucking started doing?') and performances of some of the songs I write about in my book.

Fourth My word for the day: callipygian. You'll find it on the second page of this New York Times review of the Knee High production of Brief Encounter — which, being much impressed by other Knee High shows, I meant to see in London but, being somewhat busy with my course and book etc, never did get round to doing.

Next up Freud: if it's not one thing, it's his mother

Eine kleine nacht spiel, part six: the contents of Mrs Klein’s drawers

There is a joke in the play about Mrs Klein’s filing cabinet. It’s of a kind that Ray Cooney would have constructed an entire play around. An intellectual version of Benny Hill could have made a career out of it.

The gag is this. Mrs Klein files her her correspondence into three different drawers of the cabinet, according to the divisions of Freud’s 1921 structural* model of the mind: ego, superego, id. (I’ve no idea whether Mrs Klein's filing strategy has any historical accuracy. Nor can I decide whether that matters — or whether I wish it did or didn’t.)

So, of course, Mrs Klein puts letters from the taxman in the superego drawer. And she puts the letter from Melitta which is the driving force of what plot there is . . . well, to be honest, I can’t remember which drawer she uses for her daughter's correspondence. However, I do suspect, that my not remembering is an accurate reflection of a similar confusion in the characters’ minds about which drawer the letter properly belongs in.

I had an irritating question about this gag, though. It’s a topographical one. Filing cabinets (including the one in the play) have four drawers, not three. So what does Mrs Klein call her fourth drawer? And what might she keep in it? What, in the Kleinian administrative universe lies beyond (or below) the ego, superego and id. Possible answers welcome in this posting's comments section. (Facetious ones, hopefully.)

PS1 How can I have six sessions in a week? Isn’t that transgressing a central rule of analysis? No. Freud himself regularly did six-day weeks for his patients. (I’ll be writing more about Freud’s work practices when I get back to writing about my dissertation.)

PS2 Kleinians, of course, would never do six-day weeks. That would mean they couldn’t demand of their patients** on a Friday morning: so how do you feel about how much you will miss me over the weekend? Or, of a Monday: so tell me about your missing me over the weekend.

PS3 Yes, I do know that ‘spiel’ is a masculine noun in German but ‘ein klein nacht spiel’ just didn’t roll right.

PS4 The play’s run finishes tonight.

* The structural model — the ‘second topography’, to the French — eclipsed the previous, topographical which divided the mind/brain into conscious, unconscious and, sometimes, pre-conscious. Almost without exception, modern analysts slip — promiscuously, with polymorphous perversity even —between the two models.

** At first, I typed ‘parents’ — a significant slip, of course, and one that neatly matches (and ironises) Kleinians’ view of the transference thing. The patient as parent to the analyst is as good a construction as any to start a discussion of the meanings of transference.

Next up I shoot a model

Eine kleine nacht spiel, part five: the so-what of it

My teenage son and I walked away from the theatre, north on Upper St, past the Hope & Anchor, the rock basement where I spent so many hot and sticky evenings in the late 1970s — when my theatre, I guess, was seeing Joe Strummer in the pink zoot suit he wore as a 101er, clambering over amps and barking Them’s Gloria.

Well? I asked my son.

Hmm, he said. (Or something of the like.) What was it about? he asked. What was the point of it?

If I’d been really on the button, I’d have said: That you came to ask what was the point of it, that was the point of it.

But I wasn’t and I rambled a bit about how sometimes the things which have an obvious meaning later come to seem as if they have actually have no or little meaning.

At least he didn’t suggest that it’s not just psychoanalysts make bad parents but students of psychoanalysis, too. Too polite for their own good, perhaps, today’s teenagers.

Next up The sixth of the five parts of Mrs Klein. (I told you the collective noun is a complex of analysts.)