A room in Bloomsbury

So there we were in a private room in a Bloomsbury hotel. Which sounds more Virginia Woolf than it was. Far more. Maybe a bit Lytton Strachey, though. It was just down the road that his little brother James translated Freud into English. I doubt James Strachey took local hotel rooms for the afternoon, though.

It was a drinks-affair to mark the end of the course’s seminars. It was in a room off the main bar, with a large TV screen showing a black and white Audrey Hepburn movie, with the sound turned off. Breakfast At Tiffany’s suggested someone. But it wasn’t. I knew that. The Eiffel Tower kept cropping up and there’s no Eiffel Tower in Breakfast At Tiffany’s — nor two eggs over easy with wholewheat toast either, of course. Noel Coward kept appearing, too. I felt I’d seen it but couldn’t remember it.

Nearly everyone on the course turned up. In fact, the only absence I noted was the person who talked the most in seminars.

There were chairs round the edge of the room. We sat in them, a little awkwardly, the way you do when you’re not used to socialising. The people who knew each other talked to each other. The faculty members poured the white wine (not bad) and handed round the Thai-ish snacks (pretty good).

‘How generous,’ said a student to the administrator. ‘You paid for it,’ said the administrator who, despite not being English, has a finely tuned sense of English dead-drop irony. The student was clearly taken aback. ‘Your fees cover everything,’ I explained. I’m not sure I was understood.

After an hour so, the drink ran out and most people moved on to a pub — the cheapest pub in the area. We stood on a pavement in the early evening sun and drank cheap beer and cider from plastic cups.

They told me about how their year was so much less social than the previous one. I told them that I’d felt a real outsider for most of the year. Because I’d done more than three-quarters of the course (and exams) in my first year, I attended hardly any lectures. So it took me a really long time to get a hold on all their names. Also, there was often barely a spare seat and I’d find myself squeezed out to the margin.

The social thing seems to have been really important to them.

One of them told me he’d just been working, as an actor, on a Ridley Scott’s new version of Robin Hood, filming in Surrey somewhere, I seem to remember. He played a French assassin. ‘Talk them to death with Lacanian concepts, did you?’ I said.

Then someone mentioned Princess Marie Bonaparte, the woman who rescued Freud from Vienna. Catherine Deneuve played her in the 2004 biopic. Brancusi sculpted her as a phallus. A cousin of Prince Phillip’s, she sloped off from the Coronation with Francois Mitterrand, then a French cabinet minister. To psychoanalyse him, she said.

I added the odd fact that she’d had her clitoris surgically moved. Twice, in fact, if I remembered right.

‘Why?’ asked one of my fellow cheap beer drinkers.

She thought it might improve her sex life, I think.

‘Where did she have it moved to?’

I said: ‘I don’t know.’ Someone else said: ‘To her forehead?’

I should have replied but didn’t: ‘Walthamstow, actually.’

PS The film finally ended. It was Paris When It Sizzles — which has a film within a film called The Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower.

Next up I have seen the future and it’s smelly

What a (narcissistic) difference a year makes

The other week or so, there was a drinks evening for everyone on my course — right after the final lecture/seminar ever, for me anyway.

It was in a room at the myhotel just off Tottenham Court Rd.* We walked the few hundred metres in loose groups. Some got a bit lost, of course. I asked: what would be the collective noun for psychoanalysis students? I think I remember suggesting: a confusion. Someone else, though, came up with a far better idea. I can’t remember what it was, though. So the best suggestion will be rewarded with a copy of the Freud Goes Pop CD I compiled to amuse myself.

En route to the drinks, one of this year’s students said to me: last year was much more sociable than this, wasn’t it?

I said: ‘Oh, no, not at all. I thought you lot were really sociable.’ She disagreed — though she did disagree when I suggested they were harder working than the previous year. (I might have used the word ‘swottier’. If I didn’t, I’m embarrassed to admit that at least part of me thought it.)

So I said: ‘What about the Sunday morning film shows at the ICA?’ (A season of four movies which I dreaded in advance and didn’t like much when I was there — the post-film discussions were not exactly sparkling.) ‘Didn’t you go out for coffee or a drink afterwards?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe one or two occasionally.’

Which was pretty much the end of the chat. There was nothing else to say, really. She was, it seemed, clearly right. This year was less sociable than the previous one.

And yet . . . all year, I’d felt differently about this. Somehow I’d got the idea that they were far more social than they were — certainly than they thought or felt they were. I’d come into a seminar and they’d all be chatting away to each other and I’d feel something of an outsider.

We couldn’t both be right, of course, could we? Well, yes, of course we could. Groups form so easily, don’t they. And define themselves against each other so clearly, so easily — projecting all kinds of stuff on the other group, as imaginary or fantastic as it can be.

To them, the previous year was the Friendly Ones. To me, this year was the Swot Team.

Freud had a phrase for this, of course: the narcissism of small difference.

* There was a similar event last year. When asked for venue ideas, I suggested Spearmint Rhino — it’s just down the road. They weren’t keen on the idea, for some reason — not even when I raised the possibility that they might get a special psychoanalyst’s discount.

Next up What we drank at the drinks, what we ate (and some of what we said)

Memory and the unconscious

Not that long ago, I went to see Nick Lowe play, at Cambridge Corn Exchange — a one-night stand with a three-piece band.

Memory?

It must be nearly forty years since I first saw him play, at Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall or maybe Southborough Royal Victoria Hall. He’s better now. Much. His clothes are better, too. Pastel frilly shirts never really suited his hawk-like frame.

The unconscious?

For one of the encores, he sung The Beast In Me, alone. To most, it’s a Johnny Cash song — or what passed for Tony Soprano’s theme song. But it was written for Cash by Nick — who, the man in black said, was his favourite ex-son-in-law.

That night in Cambridge, Nick sang it with such echoic meaning that the audience did what audiences tend to do when their hearts have been powerfully opened and operated on — nothing. When he finished, there was that rare, silent moment in which everyone draws themselves out of the emotional world they’ve just been through. Only then does the performer breathe and the audience applaud.

Later, I thought about the song and its lyrics . . .

‘The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day and by night, rants and rages at the stars.
God help, the beast in me . . .
They’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes,
Patently unclear whether it’s New York or New Year.’

And I thought two things. One, it’s a song about the unconscious, the id, if you like, that bit of our brains that’s been around a little longer than manners and fine writing — but is still hanging around down there in our well, somewhere far below the cortical line. Two, that’s why Nick’s version so got to us all. Whatever the beast in him — and reliable sources attest to his historical propensity for beastliness — it’s in all of us, too.

Memory and the unconscious?

If you’d asked me about Nick a couple of weeks ago, I’d have made a point of pointing out that he was one of the only two famous people to have been to my school. The other was Bob Woolmer the cricketer.

Then, on the train to Cambridge, I read my old friend Will Birch’s book on pub rock, No Sleep Till Canvey Island. And I remembered that Nick didn’t go to my school.

It’s true that I knew Nick a bit when I was a teenager. He and his then band, Kippington Lodge were, in the parlance of the day, getting it together in a cottage in the hills of East Sussex. Me and my friend Steve would visit them. They’d smoke our dope and steal our girlfriends. The usual fair exchange between teenage boys and half-successful musicians a few years their senior.

Nick didn’t go to my school, though. That was Brinsley Schwarz — the guitarist, that is, not the band that took his name. I guess, my unconscious must have swapped Lowe for Schwarz, figuring out that it was a more impressive thing to chalk up on my internal CV. Not just a beast in me, then, but a beast with aspirations.

Next up White wine, olives, cheap cider and the narcissism of small difference

Jokes and the unconscious

A joke from the world of psychoanalysis. Which also, probably, offers an indication of why, in some seminars, I feel like I’m in The Life Of Brian.

Sometimes I feel I’m in the scene in which Brian drops his sandal and his band of followers argue over the theological meaning over it — does it mean we should wear one shoe like him or should we worship his dropped shoe as a religious relic.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in the scene on the amphitheatre steps in which the John Cleese character tells Brian that, as members of the People’s Front of Judea, it isn’t the Romans they really hate but the Judean People’s Front.

Which reminds me: I’m off to Israel for a few days later this week. Which in turn reminds me of something further. On the in-flight entertainment on British Airways, The Life Of Brian was always one of the movie choices. Except, as the entertainment guide solemnly pointed out, ‘on flights to the Middle East.

I always found myself thinking: God (Christ, whatever), what an achievement. Monty Python should feel very proud of themselves. Decades after the film came out, it’s still offensive to the very people it was meant to offend — religious nutters, that is, not left-wing splinter group nutters.

Anyway, here’s the joke . . .

It’s a universally acknowledged truth that if you walk down a corridor in a psychoanalytic institute, you can tell which kind of analyst is in each room.

If the patient is doing all the talking, it’s a classical Freudian.

If the analyst is doing all the talking, it’s a Kleinian.

If neither is talking, it’s an independent. Patient and analyst are having an ‘experience’.*

* If you sense a sneer in this phrase, you’re probably right.

Next up Nick Lowe’s beast; a new picture; an explanation of that joke

If the word fits, wear it

In the course of my writing my book on bad language (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009), my younger son bought a cap with a word on it. I told him that a cap with that word on it might cause problems for him in public, even in Primrose Hill. He gave it to his older brother.

A few months later, we were in New York and, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I took a picture of him wearing this cap standing outside the building in which that word was first recorded — in a popular song, anyway. It’s 55 5th Avenue and now home to the Yeshiva University law school. (See the picture here.)

Then I had another thought: what if the cap had ‘sexual intercourse’ on it instead? I sent the 5th Avenue picture to all of you who are on my blog update list and asked what you thought: would it be more or less offensive with ‘sexual intercourse’ on it. Not exactly a giant study but still several hundred people. The vote was 37 per cent ‘more’ and 63 ‘less’ – though ‘twice as daft’ said one. ‘Only by the tiniest of margins,’ said another.

Next up a psychoanalyst’s joke

The longest month

Having spent the last month on the final knockings of my book (Filthy English, Portobello, October 2009), I've been completely blogged off. Now I'm back. I'll be posting regularly. Well, fairly regularly. First up, tomorrow, the results of the online poll about the language of my son’s cap. See you then — bright if not necessarily early.

Pop stardom

I’m assured this story is true. I’ve removed the name of the artist, though, as it’s perhaps too good to be true. (And, in these Madoff times, we should all be extra-wary of that which might be too good to be true.)

A pop star, a very major pop star is onstage at a very major venue. It is between songs. There is silence in the giant hall. The crowd wait for the pop star’s words of wisdom. Instead, the pop star farts. The fart is picked up by the mike and sent round the hall at full volume, in the kind of perfect balance that only a very major pop star’s sound engineer can manage.
At the end of the show, the pop star leaves the stage. The pop star’s manager is standing in the wings. Says the pop star to the manager: ‘Why the hell didn’t you stop me doing that?’