On reading and being
unable to read

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

Now I’m not so sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



In memoriam

Tony Soprano 1999–2007

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

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

Encountering the others

I didn’t go to the freshers fair — and not only because it was called the Freshers’ Fayre!!, exclamation marks and all. I didn’t go to the freshers’ ball, though I think I might have walked past it, quite by chance late one night in Gordon St — there were flashing lights and loud music coming from a first floor room and a flirt of flushed-face young smokers on the pavement.

I didn’t join the chess club or filmsoc or Greenpeace. I assumed I automatically became a member of the student union, but I didn’t bother to check. I wasn’t tempted by an evening of Bar Footsie, nor by its explication — a stock exchange drinking game. I didn’t even refuse to open an account at Barclays (thank you for that joke, William).

I’m married. I’m old. I have three children, a dog and a pension plan. I can stay at home. I’m not out there, don’t need to be, don’t want to be.

My non-course, extra-academic involvement would, I thought, begin and end with registration. Which itself made for an amusing afternoon, fun almost. If, that is, you’re up to taking fun and amusement from a process that me put me in mind of how a socialist state might be if it were run by Quakers, or perhaps the Women’s Institute. Very bureaucratic, very polite, almost efficient, with a faint air of talcum powder and Timotei shampoo.

There were lots of very helpful young people — students, presumably, working on minimising their overdraft (or splurging on Bar Footsie). There were apologies for not having quite the right form — that’s dealt with by the desk over there, I’m afraid, smile, smile. There was a rainbow of coloured zones — red and yellow and orange and green and purple and taupe and cerise. (I may have hallucinated those last two.) And there were queues. Long queues, very polite queues, slow queues. Still, they gave me time to listen to a muffin-topped north Liverpool teenager sharing her mental map of cheap alcohol sources in the NW1 and N1 postcodes.

There was money to pay, forms to fill, names to be logged, a photograph to be taken. It took a long time, a very long time. Almost as long, I found myself thinking, as changing a traveller’s cheque in an Italian bank. And then I realised: I couldn’t crack that gag to anyone here. I’d have to explain it. They’d ask: what’s a traveller’s cheque? And: why not just use a cash point? It was an old man’s joke, unshareable without footnotes and explanation. I found myself thinking about my friends who have girlfriends young enough to be my daughter.

But that, I thought, would be it for non-course stuff. Oh, there was a Facebook group. (Have a look if you want/can. It’s UCL MSc Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies.) But only half the course signed on to it and even they’ve mostly kept quiet.

Then came the email. In the subject field, there was just one word and two punctuation marks — pub?!, it asked. It was an invite to the whole course for a drink or more ‘after class’. I put those two words in quote marks not to sneer but because, again, I found myself thinking of friends in October-May relationships. And of how, when I first went to college, I kept addressing the lecturers as ‘sir’. They’d smile, amusedly, not at all patronisingly. I, good Catholic atheist that I am, would pray for the floor to open up. It never did. God the atheist is far too much of a Curb Your Enthusiasm fan ever to pull that one.

The inviting email put me in a quandary. Not to go would be rude. But going out for drinks with a group of people who are nearly all a good hunk of a century younger than me could be, well, like going out with my children’s friends. Before, in this situation, I’ve turned for advice to my etiquette advisor, my daughter. (She’s good, I recommend her. When I told her I’d not quite finished the pre-course reading — a dozen books or so — she had just one word for me. Swot! she said. So, I said, would it be best if I kept quiet about the reading? Excellent idea, she said.) But she’d gone away, for a month or two, to Latin America somewhere, to help out with a local wildlife issue. (Truly, I don’t know how the third world got by before the arrival of first world young people armed with nothing but good degrees and caring parents.)

So I went for the drink, ‘after class’ on Saturday. (All the seminars are either then or on Friday afternoon so that students can also hold down serious jobs or travel in from beyond the M25.) I was one of the last out of the seminar room so I tail-gunned the crocodile of fellow students — the whole group as far as I could see. Along the street, across the road, through the doors, up the stairs, down some stairs, up some more stairs, through some double swingdoors. I looked around. It felt familiar. We were in the student union bar. The last time I was here, I was barely legal.

We sat at a long refectory table, fifteen or so of us. I thought about the difference between this group and my first university cohort all those years ago. That lot was determinedly homogenous, though not exceptionally so by the standards of the day. It was just the way universities were: white, home counties or shires. The fact that I’d grown up in a council house and a pub gave me a touch of the exotic.

But here was Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Taiwan, Vienna and Wapping — as well as a sprinkle of home counties and shires. Some of us might not even be heterosexual. Such a mix and range might perhaps be as predictable now as homogeneity was back then. But still, a surprise, if a pleasant one.

Well, I was asked, what do you think of the course? I thought about mentioning the cultural mix thing, but I didn’t. Instead, I said: being in a room with so many sharp minds is just in itself so, well, exhilarating. I could have added — but didn’t, worried about the old man’s joke thing and on grounds of potential Humbert Humbertness — that it put me in mind of the slogan for Beserkley records: the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

I also thought of a piece of very smart advice, given freely, if aggressively, by James ‘Double Helix’ Watson. ‘Never be the smartest person in the room because if you're the smartest person nobody can help you,’ he said. So, that’s one smart thing I’ve got right then.

This week’s listening
Psycho by Jack Kittel
‘Mama, why don’t you get up?’

On lateness and being late

Despite my very best intentions, I still nearly managed to be on time for my first day back at university after a gap of । . . Well, it’s nearly 33 years since I walked out of my final finals exam, promising myself and everyone else in the student union bar: never again.

It was a promise I kept। In all those years, I’ve only sat two exams. Or, rather, sat and resat the same exam — my driving test failed first time, passed second. And that was 27 years ago: the very last driving test of the very last day of 1980, in the yellow, drizzly, late-afternoon, mid-winter gloom of Hendon. Since then, nothing. I even avoided eye tests till a couple of years ago, having convinced myself that it wasn’t that I needed reading glasses, just that the world was getting darker.

I’d been taking exams since I was eight, twice a year at least। I was good at them, too, mostly. It was just this: enough was enough. A room with rows of desks. The smell of blue-black ink and English teachers’ leather-elbowed jackets. High summer sun shafting seductively through stained-glass windows. The breath-constricting sense of anticipation as you opened the paper. Being reminded: not to talk, to answer all the questions, to re-read your answers, to ask permission to go to the toilet. The 15-minute warning. The 5-minute warning. The one-minute warning. The end: stop writing, put down your pen, now.

Enough। I’d had enough of it all, even the good bits — high marks, obviously, but also the wonderful sense of flow when you’re writing easily and clearly about something you know about and doing it against a ticking clock. Enough, though, was enough. (I found a substitute for the flow and writing against the clock thing. I became a journalist. An improvement on the original: same thing, more or less, only you got paid for it.)

Yet, here, now — half a lifetime and three children later — I’m back at university, having applied for, interviewed for, been accepted for, paid for and enrolled on a masters course at University College, London — an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies. My first degree was in psychology and, essentially, I’m picking up pretty much where I left off, all those years ago, in the bar.
I always intended to be late for my first day back at university। I’ve always been late on my first day for anything. It’s a deliberate policy. It’s important to be late on your first day. I learned that long ago, from Terry Wogan, I think. Arrive early on your first day and it’ll be expected of you ever after. Arrive late and they’ll always be appreciative of your punctuality, never take it for granted. At least that’s the theory. I’ve never analysed the data.

I worked hard at being late। I chatted to a fellow dog-walker in the park. I bumped into a very old acquaintance and made sure we progressed well beyond the ritual exchange of pleasantries. I had a proper breakfast, even though I knew time was getting tight. I strolled to the tube station, only to discover I had plenty of time. Then, to my blissful surprise, there were no trains running on the Charing Cross branch. I’d have to take a Bank train to Euston and walk from there. I did. I got to the right building just on time. I resigned myself to promptness.

As I’d been told to, I checked in at the desk। Someone rushed through next to me, a flurry of black and determination. The man at the desk told me to take the first lift to the fifth floor, then walk across the building, past the second lift. It didn’t sound right but I did as I was told. It wasn’t right. The fifth floor entrance was security-locked against me. As was the sixth, the seventh, the fourth etc etc, all the way down to the first, where someone offered to help me out, take me to the right place. ‘I’ve always wondered where the psychoanalysis unit was,’ he said. The spirit of enquiry.

I was fifteen minutes late. The flurry of black and determination was there already, attentive and inquisitive five seats to my left. Later, we talked. ‘Being late is a big thing in psychoanalysis, isn’t it,’ I was told. I should have replied: are we talking 15 minutes or 33 years? But, of course, but didn’t.

Back to uni at 55 (Well, almost)

Who?
My name is Peter Silverton. I’m a writer. I’ve been an editor. It’s what I’ve always done. Well, for a year right after university, I worked as a banqueting barman — lucrative, educative, basically illegal. That aside, my working life has been measured out in words, pages and by-lines. Now, at the age of 55 (well, almost) I’m re-entering the world of academia, taking a masters degree — and writing about it, here, week by week by essay by term by dissertation.

Where?
I live in north London. I have three children. I’m married to their mother and have been since not long after our second child was born. We have a dog. Sometimes I call him by my younger son’s name. I have an allotment, high cholesterol and too many CDs.

When?
In September 2007, I started an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies, at University College, London — two years, part-time. More than three decades after I graduated, in psychology, in 1974, from Goldsmiths’, I’m back at university. I’ll be just round the corner from the elegant neo-Stalinist tower in which I crammed for my finals — and the ugly 1970s block from which my two oldest children have just graduated.

What?
What will it be like to be the oldest person in class? How will it be studying with people younger than my children? And being taught by people younger than me? (I mentioned these worries at my interview and was told, basically, not to. But having been to a school where not calling a master ‘sir’ got you a Saturday morning detention, it’s hard not to.) Will I be able to keep up with the reading? (A cousin took an MBA a few years ago. She cheerfully advised starting my day at five.) How will I cope with a whole new range of vital etiquettes and protocols — essay-writing, departmental and inter-departmental status structures, citation checking, how the photocopier works, where my pigeon-hole is, which photo I should use on Facebook. Above all, will I be up to it? For now, I guess I can only tell myself what I so often tell other people under similar circumstances: if you’re not scared, you’re clearly not paying attention.

Why?
Why Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies? What are Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies anyway? And why ‘theoretical’? A short answer to the second question is easy: Freud and all that. So is the answer to the third: it’s an academic course, not a clinical training for analysts and therapists. Question number one, of course, is the toughie. Any answers are provisional, naturally, but I can have a go.
a) I hold to the view that if we fully understood why we were doing something, we quite likely wouldn’t need to do it.
b) It’s a resumption of my original studies. I set out intending to be a psychologist — until I looked at the length of the training and how little you got paid at the end of it. I went to university to study the human mind and found I was studying rats’ brains. Now I’ve got the chance to make that good.
c) I’m in a position to do it. I’ve got the time etc.
d) My wife has almost finished her MA (in Infant Mental Health — it’s a family thing). A little competition enlivens any marriage.
e) And finally, because time’s winged chariot is hurtling round the corner at me, wheels off the ground, horses snorting, driver’s whip cracking. I can, of course, continue to believe that, until proven otherwise, mortality is something that happens to other people. But I go to enough contemporaries’ funerals to know that, at the very least, I should cover my bets.