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What do you do with a convicted paedophile?
In my last post, I went to see the Ian Dury musical in London’s ‘exciting West End’. I’d seen Chris Langham in the audience and had posed the question: what do you do with a convicted paedophile?
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Chris Langham in person. When I worked in the West End, I’d see him often, generally on the fringes of Soho, the southern end mostly where it hands itself over to Covent Garden. He always looked like a man on something of a mission.
I’d last seen him shortly after he came out of jail. Not in the Soho/Covent Garden interzone but in the men’s toilets on the upper level of the orange section at Arsenal stadium. I thought various things:
* this could go badly wrong, this being a roomful of male football fans emptying out their pre-match beers
* that really takes some front on his part
* he’s either brave or stupid
* and, finally, what would I do if it turns ugly?
As it happened, nothing happened. But what would I have done if it had done? Who knows what I would have done in the moment but I hope I’d have been brave enough to have come to his aid.
Some, I know, would be shocked that I’d have hoped that I’d have come to the aid of a convicted paedophile. Read the comments about Chris Langham’s involvement in the Dury musical on The Sun website. I think they’re a fair dip-test of the level of hatred that paedophilia can arouse. (Though not, it seems, in Arsenal fans — at least those ones in that toilet on that afternoon.)
It’s not that I think paedophilia is a good thing. My primary school headmaster went to jail for it. And died the day he got out. Tears were not shed.
But I do have various thoughts about it — and about Chris Langham, in particular.
The particular first. Chris Langham was convicted of downloading child porn, not sexual assault on minors. To my mind, there is a difference between act and thought. I don’t share the Christian belief that the thought is half-way to the act.
I’m more impressed by the Portman Clinic’s take on the relationship between the thought and the act. The Portman is a major — maybe the major — treatment centre for perversions. (Their word, not mine.) Paedophilia, violence, etc etc. But they’ll only treat people who’ve actually acted out their thoughts. Violent fantasies are one thing. Violent acts are another.
Some, I know, argue that because the creation of child porn inevitably involves — at the very least — an act of coercive violence, then downloading it is party to that violence. Well, kind of. It’s a meta-argument — popular but something of a stretch. There’s no actual act on the downloader’s part. He’s merely aiding and abetting at most. And if we jailed everyone who’d aided and abetted a serious criminal act, our prison population would quite likely outnumber our non-prison population.
Now to the general. To me, the splenetic hatred of paedophiles raises various thoughts.
One, judging by TV cop shows, child sexual abuse is the explanation for just about every wrong in human society. It’s got to the stage for me that I find myself groaning in displeasure when a cop show’s plot turns to sex with children. Then I switch channel. Once upon a time, it was always the butler who did it. Now it’s the child abuser.
Two, there’s an obsessive quality about our society’s obsession with it. Some say that virtually nothing was said or written about it before Freud’s late 19th century papers on it. His original thesis was that all neuroses were caused by it. Then he decided that the recollection of child abuse was actually a transmutation of the child’s wish to have sex with the parent. (It’s actually a far more subtle and complex theory than that but there is a kernel of truth in my grossly simplisticified rendering of it.) Certainly, Freud saw clearly that small children are not unsexual beings — which, of course, is no reason for adults to have sex with them.
Three, why are people so, so obsessed by it? Why are people so, so angered by it? I’m not actually suggesting that these anger-filled obsessives are actually abusers themselves — not even in thought. Nor am I saying that maybe they’ve been abused. Just that there seems to be some kind of particular mess swirling around inside them which seems somehow to hook on to abuse.
Four, particularly in the case of someone like Chris Langham, the hatred seems uncoloured by any real knowledge of the varieties and vagaries of human desire. Look at those people in Worthing trying to remove Oscar Wilde from the town’s history because he had sex with young male prostitutes.
Five, some analysts might wonder about where that hatred hangs its hat. There is a peculiar intensity to it that makes you wonder if it started life either somewhere else or as something else — or even someone else.
Six, one of the recent seminars on my course had a good deal to say about child abuse. My fellow students asked even more questions than usual. The seminar gave me a fair grasp of the psychoanalyst’s view of the workings of an abuser’s mind. It left me more than a little despairing and glad that I wasn’t the one who had them on my couch.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Sunday, 25 January 2009
What I did on my holidays
Part two: a musical
A long time ago, I knew Ian Dury quite well. I wasn’t a friend or anything but, as a music journalist, I spent enough time on tour with him and the Blockheads to learn at least five things about him.
One, he was one of the world’s great lyricists. A phrase-maker who gifted the language with ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’ and ‘reasons to be cheerful’. A list-maker pretty much the equal of Mozart in Don Giovanni, Cole Porter in Let’s Do It, Noel Coward in Las Vegas and John Coltrane in My Favourite Things.
Two, his songs and rhythms were dream expressions of the dancer inside him. As a raspberry — his word, not mine — he could barely move, let alone dance. His songs were imaginative projections of his impossible dreams: if he could have danced, this is how he would have danced. As dreams rather than reality, his dances could be perfect in a way reality never can. The Dury dance is not just in the music and rhythms but the lyrics themselves.
Hit me with your rhythm stick.
Hit me! Hit me!
Das ist gut! C’est fantastique!
Hit me! hit me! hit me!
Hit me with your rhythm stick.
Three, his whole Essex Cockney shtick was just that, a shtick. The closest he’d got to Upminster in any meaningful sense was Walthamstow Art College. Like most successful English pop stars of that generation, he was a grammar school boy. (Me, too, of course.)
Four, he could be a complete and utter arsehole — even by the standards of pop stars. He drank. He chain-smoked dope. He could be selfish to the point of malice.
Five, everyone around him forgave him his trespasses. Until they didn’t. When did that happen? I guess when the hits stopped coming. It’s a rare eye that doesn’t turn away from a falling pop star. Also, frankly, I gradually formed the view that Ian destroyed his own career. It’s what people do. Fear of success is probably as common as fear of failure, maybe more.
When he died, I got myself a commission to write a life-and-emotional-crimes of Ian Dury piece. It could have been a really good story. I never finished it. Maybe that was my fear of success. Like I said, fear of success is common as . . . muck.
All of which is by way of making the point that when I went to see Hit Me! The Life & Rhymes of Ian Dury, I had some previous on the matter. It was at the Leicester Square Theatre. The last time I’d been there, it was a pop venue, the Notre Dame Hall. My date for the night had even played there.
The show? Well, it’s more a tell than a show, to be honest. But the story it tells is similar to the one I would have told: that Ian was a horrid, glorious, unstable mixture of genius and arsehole.
It’s a two-hander — Ian and his long-time minder, Fred ‘Spider’ Rowe, a former criminal whose life was transformed by his partnership with Ian. It was a marriage of sorts, of course, and one that, given Ian’s capacity for arseholeness, ended in divorce. I found myself thinking of Steptoe And Son. And wishing that it had been less shouty. And that it had found a way to give voice to the inner life of Spider. And that it had had something interesting to say about the mechanics and meaning of Ian’s lyricism — both words and music.
The audience loved it, though. Particularly, this joke:
Ian: If they held a c*** contest, you’d come second, Spider. (I censor myself only to prevent my blog being torn down by external authorities.)
Spider: Why’s that, then?
Ian: Because you’re a c***.
A wonderful joke, so good that I’m going to put it in the book I’m writing about swearing. (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009.)
And, I suspect, a joke written by the man I saw talking to the playwright at half-time and again at the end — Chris Langham, the actor who went to jail for downloading child porn. He had been brought in to help fine-tune the show for its West End debut. I only learned that later, though. ‘Row over disgraced star's involvement in musical’ was the Independent’s take on it.
Next blog: What Do You Do With A Convicted Paedophile? (Particularly now that Ian Dury is no longer around to make rhyme and reason of the question.)
Part two: a musical
A long time ago, I knew Ian Dury quite well. I wasn’t a friend or anything but, as a music journalist, I spent enough time on tour with him and the Blockheads to learn at least five things about him.
One, he was one of the world’s great lyricists. A phrase-maker who gifted the language with ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’ and ‘reasons to be cheerful’. A list-maker pretty much the equal of Mozart in Don Giovanni, Cole Porter in Let’s Do It, Noel Coward in Las Vegas and John Coltrane in My Favourite Things.
Two, his songs and rhythms were dream expressions of the dancer inside him. As a raspberry — his word, not mine — he could barely move, let alone dance. His songs were imaginative projections of his impossible dreams: if he could have danced, this is how he would have danced. As dreams rather than reality, his dances could be perfect in a way reality never can. The Dury dance is not just in the music and rhythms but the lyrics themselves.
Hit me with your rhythm stick.
Hit me! Hit me!
Das ist gut! C’est fantastique!
Hit me! hit me! hit me!
Hit me with your rhythm stick.
Three, his whole Essex Cockney shtick was just that, a shtick. The closest he’d got to Upminster in any meaningful sense was Walthamstow Art College. Like most successful English pop stars of that generation, he was a grammar school boy. (Me, too, of course.)
Four, he could be a complete and utter arsehole — even by the standards of pop stars. He drank. He chain-smoked dope. He could be selfish to the point of malice.
Five, everyone around him forgave him his trespasses. Until they didn’t. When did that happen? I guess when the hits stopped coming. It’s a rare eye that doesn’t turn away from a falling pop star. Also, frankly, I gradually formed the view that Ian destroyed his own career. It’s what people do. Fear of success is probably as common as fear of failure, maybe more.
When he died, I got myself a commission to write a life-and-emotional-crimes of Ian Dury piece. It could have been a really good story. I never finished it. Maybe that was my fear of success. Like I said, fear of success is common as . . . muck.
All of which is by way of making the point that when I went to see Hit Me! The Life & Rhymes of Ian Dury, I had some previous on the matter. It was at the Leicester Square Theatre. The last time I’d been there, it was a pop venue, the Notre Dame Hall. My date for the night had even played there.
The show? Well, it’s more a tell than a show, to be honest. But the story it tells is similar to the one I would have told: that Ian was a horrid, glorious, unstable mixture of genius and arsehole.
It’s a two-hander — Ian and his long-time minder, Fred ‘Spider’ Rowe, a former criminal whose life was transformed by his partnership with Ian. It was a marriage of sorts, of course, and one that, given Ian’s capacity for arseholeness, ended in divorce. I found myself thinking of Steptoe And Son. And wishing that it had been less shouty. And that it had found a way to give voice to the inner life of Spider. And that it had had something interesting to say about the mechanics and meaning of Ian’s lyricism — both words and music.
The audience loved it, though. Particularly, this joke:
Ian: If they held a c*** contest, you’d come second, Spider. (I censor myself only to prevent my blog being torn down by external authorities.)
Spider: Why’s that, then?
Ian: Because you’re a c***.
A wonderful joke, so good that I’m going to put it in the book I’m writing about swearing. (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009.)
And, I suspect, a joke written by the man I saw talking to the playwright at half-time and again at the end — Chris Langham, the actor who went to jail for downloading child porn. He had been brought in to help fine-tune the show for its West End debut. I only learned that later, though. ‘Row over disgraced star's involvement in musical’ was the Independent’s take on it.
Next blog: What Do You Do With A Convicted Paedophile? (Particularly now that Ian Dury is no longer around to make rhyme and reason of the question.)
Friday, 16 January 2009
What I did on my holidays
Part one: a pantomime
Every family has its Christmas traditions. Ours includes a trip to a pantomime or some such seasonal show.
Actually, it’s quite a recent tradition, almost a fake one really. We took our children, dutifully, to pantomimes when they were young. But, to be honest, they had their doubts. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they screamed. At least once, one of them had to be carried out, crying and screaming, then soothed in the lobby for the rest of the show. What didn’t they like? The noise, mostly. And the flying in the case of the one who was happiest watching the show from the lobby.
So we gave up on pantomimes when our children were actually quite small. We only went back when the youngest was almost grown up — old enough, at least, to have a glass of wine at the big family dinner afterwards. (Though it’s also true that his sister was so determined to grow up that she started requesting wine with her meal soon after she mastered international direct dialling to her cousins — which itself was not that long after she learned the rudiments of walking and talking.)
Why did we start going to pantomimes again? In part, it was just a way of adding a family event to the seasonal schedule that wasn’t rippled with the emotional complications of food, eating and food preparation. But it was also that I’d seen so many clever, original adult stage shows that I decided there must be similarly inventive pantomimes etc.
So, for the past few years, the youngest child and I have secretly chosen a show, bought tickets and told everyone when they’re going — but not to what. Even the location is only revealed en route. We just tell them they’ll be having an adventure, with dinner afterwards. Wine, too. Beer, if they prefer.
Generally, there are also foreigners involved — family from around the world, generally. This year, there was an Israeli and a Zurich-based Slovak, both young, both female.
The show was Hansel & Gretel, a promenade performance at the Barbican. I figured the foreigners would never have seen a promenade performance before and would be slightly staggered by it. They were. Not, though, as staggered as they were by the show itself.
Somewhere, on a shelf, in another room, there’s a copy of Bettelheim’s The Uses Of Enchantment, a psychoanalyst’s view of fairy tales. I can’t bring myself to open it again. He’s a stunningly boring, repetitive writer, even by psychoanalysts’ standards, and I’ve never really been able to look him or his work in the eye since I read that he hit children — not even his own but those in his care.
I can half-remember and half-guess, though, what Bettelheim would have had to say about Hansel & Gretel. Like so many fairy stories, it’s a stepmother narrative. Why so many? The traditional explanation is that maternal death rates were once far, far higher, so stepmothers, wicked or not, were far, far more common. The other view — Bettelheim’s, I should imagine — is that the stepmother figure is a euphemistic replacement for the real mother. We pour public hate on the stepmother as a way of expressing our private hate for our real mother.
Hate? What about love, then? There’s that, too, of course. Hopefully, for our emotional equilibrium, more of it. But the only people who don’t have mixed feelings about their closest and dearest are those who have no feelings.
But why hate? Isn’t that a bit strong? Well, psychoanalysts are big on the word ‘hate’, particularly if they’re Kleinians. Really, they mean negative feelings — or, at least, the primitive, childish part of ourselves that can only think in the most black of blacks and the most white of whites. Which of us didn’t, at some childish point in our lives, say ‘I hate you’ to a parent or two?
This particular stepmother? Very black, with a touch of purple — and a passion for the Bay City Rollers. She was young, short-skirted, made-up, uninterested in household tasks, visibly (and fakely) big-breasted. Not so much a person as a disco dancing symbol of sexual desire — of the father for the stepmother, and, if you credit the psychoanalytic view, of the real mother for the real father (if only in the child’s imaginings).
It was a tiny cast so the same actress played the witch, too — and screamed with worrying accuracy when stuffed into the oven and death. Bettelheim, I guess, would say the witch is also a kind of secret substitute mother.
It was that kind of show, never frightened to make the latent manifest. I’m not sure, though, that the small people in the audience were that keen on having the latent made manifest for them. I think they had their doubts about walking through a forest of dismembered and mutilated dolls. I also think they were confused, at best, by the scene in which the father and stepmother could be heard offstage making noises which were clearly meant to sound like they were having sex. If the fairy tale stepmother really is a euphemistic substitute for the real mother, then this was clearly what Dr Freud called the primal scene.
By and large, the children didn’t scream or cry or demand to be taken out. They were beyond that, I think, judging by the blankness of their faces. They put me in mind of the shot of the audience in The Producers in which it’s faced with the full horrific truth of Springtime For Hitler — open-mouthed, fish-eyed. Then the audience decides it’s a camp joke — in both senses. So they can laugh.
It’s not a joke, though, is it. The audience was right the first time, when it thought the play was for real. It is a genuine, heartfelt tribute to a Nazi by a Nazi. Taking it as a joke makes it acceptable. It’s what we do. It’s how we fight the horror, swaddle it in humour.
It wasn’t what the children at Hansel & Gretel did, though. They didn’t laugh. They knew it wasn’t a joke. They knew they’d seen something of life’s truths, stuff they’d rather not know.
We certainly did. When it was finally over and had ended as unsatisfactorily as the Hansel & Gretel story always does (how can they forgive their father?), we smiled at each other like survivors of an unexpected natural disaster.
Then we did what you always do under those circumstances. We went to dinner. With wine. And beer.
Part one: a pantomime
Every family has its Christmas traditions. Ours includes a trip to a pantomime or some such seasonal show.
Actually, it’s quite a recent tradition, almost a fake one really. We took our children, dutifully, to pantomimes when they were young. But, to be honest, they had their doubts. Sometimes they cried. Sometimes they screamed. At least once, one of them had to be carried out, crying and screaming, then soothed in the lobby for the rest of the show. What didn’t they like? The noise, mostly. And the flying in the case of the one who was happiest watching the show from the lobby.
So we gave up on pantomimes when our children were actually quite small. We only went back when the youngest was almost grown up — old enough, at least, to have a glass of wine at the big family dinner afterwards. (Though it’s also true that his sister was so determined to grow up that she started requesting wine with her meal soon after she mastered international direct dialling to her cousins — which itself was not that long after she learned the rudiments of walking and talking.)
Why did we start going to pantomimes again? In part, it was just a way of adding a family event to the seasonal schedule that wasn’t rippled with the emotional complications of food, eating and food preparation. But it was also that I’d seen so many clever, original adult stage shows that I decided there must be similarly inventive pantomimes etc.
So, for the past few years, the youngest child and I have secretly chosen a show, bought tickets and told everyone when they’re going — but not to what. Even the location is only revealed en route. We just tell them they’ll be having an adventure, with dinner afterwards. Wine, too. Beer, if they prefer.
Generally, there are also foreigners involved — family from around the world, generally. This year, there was an Israeli and a Zurich-based Slovak, both young, both female.
The show was Hansel & Gretel, a promenade performance at the Barbican. I figured the foreigners would never have seen a promenade performance before and would be slightly staggered by it. They were. Not, though, as staggered as they were by the show itself.
Somewhere, on a shelf, in another room, there’s a copy of Bettelheim’s The Uses Of Enchantment, a psychoanalyst’s view of fairy tales. I can’t bring myself to open it again. He’s a stunningly boring, repetitive writer, even by psychoanalysts’ standards, and I’ve never really been able to look him or his work in the eye since I read that he hit children — not even his own but those in his care.
I can half-remember and half-guess, though, what Bettelheim would have had to say about Hansel & Gretel. Like so many fairy stories, it’s a stepmother narrative. Why so many? The traditional explanation is that maternal death rates were once far, far higher, so stepmothers, wicked or not, were far, far more common. The other view — Bettelheim’s, I should imagine — is that the stepmother figure is a euphemistic replacement for the real mother. We pour public hate on the stepmother as a way of expressing our private hate for our real mother.
Hate? What about love, then? There’s that, too, of course. Hopefully, for our emotional equilibrium, more of it. But the only people who don’t have mixed feelings about their closest and dearest are those who have no feelings.
But why hate? Isn’t that a bit strong? Well, psychoanalysts are big on the word ‘hate’, particularly if they’re Kleinians. Really, they mean negative feelings — or, at least, the primitive, childish part of ourselves that can only think in the most black of blacks and the most white of whites. Which of us didn’t, at some childish point in our lives, say ‘I hate you’ to a parent or two?
This particular stepmother? Very black, with a touch of purple — and a passion for the Bay City Rollers. She was young, short-skirted, made-up, uninterested in household tasks, visibly (and fakely) big-breasted. Not so much a person as a disco dancing symbol of sexual desire — of the father for the stepmother, and, if you credit the psychoanalytic view, of the real mother for the real father (if only in the child’s imaginings).
It was a tiny cast so the same actress played the witch, too — and screamed with worrying accuracy when stuffed into the oven and death. Bettelheim, I guess, would say the witch is also a kind of secret substitute mother.
It was that kind of show, never frightened to make the latent manifest. I’m not sure, though, that the small people in the audience were that keen on having the latent made manifest for them. I think they had their doubts about walking through a forest of dismembered and mutilated dolls. I also think they were confused, at best, by the scene in which the father and stepmother could be heard offstage making noises which were clearly meant to sound like they were having sex. If the fairy tale stepmother really is a euphemistic substitute for the real mother, then this was clearly what Dr Freud called the primal scene.
By and large, the children didn’t scream or cry or demand to be taken out. They were beyond that, I think, judging by the blankness of their faces. They put me in mind of the shot of the audience in The Producers in which it’s faced with the full horrific truth of Springtime For Hitler — open-mouthed, fish-eyed. Then the audience decides it’s a camp joke — in both senses. So they can laugh.
It’s not a joke, though, is it. The audience was right the first time, when it thought the play was for real. It is a genuine, heartfelt tribute to a Nazi by a Nazi. Taking it as a joke makes it acceptable. It’s what we do. It’s how we fight the horror, swaddle it in humour.
It wasn’t what the children at Hansel & Gretel did, though. They didn’t laugh. They knew it wasn’t a joke. They knew they’d seen something of life’s truths, stuff they’d rather not know.
We certainly did. When it was finally over and had ended as unsatisfactorily as the Hansel & Gretel story always does (how can they forgive their father?), we smiled at each other like survivors of an unexpected natural disaster.
Then we did what you always do under those circumstances. We went to dinner. With wine. And beer.
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Merry Christmas to one and all
This is what I'll mostly be listening to this holiday. More details in the next posting. Plus: an evening of seasonal terror in the City of London.
1. All Alone On Christmas Darlene Love (1993)
2. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus The Ronettes (1963)
3. Here Comes Santa Claus Bing Crosby (1945)
4. Poor Old Rudolph The Bellrays (1996)
5. Frosty The Snowman Leon Redbone (1987)
6. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers (1946)
7. Velvet Santa Divide and Kreate (2007)
8. Sock It To Me Santa Bob Seeger & The Last Heard (1966)
9. Christmas Morning Blues Titus Turner (1952)
10. Merry Christmas Little Esther & Johnny Otis (1950)
11. Faraway Christmas Blues Little Esther & Mel Walker with Johnny Otis (1950)
12. Santa Claus, Santa Claus Louis Jordan (1969)
13. You Don't Have To Be A Santa Claus Mills Brothers (1955)
14. Merry Christmas Baby Elvis Presley (1971)
15. River Madeleine Peyroux (2006)
16. Blue Christmas Low (2000)
17. In The Hot Sun Of A Christmas Day Caetano Veloso (1971)
18. Raat Christmas Ki Thi Asha Bhosle (1987)
19. Spotlight On Christmas Rufus Wainwright (2004)
20. So Much Wine The Handsome Family (2001)
21. Merry Christmas From The Family Robert Earl Keen (1994)
22. (I Was) Drunk (On Christmas) Winechuggers (1998)
23. Xmastime For The Jews Darlene Love (2005)
24. Fuck Christmas Eric Idle (2006)
This is what I'll mostly be listening to this holiday. More details in the next posting. Plus: an evening of seasonal terror in the City of London.
1. All Alone On Christmas Darlene Love (1993)
2. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus The Ronettes (1963)
3. Here Comes Santa Claus Bing Crosby (1945)
4. Poor Old Rudolph The Bellrays (1996)
5. Frosty The Snowman Leon Redbone (1987)
6. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town Johnny Mercer and The Pied Pipers (1946)
7. Velvet Santa Divide and Kreate (2007)
8. Sock It To Me Santa Bob Seeger & The Last Heard (1966)
9. Christmas Morning Blues Titus Turner (1952)
10. Merry Christmas Little Esther & Johnny Otis (1950)
11. Faraway Christmas Blues Little Esther & Mel Walker with Johnny Otis (1950)
12. Santa Claus, Santa Claus Louis Jordan (1969)
13. You Don't Have To Be A Santa Claus Mills Brothers (1955)
14. Merry Christmas Baby Elvis Presley (1971)
15. River Madeleine Peyroux (2006)
16. Blue Christmas Low (2000)
17. In The Hot Sun Of A Christmas Day Caetano Veloso (1971)
18. Raat Christmas Ki Thi Asha Bhosle (1987)
19. Spotlight On Christmas Rufus Wainwright (2004)
20. So Much Wine The Handsome Family (2001)
21. Merry Christmas From The Family Robert Earl Keen (1994)
22. (I Was) Drunk (On Christmas) Winechuggers (1998)
23. Xmastime For The Jews Darlene Love (2005)
24. Fuck Christmas Eric Idle (2006)
Saturday, 15 November 2008
Back again
I never gave it any thought. Stupidly, I guess. I should have known that it would be quite a different thing going back again. I’d been a second year before, at school and university, too. Somehow, though, I didn’t think about it this time round. Like I said, stupid.
It is different. Quite a lot different. Part-time students — who, like me, are doing the course over two years — are in a tiny minority. Nearly everyone manages it in one — even, in some case, with a full(ish)-time job. I’ve no idea how they do it. None at all.
I remember last year looking at the second year students and wondering what was going on in their heads. What did they think of us new bobs? Were they a little amused by the gaucheness of our questions? Were they just waiting to get it all over with? Were they bored or did they find the second year even more interesting than the first? Was it all much easier for them?
Another thing I didn’t think about was just how much each year’s intake can vary. As ever in life, I knew what I knew, no more. So I guessed that was the way things actually were and would always be. Wrongly.
I should have known this year’s intake would be different. One, I’d been told they were — by one of last year’s students with whom my work brings me into fairly regular contact. As a one-year-only student, she hadn’t actually seen this year’s newbies with her own eyes but she had it on the best of (gossipy) authority that they were, on average, far younger than our year. More her age, in fact, than mine.
Two, I’d heard tell of a previous year’s intake, a few years back, that was infamous in their difference. They threw rubbers at each other in class. Or rather, they threw erasers — they were mostly young Americans. They teased one of their number who happened to have ginger hair. It was, or so I’m told, like being in an American high school sitcom that wasn’t funny.
So what are this year’s intake like? Well, I’ve hardly seen them, truth be told. The way I divided up my work over the two years, I’ve ended up with only six seminars all this term — the first half of Mrs Klein and Bion.
So any observations are necessarily partial as well as inevitably partial. They are younger. There are also more of them than there were last year. There are a lot more English Literature graduates and a few more psychiatrists.
I do find some of their questions a bit gauche — though, thank God, I have the sense to recall some of my own questions from last year, with pain and retrospective embarrassment. They ask more of them, too, than we did. They seem, well, keener somehow. As one of last year’s full-timers said to me: ‘We were a very laidback lot.’ Though rarely late for seminars. Unlike this year’s lot — who have already been told off a couple of times for it.
That aside, they are a lot more organised. They’re sorting out study groups, seminar presentations and dissertation-sharing sessions. They are all-round far more communicative with each other. Last year’s lot generally couldn’t even get it together to look at the course Facebook site. Like, I said, laidback.
This communicativeness, though, was how I came to upset some of them — not deliberately but not quite inadvertently either. They were sending emails to each other several times a day — about organisational issues, kind of. The problem was they were copying them to the whole group, including me. I got fed up with the emails — a good number of which said nothing more than ‘me, too’. So I said something. I don’t think they liked that. But I don’t get any more emails.
And they’ve set up a mooli. Sorry, that’s a radish. I meant a Moodle*. That’s a sharing web thing for academia — in this case, restricted and password protected. I just had a look at it. There was an invite to a crochet circle breakfast — run by a mathematically inclined artist-in-residence. It was yesterday. I missed it.
* Martin’s Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment
I never gave it any thought. Stupidly, I guess. I should have known that it would be quite a different thing going back again. I’d been a second year before, at school and university, too. Somehow, though, I didn’t think about it this time round. Like I said, stupid.
It is different. Quite a lot different. Part-time students — who, like me, are doing the course over two years — are in a tiny minority. Nearly everyone manages it in one — even, in some case, with a full(ish)-time job. I’ve no idea how they do it. None at all.
I remember last year looking at the second year students and wondering what was going on in their heads. What did they think of us new bobs? Were they a little amused by the gaucheness of our questions? Were they just waiting to get it all over with? Were they bored or did they find the second year even more interesting than the first? Was it all much easier for them?
Another thing I didn’t think about was just how much each year’s intake can vary. As ever in life, I knew what I knew, no more. So I guessed that was the way things actually were and would always be. Wrongly.
I should have known this year’s intake would be different. One, I’d been told they were — by one of last year’s students with whom my work brings me into fairly regular contact. As a one-year-only student, she hadn’t actually seen this year’s newbies with her own eyes but she had it on the best of (gossipy) authority that they were, on average, far younger than our year. More her age, in fact, than mine.
Two, I’d heard tell of a previous year’s intake, a few years back, that was infamous in their difference. They threw rubbers at each other in class. Or rather, they threw erasers — they were mostly young Americans. They teased one of their number who happened to have ginger hair. It was, or so I’m told, like being in an American high school sitcom that wasn’t funny.
So what are this year’s intake like? Well, I’ve hardly seen them, truth be told. The way I divided up my work over the two years, I’ve ended up with only six seminars all this term — the first half of Mrs Klein and Bion.
So any observations are necessarily partial as well as inevitably partial. They are younger. There are also more of them than there were last year. There are a lot more English Literature graduates and a few more psychiatrists.
I do find some of their questions a bit gauche — though, thank God, I have the sense to recall some of my own questions from last year, with pain and retrospective embarrassment. They ask more of them, too, than we did. They seem, well, keener somehow. As one of last year’s full-timers said to me: ‘We were a very laidback lot.’ Though rarely late for seminars. Unlike this year’s lot — who have already been told off a couple of times for it.
That aside, they are a lot more organised. They’re sorting out study groups, seminar presentations and dissertation-sharing sessions. They are all-round far more communicative with each other. Last year’s lot generally couldn’t even get it together to look at the course Facebook site. Like, I said, laidback.
This communicativeness, though, was how I came to upset some of them — not deliberately but not quite inadvertently either. They were sending emails to each other several times a day — about organisational issues, kind of. The problem was they were copying them to the whole group, including me. I got fed up with the emails — a good number of which said nothing more than ‘me, too’. So I said something. I don’t think they liked that. But I don’t get any more emails.
And they’ve set up a mooli. Sorry, that’s a radish. I meant a Moodle*. That’s a sharing web thing for academia — in this case, restricted and password protected. I just had a look at it. There was an invite to a crochet circle breakfast — run by a mathematically inclined artist-in-residence. It was yesterday. I missed it.
* Martin’s Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment
Monday, 10 November 2008
Double body
In my last posting, I put a link in where it said 'my wife'. I thought you might like to be reassured (or disappointed) that it wasn't actually my wife in the picture. They just share a name. The clue was the initials on that woman's badge. For more details, look here.
In my last posting, I put a link in where it said 'my wife'. I thought you might like to be reassured (or disappointed) that it wasn't actually my wife in the picture. They just share a name. The clue was the initials on that woman's badge. For more details, look here.
Friday, 17 October 2008
The me-me meme
Often, though not always, I get my wife to read my postings before I upload them. Our offices are next to each other in the house. I email them to her. She emails back. Such is the modern work-home balance. Such is modern marriage.
My email wasn’t working properly when she sent her response to my last posting. So we had a face-to-face conversation, before breakfast. Such, too, is the modern work-home balance.
She: You know I always really like your blog.* But . . .** I wondered if that posting doesn’t come across a bit self-concerned.
Me: I know what you mean.*** But I’m torn. Some people tell me they like my blog best when it’s personal. Others that they’re more interested in it when it reaches out into the world.
She: That posting, though. Isn’t it a bit too much like those columns in the paper where someone writes about their own life, self-obsessively. It’s all so me-me-me.
Me: But those are the columns you read. I don’t. But you do.
She: Mmmmm.
And so to breakfast.
* A note for anyone ever having a conversation with any writer about their writing. Begin any and every conversation with something like this. Even if it’s a complete lie. Particularly if it’s a complete lie. If you don’t first tell them they’re wonderful, they won’t hear anything you say after that. Particularly if you’re about to tell them it’s rubbish.
If it is rubbish, tell them it needs a little work. Then start on your list of suggested changes. No matter how extensive the list, the writer will still be basking in the glow of that initial praise. Think of it as tickling a dog’s tummy. It works. Every time. I’ve written and I’ve edited. As an editor, I learned all about writers’ vanities. Mine included, of course.
** There’s always a ‘but’ after a sentence which begins ‘You know I always really . . .’
*** Defence is the last resort of offence.
Often, though not always, I get my wife to read my postings before I upload them. Our offices are next to each other in the house. I email them to her. She emails back. Such is the modern work-home balance. Such is modern marriage.
My email wasn’t working properly when she sent her response to my last posting. So we had a face-to-face conversation, before breakfast. Such, too, is the modern work-home balance.
She: You know I always really like your blog.* But . . .** I wondered if that posting doesn’t come across a bit self-concerned.
Me: I know what you mean.*** But I’m torn. Some people tell me they like my blog best when it’s personal. Others that they’re more interested in it when it reaches out into the world.
She: That posting, though. Isn’t it a bit too much like those columns in the paper where someone writes about their own life, self-obsessively. It’s all so me-me-me.
Me: But those are the columns you read. I don’t. But you do.
She: Mmmmm.
And so to breakfast.
* A note for anyone ever having a conversation with any writer about their writing. Begin any and every conversation with something like this. Even if it’s a complete lie. Particularly if it’s a complete lie. If you don’t first tell them they’re wonderful, they won’t hear anything you say after that. Particularly if you’re about to tell them it’s rubbish.
If it is rubbish, tell them it needs a little work. Then start on your list of suggested changes. No matter how extensive the list, the writer will still be basking in the glow of that initial praise. Think of it as tickling a dog’s tummy. It works. Every time. I’ve written and I’ve edited. As an editor, I learned all about writers’ vanities. Mine included, of course.
** There’s always a ‘but’ after a sentence which begins ‘You know I always really . . .’
*** Defence is the last resort of offence.
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