FIRE ON THE LIFEBOAT

The waiting hours are over, the time today being slacker than usual, British Summertime coming to an end.

Today I settled on a focus for my essay, a culmination of my thought here over the past few posts, and drank tea, reheated food and rediscovered a post-rock urge. Militaristic drumming and a hyphen, what more is there you could want?

I missed it though, the time-change. For no real reason, last night I took herbal sleeping remedies and slept with earplugs. I am not aware of a sleeping problem. I have suffered I the past with nauseous bouts of insomnia, sickly dawns that never end, but not now. A night like it I have never known. Emptier and overwhelmingly insular, no dreaming or disturbance. I wasn’t aware of how irregular and distracted my sleep is, how often I wake and move and turn and move, wake and turn. Last night was nothing, it didn’t exist. Today is the only evidence that yesterday even happened. There was no foothold for my awakening, it arose straight from a moment where I decided to go to sleep.

As a child this sense that one woke immediately as soon as one fell asleep (based in the lack of facts to prove you were ever asleep; I never saw myself asleep) was a common bewilderment. Perhaps, my juvenility was attempting to cognitively grasp the notion that the present doesn’t exist, that the future moves seamlessly into the past and that the present is nothing more than a realising, an allowance.

Yeah, perhaps. That's exactly what I was thinking, unaware, aged six.

A full, heady two days off. A proper Saturday and Sunday full of laze and precipitation, mountains of inky paper and purposeless drifts to the newsagent, to the supermarket, to the park.

Paid for it though, this space.

Nearly sixteen hours of full work on Friday, first at the office and then at the public house. This seriously impacted on my ability to absorb culture this weekend.

A set of avant-garde music nights have formed a regularity in the city at the moment, featuring derivations of folk and electronica topographies, organic movement splintered and repeated by laptops, L.E.D. driven appraisals of the British musical heritage. These situations are impossible to go and enjoy.

At a venue where I myself regularly perform, in the company of peers and advocates, and massively mindful of the grant I have just received to organise a cultural event, I cannot relax. I am cajoled into needing to network, to value myself against the stock of my achievements, to ask the participation of promising musicians in my own little variation on the graph. More pertinently, I have no real qualification to justify this role.

I walked past the alley, listened to the strains of an accordion over erratic synth punches, and continued walking. Instead, I pushed through the shadows and made my way down to the quay. Meeting friends was easy, easier now.

Sat in ornate, homely anachronism of a bar, anonymous from the outside, remarkable from the inside - all stained glass pre-Raphelites and Victorian trim. The high ceiling betrayed the crammed space; a series of circular tables demarked the lounge into pockets of hustled conversation. We sat and talked of the leer and debauch of a Friday night, smugly confident in our conservative surroundings, and also of the judgements of people, of the hallucinogens of last night (C. watched seasons change, leaves heal, roots burrow), of football, our last escape.

I have become thankful for distractions.

The (a) novel is slowly sedimenting in my head. Somewhere, someone is switching a light on and off. The girl, previously blurred and washy like a watercolour challenge, is gaining an identity. She may or may not be called Anna; a tribute, a palindrome. She begins and ends this thing, this affair with our married & estranged engineer. She will be vaguely supernatural, naturally super vague. She talks in repetitions, levers meaning into pauses, conducts with silence. She is a figment.

Read Ishiguro in a day. A Pale View Of Hills tempted and then banished any creative thoughts; hopelessly accomplished for a debut at twenty-eight years old. I was taken by the structure. The struts of the novel were not of plot but of theme. The plot was cloth - coloured linen - laid across wooden splints many times, a layering, the process of which softens and obscures the hard, solid form that lies beneath. To the eye is seen undulations, a rise and fall like breath, movements of tiredness, of absence, of comma use and stilted conversation.

The structure must be there. I am learning.

Spoke too much in the lecture tonight, postulated at length about the title of the book, the linguistics of the book, the mirrors of the book, the femininity of the book. Grew fond of the sound of my own voice. Argued half-vehemently for distortion-through-false-memory rather than false-memory-displaced-through-guilt. Either way, it is irrelevant. Ishiguro knocks haunting psychology and regret into last week, creating a set of quasi-truths, a set of lies best explained through the hyphen. My syntax and punctuation meanwhile has become overbearingly obvious.

Walked back through town after the lecture having spent my last doubloon on a filthy strong filter coffee to stave off the heavy eyes. The old brewery which towers in town, a legacy of production, employment and identity, is to become a 'city of science' as rumour has it. A complex of biochemical labs, guinea-pig farms and hands-on interactive museums. Thousands of jobs to come, and maybe one that will keep my clever, foreign girl here. It is a good thing. I have no-one to tuck me in at night otherwise.

Tempted not to say anything to the keyboard tonight, but the ease of Jamaican lager and a Drum Gold rolled sedative have persuaded me, I am drawn in like a journalist gravitating towards fiction after the taste of gin...

Yesterday was spent pleasantly labouring over Dickens (tonight you will get no lit.crit because nothing remotely new was raised in tonight's lecture and because I have lost the Ishiguro book I am meant to have read by Wednesday) and then walking, vunerably - as all walks in my neighbourhood are - to the bus-stop. I got on a bus and went to work; the other, second work.

Usual mixture of slump and chump in the bar, returning to an old shift which I have not worked for three months and finding nothing, thankfully, changes. Same mix of dog-owning, paranoid secondary-school teaching batchelors, the odd flimsy muso, and plenty of the frighteningly assertive breed of middle-aged female ale-drinkers. The ending scene is me shouting, "time to finish your drinks please" to a gaggle of shitfaced mothers slavering over a bearded ukelele player thrashing out Dylan on a piano clearly half an octave short of a symphony.

Then today: notably, and finally, raining.

Tonight however I am just thinking, pondering my next move, buying a little time. I have many things to accomplish, time willing. I have much to sleep too, time willing. In the meantime, there is a whole wealth of cloth from which to tailor yourself an opinion; make sure you be visiting the fantastic And So It Goes, Side Effects and Spurious for explosion, extraction and exclusion accordingly.

R.W. Dickenson’s assertions about my writing deserve something.

A direct, referential promotion of his comments? A literary construction, taking his post as adage and seed? Hyperlinked favourites from his expanding, penetrating catalogue of nether-fictions? A simple thankyou, old bean?

Assimilation is the greatest form of flattery. R.W. Dickenson’s contentions that the city is my most powerful character broke me, beautifully. I confess. I cannot help but scene myself, sketch my position into my academic wanderings, give a reader the sense of not simply what I have been reading, but where.

So, borrowed I-Mac graceful and almost weightless upon deep-grained ‘20s accounting bureau, anglepoise lamp both angled and poised, tottering structures of CDRs and invoices, a shock of cigarette butts in the ashtray, and myself situated within another grey Sunday, myself a weekly monochrome.

Earlier, upon the flowered kitchen table I annotated stolen lectures and essays on Bakhtinian textual ventriloquy (Wilkinson*) and Cordery’s hesitations upon spatial instability. The context; Charles Dickens’ Sketches By Boz.

Slowly, slowly, and with a rereading of R.W. Dickenson’s signpost (the fluidity, acuity and brazen insight of his writing, as ever, undermines his pretensions to submersion beneath my concepts. The concepts are mainly his, stolen and appropriated. This much is evident from his complicit grasp of the subject...) a structure grew; a structure involving the day, my academic reading and my keenness to form an appropriate and deferential response.

Sketches By Boz is masterful, and all to often reduced to an example of 'early formative Dickens'. In using voice to replicate the polyphonia of a city, there is no equal. Joyce’s Dubliners is child’s play. At the centre of Dickens’ writing one feels a plurality, a sense that language is not monolithic but belonging; each utterance holds signifiers peculiar to the speaker. Meaning therefore, crucially relies on the reception of the speech by another person, which is also plural. Interaction between the two parties has therefore an unfinalisable play and potential to create new meanings. Think of text message misunderstandings, of lost tone in emails.

Dickens takes this precept and hurtles around the city, throwing voices in a commission of reportage, omniscience, mimicry and detachment. Infinitely aware of not only the play between two speakers, he is also devastatingly mindful of the lag between narrator and author. He is experimenting with literary and narrative forms in a way that seeks to express the multi-vocality of the streets.

In the different sections of the sketches, Boz, the central narrator, shifts in viewpoint, knowledge, voice and proximity to the street-life he portrays. Boz is fragmented and elusive but there is a deliberate act of authoring cutting through and across the narration in order to cast deliberations upon social strata, architectural function and class movement. Boz falls like a shadow upon Dickens’s chosen subject, unquantifiable but perceptible, abstract but wholly there and undeniably influential.

The city is created by Dickens; he is ‘of’ London. The author, and here we drift back to the room with the wood-grained desk and grey aspect (now accompanied by two balls of feline affection), is not only a capturer of the city, but a redefiner also. Reifier too, perhaps.

[It is worth that noting at this point that, quite brilliantly, my host’s I-Tunes has randomly selected London Is The Place For Me by Lord Kitchener. No further comment needed.]

The author is instrumental in delimiting and challenging social space through a series of bewildering complex authorial moves, moves I lack the foresight to understand let alone implement. This interplay – how a novel shapes and is shaped by its surroundings – is the requisite of accomplished writers. I simply walk the streets, trying to avoid rainy determinism.

Dickenson is of course right. The city is the greatest character of them all, providing a dialogical playground between sociality, space, author, narrator, character, voice and reader. At present I inhabit and observe the city, thinking that perhaps poets are of the country and novelists are of the city. The merits and implications of the form hold a key to the nature of their residences, the residences a key to the form. But that is another story…

*The intention of including author names is not to name-drop, but remind myself that none of these ideas are my own.

Changed blog template, previous one had cramp, silly tiny central column.

Hopefully this one is clearer and with nicer colours too.

Hiding my maddening anger, he challenges me, yeah - but so what?

It's just that, I reply, it's just that the opening up of spatiality in modern critical theory has to be at the expense of the reader. I sound desperate.

I don't agree, says he.

It makes perfect sense, I argue. Your negative reaction is a product of the subordination of space in social theory - pause for breath - circa 1880 to 1920, you know... fin de siecle and all that?

I don't agree, says he.

But you haven't even read the fucking book, I plead, exasperated.

I bet you're jealous, says he.

***

Right now, I am sitting in my room, pondering the effects of a seventeenth hot lemon and the possible repercussions upon the third-world of my quite ridiculous tissue consumption. I have a cold, which makes me irritable, which makes my head hurt. It also makes it quite hard to convey notions of social space, of human geography to anybody without getting irate at their complete inability to grasp the concept; a complete inability stemming, of course, from my woefully inadequate attempts at synopsis and argument.

If I don't understand myself, then I cannot possible attempt to engage others.

Outside there is a fine, persistent haze of rain and two cars parked. One is a green Rover, its colour identical to the higher, older leaves of the ivy plant which climbs my window frame. On the opposite side of the street is a black BMW, its colour mimicking the slick tarmac it rests upon.

Life is always about interplay, not simply one set of circumstances implementing themselves on another. Cause and effect are doomed in contemporary life. Just as modernization (in an industrial change, new technologies, global trade kind of way) leads to modernism (of art, literature, science, philosophy and politics) through a need to steady social life during a period of considerable disintegration so then art and literature are able to reflect back upon the processes of modernization and accentuate, support, deny and provoke them. In truth, as history looks back, the beginnings of the two movements are inseparable and inextractable. The contemporary has changed, and social-life must adapt. In doing so it changes the catalyst that caused it. A red car passes the black BMW, travelling towards the give-way junction and slowing.

A previous post suggested that the prominence of spatiality in human thought and endeavour may well herald and/or be indicative of the postmodern age. But a definition of space is needed. We talk not of space as a contextual given, as a physicality but as an organisation of the physicality as a social product.

It is the turn of a taxi, Newcastle coat-of-arms proudly jutting from the driver's door, to wait for a TNT delivery lorry. There is a patient filing-in behind the obstruction of the green Rover and then a slightly fatigued gesture from the wheel as the taxi driver pulls out and continues up the road, the arc of his trajectory round the Rover momentarily measured by a spread of water, water now dissolved into the general greyness of the road.

Time and space are the objective form of matter and all three are inextricably connected. Indeed the nature of the relationships between the three are a central theme of history, philosophy and science. Space itself might be empirically measured, given dimensions but its organisation and meaning is a product of society, as Lefebvre argues, space is political and ideological, it is a product literally filled with ideologies.

There is a danger however, of just seeing the notion of space as a white page onto which the actions of groups and individuals are written, encountering no obstacles other than the echoes of past generations. The creation, naming, reification, living-within is a dialectic process, a two-way continuous happening in which the environment shapes its inhabitants, and man shapes the environment. Man gives functionality to the material, and so the theory of spatiality is necessarily a social one.

And where better to explore this notion within the covers of novels? Joyce's Dublin, Doblin's Berlin, Auster's New York, Sinclair's London, all books which are shaped by the cities they describe but also books that themselves wield a creative tool able to shape. They carve in symbols and signs, turn cathedrals into metonyms and motorways into thighs, they splash paint into the sky and stamp libraries into the pavements, attesting to words that were unspoken and conversations unworded. 

So of course one man's window-aspect is another man's parking space, is another man's irritating delay, and the green rover is gone, the taxi driver is late and my inclement, shivery view of Friday afternoon is restored, reminding me why I didn't go to work today.

But I got this wrote, yeah, which is halfway towards doing something productive I suppose.

***

[Much of this post owes direct or oblique reference to Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion Of Space In Critical Theory, a book which whilst dubiously structured (it claims its haphazard argument is entirely appropriate given the fragmented nature of its topic - hmmm.) and unnecessarily alienating (it talks of spatiality for eighty pages before actually defining it - erroneous seeing as it claims that its use of 'spatiality' is fascinatingly unconventional and precise - hmmm again.) but does have passages of lucid theoretical exposition. However, these passages usually appear at a juncture in which another theorist is quoted, leaving the sense of wishing you'd read those theorists instead. John Berger and Henri Lefebvre are two I shall have to investigate more thoroughly.]

Mindful of my previous blog and the excesses of boredom, I have now come full circle in barely having enough time to write of anything. This blog seems to be entirely constructed of a tiresome moaning about workloads (workloads I happily brought upon myself) and a turgid walkthrough of basic literary theory. My slender understanding then offers a strained application towards post-war fiction, before finishing with a pirohette of hacked about symbolism.

I can't decide which I prefer/loathe the most.

Previously, readers could indulge themselves with poems, short-stories and declarations upon ennui and static living, the precise length and weight of my latest turd, exactly how many spoonfuls of sugar I'd consumed in a day, fantasies about drainpipes and the colour of my walls.

Instead, now you have to endure endless ramblings about me catching the Metro to such-and-such, the fallacies of plot in the English novel and tepid illustrations of my half-induction to the cultural sector.

But I think I'll continue, if only to spite myself. The literary posts, while not accomplished, were never meant to be. They are a cautious finding, the attempt to stand up once more in academia as the sands beneath my toes shift and the undertow attempts to haul me back to sea. They allow an exploration, not a definition, and as such should be read best as a summarising of the arguments of others through the eyes of one desperate for an opinion, an idea of his own.

So much of life is punctuated by journeys that one begins to wonder whether it is indeed the journeys rather than the destinations that are of importance.

Once again, after packed public transport (doing my head-cold no good whatsoever) against a background of discontented murmurings, we review and readdress this meaning of Fictions Of Displacement - my university module title. The window of the lecture room is open, drawing in the disturbance of a busy wet road, kept in time by the gentle breezy slap of the blinds against the sill. They would put in double-glazing, but they'd have to sack the lecturer.

We are introduced with a smile, a crackling tape player emitting a Received Pronunciation reading of today's book. Grids are sketched with an erring hand upon the whiteboard in preparation for an icebreaking session with our new tutor.

We have summarised inter and intra cultural movements - between and within - before but they come to the fore again in light of Timothy Mo's novel Sour Sweet. Mo provides us with a Chinese family transplanted, face and all, to London but within this also portrays a shifting family make-up; gender reversal and authority dispersion playing out as boundaries of language and varying levels of adaptation allow the family members to cope, with varying degrees of success. The family structure however does not cope, but nor does it disintegrate entirely preferring to defer, allow, cajole and gently stretch its way into the fabric of an Anglo-Chinese existence.

The tutor threatens us with Freud for a moment, talks of dream interpretation and of condensation & displacement but falls short of asking me to describe last nights dream (a dream which I, incidentally, transcribed onto this very blog but the gods were censoring and the post was thankfully lost). The blind continues to slap on the sill as the tutor's peculiarly tight trousers tighten further and begin to define his crotch with some accuracy, dangerously close to an overwhelmed Estonian student but thankfully the wind changes, the window swings and the tutor is forced into action to save the window from smashing. The crotch is withdrawn, and Freud as a tool for criticism is forgotten.

Which is just as well, for psychoanalysis makes for GCSE discussions, and its predilection for reductionism is inappropriate for Mo's book; a book which by and large is obvious and not particularly revelatory about either its subject matter or the postcolonial literary form. To the author's credit though, he denies any attempts of simplification. The interweaving, ever-changing complexity of family relationships, business acumen and social responsibilities rarely unfolds or presents itself to us in the book.

Narratorial aides are used in the form of flashbacks (and the abhorrently clunky sections about Triad culture, which, as I suspected, were robbed wholesale from a history book) but this is a fairly straightforward telling of a generally more complicated tale. The Chinese in the novel are willing and skilful to adapt to the business markets, but less adaptable to the UK's cultural aspect. Obvious as this seems, Mo is astute in creating this tension not from anecdotal, East-meets-West awkwardness but rather from an unfamiliarly evolving family unit; a prevalent and telling occurance in more contemporary times.

The family Mo describes do not come from 'typical' Chinese families but from more realistic and unconventional ones. The central female character Lily for instance, was raised as a boy leading her to confound the patriarchy and dominate the family in times when men were still very much the breadwinners and wives the meek cleaners. Instead, driven by a business head and a steely will, Lily works front-of-house in the restaurant and Chen, her husband, is forced into the kitchen. Sour Sweet therefore recognises family influence as much as cultural, and in doing so portrays a far better sense of multi-culturalism not just as chalk-and-cheese incompatibility but a series of self referential and ordering changes and assimilations in which the culture not only affects how the family functions, but the functioning of the family actually influences how they are able to receive and adapt to the British way of life.

Although inestimably let down by his decision to include a gangland Chinese crime sub-plot (one imagines the editor screaming "we need more twists, Timmo, more twists!" into a mobile), Mo inevitably succeeds in some aspects, and fails in others. The class meanwhile, presumed bored, are just thinking. Nothing razors the intellectual slump particularly but some valid points are raised towards the end, comments about the level of heating in the room mainly.

Then to the journey home, as anticlimactic as the ending of this post/review/journal (the damn categories of confessional and literary that I have established for myself are proving useless), until the train doors slid open to reveal the session's tutor sharing a carriage home with me. And it was there that I gleaned most, derived personal preferences, discovered his personal interest in Ackroyd and the publishing details of his subsequent book on the man. Glossing over my background we also arrive at a mutual likening for post avant-garde droning electronica-skiffle, if that’s what the kids call it these days (twenty-four, I'm getting on), although his was tinged (tarnished?) with a slightly more eighties, Eno slant.

More learnt, though, on that train home, more connection felt that at any other point so far on the course. Not because anything perceptive was said, not because any real relationship beyond academia was established but just because the end of the seminar didn't just end with a damp, sodden stomp home in the drizzle. It started and ended with a journey.

I have become delirious. And so have you.