Thursday, 29 September 2005
Meta is better.
Needed to attend Fictions of Displacement lecture last night, so a dawdle on the Metro through the housing estates - Brockley Whins et al - and a pitching, standing observation of passengers ensued. Forty minutes is too long to just stand looking so amused myself by slipping my hands into peoples pockets and back out again, timing my intrusions with the clack-clack of welded rails.
Lecture was a struggle, slow-paced and erudite, a guarded, protracted revelation of just how much the module leader had read. Synopsis is his game, that and skirting over all aspects of literature that are not contained within. Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea should provide a suitable vehicle for stretching the patience, so intend to challenge the notion that it is a 'fiction of displacement'.
Rather, it is a 'displacement of fiction', if you'll forgive the pedantry. Taking one of fiction's most fascinating and discussed characters (the insane, attic-bound Bertha Mason) and daring to plot out the beginnings of a creole life in Jamaica, is clearly and indubitably a comment on the literary canon, especially its validities and relevance.
The action within the book is a metonymic attempt to displace the order of fiction, to remove criticism and the reception of English Literature from the clutches of temporality and deal it within a more spatial context; that is to say there can be no history aside from our perceptions of it and lineage/homage/influence exist as cognative paths not chronological ones. Jane Eyre is directly influenced by Wide Sargasso Sea despite being written some 120-odd years earlier.
In the life of a child there are revelatory points in which our place in the world dawns upon us. It occurs in a spectrum of understanding that weaves back and forth from the self to the external world, each time pushing the boundaries and expectations of the respective realms into new intellectual relationships. The stages of mental progression are quite probably inevitable and unavoidable; the time and nature of the discoveries however remains unfixed and a product of external influence. There is a mirror to be held up here, a mirror reflecting this notion, the movement of our understanding of our place in the world. In the mirror is reflected literature's relationship to the world, or rather the gulf (or non-gulf) between fiction and reality.
Coming home, I fell asleep on the rickety, yellow train and dreamt of a beautiful girl wrapped in colour and struggling to stay cool admidst the fascinations of hundreds of African children swarthed in purple. I woke, with a start and a dry throat, at exactly the right point. Then I went and spent cash I don't have with friends that I do and we drank Guiness stout and Matuzuelem rum, before finishing with cheap Scottish blends in a shouty, windowless bar. I feel terrible this morning, terrible and monetarily guilty, however a walk through the park cleared the senses and now I can spend a day reading, eating and preparing my laughably naive assaults on literary criticism.
14:45 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 28 September 2005
Curriculum vitality.
Formatting fits, especially today when planning journey across two cities, heading for the grey rectangles of concrete fascination. Sunderland wishes the sixties never happened. But there I study and there I prosper, feeling a genuine stimulation and abruptness of thought as intellect lurches into action once more.
Postgraduate study came suddenly and not without a minature chaos but I am assimilated into grain of degree now after one lecture. Classes are a great bundle of ethnicity, bored freelancers and Germanic intellectuals.
Gentle awareness of metafictions made possible today by lounge-reading, taking in practices of fiction that expose the theories of fiction. I should like to expose much more than that with my writing, I think.
'Traditional' forms of fiction attempt to supress the conflicts between fiction and reality, settling for an omnipotent narratorial conclusion, while metafictions seek to expose and revel in the impossibility of a resolution. Or so says the critic, applying a negative slant simply by apostrophising 'Traditional'.
Perhaps the skill is in denying the conflicts, applying a skin of story in which the conflicts take place but obliquely within our minds and not obtusely in juddering, rearranged sentences with juvenile ambitions upon confounding the logic of thought. Essentially, it is all about the balance. Think Henry James.
Turgid meta-funk of musically-amateur upstairs neighbours proved a hinderance to these locomotives of logic though, so dressed in my suit and knocked on the door asking them to turn it down, down, down, off. I'm a musician myself, I lied. I understand, but you know? Would you mind? It's just that I'm working at home today.
That concept - working at home - may very well be true soon. In my new occupation I have desk space also though. And a laptop. But not a lapdog, not on my wage. I am Festival Assistant for an international film festival in a convienient part-time pay, full-time stress way.
Still, nepotism and simony will get you everything and I have many to thank for an opportunity shining with aggressive curriculum vitae potential. Starting next week, I shall be shuffling screen-tests and harbouring european delegates like there is no four-star tomorrow.
15:35 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
I thought you'd finished.
I had but...
No way, no statement of intent. Simply inconsequential journaling which is more of the same (irrelevant, immodest) but less of the same (showcasing, showboating, showstopping) with some representing of discourses, mapping of dialogics and descriptions of people falling over in the street.
[To those of you nubile to my bile: enthusiastists, plagiarists and charlatans may find what is quaintly known as an archive (actually a years worth of unfocussed idiocy) at These Four Walls. There are links to worthy recipients and lists of literary projects and journals.]
14:30 Posted in Promotional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this