Episode 1164: There's A First Time For Everything...

Had a good afternoon, earning £16 from a DR@W experiment. Rubbish evening though, since I failed to meet a review deadline for the first time. I've actually written a third of the review for Armour and have ideas for the rest of it, and normally I'd stay up until it was all done. Since Rum & Reviews Magazine publishes issues though, as opposed to Sabotage Reviews and The Cadaverine where work goes up on a rolling basis, it doesn't make sense for me to now divert any more time away from doing the Schiller reading for Friday's EN974 seminar, especially not since Craig's given me a one-week reprieve. Also gives me a chance to read Armour again, and maybe some other points will emerge from that for the review. I've got enough material to meet the word count as it is, but I feel like I'm still only skimming the surface of Kinsella's new collection. I've never been what you might call a fan of Kinsella's, but this was due more to lack of exposure than any actual antipathy for his poetics, which if Armour is anything to go by, I should actually quite enjoy because there is a definite formal streak running through it. Maybe it is time to pick up some of his other collections when I have some spare cash. Anyway, time to finish up this newest episode of Covert Affairs, and then get on with the Schiller reading!

Episode 1163: No, I Don't Want More Contact Hours

I'd considered attending the SU General Meeting in MS.02 this evening, but seeing as it's still carrying on nearly four hours after it began, I'm quite glad that I exercised my right to not care. The ban on Bacardi has been upheld, which seems a bit pointless anyway, since it's still sold in Costcutter on campus and Tesco off campus. Ethics wins the battle, but capitalism already won the war. Regarding the motion on the agenda about enhancing the quality of education though, I'm not entirely convinced that having a guaranteed minimum number of contact hours translates into enhancing education quality. I quite like having all that free time to read (and think about what I read). Ideally, anyway. Just because it doesn't always work out that way doesn't mean that it's somehow better to increase the number of hours I have in class. Having read Thomas Docherty's book, I'm more inclined to think the desire to have a minimum amount of contact hours as reflecting the same logic that sees a degree in terms of it's delivering value for money. If students here didn't have to pay tuition fees, do you think they really would be terribly bothered by the absence of a minimum number of contact hours? I doubt it. Or at least if they were, it would be for reasons other than wanting to get their money's worth, which I would probably regard as being fine. Not to say that brand of reasoning is completely absent at the moment, but to deny that capitalist logic has anything to do with it at all is being unrealistic.

Episode 1162: A Brace Of Ideas

Have just finished reading Thomas Docherty's book, which again, I highly recommend for anyone interested in the issues surrounding higher education. Now about to start on John Kinsella's Armour, which I need to read and review by Wednesday. A bit of a challenge, as it's a significantly longer volume of poetry than the ones I've reviewed in the past! On the bright side, spoke to Emma Mason today, and she thinks both the essay ideas that I've got sound like interesting things to explore, and yes, I was right that the one about form and disease could work for next term's module instead. The trick then, as always, is to get all the reading for the essay done. It does look like I probably need to read most of this anthology edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin called The Sound Of Poetry/The Poetry Of Sound, just because a good part of the effect of Eunoia comes from the soundscapes that Bök creates within the different sections of the univocalic poem that are nevertheless tied together by the recurrence of certain images and themes. Emma also pointed me to an article by Simon Jarvis called 'The Melodics of Long Poems', which definitely sounds intriguing.

Episode 1161: Getting Ahead Of Myself...

I'm having trouble deciding what I want to write about for my EN973 essay. I know it's definitely going to be related to questions of form (or apparent lack thereof, since I'd argue that even free verse, which is supposedly the absence of form, is in itself a kind of formal choice, if that makes sense), and I initially thought I'd got it all figured out. I was going to write about Thom Gunn and either Elizabeth Bishop or Jack Clemo, and it would be in relation to what has been thought of as 'the consolation of form', to borrow Frank Kermode's words, since I think it isn't hard to make a case that in the work of these poets, the formal shape of the poetry is very much a part of its effect. Intuitively though, I sense that I may be getting ahead of myself, since the particular angle I want to approach the poetry from, i.e. in relation to disease/disability and grief, could make for an essay question better suited to next term's EN954 Romantic Elegy. (Especially because then I could do Mark Doty or Paul Monette alongside Gunn instead, in relation to specifically AIDS and grief.) Then I was browsing through this book I'd borrowed by Marjorie Perloff, in which she does close readings of a whole series of poems, and there was one chapter where she brought up Christian Bök's Eunoia, and her reading of it really made sense for me of what I'd previously only been able to think of as an Oulipian exercise. So I got to thinking that maybe the broader question of constraints in writing poetry would be something interesting to look at. After all, form is a type of constraint when it comes to the writing of poetry; it's just one that can be handled well or misapplied. I guess what I really should be doing is talking all this over with Emma Mason, since she convenes both the modules that the essays are for anyway...

Episode 1160: For The University

For the past couple of days, I've been making a serious effort to get through one chapter of Thomas Docherty's For The University: Democracy And The Future Of The Institution each day. So far, so good. Plus I really like what he's saying in the book, which is incidentally available to read in its entirety here, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. My favourite quote so far is this one from Chapter 4, 'Leadership: Legitimation and Authority': 'Education, however, is not the mere realizing of potential; rather, it is the ongoing making of more and more potential, the never-ending desire, identified now with the activity of research, to seek out the good, the true and the beautiful.' Perplexingly, his article on the New College for the Humanities for The Independent was labelled 'Impenetrable hogwash!' and being filled with 'ethereal descriptives', neither of which are criticisms I agree with. A review of the book in the New Statesman similarly claims it exemplifies 'the bad habits of theory-dulled seminar-speak'. Personally speaking though, I've never found Thomas to be one of those academics who've retreated so far into jargon that they can't communicate to anyone not steeped in the same discourse, and if the writing seems obfuscatory, maybe it's symptomatic of an attitude towards education that says knowledge has to be broken down into modular units that can be easily digested (after having been paid for).

Episode 1159: Caught Up With How I Met Your Mother!

I like to think that I publish a fairly diverse selection of work in Eunoia Review, but I just turned down a submission that was way too experimental for me. I don't know if I can even say whether the poems were good or bad, that's how shut out from them I felt while reading. I guess what seemed weird was that the poems were grammatical, and yet I couldn't make sense of them. Almost as though blanks in a template had been filled in using a random word generator. Don't mean to be dismissive, but it was really alienating. Anyway, I'm now fully caught up with How I Met Your Mother, all six-and-a-half seasons of it. I feel like I've crossed some sort of invisible threshold where comedy fans are concerned. (Only way forward from here is to get into stuff like Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia or The Big Bang Theory.) I'm also impressed by how consistent the overall ratings for How I Met Your Mother have been. I know the Nielsen ratings system is ridiculously outmoded, but having a Season 7 episode with numbers that narrowly missed beating the current all-time series high in Season 1? That's incredible, as far as today's American television landscape is concerned.

Episode 1158: Menu Of Conversation

Lately, it seems like Threadless is having a sale every other week. Not that I'm complaining! A couple of tees I've wanted for quite a while have finally been discounted to $10 (I learnt my lesson from the last time and waited!), so I'm going to get them. Only have to spend $75 to get $6 shipping, so I figure, what the heck, I can treat myself. (Given the current exchange rate between USD and GBP, it's going to cost me around £50. This is including $6 worth of Street Team points that I'll be earning from the pictures I uploaded of me wearing my most recent purchases.) Otherwise, it's been a day of ups and downs. Woke up still with a stuffy nose, and was actually feeling quite ill just before I had to go to the DR@W experiment in the WBS building. Earned £10 from that though, so that was good. The talk by Theodore Zeldin after that, organised by the PPE Society, was also thought-provoking. At the dinner after the talk, I was paired with a complete stranger, a French Erasmus student, who (and I swear I'm not making this up) happens to be studying Mandarin at the Language Centre! So even without the Menu of Conversation given to us at the table, we'd have had plenty to talk about anyway. As we were leaving the Rootes Building, she praised my French accent, especially considering that I've never lived in France before. Looks like 11 years of studying the language have not been in vain!

Episode 1157: Ill, But On Track!

Met with Ross Forman today, and felt more reassured that I'm making an appropriate amount of progress where my dissertation is concerned. If you think of 'researcher' as being derived from 'reader' + 'searcher' (I know it isn't, but just go with me on this), I'm very good at searching for information that could potentially be relevant, but I'm terrible at actually getting around to reading any of it. Have managed to pick up an upper respiratory tract infection anyway, so I haven't been in the mood for any sort of academic reading all day. It's annoying because this is the mildest winter I've experienced in all my time at Warwick. By this time, I usually can't get by with just a hoodie anymore, yet I've only worn the Ted Baker coat once this term! I'm starting to think of what to do my EN973 essay on, and at the moment, I'm going with the lazy option of picking poets I'm already sort of familiar with. So Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn for now, as I'm interested in the formal aspects of their poetry. I was intrigued by Jack Clemo after this week's seminar, but most of his books in the Library are only for use in the Library and not for loaning, which means having to photocopy them, but that becomes a waste of money if I end up not working on Clemo for the essay. Frustrating! Maybe I'll request them anyway, just to have a look.

Episode 1156: Banterrific!

In the end, I went with carrying on writing within the Safehaven universe. So I've just finished a prologue to the two chapters I've already got, to begin fleshing out the story's setting and establishing the motivations of the protagonists. I think the picture that's emerging for me at this point is growing more layered. Instead of the Exodus being humanity fleeing from a catastrophe on Earth, I've decided to portray Earth as having developed into a utopia of sorts. Efficient arcologies have replaced urban sprawl, and as a species we've grown to a level of cooperation that would have been inconceivable at the present time. However, efficiency can be stultifying, and the people who leave on the Exodus are making a conscious choice to escape this way of life. (Shades of Tony Ballantyne's Watcher trilogy here!) While life on Safehaven doesn't exactly prove peachy for most of the colonists, it's still an independent civilisation that's been established. The arrival of the Last Ark from Earth is thus seen as a threat, since it carries the Founding Families who were the literal and figurative architects of the Exodus. It's not like they're the bad guys though, and it's all these layers of ambiguity that I want to play with in my story.

On a separate note, James Gapinski at The Conium Review has kindly reviewed Eunoia Review here. (He's also a contributor to the journal, and you can read his stuff here.) I didn't know he was going to do this, so it came as a pleasant surprise. Always nice to know there are people out there supporting what you're doing! He also praises the daily posting concept, which meant a lot to me because I think it's what sets Eunoia Review apart from a lot of other online journals, in terms of the sheer amount of work it allows me to showcase as an editor. (That and my half-day average response time!) What I really want is a way for people to click a button on the site that just pulls up a random post for them. I'm sure I could find a way to do that, right? Anyway, in case you're wondering about the title, it's what I suggested Laura name her blog. I thought it was an excellent pun, and it sparked off a brilliant comments thread on Facebook that pretty much made my day (and Sophie's, when I told her to check it out). Banterrific, to employ a neologism. I literally had to stop from bursting out laughing every time a new comment was made on the thread, which was kind of awkward because I was walking to my seminar in the cold, and then I was actually in the seminar for the next three hours.

Episode 1155: What Story Do I Write Now?

Came home from my seminar to find a notice about painting work in my room stuck to my door. It's baffling, since I can only identify one patch of wall that might need repainting, and it definitely isn't major enough to require its being done during the term. Apart from that, the paint job everywhere else looks pristine! The painting's supposed to happen this week, but the notice doesn't say which day or what time, or whether I need to clear stuff from certain parts of the room. If Warwick Accommodation thinks I'm just going to guess at their intentions and pack up everything, they've got another thing coming. It'll be far more fun to complain if they get paint on any of my stuff, right? I've got some free time tonight, but I can't decide whether I'm going to write my workshop story or not. Or if it's even going to be a third chapter set in the same universe I've been working in so far. It feels like I need to fix what's already been written before I can move on to a third chapter, and that process may involve adding additional chapters before what's currently the first one anyway. On the other hand, with such a rich universe to work with, it feels like generating unnecessary work for myself, trying to come up with a new idea that I won't have the energy to follow up on.