Across the Fields

Still on the Macbeth tip, I took the Espio out into the countryside just now to try and grab photographs of an "open place". If you walk about a mile from my mum's place, you come to a small church and graveyard, where a man who lived to something in the vicinity of 130 is buried with a huge memorial. It's a tranquil place but also very eerie, situated as it is on the edge of a little hamlet with its back to what appears to be neverending countryside. The Vale of York can't be much more than thirty miles from Richmond (at the edge of the dales) to the foothills of the Yorkshire moors but feels like a huge void. It seems like the kind of place that's been put there to cross, either on the conduit North-South routes connecting London and Scotland that run through it (the East Coast Main Line and the A1 both run within five or six miles of the house) or on the East-West routes between the two national parks. The VoY becomes a gap inbetween any number of other co-ordinates we could select: estuaries (Humber and Tees), sports clubs (no football teams of any note between Darlington and York), stabilising points for dialect. Valespeak is only made distinct by the fact that it's speakers sound like the crows that inhabit the area, but it's actually just a combination of all the harshest elements of Leeds, Teeside and Mackem.

Anyway, I take some pictures at the church and then start to lose my nerve, having as I do a head full of MR James (currently). I cross a bridge over a muddy stream, flowing into a flooded field with a few rotten trees. To the left of the little lane is an air force comms post for navigating the Tornados into RAFs Leeming and Dishforth. Whenever I take a photograph of it I remember the Greek planespotting scandal. Carry on up the road and there's a suitably sinister lone farmhouse, reminiscent of many a cheap horror film (ha, ha, ha...Jeepers Creepers). I picture the farm as run down, not doing business, a couple of dirty dogs chained up in the Yard. Chances are that a businessman-commuter type actually lives there, or a doctor. Further up the road, I notice that there's a woman (country type wearing a bodywarmer) also walking on it which for some reason causes me to decide to return to Scorton. I've proved my point about the open places, anyway.

Jx

argh! ahrb!

The thing I enjoy writing the least, but seem to spend the most time on, is the proposal. Currently, it's the AHRB proposal, the "give me £10,000 so I might actually have time to study" bout of arse-kissery, that's giving me a headache.

How do I put this into the AHRB's brand of Newspeak? Reconfigure the below to Academese and I'll buy you a pint:

So, there was this guy called Henry Green. He wrote his first novel very young and then crammed a whole career into (give or take) twenty-five years. At times (especially during the war) he was very prolific, but on other occasions it took him ten years to produce anything. In the 1950s, he gave up, apparently convinced that he couldn't do anything else with the genre.

Anyway, there's an acute concern with place in Green's work. You first notice it because of the amount of times people walk through doors, are in the wrong place, get caught, shut doors and so on. Initially, the boundaries are the main indicators of space rather than what a demarcation contains. Then you start to pick up on something which I can't call much more than a "nuance", or a "strangeness". I happened to read Bachelard (who is, apparently, too en vogue to mention in an AHRB application) alongside Elizabeth Bowen, causing me to think about the effect of the perception of place and on the way we respond to the spaces literature (or art, or even music) offers us. Green is frequently surreal in his presentation of space (in much the same way as Robbe-Grillet was later, often employing a process of super-banalization or chosisme so maybe I really mean absurdist but who knows) but his general artistic non-alignment makes this a risky claim to be making. I've read shitloads and started writing a chapter but, given that I'm talking about ineffability, you haven't got a peg to hang all of that money onto. Go on, please, I'm desperate.

As I said, translations win prizes.

All I really wanted to do today was sit around at home and read idly. I intended to do a couple of chapters of Ackroyd's book on William Blake and maybe some other stuff, but now have a head too full of the AHRB. Back to Norwich tomorrow, a million and one things to be getting on with, and a gig winging it's way towards us.

Later,

Jx

Not always so grumpy

Hey, the adolescent nit-picking below isn't my conventional mode of being (I hope). Here's one or two treats to make up for it. (Adopts Jools Holland's start-of-the-show-look-the-bravery-are-playing-voice)

We have an interview with Ian Sinclair, in which the doyen of the going-for-a-walk scene talks of his desire to "bury" psychogeography (and differentiates, helpfully, between surrealist and situationist attitudes towards the derive).

Over here, mildly pleasing photographs of candy cigarette packets from "abroad": that's one for the kitsch folk.

Now, for all the footy pervs, a load of non-league porn. There's a reason behind my research into this, honestly, I'm not just a spod. One suspects that the owner of this site may have Chad-esque tendencies, though...

And, combining elements of the above, some quasi-situationist writing about football.

Next time, I'm going to put the link to the CIA World Factbook 2005 up. What a day that'll be.

Jx

real people

So, today I've been mostly sitting around my mum and stepdad's house watching it rain outside and trying to figure out how most people spend their time. I'm aware that this could become a reasonably self-pitying splurge (to which the response should be "most people work, you pig-fucking student") and is at best an example of writerly neurosis.

So it starts last night. I met my friends Will and Lottie in a dive in Richmond in time for the second half of the England-Northern Ireland match, late because I'd already been wasting my life watching Darlington put in an utterly inept performance at the damp WMS. It soon emerges that we shall be out for the duration, and by the time Sinj meets us around half seven I'm pretty steaming.

Standing at the bar with Andy Lamming, waiting for him to get the drinks in, some skinhead kid turns to me and mutters something incomprehensible. I respond in kind and then realise that he's planned it all, he wants a scrap and he's picked me. I'd been full of foreboding at Middleham the day before and I think it was only last week that I said to someone or other that no-one's given me any gyp for ages, years and years. "You tekkin' the fuckin' piss?" he says, a couple of times. "No mate," I respond, "I wasn't". With no answer, he turns away, distracted by one of his mates. Lamming and Sim decide that we're staying in the pub anyway and I agree- what's to be gained by being forced our of a pub. Like all stupid young men, I don't like to lose face.

So why am I so fucking bothered (if the answer's not at the end of the passage immediately above)? I didn't get a kicking. I just felt fucking stupid, like I'd let myself down by being vaguely intimidated. And as usual, I spent the rest of the evening getting drunker and drunker and imagining stacking his face in with an ashtray or kicking him down the steps at the top of Frenchgate. Then I hooked up with my brother and we went on up to his mate's house in the Garden Village to drink even more. I woke up under a shelf, disorientated and nauseaous.

Sorry about the venting above. I think that when I come home a general malaise develops borne of my inability to get anywhere, knowing that only five or six miles away there's a few thousand square miles of England's greatest countryside to walk over, climb in, photograph or desecrate, but the buses never show and twenty-four year olds can't be begging lifts all the time. That feeling of unreality sets in, a space-and-time claustrophobia when you develop the impression that you won't get everything done in your life you want to, so you won't bother trying.

Ask yourself, how much time have you wasted in your life? I'm always fucking on at people not to waste what they've got and to grab everything that comes, but I've frittered the hours away watching shite TV, staying sober, doing nowt. Some people- film directors, politicians- just can't have let time slip like that. You know what I mean.

I've just chanced upon some early Auden which resonated for a moment and, breaking my usual rules of blog-composition, I'll quote (from "Thomas Epilogises", , 1926)

Lights!
The train shies, throws its rider. There's an end
Of our pathetic search for difference.
We are embraced by lichenous desires,
Change Wanderlust to Weltschmerz in the Under-
Ground.
The poodle has returned to her old vomit,
We to our cottages like crouched Ophelias

To repeat myself, know what I mean? Believe it or not, the Teknikov song "Lloyds of London" is about much the same sense of early-twenties inertia. The Teutonophilia evident in the lines above cheered me up a little, as I've been contemplating Germany again today. Real people go places, I think.

So once more, that old call-to-arms that marks the beginning of summer: Do everything properly, love every minute, try something new, one hundred percent. One day, I might try and take my own advice.

Jx

At Home

Up in Yorkshire at the moment, reminding myself what contours are and behaving like a child. Went to help my mum out today, taking photographs of an open day at the stables she does a little marketing work for. My sister's digital camera ran out of battery after all of thirty minutes, rendering me impotent as an assistant as I'd promised myself I'd use the point-and-click to take some Yorkshiregraphs.

I walked out to the hill over the little town with the stables and took about fifteen pictures, trying to cram as much of the suitably moody-looking sky into them as I could. I sat on a bench and thought about Macbeth, and how I'd quite like to use Macbeth as a title for everything I ever do. It sums a lot up.

Note to Taz: I've varied the testosterone level, as required. I've read a book on Lee Miller, the surrealist photographer (woman) this week and am around halfway through The Last September by "posh Irish bird" (copyright K. Whitney) Elizabeth Bowen. Also reading the collected poems of David Gascoyne and Mad Travelers: Reflections of Transient Mental Illnesses by Ian Hacking, which I thoroughly recommend. It even manages to be funny.

So home, home, home. It's a state of mind. It's got me listening to Cream, Black Sabbath and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I'm eating my fingers. I've spent today surrounded by extras from Emmerdale, tweedy old fellas with tobacco-stained moustaches and blonde ladies with big thighs. There was a pro-hunting protest, young Tories milling around looking like they were just waiting for a Guardian reader to show up for them to beat to death with bugles, then feed to their dogs. I sneaked by. Some hefty old boys in that mob, and I was marking myself out anyway by wearing a vee-neck with nothing underneath....a queer lefty poser. I avoided meeting student-hilarity celeb Richard Whiteley, thankfully, and walked around with my sister putting the world to rights.

I am knackered

Jx

funny because it's true

From the Mogwai Q+A:

Q:
if the world was to suddenly be visited by aliens, what music do u think would be best for them to hear first?
A:
The Bravery. It would then become apparent to the aliens just how shite this planet is. They would then kill all the humans and leave the animals to get on with things down here. Barry

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Jx

where we're at

Flowers in the verges and students spring-breaking on the concrete, plastic cups spilling in the Roald Dahl-for-young-adults lager waterfall that the architects of the UEA "piazza" so thoughtfully provided us. Easter has always been a time that I run off home for a week or so, abuse Sinj's lift priviledges and get dewey-eyed about small animals running around fields of the dales. So I've leapt at the chance to do a good deed by going to take photographs of horses this time next week (do camera flashes make horses bolt?)

I also tend to associate this time of year with the South West Coastal Path trip, which has passed into lore amongst those concerned. It was a watershed (well, there was a lot of water involved), involving as it did my unintentionally hilarious Jesus impression where I walked along the sand, shoeless, for a few miles having a rapid sequence of epiphanies which ran something like...

"I'm never going to get drunk again...I'll be nice to everyone from now on...keep on smiling, positive mental attitude...never going to get drunk again...be nice to girls..."

I was so pleased with my resolutions that I went to a pub all decked out in Union Jacks and drank five or six pints of ale. I'd like to finish it one day- we dropped out with four hundred miles to go, under the walls of King Arthur. Fuck, it rained that fortnight, all varieties- we kept getting stuck in estuary mud and slipping down hills. It was blazing sunlight for the first three days, causing dehydration and sunburn (and midday drinking) but it was snowing by the end of the trip.

Anyway, all of this is part of an experiment into nostalgia. All reading suggestions welcomed as ever.

STEREO:

Tortoise- Standards
Scott Walker- Sings Jacques Brel

BOOKSHELF

Carl Sandburg- Chicago Poems
CIA World Factbook 2000
Peter Ackroyd- Albion

Jx

reading list

I'm waiting for the reading lists at SCHEMES but I'd better share today's find....

Sandburg

Nostalgia, of course, is much like masturbation (cheers, Twainy) but I'm not sure where the line is between it and melancholia. Sandburg is completely American, in a kind of Bruce Springsteen way (he gets the joke).

What else have I been reading? Henri Lefebvre, Viteslaw Nezval, Louis MacNeice, Henry Green, a little WB Yeats, Tzvetan Todorov and a book by Lethaby on architecture and mysticism that made perfect sense after a whole bottle of £2.99 Corbieres.

Got to decide what I'm applying to teach next year. English Surrealism looks a canny choice but I'd have to A) shoehorn Green in and B) read everything else on the reading list. And Vic's taking it...

best to go,
Jx

A Good Thing

I think the fact that I've written so few entries recently means that I've been spending less time on campus, which means (strangely enough) that I've been doing more work.

I've just written a poem for SCHEMES, which should be up there soon. I think that poetry is one of those things that you can't really self-publish- you're better off being masochistic and putting yourself at the mercy of someone else. Cf all those people who print "academic" essays on the internet, much like that one I slantily cited in my MA dissertation.

What was the line I thought of on the bus? You'll never write anything better than the stuff that comes into your head on the bus when you've been disarmed of pen. Well, I won't share it with you now having provided a beating-stick like the previous sentence.

What else do I think is interesting at the moment? I've been reading, in no particular order of preference...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (when is an arm not an arm?)
An introduction to Heidegger (I have an arm! Big deal!)
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (don't listen when people say you shouldn't think your mother's hot)
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (encyclopaedically wacky)
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (for light relief and because it was cheap)
Poems of Viteslaw Nezval (beautiful, taking a moment to be serious)

It is time to go to work now.

jx