my ideal novel

defensiveness; on failure; backdated

2010-06-02T01:21:00.000-07:00

I have been busy for the past few weeks preparing for my first year oral exam, which was on Thursday. The exam is the one that I think I may have mentioned to some of you, whereby I submit a list of texts broadly representative of British and American literary history and a panel of three (plus one observer) quiz me on it for twenty minutes each, so that the three time periods that they represent occupy an hour. I failed all three sections of this exam. When I got feedback from the examiners, (and all that follows is a melange of direct quotes) I was told that I came across as being very witty, charming, urbane, intelligent and glib. That I was all style and no substance - that in many cases they simply didn't believe that I had read the texts that we were talking about. Of course, because I am not stupid enough to believe that my examiners are stupid, I had read every text on my list. I got the DGS to admit that the impression that I gave to the committee was that I thought that I was a clever Oxford boy who could slide through this exam on his charm. That I was so charming that I had never really been pushed on anything before. Everything had simply fallen into my lap and I'd not had to really work for anything before. Frankly, said the DGS, they just wanted to see me sweat a little. But it is important that I understand that this isn't political, it really isn't, and everyone thinks I'm fabulous and golden and noone is out to get me, and it really isn't political, but they just want me to do it again. Discursive, bluffing, bullshitting, throwing questions back with modifications rather than just answering them: my style is parrying, apparently, and superficial - and evaluative rather than analytical. I seem to have been trained, they say, in a softer, more pastoral tradition.

On this last remark, which is, perhaps, the only substantive criticism that was levelled, I have been thinking a bit. And it occurs to me that I think that in general discussion, rather than in a context in which you actually have the text in front of you and are talking about what a sentence means and why, or what a particular piece of punctatuation is doing, I believe that a simple aesthetic judgment is almost always more defensible on the spot and therefore a more rigorous mode of discussing a text than to make some assertion about a text or body of texts without the ability to provide textual substantiation for that assertion. By which I mean: without recourse to textual empiricism for an evidential debate, I think that aestheticism coupled with a very flexible relativism and circumspect openness to other, differing aesthetic judgment, will always be the most valid, interesting, useful way of talking about a work.

So - I will be retaking the exam in the next month. I will knuckle under, suck it up, kiss the ring. I am not going to leave Stanford over this, and nor will it go on my record. But it is an instantiation of hierarchy that serves no end other than itself. No other student in my cohort failed this exam, and I hope that I do not flatter myself that I am not so distinctly the worst of my peer group that such a clear, nay, qualitative line can be drawn between my knowledge, manner, and intelligence and theirs. So I do, I confess, wonder: to what extent did I fail this exam because I have two degrees from Oxford? To say that I am unhappy, crushed and disappointed would be litotic. But there is nothing I can do about that. It might be a hoop to jump through, but if I don't jump through it I will not be able to jump through other, more meaningful hoops down the line, to whit passing my orals proper in two years, getting a PhD, or getting a job.

The irony of it all is that I was not trained in anything remotely resembling a softer, more pastoral tradition. I was trained in a way that, despite its flaws, attempted to imitate the Socratic tradition. And perhaps on top of that I simply ingested Blindness and Insight too deeply - took its epistemological lessons too very much to heart, and have attached too much importance to de Man's exhortion not to "confuse the rigour of the analytic procedure with the epistemelogical authority of the ensuing results." But soft it wasn't, and pastoral it wasn't. By which I mean, intellectually lazy it wasn't. And intellectually lazy I am not.

savage self-involvement; backdated

2010-06-02T01:16:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written anything here for a while of any real substance, for explanations of which see every other life-gets-in-the-way post on the internet. I’m spending this Christmas in St. Louis with XXX and her parents, which is truly wonderful. Her parents are kind, genial, funny people, but spending Christmas with XXX has been the best present I could have asked for. I don’t care if it sounds cheesy.

[...]

I suppose part of the reason that I don’t write much here is that I don’t do much of my emotional thinking in writing any more – I do it by talking with XXX . When I do sit down to write something that isn’t a tedious email, or a piece of work, I’m more likely to struggle with some half-formed idea of a lyric poem than I am to update this. It’s loathsomely pop-psychologistic to say that, then, writing poetry is my outlet, (outlet for what? Narcissism? Self-promotion? Dimly-glimpsed fantasies of art? Who knows.) but it’ll do.

I spent the previous fortnight in England, with a week at my father’s and a week at my mother’s. The best part was seeing my sister and a few dear and much-missed friends from university. The parents were both rather depressed in their different ways. I’m trying to learn not to take that personally, or to imagine that it is up to me to solve their problems for them. It is a hard lesson to learn.

Really, I feel oddly suspended between studenthood and ‘real-life.’ I was nominated for membership at my father’s club – which is full of unspeakable cunts, needless to say – and they waggishly put my occupation down as ‘dilettante.’ I work very hard, but it isn’t work with tangible outcomes, or work that fits into any particular sector. Really, I suppose am serving what used to be called an apprenticeship. I am weirdly hostile to suggestions that what I do isn’t hard work, or that I am a ‘perpetual student.’ I think that these are pretty usual insecurities and that I probably don’t need to worry about them.

I had a ridiculous encounter in a cafeteria last month and have been since wondering what poise is – because poise seems to me to be an affected self-sufficiency that you learn to internalise. Someone blew up at me and I didn’t blow up back, although I did feel sick for half an hour afterwards.

I’ve had a pretty materialistic year. I’ve bought boots, shoes, jumpers, t-shirts, and jeans. I crashed my car twice (the second time reasonably seriously) but I’m ok. I keep forgetting to go to an osteopath. I steal a lot of music from the internet and keep in touch with my friends only sporadically. After September-October-November, I started a higher dosage of anti-depressants, and they continue to help me live like a functional human being. I drink an awful lot of coffee. XXX and I cook for each other most nights and watch a film, or the X-Files, or Buffy. We usually work until one or two in the morning. We take a lot of care of each other. I think we are hollowing out a space for ourselves. It takes a long time, and it feels like we have to push against a lot of stuff to make it happen, and I like it.

Things that are great when frozen - (II)

2010-06-02T01:00:00.000-07:00

Bananas!

2010-05-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

Be clear, I tell my students. Clarify. Rephrase this to make it active. The main verb is buried here - bring it out. There no main verb in this sentence. Take this out of the conditional. If this is what you mean, says so - don't couch it. But really, what good will it do them? I am just teaching them to condemn themselves faster and faster

2010-05-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

I have limitations. That makes me sad.

2010-05-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

So tired in the car today that I kept swerving onto line dividers coming up the 280. Efforts to find abrasive music on iPod only exacerbated matters.

Justice - (Cross)

2010-05-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

I was listening to this album today and yesterday. I can only really describe it as French electro-house. The first two tracks alone are extraordinary - packed with references to Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73, Grizzly Bear harmonies, Daft Punk and Air homages especially prominent, also less clear stuff like Cassius (!) and old-school funk bass lines straight from Parliament and James Brown. Treatment of samples from Orbital, fascination with aural properties from Chemical Brothers. Huge beats and tunes from Basement Jaxx. More than anyone I've heard for a long time they are fascinated by the real quality of a sound - when you do this to a Moog and let it sit and dwell, what is the nature of the resulting noise - fluctuations are drawn out and made to carry harmonic weight. It's very French, very European LCD Soundsystem. Fuck you, they say - this is how we do it here. White noise and glitches thrown in from Squarepusher and unplaceable samples from DJ Shadow on out.

Something that they do that really grabs me is that they insert blocks of silence - silence made to sound like glitches. Huge gouges, effectively, cut into the texture of the thing (and texture is more than in most things the way to listen to Justice). It reminds me of Dr. John taking 5 whole beats out of a solo just to let his phrase sit for a bit.

Then I wondered - could you make music in which silence was the beat - say white noise punctuated by silences? But the problem is that you can't differentiate silences. They are not variable in pitch - silences are the absence of pitch, the absence of anything. They are a null. So you couldn't, because anything more than marking time would be confusing and undifferentiated - and of course a beat is always in tension with the time that it is marking.

Spring

2010-05-02T01:30:00.001-07:00

Whenever I buy flowers I vacillate between horror at their expense and astonishment at how beautiful they are.

Now that they have been in the flat for a few hours I have stopped wavering and settled down at wonder - and thinking about carnations & Oxford; irises and my great-aunt, whose name was Iris and who gave my mother a pair of iris-coloured marmalade jars (one of which now broken); of roses and Valentines past; of freesias wrapped in shredded paper, sent by my sister and still in their buds - too delicate to show to anyone, I hid them away until they bloomed, like a conservative parent, only, successful; heather and summers in Scotland, and hybrid flowers, and my grandmother, who bred hybrid rhododendrons and how is now wasting away, forgetting, deep in Switzerland.

I wonder how long they will last.

Baime

2010-04-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

Alas, this is beautifully put together, but it just isn't for me. Some things that are well-done that I wouldn't have thought I would like - like Britney Spears' Toxic - surprise me. Sadly, Baime falls into the category of things that I can and do admire without liking them. (Viz. Glinka, American Football, Tarkovsky, etc.)

The caraway and basil dominate here, along with the lavender and sandalwood, making it smell like a very expensive and gorgeously worked-out cheap fougere. Mind you, the astringency of the caraway is very classy. But still, overall, a very classy snooze.

(Actually, I do like Tarkovsky - I couldn't think of a third thing that I admire without liking. The logistical prowess of Nazi Germany seemed inappropriate for a perfume review in the public domain.)

Things that are great when frozen

2010-04-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

Turkish delight!

Patriarchy / Marxism

2010-04-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

When my mother started reading Foucault she began trumpeting 'There is nothing outside of discourse!' and this troubled me very much for some months because I didn't like the idea that everything was always already subsumed into a construction of power, and I eventually hit on the idea that to engage in discourse was itself a choice of modality - I thought for a while that this was a way out of the bind that Foucault set up. I was going to say that this might point a way out of these binaries - simply to refuse to engage in binary choosing - but now that I sit down to write this I'm not so sure.

Anyway, I had to look up Danger, Will Robinson, and - ouch. But I don't agree that the patriarchy invites you to try to love your way out of it - or at least that this is the patriarchy's only trick. I think that the patriarchy aims to be invisible, or, better, a joke: certainly that is the treatment that other men give it to me. (Also, I don't think that loving your way out of the patriarchy would work - you have to act against it and still know that it'll probably always contain you.) (I worry about the patriarchy a lot (like the Johnny Cash song, The Beast in Me.)) But what I meant to say here is that setting up these binaries (patriarchal-not patriarchal) is always a doomed endeavour because, as you say, it is systemic - the context in which you make those choices is a patriarchal one. So there is no set of choices or actions that will produce a consistent "not-patriarchal" life because in between all those choices and actions are all the things that you overlook to chose - and those gaps are where you (I) are (am) patriarchal. So it's asymptotic, I guess I am saying. Is this why it breaks you? Explain to me the gap between this and despair.

So should I resign myself to a wrong life, enmeshed in systemic wrongs, nonetheless aiming to be as unwrong as I can? This is such a hopeless prospect that I don't think it is glib to be uninterested by the possible - the possible offers such a small view. And sure - the main danger is a good way to look at this. ~~But my main dangers are all (I think, at least) so personal - I'm so afraid of things about me - that I don't know how determining my~~ But I still think that the main dangers are systemic - ecological damage, global mechanisms of economic and social injustice - that addressing myself to them would mean making sacrifices in uprooting my life that I am too self-absorbed to want to make. (This is my question from before, really - doesn't admitting these problems mean admitting their priority?)

And always this feeling as when talking to the religious - mostly clergy, really, of one stripe or another - of empathy and also despair born of my inertia. Can you forgive my incalcitrance? - I am saying that yes, you are probably right, but I don't have the courage to be that right.

Networking

2010-04-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

Dear XXX,
I realise that I'd already agreed to meet XXX this thursday morning for a long RA meeting (splicing together videos of british comedy for her to give as a lecture on a XXX Alums British Isles cruise... enough said). Would next thursday, or any day that week except fri, be any possible? Sorry for this mix-up - I overlooked my meeting withXXX .

XXX had some fascinating things to say about potential hires. I don't know where he gets his information from. How are you doing?

Best
XXX

stanford email

2008-04-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to write a mass email about something as important as this, but I thought that it would be dishonest of me to pretend that you were all getting an individual email, and you would all see through it pretty quickly anyway. (Although in saying that it is 'important' I effortlessly elide importance to me with importance to you, which might not be valid...) So there follows a rather disorganised set of impressions about my visit to Stanford last weekend.

With much love to all of you,
xxx

On Thursday and Friday I went to visit Stanford. From the visit, I liked what I saw a lot. The campus is very big indeed, and built in a sort of faux-antique hispanic style. The library is enormous and has around 8 million holdings, including a lot of early printed books in the eighteenth-century. On Thursday we were greeted with breakfast and talks from the Director if Grad Admissions, who congratulated us on making the 4% admission rate, and the Director of Grad Studies and the head of the department, both of whom evangelised about the programme. We were encouraged to mingle with other admitted candidates, many of whom are, or were still making decisions, largely between and Stanford and one of NYU, Columbia, Virginia and Yale. The other candidates are between 22 and 36, though mostly around 25/6, so I'm at the younger end of students. They are specialising across literary history, but clustered mainly in Medieval, C18th, and modern literatures. It reflects the strength of C18th lit at Stanford that though it is a more marginal area than most, 4 of the admitted students had chosen it as their focus.

We were taken to lunch at the faculty club, with current grad students and faculty members. I then had office hours meetings with professors in my area (Professor Blakey Vermeule, C18th Lit, Prof Ursula Heise, Theory and Urban Lit). There was then a class on Romantic poetics with other grad students, who were really impressive. We were taken out for dinner in the evening by the grad students at the faculty's expense. They seem genuinely happy with the programme - extremely well-funded, intellectually stimulated and fulfilled people who were content with the choice that they'd made. No-one pretended, of course, that the workload was anything other than very strenuous, but they did say that Stanford did absolutely everything in its power to make sure that nothing got in the way of students doing their work.

The next day we had breakfast and another class, this one on the history and theory of the novel with Professor Franco Moretti, who is one of stanford's biggest names and a truly inspirational theory. I haven't even really studied the novel and it found it very exciting; I'd love to take classes with him. Then there were more office hours, in which I met with two more professors in C18th Lit, Prof John Bender and Prof Terry Castle, both of whom had a lot of upbeat things to say about Stanford (as you would expect) and who were very positive about my admission. After lunch there was a tour of the library for a few hours and then tours of the enormous campus. After that we were driven into San Francisco by the grad students, which was a 35-40 minute drive, and taken out for dinner (so much eating!) at a Tapas restaurant. she came along and got to meet my fellow prospectives. At about 10.30 or so I was absolutely exhausted and we went home.

All of this is just to say that I really enjoyed my visit there, and found the graduate students at Stanford to be very, very smart and just as friendly. They have said, also, that they will look into seeing whether they can reimburse me for any of my air fares - so we'll see about that. The atmosphere there was so un-English-ly content as to be almost jarring; the faculty, staff and students all seem uncomplicatedly pleased to be in their huge red sandstone buildings, surrounded by their Rodin sculpture garden. The university's wealth is sort of staggering - I think that their endowment is in the region of $20bn. Which is, presumably, why they can afford to pay their english grad students so well.

I did ask some grad students, once the shine has come off your experience at Stanford, maybe after a few years, and the inevitable jading and cynicism has begun to set in as it does at any institution, what criticisms are typically levelled, and what complaints made? The response was that the dissatisfactions that people feel owe more to the actual process of writing a doctorate ("It's hard! And can be lonely!") rather than inhering in the institution itself, which, more than anything else, made me look forward to started classes there in September.

(Oh, and XXX, I met that girl that you didn't like at the NYU w/e. Stanford has just lost Seth Lerer, so it is more likely that she'll be in your cohort than mine. Ha!)

xxxx

my ideal novel

2008-04-09T17:11:00.001-07:00

For some reasons that won't go away, and some that will, this short game has come to an end.

As a young boy, I was so obsessively confessional that the first time I successfully kept a thought to myself I went and told my mother.

"[fragment ends]"

on prepreprofessionalisation

2008-03-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is long and disorganised and the things I want to say don’t really follow in any especially cogent way.

I don't really know how to contribute to this in a sensitive way, because I feel like I still don't really have any idea of what works and what doesn't. My status as an international student is complicated and so engaging in comparing metrics etc is, I think at least in my case, a largely futile exercise. The principle things I did differently this time around were to network with professors as much as I could and to work on my sample. I tailored my sample quite closely to my schools and very closely to myself. I've said all this before elsewhere.

A quick note on publications: a friend of mine who has a publication forthcoming in Tulsa Women's Studies (so ... kind of a big deal) and conference papers accepted at two major international conferences, with an excellent set of undergraduate and graduate transcripts (in fact, some of the best graduate results achieved at Oxford since the inception of the course) and good GREs still only got into one graduate school. She tailored her apps, and basically did everything that you should do, and still was rejected almost everywhere.

I guess my morals from this are that:

a) despite what some posters on here have been saying, luck *is* an element: yes, you will deserve the place that you get, certainly, but so also will someone else whose place you have taken. You were lucky; they were unlucky;

b) Having a publication in one of the most prestigious journals in her field still didn't get her into some of the schools she wanted the most.

Because really, this whole 'publishable' thing is slightly wrong-ended: it's one thing to demonstrate your commitment to the professional aspect of graduate school, and goodness knows that that is something that we're all alert to, but in truth we're going to graduate school so that we can publish in the future, not the other way around. Some faculty I spoke to explicitly said that they preferred less professionalised applicants, for which I guess there could be all sorts of good and bad reasons, amongst which would be, I'd expect, that a graduate programme is invested in your formation as a scholar, and that if you come already formed they'll say 'Ok well that's great, but what do you want from us?'. All the websites that we've read, in which programmes say just what it is that they are looking for in an applicant, don't say that they want evidence of high-octane scholarship right off the bat. They want *potential*. Acceptance letters seem to say 'in recognition of your potential'.

What I'm getting at here is that you need to defer to programmes, I think, to say 'Here I am and I'm yours to mould'. Even coming from an MA I don't think it's reasonable to expect something publishable. 'Publishable' is, by the way, a really unfair stick for us applicants to beat ourselves with: how can we have peer review from people who aren't even our peers? An MA is a one or two year course and I don't see how it's reasonable to expect a student to achieve in that period that scholarly development that is in fact that goal of the Ph.D. programme itself; the 'ability to participate in the profession'.

I don't have anything substantive to offer in place of this, and in that sense I'm guilty of offering only destructive criticism. I think that the anxieties that we have about showing ad comms our work are really manifestations of anxieties that riddle literary academia in general: what is work, and when are we doing it? (This is a line of thought I'm cribbing from an amazing article I read, called Fasting at the Feast of Literature, by Brenda Marchovsky, and if I had an athens account I'd quote it here.) Is work comprised to some extent in our ability to marginalise and co-opt an area of study? I mean: does being 'professional' inhere in producing work that amateurs or lay people by definition wouldn't read or write themselves? (Am I just trying to demonstrate professional competency here? Probably, yes.)

So from this it follows that bandying around the criteria that a sample be 'publishable' that the graduate application is necessarily not an enjoyable process. It is a process that requires, in fact, that we subject ourselves to a set of entailments. We can't submit samples that say 'I love this' or 'I need this' or 'This piece of literature is integral to my sense of self' because those sentiments are deemed to be amateur. And yet those sentiments or ones like them are precisely what make have made us go through this whole thing: it's an irritating and useless paradox that to demonstrate readiness for a process we are required to show that we've already undergone it, that we've already viably transformed our undergraduate, passionate essays into invested but professional work.

Ok I'm done pontificating. I just think that the way that even this thread is a long and subtle investigation into how better to tailor an application or set of applications is fairly indicative of the way that this profession worries over intellectual value and self-worth: when is our work acceptable, and to whom? How can we produce work that will make us both professionally successful and personally satisfied? I don’t think we’re even sure that these two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Hence the anxiety, and the feeling rubbish, and the double vulnerability that the process engenders. Ok and now I really am done. Thanks for bearing with this. Thoughts?

Conversation #5

2008-03-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

I was pleased to see on my lunch break that the particular sandwich I wanted wasn't sold out. An artisanal baguette. Even baking's a cottage industry now. And co-opted. I picked up a blood orange juice and a chocolate brownie and went to pay. Vito was behind the counter.
"Vito. How's it going?"
"How's it going."
"You're well."
"Good, good." (absently, scanning my lunch in.)
"Did you get that feedback yet?"
"..."
"They said they'd send it you. On the website. They'd email you what I told them."
"They said."
"They said they'd let you know what I said about you. I told them how great you are, there's Vito, he's fantastic, they said they'd tell you."
"Oh, they, it's funny, sometimes they let us know, when someone leaves something good, someone says something good, they tell us."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
"Well, I hope they let you know."
"That's 6.48. You want a coffee?"
".... Yeah, a latte."
"Latte!"
"Thank you."
"Thank you. A latte."
"Thanks."

And out I went.

snippet #10

2008-03-04T04:57:00.000-08:00

The more invested in something I am, the more retrospectively ashamed of it I will be.

conversation #4

2008-03-04T04:49:00.000-08:00

XXX: morning
me: morning
XXX: (um, right?)
me: yup
how's XXX?
XXX: yea
XXX is pretty good
felt much better today
me: I'm glad
XXX: and there were no surprise visits from my somewhat bosses
me: phew
that's always a plus
XXX: also the magical flying pirate ship i'm working on in the modeling tutorial
me: !!!
XXX: is starting to look more like a pirate ship
and less like a bad modern art sculpture
me: hahaha
oh, dude
mad modern art is the best
was it all post-cubist?
XXX: heh
oh very
me: awesome
XXX: all kinds of geometric shapes popping out where they aren't wanted
me: hehe
if you were having an especially picasso evening there'd be the odd stray horse-head
XXX: mm
yes
me: which would be wholly undesirable
XXX: rather
though this program does have an amusing feature
whereby, if i wished, i could have random teapots
all over the ship
perhaps the ship is crewed by teapots
and sails on their steam
ha ha ha
me: (I just got an email that begins:

Those gloaming hours again in which I wonder what, given its virulence and ubiquity,the plague was doing around 1400 when it could have been cutting shorter John Lydgate's infinite flow.)
Wow -- is there a teapot button?
XXX: hah wow
me: that's amazing!
XXX: yes
quite literally
a teapot button
me: I
Love
Whimsy
XXX: or even a teapot paint brush, actually
and also that is a fantastic start to an email
wow
hah
me: haha - he is reading lydgate
and not liking him much
as you can probably guess
XXX: i imagined not
heh
me: How come your status is breaking?
XXX: oh
on break
break-ing
sorry
better?
heh
me: got you
sorry I just got paid
XXX: or wait did they do those commercials in the uk?
me: and was taking a moment to be happy
yup
XXX: ooooooh
YEA for getting paid!!
me: man I love it
money is great
oh! have you read quicksilver?
XXX: nope
that's neal stephenson, right?
me: yeah
XXX: i've just started the, um, cryptonomicron
it's my first of his stuff
me: or did I already tell you about it?
ah
XXX: nope
go right ahead!
me: cryptonomicon is amazing
XXX: greatly enjoying it so far
though i wish i had bought an edition with bigger pages and font
me: quicksilver is the prequel to Cypto. It take place between 1660 and 1715
XXX: but that is neither here nor there
ooh hmm
me: or rather the trilogy of books does
XXX: (nods)
24 me: um... it's a cast, operatic, brainy, sexy, swashbuckling, incredibly researched monster ofa piece of work
*vast
XXX: wow
that sounds, um, incredibly cool
me: It includes lots of liebniz and newton
and pirates
XXX: !
so cool!!
me: and about 5 seperate heists
and Louis XIV
XXX: ...hah though i admit i had some unkind thoughts about mr. isaac newton when i started calculus
similar to your friend's in that email
whoa
....i must read this book
me: monarchs coercively having sex with other monarchs' subjects
XXX: !
as proxy or by design?
or wait
don't want to know
me: haha, calculus, oh my
No, it's not graphically unplesant
XXX: oh oh not that
me: also... pepys, and the foundation of the royal society, and of MIT
XXX: was just interested in motivation
oh!
wait
mit?1
geeesh
this guy is rapidly becoming my idol
and i haven't even finished one of his books
me: haha
I will put quicksilver in the package.
XXX: yea!!!!! (does little happy dance)
me: woop woop
I will try to include short stories and maybe poetry too if there's room in the box
XXX: hah no poetry ;-) :-p
me: do you not like poetry?
XXX: though i, um, appreciate the thought
mm
me: you lose, dude
XXX: (bows deeply)
mah
other than (weirdly) a few authors/poems who stick with me
i am not a fan of poems
me: wow - that's a sentence I could never type
XXX: hah i know
me: mind you, that's cause poems are my thing
XXX: you like the dunciad :-p
heh yes
me: and how!
XXX: i have great respect for poems and people who like them
just not my thing
me: :-)
XXX: that's actually how i encountered claude rawson
me: fair enough
XXX: trying to dodge my poetry requirement
me: oh?
ha
XXX: i had to take something with poetry more modern than milton
me: oh noes!
XXX: and ended up winning an arguement to the effect that his seminar on satire counted
as it included pope and etc.
me: that seems reasonable
XXX: it was
...i'm glad they didn't check what i wrote my papers on ;-)
me: but .... but, what about all the great 20thC american poets?
XXX: .... (sigh)
me: Lowell? Frost?Bishop? Moore? Berryman? Ashberry? Roethke? Crane?
XXX: i like some frost
out of that list
me: (author's note: I am smiling)
XXX: i also like some atwood
hah hah i thought that might be the case
also i like eliott
for whatever sadistic reason
but i think this is because he writes long poems
me: yeah, whoops that was a fairly substantial oversight on my part
XXX: i need my narrative
(laughs)
and ironically enough
my first real literary paper (pre-college, but it was the first one i everwent to crit for) was on zukofsky
me: I know zukovsky not
XXX: mmm
likely better off
very modernist
me: ha
XXX: very "ooooh eliot makes cool allusions that are impossible to understand I must do this to but make it EVEN HARDER"
but i seized on the bits that i liked
like the idea of having an image that is tied to an idea
but is not a metaphor for the idea
my poem was about a grasshopper
me: Ok, this is interesting
XXX: zukovsky?
he is interesting
me: mhm
what you are saying is interesting
XXX: oh
hah
me: bozo, what else am I going to be talking about?
XXX: (laughs)
me: (except myself, of course to which I don't usually refer as 'this')
XXX: hah ha ha ha
well you could have gotten a bonus or something...
kidding
me: It's my first month on my new pay
for that is nice
XXX: yea!
but yeah
i've tried to explain my feelings about poems to people before
i can read them
but they don't really mean much to me
me: it ok if you need narrative
XXX: the way that stories do
me: it happens
it's sad
XXX: hah
me: but for some people
you know... that's all they have
XXX: (is laughing)
me: in seriousness, I get it
because I struggle with narratives
I'm like, you want to me to do what? Analyse it? What?
XXX: yes!
exactly!
me: but how!
it's so wishy-washy!
XXX: ha ha ha
you read it and are like "okay, that was nice. ....what? I have to write a whole paper on this?!"
i love how we are having the same conversation
me: see for me poetry is just the crunchiest, most economical, most beautiful words with none o the extraneous crap about people and stuff happening to other stuff and yadda yadda
XXX: or the same feelings at least
about the opposite things
me: yes!
XXX: mm and for me narratives allow you to meet real characters, people you can learn from and encounter like actual people, and provide a looking glass and a suggested pattern for what to do with your life
...i don't have the gift of being able to describe this well
you can carry ideas to their conclusions
without unneccessarily veiling them in allusions and cryptic language
gah
(gives up)
me: no, I think I see what you mean
I just think that there's more to life than narrative would have you believe
XXX: heh
me: take closure, for example
XXX: mm
me: and I'm sorry that I haven't finished your paper yet
the weekend got in the way
XXX: ha ha aww
's okay
i hear your thesis is quite brilliant
you have to send it to me sometime :-)
me: but what happens in closure is intensely interesting and reveals the fundementally problematic nature of narrative, which is that we actually have no idea how one thing causes another, only that one thing follows another
follows, even
I think poetry is interested in those gaps
XXX: oh ho ho.... that's not a problem of narrative
that's the point!
me: where the narrative isn't
XXX: to figure out how these things happen!
me: not where the narrative isn't interested - i was unclear - I mean, where it is absent
ok, that's a fair point
XXX: exactly! that's where we come in! that's where the engagement happens!
and not just in comics
more generally
me: and whoever has been talking to you about my thesis is telling porkies!
XXX: hah
now now i thought XXX was a nice person
me: she's lovely
XXX: who certainly knows what she's talking about
me: and ((((hugs)))) on your letter
XXX: thanks (sigh)
i kinda knew it was coming
and it spurred me into action in a sense
i actually emailed u mich and harvard
me: I still kinda hoped it wasn't
oh, good on you
XXX: to be like "yo. what's going on?"
(um, in that, "thank you so much for taking the time to read my email during this busy season" kind of way)
me: yeah, of course
XXX: yeah
i dunno
i'm almost relieved in a sense
because it would have torn me to shreds to be accepted without funding
and have to deal with that
me: yes
XXX: i also agree with what many people are saying about how funding difference poisons the atmosphere of a program
because i saw that happen when i was interning
about a quarter of us were paid
the rest of us were not
me: mmmm that's interesting, but not at all the atmosphere in Berkeley
XXX: and it created a lot of bad feelings and divisions
hmm
that's good!
wow
me: XXX is sufficiently sensitive to have picked up on that, as an unfunded person
XXX: ...maybe everyone there is supernaturally nice
(nods)
oh i certainly imagine so
me: actually, because she's unfunded she gets TAships and RAships
XXX: ooooh
me: and the funded people are anxious
!
XXX: i thought that the funding, um, was entailed upon taships
me: (anxious that they're not good enough)
XXX: and that if you weren't funded then you had no shot at such things
interesting
me: some people (eg XXX) get fellowships
XXX: (nods)
me: that is what being funded is
everyone has recourse to some funding
just unfunded folks have to work for it and don't get much
XXX: ahh
huh
interesting
me: ... and have to pay tuition in the first year
XXX: ....don't really want to think about it at the moment
ah
yes
me: no no I know
sorry
XXX: there is always that
me: sorry
XXX: 's okay (sigh)
my friend lectured me today
about how i appear to be "grasping for a scattershot of programs"
me: what about?
ouch
XXX: (sigh) that is not true
this all makes sense in my head
me: ouch
XXX: i am still angry
as you can tell
me: of course it does!
well, yeah
XXX: partly because i think he's just bitter as he did an english masters
and hated it
and is still not done with said thesis
me: they clearly have no idea of you, your interests, or your applications
XXX: (firm nod)
me: ((((hugs))))
XXX: (hugs) thanks :-(
i have to remind myself
me: people are occasionally rubbisyh; there appears not to be any way around this
XXX: that things other people say are not always true
just because other people are saying them
they are
me: no! absolutely not
of course not
brb
XXX: ok
me: I have fucked up at work
will be back
sorry
XXX: oh no!
you go!
good luck!!!
(hugs)

2008-03-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

Dear XXX,

Thanks very much for your email. My number for your reference is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I've spent my day at work ignoring my deadline for this report on Danish vs. Canadian sub-regional financial autonomy, which is, somehow, even drier than it sounds, and reading up instead on the Ph.D. course at Stanford. I have a couple of questions which aren't urgent, and if you'd rather answer on the phone at yr convenience than having to type everything out that's fine.

The Ph.D. handbook on the English faculty website assumes that a five year course is normal; however there are six years of funding and looking online, estimated mean times to degree at Stanford seem to vary between seven and eight years. How does this time to degree change the structure of the program? Is the leeway for a longer dissertation-writing period? Or is the extra time factored in elsewhere?

Thank you very much also for your kind words about my sample - as you can see, whilst writing it I developed a strong interest in theories of urban space that I tried to suppress with limited success. Something I would be very interested in doing would be to pursue these interests and think about poetic formations//formulations of urban space more generally (or even for example look at Hart Crane vs GG Lorca in New York - there's probably some fantastic SF examples I'm overlooking). I know that this would take me wildly out of my specialised area in both literary and more generally disciplinary terms, and my heart isn't set on it, but I was wondering - could I get credit for taking a class in Stanford's Urban Studies department? And if not could I do it anyway? Also were I to commute my time in the first year by transferring credit from my Master's at Oxford, would my funding be docked? (The handbook implies this - I don't think I actually want to do it, but I wanted to ask in case.)

Similarly at Berkeley I know that they stipulate that you have a member of another department on your dissertation committee. Looking through the handbook, that doesn't seem to be a requirement; but is it a possibility? I was also hoping to live in Berkeley with my partner and commute - candidly, is this possible (with a car, presumably)?

I've been talking to XXX XXX, who asked me to pass on her best wishes to you, and she's just hugely positive about the program - would it be ok for me to contact current grad students with questions? Otherwise I have spent my day looking at the course lists and getting extremely excited about them, and hoping that United's strength and depth will show against the Gunners in the last ten games of the season.

with all best wishes,

on stanford

2008-03-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

Dear XXX (and XXX),

Thanks so much for your responses, which have been really helpful and which have made me feel pretty great about Stanford. My only anxiety (or at least one of them) is that I want to live in Berkeley with my gf and commute - looking at the reqs it seems that I'll be required to take two or three classes a term, sorry, semester, sorry, quarter, and so I'd only have to drive down a couple of days a week. It looks like I'd have borrowing rights at the Bancroft too - from your experience, do you think that a setup like this would be tenable. (And from this pov it's reassuring that I'd need a car anyway.)

As far as apps go, I'd be more than happy to share my statement and sample for what they're worth. As I was saying to Ryan earlier, when people have commented personally in emails to me they have commented on my sample, not my statement, for whatever that is or isn't worth. I confess that also, not being in the system in any sense as an international student whose recommenders knew no-one, I insidiated myself with the faculty at colleges I really liked. I'm in the incredibly lucky position of having supportive parents, and they helped me out with visiting colleges I liked and meeting up with professors I wanted to work with. I emailed them all two months in advance, give or take. I bound up copies of my Master's dissertation and distributed them liberally, which I just hated doing because self-promotion is for scummy right-wing politicians, but which I think was probably worthwhile. Certainly, I've had a better strike rate, if I can be crass about it, at schools where I met people then I have where I didn't. But I'd definitely be more than happy to offer any and all help you wanted, if I can offer it without sounding like an arse.

I'm also pumped by the awesome things you say about XXX XXX, who basically seems to be the Bomb in human form. One thing I was wondering, though – what are the possibilities for interdisciplinary study? I would love to take a couple classes in Urban Studies or in theories of space, for example – would I be able to do that, do you know? The interdisciplinarity is something that I actually preferred about Berkeley, where it is actually a requirement to have someone from another department on your doctoral committee. Also at Berk there are a couple of Stanford grad students who have cross-registered in Berk classes – is this something that's done much?

Thanks also for all the tips about where's good to go in Palo Alto – my question is also whether there are any shit-hot bookshops in PA?

I'm also at work, and also bored by it. My report on Danish sub-regional financial autonomy just isn't getting written…

xxx

on depression

2008-03-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

XXX finally joined FB, so I messaged him your post to get his highly qualified opinion (he's currently chief resident of psychiatry at XXX General Hospital).

Here goes:

Out of the erudite arguments of the post, I emphasise two things:
1) "we don't know what depression is..."

Depression is an overdetermined, multifactorial illness. There are probably a hundred different pathophysiologic conditions that are lumped together under the name depression. Kind of like how for what we call snow, the Eskimos have many more words. So it makes sense that any treatment for "depression" will treat only a limited percentage of users, and that the data for its efficacy will be controversial and mixed. I have seen antidepressants fail miserably. I've also seen them, and other related meds, literally wake people from the dead. I understand that human beings, and their biopsychosocial illnesses, defy any simple explanation or treatment.

2) Treating a psychological condition with medication is also one way of ascribing "meaning" to the condition. It medicalizes the condition; it pharmacologizes it. As you mentioned, it quantifies it on a scale of milligrams of drug. For many, having a medication validates that they are truly suffering--and that seems to be a response to a societal indifference to suffering we are all occasionally guilty of, whether you attribute it to the breakdown of the extended family, or breakdown of the tight-knit local community, or our generation of "narcissism combined with nihilism" as Al Gore put it. Depression is at its base a loss of hope--and meaning is the antidote to hopelessness. Sometimes a pill is both meaningful, and efficacious...

fajitas

2008-03-03T08:49:00.000-08:00

XXX: guac or no guac?
me: dude, I always make my own guac
how's the move?
XXX: blah
almost done...currently in irvine

(btw, i make my own guac too...with lime and cumin!)

me: are you visiting?

Oh!
Lime!
piss!
XXX: haha....
did i hit on a sensitive note? don't forget the cilantro and tomatoes :)
(yep...though currently writing/notwriting my paper)

me: of course not, honestlyno one forgets coriander and tomatoes

but I shouldn't distract
from your paper - I hope it goes really well and that you enjoy your visit!
XXX: coriander?
*grins *
did you say coriander?
me: yup
very definitely so
that's what it's called!
XXX: ....on one island
the rest of the world thinks differently
me: haha
I'm just opposing your linguistic hegemony by promoting marginality. betcha didn't realise that saying coriander was a political act

XXX wait a second
is the BRIT telling me that he's promoting marginality?
me: hahaha ouche
*touche
XXX: :)
me: and also ouch
XXX: ouche. combines both...perfect word for the lazy :)
me: should it be pronounced 'ooshe', as a neither-half-way house?
XXX: oh-shay!

the still sad music of humanity

2008-02-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

The whole point of crying is to stop before you corny it up.
(Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

The publication in 1994 of Listening to Prozac by Peter Kramer, in which he suggested anyone with too little "joy juice" might give themselves a dose of the "mood brightener" Prozac , lifted sales into the stratosphere. (Independent, 26/2/08)

Today, a major new study shows that Prozac, taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar types of drugs. For a profession normally diplomatic, the words today of one of study's authors are damning. "Given these results", Professor Kirsch of Hull University says, "there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients." (Guardian, 26/2/08)

The problem with depression is that people are generally disinclined to believe that it exists. Not that people disbelieve melancholy. Chaucer believed in it, and so did Durer. But they disbelieve, instead, that depression could be a condition worthy of medical attention. Never mind that an excess of melancholy was treated by emetics and blood-letting, before they got the circulatory system was figured out. The problem is that, having stopped treating it because the grounds for treatment were found to be faulty, which is fair enough, the treatment itself resurged because the condition was still endemic. Whether it's electroshock therapy, or some kind of analysis, or cognitive behavioural therapy, or anti-depressants, the past hundred years have (I guess) a pretty consistent theme of reworking and treating the Black Knight's complaint, assuaging his unhappiness as the dream is unable to do.

What I'm getting at is this: irrespective of whether anti-depressants work, or of whether blood-letting and leeches worked; we have been turning to doctors, asking for treatment for a pain we can't place but which saps the very life out of us for as long as there have been doctors.

Maybe anti-depressants don't 'work', however that functionality is calibrated. Maybe no anti-depressant treatment has truly 'worked' - for example, exercise is just a stimulated deferral - but perhaps it's more telling that we feel compelled to be treated. So what if the pills are placebos? To all intents and purposes I find it impossible to distinguish between a psychological medicine that works because it works, and one that works because you think it works. Any takers for that one?

I don't really mind if my antidepressants are placebos. And I am as hostile to Big Pharma as anyone else. It seems to me that antidepressants are just a heavily industrialised extension of an old solution to an old, old phenomenon: that we need institutions (and the very institution in particular that is the guardian and guarantor of our health) to recognise that we have interiority. Paradoxically, maybe we need an institutional recognition that there is something about consciousness that is indivisible?

In a way, that the latest treatment for depression is unmasked as a kind of quackery isn't a victory for the scientist who've produced this report, or the anti-Pharma activists, or for the people who say that depression is a self-constructing, self-perpetuating phenomenon. This is because we don't really know what depression is, beyond an ever more minute catalogue of its symptoms. We don't really know how to cure it, either. And we certainly don't know why it is that we keep taking cures that, though they work, demonstrably don't work. (Phrenology, anyone?)

it seems that there's a blind-leading-the-blind element here. Scientists devise fake treatments that work for a non-existent condition that is described by one analyst and philosopher as 'like death-in-life'. Other scientists then expose these treatments as bogus (although they too are wrong). New treatments are designed simply to meet demand. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We don't know what our antic disposition is (or why so many accounts of depression sound a lot like Hamlet's 'seeming' rather than 'being') but soon there'll be another cure for it. People will re-engineer SSRIs, perhaps, but there'll be something else, something new. It'll be wonderfully effective, too - it'll be the new wonder treatment for depression, until we figure out that in fact, it doesn't work at all. All this makes me think of that wonderful Simon Armitage poem, To his Lost Lover;

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

the another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

Why I would be a bad journalist

2008-02-26T09:07:00.000-08:00

"Hatred is a failure of the imagination."

"Why do the indignant tell so many lies?"

Tantalus

2008-02-26T05:25:00.001-08:00

Something left me unsatisfied about The Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Something in particular, I mean - and it was something about the baddies. The nature of their curse really wasn't clear to me. When Geoffrey Rush has his exposition speech about what's wrong with him, about how all the liquor in the world will not quench their thirst nor all the women slake their lust, I'm not convinced. Isn't he just describing the human condition? I mean - sure, the skeletal thing is disconcerting, but also a not-very-well-veiled metaphor for the shock of true corporeality that you get out of Nausea. Do they have souls? Do they not have souls? The know that they are unsatisfied - they long and desire and ache and perceive a lack even if they don't sensorally feel it. So - they have souls but they can't use them? What? What?

When Geoffrey Rush dies he says, in heartbreaking tones of a wasted actor in an enterprise he's too gifted for; 'I feel - cold.' He dies, he drops the apple - he's got his innocence back, he's miraculously undone his fall and yet what that comprises is actually a return to knowledge itself, a knowledge of the feeling of cold and the taste of apples and so on - the apple symbolology in the film is so confused that it gives more sentimental heat than light. But it's clearly a trope of return to humanity from damnation.

I just think that the problem that the film encounters is that to humanised the damned, as it does, thorough, it to un-damn them: the damned who yet smile and curse and plot and laugh and despair &c &c are not damned. Who is't can say he's at the worst / is not yet at the worst. Maybe it's this tromp l'oueil damnation makes even the most 'occult', 'exotic' etc parts of the film cartoonish - the damned characters are predestined for humanity since that is, really where they start anyway.

The reason that this makes me think of Tantalus is because they are essentially in his position - mythically unable to sate the longings that they are eternally subject to, despite the fact that whilst longing and perceived lack is quintessentially human, an eternity isn't.

nighttime habits.

2008-02-26T05:19:00.000-08:00

Apparently, I wake her up - but not myself - crying about one night in three. I have no idea what about. The last time I shared a room with my dad I woke him up - but not myself - saying over and again "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry".

tagging

2008-02-25T10:13:00.000-08:00

At work we've been given these little radio-magnetic tags that have each been assigned to us, and which we have been expressly forbidden to loan to oneanother. They're subtle, discreet little things; they're stylishly designed. We need to use them to access our offices on either floor - and this after a seperate tag lets us into the building.

This new tag is, we're told, for office security. After, the secret services don't come in here at all to meet with our head of security who isn't alleged by some to work for the CIA. I don't mind, in a way, the blatancy of this tracking - we're hired because we're clever, so I don't imagine that they even expect what's going on to have escaped us.

And yet - do you know how these tags are meant to be worn? Around our necks.

Ascot

2008-02-25T06:04:00.000-08:00

"Her Majesty’s Representative wishes to point out that only formal day dress with a hat or substantial fascinator will be acceptable.

Off the shoulder, halter neck, spaghetti straps and dresses with a strap of less than one inch and / or mini skirts are considered unsuitable. Midriffs must be covered and trouser suits must be full length and of matching material and colour.

Gentlemen are required to wear either black or grey morning dress, including a waistcoat, with a top hat"

Substantial fascinator? I like.

Every boast is a confession; every confession is a boast

2008-02-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

I loathe self-excoriating writing, that is unimpeachably and disingenuously down on itself; filled with onedownsmanship. It is such an adolescent posture that pre-empts rebuke and demands a kind of praise on its own terms.

pseudodoxia epidemica

2008-02-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

When I was ten years old I used to insert spelling mistakes into my communications with adults above whom I placed myself intellectually, so that they would think I was charming and would talk down to me so I could take advantage of me. These adults included my step-mother, who turns out to be fucking smart.

omelette

2008-02-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

Hey there - I was sent this email about recipes. It said just to type out the first recipe that came into my head, so that's what I'll do. Whenever I get home from work and I'm just exhausted, and can't bear to do anything special or time consuming, I make myself an omelette. It's hot and filling and yummy and makes you feel good.

So! put some butter (about a single piece of toast amount of butter) in a frying pan on a low heat and then break a couple of eggs in a bowl. I have three, but then I'm getting a bit fat. Your call. beat them together really really well until there's little bubbles on the surface. The butter will have melted now, so put that in as well, and beat is together again. put more butter in the pan - quite a bit more than before - and turn the heat up. put a little bit of salt and quite a bit of pepper in the eggs and mix it well.

When the pan starts to smoke a little bit, but before the butter goes brown, pour in the eggs. It should sizzle in a really pleasing way. After a moment or two you can turn the heat back down again.

At this point, you definitely want to add some stuff - if you have any sour cream or creme fraiche it's totally wonderful. Otherwise a really creamy cheese - even philadelphia - is perfect. With this you might want some chopped spring onions, and maybe some tiny little tomatoes chopped in half. Don't put too much in. The omelette should still be a little runny on the top when the sides are beginning to look done.

As soon as you can without breaking the omelette fold it in half and press it down a little - goo will come out. It's great. Slide it onto a plate with some big hugs of brown bread and a pint glass of tap water, and you're away.

I'm not feeling confessional today

2008-02-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

I have had the most bizarre week - I made £20,000 for my company, issued a publication, let my room in my flat so it dovetails neatly with when my lease ends, and also had fantastic admissions news from NYU, Rutgers, Wash U StL and Yale. I am honestly staggered by this. Honestly -just blown away. Unsurprisingly my lexicon of extremity is pretty limited, but everyone's is, surely. I slept in till 3pm yesterday. I could think of any better way to spend my day than drinking tea, eating crumpets, reading and shooting terrorists in the face. After Revolutionary Road, The Power and the Glory has an uncomfortable staginess to it. Once I immerse myself into it a bit more I'm sure I'll stop discriminating against that. Now I need to contact everyone who helped me apply and thank them, and then ask them for more help on choosing. Unless Stanford chooses for more.

snippet #8

2008-02-20T04:19:00.001-08:00

What is it that is so delightful about a dog?

Can you keep a secret?

2008-02-19T14:49:00.001-08:00

Isn't that a revealing phrase; can you keep a secret? A secret has to be kept. Left to its own devices it will escape, it'll get lose. A secret has to be actively kept. It has its own agency, and force, and that has to be counteracted. If you keep a secret and you never ever tell anyone, you lose a part of yourself.

The film Cloverfield is told entirely by handheld camera. The script and the characters have the self-awareness to call the cameraman on this irritating habit he has of filming everything. At one point, chickening out of investigating something, he says 'You go. I'll ... document it.'

And yet every time that the person holding the camera dies, another one picks it up. Despite any reservations they expressed about filming beforehand. And it's because they can't help confiding in the camera; they have to share the secret. The story, in Cloverfield, forces its protagonists to tell it, no matter how little they want to.

My sister thinks that this is too exclusive. That you need some teleologies. She means that you need some secrets. So I'll tell you some. Can you keep a secret?

I can't.

Can you keep a secret?

2008-02-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

Isn't that a revealing phrase; can you keep a secret? A secret has to be kept. Left to its own devices it will escape, it'll get lose. A secret has to be actively kept. It has its own agency, and force, and that has to be counteracted. If you keep a secret and you never ever tell anyone, you lose a part of yourself.

The film Cloverfield is told entirely my handheld camera. The script and the characters have the self-awareness to call the cameraman on this irritating habit he has of filming everything. At one point, chickening out of investigating something, he says 'You go. I'll ... document it.'

And yet every time that the person holding the camera dies, another one picks it up. Despite any reservations they expressed about filming beforehand. And it's because they can't help confiding in the camera; they have to share the secret. The story, in Cloverfield, forces its protagonists to tell it, no matter how little they want to.

My sister thinks that this is too exclusive. That you need some teleologies. She means that you need some secrets. So I'll tell you some. Can you keep a secret?

I can't.

extraordinary news:

2008-02-19T04:14:00.000-08:00

'US President George Bush has said that Fidel Castro's decision to step down as Cuban president should begin a "democratic transition", eventually culminating with free and fair elections.'

'The chairman of Pakistan's ruling party has conceded defeat after opposition parities routed allies of President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections.'

'Blair sanctioned Diana murder, claims Fayed.
The Duke of Edinburgh was accused of ordering MI6 to orchestrate the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed.'

implicit rejection

2008-02-19T03:09:00.000-08:00

Implicit rejection is a term of art in the graduate application community. It is the term for the suspicion you have that all the accepted students have been notified. You didn't hear; you're not an accepted student. Implicit rejection.

My implicit rejection count is, unhappily, soaring. It's an imprecise art, because grad admissions comms are human and do things irregularly, however much they try to systematise for efficiency's sake. But that considered, the count stands at:

Berkeley
Penn
JHU
UVa
Chicago
Michigan

Add in my acceptance at Duke and my rejection from UCLA, and that means that I have an idea of how eight of my fifteen schools stand. Suddenly, the season is more than half over - and I've only heard from two places! Thus the lure of implicit rejections.

Still to hear from and still to notify anyone: Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, Rutgers, WashU Stl and Stanford.

"Update"

2008-02-14T16:11:00.000-08:00

I am, I think, happier than I can remember being for a long, long time. I don't want to gloat so as to cause anyone upset, but - I really feel like things have turned a corner for me.

At the end of March I am moving out to California to go and live with XXX. She is just extraordinary - constantly surprising and challenging and with eerie emotional and mental synchronies and I am very, very much in love with her. I will stay until my tourist visa runs out, just before my birthday in June.I applied to grad schools again - fifteen of them! - and I have heard back from UCLA, who rejected me, and Duke, who want to admit me with a full tuition waiver, a $19kpa stipend for 6 years and a 4 year Uniersity-wide fellowship, the James B. Duke fellowship. When I got the email I cried like a baby and called up the next day to check they hadn't made a mistake. They hadn't. At least, not an administrative one! I'm still waiting on Stanford, Berkeley (and those two are my top two choices for obvious reasons), Columbia, NYU, Penn, Harvard, Yale, UVa, JHU, WashU STL, UChicago, UMich and Rutgers. Come what may, though, it's finally going to happen, whereever it happens - I'm going to graduate school! I just can't believe it.

At the end of last june - on my birthday, in fact - I went to the doctor, which was something I had been putting off for some years, and told him that I had been told that had symptoms of anxiety and depression. He diagnosed me as severe and gave me a prescription and we argued about it - he gave me something like 6 hours in four days - and I told him I felt like he'd pathologised my personality and then medicated it, and he countered that that was because I'd confused my feelings with my personality and that that was something that he wanted to stop. Since starting to take them I have stopped hitting irrational rages and thumping walls, stopped systematically alienating people who try to help me, stopped having that horrible, horrible ballooning terror and dread of everything all the time, the crippling social anxiety, the reflexive spite and bile and meanness - gone. I don't feel chemical, or artificial, or messed-with, or like I'm living through felt. I feel - fine. (I just get drunk really, really quickly.)

My job is fine. I got another pay rise and handed in my notice at the same time, which was gratifying. I am advertising my room, and starting to pack up my things. Living in London is difficult and has driven me to tears of frustration every now and then, but on balance I am so glad to have had this six months working in Westminster, learning about politics. I've put in to do a freelance political research job while I'm in CA, which will be great - hoping it comes through!I've been too coy with this blog for too long. I'm going to try to be a bit more honest and have a bit less silly over-determined angst. We'll see how it goes. I hope that you are all doing ok. Much love and a happy valentine's day to you all-

water

2008-02-14T05:23:00.000-08:00

I was living in India after finishing high school. I was there having an intense time - losing weight, teaching English to classes of 60 kids ten hours a day, etc. I only spent three months teaching, and I wish I'd spent longer. I learned what a bad pupil I was, for one thing. And I'm too impatient to teach young kids. But I'd love to teach undergrads. Anyway.

So the water supply in my apartment building - by far the fanciest accommodation in the area, given that opposite me were reed huts and an ad-hoc goat butchery, consisting of matting and a block of wood - was rather intermittent. Often it would run out for days at a time. When it did sometimes I'd leave whatever was in the sink there and leave the tap turned on, so that the resupply of water would be audible to us and we'd immediately wash all our clothes, shower, use the toilet, etc. I liked life a lot - I did a lot of press-ups and chin-ups, I wrote a lot of letters, did all my washing by hand, played cards and read a lot of Dickens and Hardy. In this sense, they were very good times. It was very simple. Anyway.

Each weekend we'd leave town and meet up with other volunteer teachers (there was a slightly unsettling neo-imperialist bent to it all, I know) at tourist spot all over south india - we'd take 10 hour buses just to see each other. There were about thirty of us in total, spread over an area the size of, maybe, western Europe. Maybe larger. Anyway.

One week the water goes about wednesday, and that week we go up to the north of Tamil Nadu to the small town of Pondicherry, where I fell deeply in infatuation and had a motorcycle accident - but that's another story. I lost a lot of skin. We got back late on Sunday night to find the whole area around our block kind of - smellier than usual. The chicken shop next to our block smelled less noxious, in some way, next to this new smell.

So we went up to our first floor flat, to find, weridly, the door off its hinges, and propped up against the wall. The lock had been cut out. We'd been burgled, we thought - only, the smell in here was even worse. There was this weird line around the room, about four foot up, like a very minimalist freize... in grey. The whole place stank. It was like a millpond - brackish.

I still shudder remembering how it slowly dawned on me. The water had come on over the weekend, and filled up the sink - I'd left a sock, a single sock, in there - and then over flowed the sink, and then filled the entire flat to a depth of 1.20m. The door was broken down in an effort to stop the flooding of the apartment below, to no avail, and by the time the tap was reached to turn it off, the entire apartment block's water tank had emptied ... into our flat.

Everything was washed out - books, letters, tape player, clothes, &c. Our host family who had loaned us the apartment were publicly ashamed.

To top it all, we'd - coincidentally- locked the bedroom door and sealed accidentally with a mess of dirty towels. But we'd both left our bedroom keys in a friend's rucksack from the weekend, and both sets were now 350 miles away. So we couldn't even go to bed.

We ate out a lot less after this.

Crypt

2008-02-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

En-crypt, crpyt-ic, de-crpyt crypt-ography, crypt-ologist.

Is there any chance that there are some cryptologists who actually study tombs? I hope so.

Windsor Forest

2008-02-13T14:32:00.000-08:00

XXX: ooh, has XXX told you yet? All the first-year students met with the DGS yesterday
to talk about our first-year oral exams
16:13 and we asked when the acceptances would be going out... to get an answer to all the rumors that had been flying around
and I GUESS they are making their final decisions this week, will have a list by friday, and notify monday/tuesday of next week
me: ooh
one sec
16:15 oh oh oh how exciting
I am just going crazy with anxiety
XXX: but WHY? You got in to Duke... so...
me
: my productivity is at an all-time low
I know, I know
XXX: ha! I understand, but you should be HAPPY happy
me: I shouldn't be so anxious. And I really am happy
16:16 There's a couple places ahead of Duke on my list (Penn one of them) that I want to hear from
is all
but thank you for letting me knopw
it is much appreciated
XXX: right. I felt bad last week, when the info I gave you wasn't accurate
I wanted to clear things up :(
16:17 me: nono - it is just much appreciated
so don't worry on that score
how's things, anyway/
?
XXX: oh, pretty good. despite the midwinter BLAHS and all that. I have three weeks until Spring Break, so... PHEW
16:18 But I had to read some Pope for class tomorrow!
me: midwinter BLAHs .... great term!
Pope!
which one?
XXX: which I thought might excite you
Windsor Forest
me: totally!
ooh
I found that realyl exciting
and I like how he writes a history of the thames onto the geography
XXX: oh, he mentions the Isis, yes?
16:19 me: and the ironic comparisons to Rome are good
XXX: ok, this is what I was wondering
me: yes - he mentions the tributaries
XXX: So, the critlit I've been reading of Pope et al has been... extremely excited to point out the poetic relations to Virgil and even Homer.
But... I see so much more... Ovid in it
16:20
lots of great metamorphoses
and these sort of covered figures of longing for a homeland from which you're kind of... exiled, I guess
me: No, absolutely! I don' tfeel that WF is especially Hopmeric
XXX: it's like an Ars Amatoria addressed to the nation
16:21 me: I think that there is a peculiar restlessness and alienation in it too - the post-Utrecht Tory victory is (we know) undercut by the fact that Anne is dying
and that the Whigs are about to take power
so it's written at an interesting time politically
and Pope is claiming a status quo that doesn't really exist, or isabout to change
16:22 XXX: RIGHT. and that's another problem I have--Not having studied Restoration/etc to any extent, I feel like I'm missing out on SO many subtle references
it's almost pathetic
me: This is the problem a lot of people feel with C18th literature - that they're missing hundreds of cliquey little references
which I think is a shame - I only got the political dimensions of WF last year
16:23 XXX: Isn't that kind of ironic, though?
me: but there's plenty of interesting things going on in the Augustan vision that Pope is building
XXX: That just at the moment that English is becoming a universal literary language, supposedly "timeless" in a sense (I don't know how strongly you could make that claim, but I will anyway)
16:24 me: no, go on
XXX: English writers are more rooted to the Nation than, for instance, Renaissance playwrigths?
it's like the moment of British ingenuity had to be intrinsically British before it could be universal
16:26 me: I think that this is right - the thing is that this is still pre- Thompson's Britannia and before, really, the (literary and political) conservativism of the scriblerians really got off the ground, I think, in terms of influence. I have this feeling like up till the 1720s they're still honing exactly what it is that they're going to be in furious defence of.
16:27 XXX: oooh
ok
me: Nonetheless, after Blenheim in 1704 and the death of Louis XIV in 1715, there's a see change, I think
(sorry, scratch the nonetheless)
and *sea
16:28
XXX: hm... I wish I could ask you a question following htat, but I don't know enough even to ask
except to go "ooh, Blenheim! The battle and all of the amazing tapestries depicting it, and oooh, they charge too much to see the grounds"
me: :-)
I think that there isn't so much an idea of British ascendancy
16:29 because of the jacobit ethreat
however real it might be
but there is, definitely, an idea of resurgent london
XXX: is this after the plague/fire?
me: which is where I think WF fits into this kind of lit/pol narrative
yeah, totally
XXX: right, I mean
me: we're straying inexorably toward my dissertation here
XXX: in terms of "resurgent"
hahaha
me: Possibly just 'surgent'
16:30 XXX: or was London resurrecting itself from something else I'm not aware of?
there was a battle against the dutch in the Thames, right?
or something?
16:31 me: I think really it's Pope trying a bit of myth-making about London, a tory london, a London which will in the future unite Westminster and the City and in which London will bear comp. with Rome as a metropolis
there is also the Medway context
but I don't remember when that was
there's definitely an anti-Dutch thing
16:32 XXX: ok
me: pope hated William of Orange
XXX: hahaha
me: As he was a protestant
16:33 See, I don't even like situating poetry politically, usually, but it's such a febrile period
It's fun
more so than finding classical analogues
though I'm sure they're there
XXX: right, I guess I have to start with the literary connections purely because I don't know the history well enough to negotiate the politics
but... this is awesome.
I think you would really like Suvir Kaul
16:34 me: I did!
I loved him!
We met at the british library!
XXX: no way!
me: I haven't used that many exclamation marks since I was 1`2
XXX: haha
me: hah - twelve, not one foot two inches
16:35 XXX: I thought you were saying 1 to the second power
me: Ha!
XXX: because I have my font small and can't tell the difference in certain types of punctuation
me: no, he was great. I didn't meet a single person in my grand tour of grad schools, withthe possible exception of Blakey Vermuele at Stanford, who excited me as much
XXX: wow!
not even Srinivasan
Aravamudran...?
16:36 we read some of his stuff for last week
me: I didn't meet him, unfortunately. But I applied to Duke for him
XXX: ahhh
me: I read tropicopolitans in November
XXX: right!
me: It is GOOD
XXX: I agree... didn't read the whole thing
but what I read, I liked
16:37 me: right. I didn't finish it - I cherrypicked, inevitably
XXX: "Petting Oroonoko" was the selection we read
but, anyway
me: Mhm
mhm
XXX: back to Suvir... I will mention in class
16:38 me: is your class with him?
XXX: how my "good friend XXX, the genius, pointed out a few interesting connections to me regarding Windsor Forest and the political climate of Pope's London..."
yes
me: oh, you awesome dude
you will embarrass me
XXX: well, at least I will try
maybe I won't.
but if I can, I will
me: but you have made me smile at a distance of thousands of miles
which is pretty good going
16:39 XXX: hurray!
ok, well. Thanks so much for the interesting insight
me: I'm going to try to get back to local government, if I can
you take care
XXX: but now I nead to read about Chaucer and Death
me: and enjoy Pope
XXX: I will!
me: and Death, obviously
XXX: it is my favorite of the medieval topoi
ttys!

2008-02-13T10:06:00.000-08:00

according to adorno, isn't a tune the notes and harmonies that you don't hear?

poetry

2008-02-13T09:50:00.001-08:00

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?

Whatever isn't the body text or the tag or

2008-02-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

The symphony is any form that isn't explicitly anything else. The novel is any text that isn't poetry or a play. (Ok, ok, with qualifications.) Dislike defines us, not like. Colour we see is the colour that isn't reflected. We prize originality, which is what hasn't been said before. the strongest faiths rest on doubt. Sculpture, like analysis, is the process of removing the extraneous, that which hinders the distinguishing of coherent shape. Suspense - and narration too - are knowing what not to tell. Sexiness is what not to show. Horror is what you don't see. Mourning a feeling about what we don't have. Loss is the only feeling we can truly apprehend:

XXX: "What is literature?"
Derrida: "Put it this way; we know what it isn't."

fit

2008-02-13T09:38:00.000-08:00

As far as fit goes, I can't think of anything more important. I submitted applications that showed me in different lights to different schools. I'm interested in a variety of things, and so some of my applications were literary-historical, some theoretical, and some a Polonius-like combination of the three, according to which of my interests would best serve and be served by the school in question.

What it comes down to is this: you will be spending at least 6 years in a school, and over that period what will count to you more than prestige or standing - so much more - is how congenial the school is to the kind of thing you want to study - and the way that you want to study it.

Forgive me if I seem rude. You have another year to sort all of this out. But talking as you do about "fit bullshit" implies that you don't care what you study, as long as you do it somewhere with a prestigious name. Professors everywhere but everywhere are likely to be smart, inspiring people to greater or lesser extents. You might as well apply based on what they do, not where they do it.

Imagine if you got into a big name school and went eager to study, say - I don't know - Paradise Lost and the civil war, but when you got there you were told that you had to study, say, historical and social circumstances of production of civil war pamphleteering and the modes of their consumption. Wouldn't you feel that your cynical opportunism had really screwed things over for you?

Finally - your comments on how to take failure are... interesting. Sure, be confident in your own quality. But if last year I had not sucked it up, but thought instead that the schools just hadn't recognised my calibre, I would have submitted the same app, and I'm sure I'd facing 15 rejections, instead of last year's seven. I wouldn't have gone on conferences and given papers, and submitted things to journals, and spent months rewriting my statements and sample.

This is the point of learning - people who know more than you tell you that you are wrong, and it hurts and you take it and then you get better. Entrenchment won't ever lead to progress.

Enid Roach

2008-02-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

I have, however, found the time to read a novel. Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. It is extraordinary bleak - reading it is like being broken over someone's knee like a tiny piece of kindling. Any novel in which the heroine's first name is not revealed until 160 pages in - and you don't even notice - is doing something right. It chronicles the relentless self-sabotage of a woman walling herself slowly into loneliness, spinsterhood, penury and, possibly death. I've never read such an utterly forceful account of the sheer insidious poison of self-doubt, and pessimism, and self-imposed victimhood.

anxiety

2008-02-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

I'm so anxious and unproductive through grad school anxiety that I can't even procrastinate properly. I heard back from UCLA, which was a no.

snippet #7

2008-02-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

Dear XXX,
Thank you for such a simple evening yesterday.
XXX

therapy #3

2008-02-12T09:49:00.000-08:00

XXX: now listen
I'm worried about you
I think
17:52 in the midst of a series of struck attitudes
you;ve forgotten who you are
me: tell me in what regard
ok
XXX: if you ever knew in the first place
me: in what sense?
when did I know?
XXX: you've relinquished the ability to be intimate
me: right
XXX: at the altar of
if you like
adopting a kind of pose
17:53 I think it's getting to you
me: I don't know how serious you're being
XXX: I'm being very serious
17:54 me: but if you are, I don't know what possible good it could do to tell me this. I don't know how not to strike poses and attitudes
XXX: I don't know when we'll be able to meet up again and I'll probably forget by the next time I see you
so I thought I ought to tell you
yes I understand that
I don't think it's something you can change
I think it's something that changes
me: hmmm. thank you.
17:55 if that's what I ought to say
XXX: Or maybe it is
me: I don't know how to engage with something
XXX: yes
on an emotional level
no
scrap that
me: I have managed to avoid this question for a while, though
XXX: on the level of sensory interaction
17:56 which leads to a more profound emotional level
than mere ironic interaction
me: characterise sensory interaction for me so I understand better what you mean
XXX: hmmm
like
for example
17:57 hugging
Anyway - I don't truly believe that there's anything you can't change - the question is a.
do you think I'm right
b. if so, do you want to do anything about it
answer no to either of those questions and this is just an
academic exercise
18:00 me: 1) I don't know, really, what other kinds of exercise there are.2) I'd love to do something about it. It would help to be with XXX.
3) I don't think you're wrong
4) Did I hug that badly?
XXX: In reverse order
18:01 4 Not bad or good - just incommensurate to your capacity to hug, if you like
me: hah
ok
18:02 XXX: 3. The question is - how do you travel from here
2. I think women help
1. How is your creative life?
me: 1. Just terrible
XXX: qualifier to 2: some women help
hmmm
that's interesting
18:03 what are you working on?
me: Nothing - I'm in creative stasis
I have ceased to believe in the practical possiblity of creative synthesis
but yesterday I discovered a new poet
hart crane
18:04 (qualifier - synthesis within myself)

therapy #2

2008-02-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

ROS: Six rhetorical and two repetitions, leaving nineteen of which we answered fifteen. And what did we get in return? He's depressed!... Denmark's a prison and he'd rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw.

therapy

2008-02-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

Harold Bloom and Stephen King are not for it. Stephen King said it would 'put a hole in his bucket'. Harold Bloom said it would make him happier, but more boring, flatter, leveller, more consistent, more boring and unworthwhile, he implied, in every way. Adam Phillips is circumspect - is circumspection anything more than a refusal to 'take short views'? Can we only be interesting, valuable and creative if we're invested in fucked-up oppositions? Can we get over this addiction to binaries? Please?

a day consumed by anxiety

2008-02-11T08:59:00.000-08:00

Work is reasonably easy, and so I can by and large do it and work it as a pleasant anaesthetic, but today I have lost a whole day to worry and the obsessive checking of the internet. I applied to, in alphabetical order:

Berkeley
Chicago
Columbia
Duke
Harvard
JHU
Michigan
NYU
Penn
Rutgers
Stanford
UCLA
UVa
Washington University STL
Yale

As I said, I have been accepted to Duke. I haven't heard back from the other fourteen places. Last year I applied to Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, NYU and Princeton. Obviously, that didn't go especially well. I can't keep my eyes open and I keep falling asleep on the bus, which is how my wallet was stolen last December, and I'm just sick with nerves.

I have been trying to remember this for years.

2008-02-11T07:43:00.000-08:00

There was a young Lady from Bude,
Who went for a swim in a lake.
A man in a punt,
Stuck his pole in her ear
And said "You can't swim here, it's private!"

Spiderman III: attack of the plotholes, or, what a rubbish film this was.

2008-02-11T05:14:00.000-08:00

Isn't it interesting that when Tobey Maguire is hit by the black goo, that, contrary to most evil transformations, he actually turns into a sexually attractive figure. The film is so incoherent that it is hard to tell what precisely is criticised, but it isn't his promiscuity, because the film presents his song to Kirsten Dunst as his climactically galling act. This opposition raises the question of what Spiderman ought to be. Ought he be chaste? Not necessarily, because the film rewards his entanglement with Dunst. Instead the envenomed Maguire is criticised for having agency: we're only comfortable with a figure like Spiderman if he is entirely contained and subservient in every regard. As Spiderman, his access to and obeisance to a moral code that other characters in the story skate around, as normal people everywhere skate around the moral codes they're looking for, is a compulsion. He is a embodied social justice who, with inhuman constancy (and this is why his relationship with Dunst suffers) fulfills his duty.

There's nothing new about such embodiments, of course. But what is interesting is that when Spiderman is envenomed, he too is given choice, as Maguire was. And when he has that agency - or free will, if you like - he becomes, instantly, an anti-hero.

The lack of faith that this volte-face demonstrates in the franchise's underlying premise - that a person could single-handedly have the power to fight his people's wrong-doing - is what makes Spiderman III so unhappily miscarried a film. The authorial distrust that inverting the hero provokes would be strong enough, properly paced, for two hours' captivation at least. That's why the film is so staggeringly alienating. When authorial trust/distrust is relegated to the role of peripheral gimmick, so is the audience. At which point, it's really pretty hard to engage with the film at all.

"and take short views"

2008-02-11T05:06:00.000-08:00

Finding that I was echoing Bloom without knowing it was so terribly appropriate, given the title of the first chapter of the Anxiety of Influence, "It was a great marvel, that they were within the father without knowing him". He is a bigoted, racist and a sexist man. But he is content to be Harold Bloom - and as long as he finds no-one with a more prodigious memory who is, more than him, sunken in learning, he will remain so. Characterising those who disagree with him as the 'School of Resentment' is a very clever move on his part: he needs a whole school to counter him. Aside from this it allows him not to engage with anyone. Not that a tendency toward engagement was really his problem in the first place. Nonetheless he introduced me to Hart Crane.

constitutional localism

2008-02-11T05:01:00.000-08:00

Dear XXX,

Thanks very much for your email and my sincere apologies for not having got back to you and the lack of specificity. And I'm grateful for your response nonetheless.

In terms of the countries on which we'd like to focus, We would like choose Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherland, and Australia, NZ, S.A. and Canada. We feel that anything more would be beyond our scope. We sent more detailed outline of our project to XXX XXX, which I enclose herewith too. We've started work on the first section, dealing with Charter compliance.

I also enclose the email I sent XXX. You'll notice that in my email to him I also mentioned that we will need funding in order to complete the project: I explain why below, but it's worth restating the reasons why we do:

- We are extremely excited about this project and look forward to bringing it to a successful completion and launching the report to our mutual benefit

- Nonetheless, as the project needs to be written during February and early March, it necessarily requires our very small team to take time out of what has been traditionally our recruitment season, during which we hope to find new members to fund XXX for the following year. Recruiting new members immediately after the start of the new financial year has historically been very unpromising proposition.

- Owing to this, unfortunately we need to ask the XXX to compensate us for the opportunity cost that this time spent represents.

- We very much hope that this won't be an obstacle to our continuing to work on this project, which we both feel is highly promising and about which we are both very optimistic.

The perspective of the report is that we believe that local government has greater freedoms in the peer group that we isolate and that it is worth analysing the ways in which local government is especially hampered in England and highlighting them by contrast to international, more liberalised practice. I will accordingly run through the questions you ask of each topic, with apologies for repetition of material in my email to XXX below or in the enclosed proposed project structure. I want also to emphasis that the five areas I asked you to get back to me on didn't reflect a full structural proposal.

1. A comparative analysis on which services are delivered locally: I think that an exhaustive examination of services is beyond the scope of the report. We should probably confine ourselves to mechanisms of delivery for health, education and transport funding. The CLGF handbook is, as you say, exemplary in this regard. A similar breakdown on the four European peers would be great.

2. Performance management regimes in commonwealth and EU countries: As you say, this is too broad a title. You're also right that a comparison of the CPA/CAA/PSA regimes with others is what we want, but we're also loking to highlight the fact that abroad performance management as it is understood here doesn't really exist - abroad authorities abroad are more monitored for illegality than for poor performance, as far as I understand it. Something that we would like to conclude from this would be that a lighter regulatory touch (as opposed to the CPA's mere 200 indicators) makes for a more innovative and effective council.

3. Local government role if any in the legislatures: We want to know whether councillors have legislative roles in the targetted peer group partly because it is something that XXX XXX mentioned in his inaugural speech. We know that it is a rather unrealistic thing to agitate for, and that accordingly too great a concentration on it would dilute the persuasiveness of the report, but we think that as a long-term ambition for local government it would help to compensate a fairly substantial democratic deficit. So yes, we are " looking to find out where local councillors are represented in the lower and upper houses" as you say. This isn't a core analytical point - it's a prospective goal. If such an analysis could reveal that subsidiarity was better achieved with the inclusion of councillors in the legislature then it would, of course, be a useful thing to include and would bolster the profile of this section in the report.

4. Status or protection in written constitution:

5. Scope for reorganisation - who can do it and how? Points four and five I now realise really address the same point from different angles. You ask whether the fifth question should read "devolution of powers and how to achieve it" but that is in fact the converse perspective to what I had intended, which was rather a comparative examination of the ease of difficulty with which central governments can erode, curb or curtail local autonomy. While we are interested in how devolution can be achieved, some countries have strong safegaurds on their local governments' autonomy: for example Denmark (I think) requires that constitutional changes to local gov't status must be passed by two successive legislatures by two-thirds majorities. Of course, no such protection exists here, but to avoid this section becoming a constitutionalist's screed we would also like to focus on how fresh legislation in a selection of our peer countries (all of them would be too many) allocated resources and powers to local authorities. On what terms are new powers meted out - is there a set mechanism which determines the different levels to which the responsibility for administering new funding or legislation is given? "I have some extensive info on Denmark which has undergone a major transformation of local government in 2006 (reducing the number of councils, and then giving them more powers including welfare etc – very good info which I will send you). Are you also looking for info on where the relationship between central / local is better? " This sounds exactly right - yes please. For this more in-depth part of the report, I think we'd want to focus on Denmark and Germany.

I know that XXX is also interested in consitutional safeguards of local government status from the perspective of counties and districts bidding for unitary status: if we could see the relevant clauses of countries' consitutions which refer to the circumstances under which authority reorganisation can be undertaken - if such clauses or guidelines exist.

I hope that you find this a useful set of responses. We are of course flexible as to when you supply the information - we don't have to write the report linearly. We would, however, like to be able to publish by mid- to late March if possible. We also look forward to taking this forward with you and I look forward to hearing back from you. Please find below my earlier email to XXX.

With all best wishes,

XXX

To Brooklyn Bridge

2008-02-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Duke

2008-02-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

First of all I meant to post about Ash Wednesday, and what a peculiarly occult service and festival it is, and then to digress seamlessly to other iterations of paganistic kinds of patterns elsewhere. (Hallowe'en.) And also about Joel Plaskett. Then I meant to post about something she said about the link between knowledge and taste, kinds of consumption, kinds of eating, internalisation, growth, accretion. And what refusing food signifies. (She is fucking smart.) Then I wanted to be worried about her on here because she is in Outpatients at the moment and I miss her very hard. And I also wanted to post about drupal, which I have spent my day learning. Then all of this was swiped aside a bit because I just heard I got was accepted for a PhD by the English Department at Duke.

my ideal novel

2008-02-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

If modernism is what you can get away with leaving out, and postmodernism is what you can get away with putting in, would that make this a post-modern Jacob's Room?

Three parent embryo

2008-02-05T06:08:00.000-08:00

From the BBC:

"Scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in IVF treatment by creating a human embryo with three separate parents.

The Newcastle University team believe the technique could help to eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases, including some forms of epilepsy. The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women in lab tests. It could ensure women with genetic defects do not pass the diseases on to their children. ... The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed with six days."

The report then went on to quote pro-lifers, which was a shame. And there's another semantic problem; life and choice are not antonyms.

snippet #6

2008-02-04T05:46:00.000-08:00

"Yeah," I scoffed, "but that's just semantic, isn't it?"
"Semantics means meaning," he responded, "so yes - it is."

Counterstrike

2008-02-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

I've no wish to alarm by the implication that my behavior plumbs depths yet more asinine that those portrayed here, yet it is so. At such moments, I act out neoconservative psychodramas in which there are two roles: terrorist and counter-terrorist. You can play as a variety of personae within the two roles, but the differences are wholly cosmetic: what is functional is the binary.

Isn't it interesting that they couldn't come up with the semantic opposite of terrorist? (Freedom fighter?) Counter-terrorist, of course, is circular and so entirely satisfactory for the game's purposes, and yet the function that the counter-terrorist forces fulfill is entirely unclear, excepting the quelling of bandana-ed guerillas.

I can't decide how unsettling this is; that the normative assumption behind the game is that violent suppression of violent means is always justified. Of course, the fact that I'm talking about a game the pleasures of which consist entirely of shooting avatars in the head render my attempts to impute inflected politics to the game mechanics entirely fatuous. It is possible, however, that under my country's new laws, they are also mildly illegal.

They're doing a survey.

2008-02-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

Generally I hate the warnings that get sent around, but I must admit that this one is important:

If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a survey and asks you to show him your bum, do not show him your bum.

This is a scam - he only wants to see your bum. I wish I had got this yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap.

Bathtime.

2008-02-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

I'm not very sanitary. I try to avoid to washing too much. I figure, if you're only going to get dirty again, why bother? I'm inconsistent in this, of course, because I nonetheless love the feeling of having washed. But prospectively, time spent washing looks like dead time. The only way to entice myself to wash is to combine it with a nap - ie, to have a bath.

So. I was sitting on my bed on Friday night, when her injunction to wash revisited me. What better way, I asked myself, to unwind on a Friday night than to bathe. And so it was that I was set. I leapt up onto my feet, and then launched myself off it, the better to hurry to the bathroom. Frivolity really does characterise everything I do. I

don't know how much you know about radiators - possibly some, but not everything there is to know. If you cast your mind back to the last time you really looked at one, you'll recall that along the top of the radiator there are two parallel metal ridges, the better to increase surface area and heat dispersion. These ridges are generally smoothed down at either end. In my room, beside the end of my bed and under my window, there is a small, foot-high radiator concealed by a curtain.

It was onto this that I unknowingly threw my left foot, such that my second and third toes went either side of the back ridge corner, even through the curtain. I yelped and lay on the floor shouting a lot in pain, trying to gauge just how painful this was. After a few minutes I crawled into the bathroom and put my left foot in the bath, and turned the shower on it on cold. It hurt like almighty fuck. I wailed; a lot. Clearly, the bath was right out. Bollocks. God only knew when I'd next feel like scrubbing myself.

I found a clean damp flannel and pressed it to my foot quite hard. I went back to my computer and fucked about online for a while; took a painkiller. Waited for the pain to abate, about which it was being rather coy. I had yet to look at it, because I knew that looking at it would only upset me. By now, a good ten minutes had passed. So I turned over my left foot and had a poke, only to see the bone of my third toe rather clearly exposed and the flesh neatly sliced, very deeply.

I called an ambulance, and then I called her (she counselled me to wrap up warm, get a book, and my wallet, and my passport - all sound moves) and then hobbled out in slippers to meet the ambulance, in which I went into shock, lost lots of blood, narrowly avoided vomiting, left scare-mongering voicemails on my flatmate's phone apologising for the blood on the floor, and so on. I kept trying to persuade the ambulance people not to look after me because I didn't want to be a bother.

I got to the hospital at about midnight and was admitted, amidst much garrulous blood-humour, to A&E minors. I was seen in about 25 minutes by a tall, slender and elegant doctor called XXX XXX. I can't quite place her ethnicity - perhaps half Malay? She spoke very, very softly, and with a tiny inflection of foreignness in her otherwise unplaceably middle-class accent. She moved as though through fluid. I thought what a good think it was that I was looking so good that night in my grey woollen trousers, &c &c. I may have been delirious.

She stitched me up (four) and her fingers on my feet and ankles were disconcertingly sensual. She spoke so softly that my injury became an agent of collusion - we, co-conspirators, fighting for the eroticisation of standard local-anaesthetic operations. In the taxi home, I thought I should write her a letter to thank her for making my evening. I may have been delirious.

Hot chocolate and whiskey. On the phone to her for a while, full of cocodamol. A very deep sleep indeed.

Today was a Good Day

2008-02-02T13:59:00.001-08:00

"This an interesting choice of song. I wouldn't call it music."
Defensively; "It's not like advocates or defends the social milieu it depicts. He's singing, 'no-one got shot today', 'no-one got arrested today', 'no-one got robbed today', and yet, today was a good day. I don't think he's really invested in ... you know, the part of LA he's from."
"Well why doesn't he just move?"
Pause.
"Did you know his parents worked at UCLA?"

snippet #5

2008-02-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

She had made some delicious pasta sauce - reduced tomatoes and courgettes - "I wish courgette meant 'King's vegetable'" I said, and we curled up on the sofa and cuddled and giggled and she nudged my cheek with my nose, but I was already smiling and smiling

Anaphora

2008-02-01T08:08:00.000-08:00

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
"Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?" Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly, instantly falls
victim of long intrigue,
assuming memory and mortal
mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of vlasses
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
prepares stupendous studies:
the fiery event
of every day in endless
endless assent.

snippet #4

2008-02-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

A white plastic bag just floated over Westminster Abbey and into a cloud. All three are very white, all three caught and gleaming in the sunlight, only two of them moving towards each other on a collision course. The sky is blue, even though the light is golden.

snippet #3

2008-02-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

"To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, submit to the world; to like something is to succumb to death, [whereas] dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction and discrimination - a triumph of life."

What I thought about during my meeting

2008-02-01T07:56:00.001-08:00

I confess to having had a lapse and pondered the introduction of character, whether signified by font or colour or style or day. But that presupposed an author, so I thought about that instead. It occurs to me that the system that provides the most compelling incentive is one which provides rewards inconsistently: thus the most compelling author is one who is inconsistently, irregularly trustworthy. But, in fact, the apparatus of this medium instills a certain authorial trust right away. You like these labels, don't you? The 'unlabelled' label is the Charybdis of self-absorption; it's a step away from the 'self-reflexive' label, the 'label' label, and so on.

Re: GRE/Grades

2008-02-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

If you're doing an MA now, then presumably your GPA is already pretty good. Most upper-tier programme websites say that they like you to have over a 3.5 GPA, I think. A lot of school refuse to answer your question - they say that there is no typical candidate.

I didn't study for my GREs at all, and my scores were perfectly serviceable though not exceptional. I think that over a certain level they are essentially irrelevant - they won't get you in, goes the maxim, but they will keep you out. There's a couple of pre-app forums (which is uncannily close to pre-op - we here are all post-op) out there - notably applyingtograd and litgre.

Good luck!

High fidelity

2008-02-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

Do you remember that song, ATB's 9pm (til I come)? It was the first song I played on my hi-fi (as opposed to on my ghettoblaster (a term which, like "Chinese Whispers" should be racist but isn't, though more properly of course it should be anti-semitic. Why don't we say anti-racist?)). The first CD I played on my ghettoblaster was either a free CD of the Vienna Boys' Choir, or REM's Singles Collected.

I was so delighted with the sound quality I wanted to play it to my father. "The artificiality" he said, "of the recording means that this is a bad song to choose for this." Flustered, I put on Yehudi Menuhin, Brahms, I think, but of course that was a CD of a vinyl release. I had had some connection problems earlier, and had subsequently resolved them with a cable of my father's. Mock-coy and cod-infantile, I said "I had some trouble getting it to work earlier, but I solved it. The key is to use Daddy's cable."

And my father said, "Hmm."

my ideal novel

2008-02-01T05:32:00.000-08:00

Objets trouvés principle

Objects read; objects written.

No teleologies left in; or rather, the only teleology which is truly there, the ur-arc, the reader's own meandering attention.

12:55 pm

2008-02-01T04:53:00.001-08:00

I'm hungry and I'm wondering what kind of lunch I can afford to buy? It's a silly question, of course, because I know that the kind of lunch I can afford to buy is actually no lunch at all. But for some reason (for quite a few, really) I'm going to choose to ignore that. I used to enjoy hungering so much that I would deliberately not eat so as to defer the gratification further.

Out of interest, what kind of defer-ance is that?

snippet #2

2008-02-01T04:51:00.000-08:00

Already you can see that delimitation is happening.

snippet #1

2008-02-01T04:50:00.000-08:00

"What kind of man will you be? Will you be a rich man?"
"I hope I'm the kind of man who never stops thinking about aesthetics."

Dream Song 14

2008-02-01T04:47:00.000-08:00

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

my ideal novel

2008-02-01T04:42:00.000-08:00

There would be no authorial intrusion, no diegetic layering. It would not be strictly epistolary; rather strictly textual. It would not address you. It would be 'a puzzle to be solved', a game for one or more players, a zero-sum game, a game of luck, a game of skill, don't refer me to Borges.

How many employees of the Office for National Statistics does it take to change a lightbulb?

2008-02-01T04:41:00.001-08:00

One.

my ideal novel

2008-02-01T03:10:00.000-08:00

Someone once told me about a piece of art, I think almost a sculpture. It consisted of a piece of fairly scuffed metal, above which had been hung a spotlight. The light was off. A switch was provided to turn it on at the viewer's pleasure. Before the light was turned on, the metal seemed scuffed and scratched every which way. Once it was on, the spotlight illuminated concentric arcs and tangents of scratches around itself. Once it was off, the brownian scuffs reappeared.

It's a very obvious metaphor, I know. But I'm a frivolous person.

My ideal novel would be online. It would consist of a black page, in the centre of which would be a grid, 5 by 5, of white dots. There would be a piece of code that would generate a link between each white dot and a random document from the server. The server would be filled with every text I had ever written. In less ascetic versions of the novel, it would also be filled with every text I had ever read.

The website would produce the randomly allocated text and at the bottom of the text would be a fresh, randomised 5 by 5 grid. There would be no 'about' section, no faq, no 'contact me' link.

The only question left is whether to provide paratexts; which gives rise naturally to an interrogation of what a paratext is. Is punctuation a paratext? I suppose it can be

It is traditional to be postmodern or definitional about your first post. This is why there is a gestural buffer -temporal and archival - before this. To take up that challenge - what paratexts should I provide here? You'll see for yourself.

Beginning in the Middle

2008-01-31T05:22:00.001-08:00

Thanks again for your wonderful talk in Belfast at the weekend. I really enjoyed listening to your analysis and suggestions and I was so pleased to hear the gnarly topic of why it’s worthwhile at all addressed, or even called out as critical.

It reminded me a little of Paul de Man on pedagogy: I wonder whether if criticism is read (or should be read) as an inherently pedagogical mode then criticism can be recuperated to an non-appropriative exercise that avoids epistemological damage to its subjects by making each encounter with them a fresh engagement. It seems to be that that’s the best way to find ethical subjectivity and avoid the memorializing/objectifying tendency that you point to. If it’d be possible to read the paper through I’d love to to appreciate it better.

How was the rest of the conference for you?

Ethical Subjectivity

2008-01-31T05:21:00.000-08:00

Thanks for your email of a while ago. I finally plucked up the courage to have a poke about your website which is, I must confess, a rather intimidating artefact. I congratulate you on putting together that CV, though, seriously. It's enormously impressive. Looking at your stated interests and your mention of ethics jogged my memory of a plenary I saw at the weekend at a conference. The speaker was XXX, whom I hadn't heard of. His title was, I think, Beginning in the Middle: Shakespeare and the New Ethic of Responsbility, and he teased out possibilities of epistemologically hygienic criticism, by which I mean crit that doesn't memorialise or objectify (which is a grail and an impossibility). Anyway, I say all this only to urge you to look out for a forthcoming article by XXX on this - I think you'd find it interesting. He's one of those inspirational guys who just assays the critical field with indomitable confidence.

I'm looking forward to reading your articles in slow moments at work - thanks for sharing the link. I met a guy at Belfast called, I think, XXX, He's Australian, and a third year, and an exceptionally smart guy. His paper was on Paradise Lost and was broadly discursive and entirely captivating. It made me want to go and read PL again. Do you know him?

Re: Thoughts on a rejection list for schools

2008-01-31T05:20:00.000-08:00

This is very interesting indeed for a couple of reasons. Firstly, what happened last year was that once people had got into their top programs they would tell the message board when they had turned down subsequent offers; this was by and large a popular thing to do, especially considering the tact with which it was done, by and large.

Secondly, I think that it is fascinating that you suggest that we centrally co-ordinate something. Just as our efforts to professionalise are to some extent efforts to preempt the requirements of graduate school, as if to say "I'm ready for this because I have already undertaken some of its steps" or "My committment is shown in my willingness to do this (conferences, article submissions, whatever it might be) even without the assurance of doctoral candidacy behind me”, so too I think our efforts to be exemplary at the admissions procedure, in everything from statements and samples to this board, we’re demonstrating competence (if only to ourselves) as far as we can, and possibly even in excess of what’s required.

I’ve been thinking about the hurdles and hoop-jumping of the admissions process, and I think that it is in a way a self-selecting series of inconveniences, as though by making it that much harder to apply correctly, departments try to get only the most committed applicants. And so we are trying to show ourselves to be at the very top of that bracket. There was some chitchat about this on last year’s board, about pre-professionalisation (and what one ex-applicant refers to as prepreprofessionalisation), and what I think is especially interesting is that applicants are using the internet to apply ever more cannily: whilst departments are (we can only imagine) at most, just beginning to think that boards like this might be worth looking at, and if only in a voyeuristic way, for some of us the suggestions, support and information we share here are actually kind of important (and will only get more so as things get going in February).

I’m sorry for this rather boring screed. (Screed is my new favourite word.) In its own way, your idea of unionising on school priorities (which would in itself be fascinating – a kind of demand-side set of rankings – we could classify by area of interest and argue about criteria – it’d be great) is a great idea. But it needs to happen outside of this message board, somewhere both collective and private. I like that it would represent a collective movement; it think it would say something about how we feel about admissions boards, that we’re ourselves unionised against and need to compensate for that.

Walt Whitman in the Supermarket

2008-01-31T05:19:00.000-08:00

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes --- and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stocks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Social care

2008-01-31T05:17:00.000-08:00

Secondly, as I say, I’ve looked through the Wanless Social Care Review, Securing Good Care for Older People: Taking a long-term view.

Basic points are as follows: Social care is a growth industry, with funding to maintain outcomes increasing by 139% from 2002 to 2026 alone. The aging demography of the UK is well known, and the problem is compounded by the fact that a significant proportion of informal care is delivered by the elderly themselves (one in six people over 65 delivers informal social care).

Wanless’ remit is to improve outcomes as much as possible and as efficiently as possible against a benchmark which boils down to one year of substantially improved care at 20000 pounds’ worth of expenditure per head. The three models that Wanless sets out are: partnership, (two-thirds of the benchmark cost is met by the state, then individuals make contributions which are matched 1:1 up the benchmark limit, beyond which contributions are not matched. Means-tested Benefits for those unable to contribute), free personal care, (state meets whole benchmark, no personal contribution) and limited liability (hybrid, means tested provision for the first 3 or 4 years, thereafter free).

Regardless of the philosophical arguments around free provision, it seems to me that in his summary, Wanless finds evidence over and again in support of a Partnership-based funding model for social care in the future, though in his conclusion he equivocates a little and dilutes the strong case that he has built. Wanless uses a range of economic criteria to reach this conclusion (p.xxxiii or the summary).

There is a strong localist case to be made for partnership allocation of funding, based primarly upon the complexity of the means-testing, which (under partnership would not include housing value) and on the differing allocations to be made: factors include housing, domestic support, personal care, nursing care. Because means-testing would take into account other benefits administered, the case for a locally-administered partnership funding model for social care is the same as every other argument for localist solutions (ie, that the principle of subsidiarity is inarguable), only, because of the complexity of the assessments to be made, more so.

At this point, it is instructive to look at the figures involved. Under Wanless’ suggestions (and I am taking his baseline most conservative estimate that delivers zero improvements in outcomes, but which simply restructures funding models), by 2026 costs are projected to be 24bn. With improvements in service delivery, that figure jumps to 31.3bn. This is against the background of current figures of 10.1bn.

It is worth putting these numbers into some context: Alan Johnson has just conceded that Individual budgets are going to go ahead, and to do this has released 520m. For local government to have any kind of angle in future social care provision, let’s say that it would need administration over only 50% of funding: this means that central government would have needed to sign a social care concordat handing over 5.05bn to local authorities four years ago. Alan Johnson’s commitment in December is one tenth of this.

My point is that to agitate for a localist delivery of social care is not a politically realistic thing to do. We might be able to get funding from, say, XXX, were we to write a report calling for complete local control of social care, but who would take seriously a report demanding the 12bn handover necessary to meet social care costs in 2008, dwarfing by 24 times Alan Johnson’s grand gesture? On the other hand, whilst I don’t doubt that we could put together a report which strongly advocating the partnership model and its localist implementation, I don’t think that, given the practical obstacles, a report like that would get funded. After all, we know that partnership-funded care is best because it’s there in the Wanless report already.

The problems in my argument are that the King’s Fund might have had its own agenda in putting these figures together and so there might be inaccuracies, and that the report itself dates from 2006 and so might be out of date.

The point of all this is that I was wondering whether you could set down for me a brief abstract of the angle that you think that we could viably take in such a report. If you could send me one then we’d be able to build on it start putting together a position and a proposal from there.