I am a teacher

I went to be interviewed for another job yesterday. It took a vast amount of courage to do it, because it is a long time since I taught, and I am rather out of the habit of thinking of myself as a teacher, and more in the habit of thinking of myself as working through a business process in order to achieve outcomes.

I had to teach the Head of the Department and the Head of Curriculum the grammar point Wish plus past tense. I taught them pretty much as I would have taught a class but I forgot to get them to do a production task (writing their own wishes). But it was a textbook lesson and included some Powerpoint slides to make in interesting and I had also made some exercises which they enjoyed.

I wish I had got the job!

They gave to job to someone who was already working in the department! But I was a very close second and the thing was, I remembered that I enjoyed being a teacher and the sense of responsibility and performance. But afterwards I could not sleep and that's what I don't like about it - the adrenaline comes and goes and the end result is that one feels terribly tired. That's why teaching suits the young. When I was at College I explained to our tutor that I couldn't sleep at all after evening teaching - that I couldn't wind down afterwards whether it had gone well or gone badly. And she said she was exactly the same! Even with all the confidence and calmness she exuded.

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, Part 2

This book, as I explained before was written in 1958. However, certain things that Huxley was concerned about at that time are more true than ever. Although he over-estimated the likelihood of people being swayed by propaganda, he was perceptive about the growth of the entertainment industry playing a role in eradicating political dissent.

In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities : the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.

Then Huxley is also interested in Hitler's methods of crowd-manipulation. He notes the size of the rallies, the difference between a huge gathering and a fairly small one, and the enhancing effect of holding them at nighttime. "assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice."

From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collectives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerating overpopulation, of accelerating over-organisation and every more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual?

Many a man, said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realised in Hitler's totalitarian system."

Since Hitler's day the armoury of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. .... Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

Huxley imagined that these devices would be used by the dictator for control rather than by the people to communicate privately. But he was wrong. As we can see from the Arab Spring, social networks allowed by the Internet empower the individual rather than the dictator.

Rejected by the office ladies

I went for a job in a school office. I got on well with the men I met first, a teacher and the burser. Then time to meet the office ladies. When someone says "Oh they're lovely!" it is time to worry. They questioned me for a very long time and found out all about me. And they did not like the person they met, even though I very much wanted the job. They considered themselves the queens of their little kingdom and did not want someone who might have managed the kingdom differently, or say it softly, more efficiently and easily.

But they very much rejected me as a person rather than my skillset. It was more hurtful, but just as well, as you don't want to work with people who are jealous and suspicious of you.

Captain Ahab was really a stalker

He was really the ultimate stalker - he had been hurt and could think about nothing else. Unlike many stalkers he did not mistake his feelings for love or benevolence, he knew that the strong feeling he had was desire for revenge, or more complicatedly, the desire to resolve the matter differently. He was ready to wait his chance, for however many months it took, and then he had a fixed purpose - "a monomania" as Melville calls it.

Because for many stalkers, their monomania hurts only themselves, it is their self-constructed vulture pecking at their spleen - just as Melville describes.

Moby Dick again

I love Moby Dick. I am on Chapter 40 something now. some of the readers are amateurs who only read fairly well, and others are brilliant readers who make every word interesting. Will Self had a seemingly very boring chapter to read about the colour white, and how it struck fear into Ishmael, and all the connotations and anecdotes from history about the colour white, which is nothing on the page, but when Will Self read it aloud it was splendid, magnificent and joyous. I do recommend this audio book because the prose is strong, designed to be heard, like Shakespeare, or the Bible.

Because I listen sometimes inattentively, and the prose is very difficult in places, I wanted to have the book to refer to. Well, I thought that the book was in the Great Pile of Unread books, in the bedroom, along with some Dickens novels and Joyce's Ulysses. It was not. I decided I must have given up on the idea of ever getting through it, and I must have taken it to a charity shop. So I ordered it again, on Amazon, and have been reading it a little here and a little there. And yesterday I found that I had the unread copy all the time! It is in the American section of my little library. So I shall have a spare copy to give to someone.

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, and Silver Linings Playbook, Part 1

Published in 1958. Rather amazing that it is still in print. In this collection of essays Huxley looks to see whether the society he was living in is more or less like the society he predicted in Brave New World, written in 1931. In this dystopia the people were happy to have no freedom of choice because they had been conditioned to this even before birth, and indeed, had been designed in the test tube to fufil a certain economic function. One question it begs is "Do people need freedom in order to be happy?" because readers argue whether this kind of happiness - the mass of people have lost the ability to ask Why? questions -  is true happiness.

Between the publication of Brave New World and 1958 the world had experienced the rise of the totalitarian state under Stalin and Hitler, and the second world war.

He first identifies the chief problem of the future as overpopulation. He foresees that this problem must lead to worsening economic conditions. These are likely to lead to political unrest, and he foresees that this is likely to be the precursor to anti-democratic forces.

More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their bureaucratic manager. But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. ... A democratic constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is concentrated in too few hands. Such a consitution works pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there is a traditional respect for constitutional procedures. Where the republican or limited monarchical tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of power.

Huxley then points out that technology becomes ever more complex and expensive, so that the small manufacturer can no longer participate in the economy, which becomes completely dominated by big Business. The Power Elite employs the workforce in offices, factories and shops, also in the media, where it can influence the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.

Huxley believes in the value of the individual rather than the value of the mass. This is crucial. He quotes a philosopher -psychiatrist, Dr Erich Fromm:

Our comtemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual, it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

Fromm rather destroys his own argument by then saying that the sympoms of mental stress are signs of the individual fighting back; and that "normal" people are really the problem.

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality", but in fact they have been to a great extent de-individualized. but "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too ..."

Huxley enlarges on this argument.

Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity's increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health. --- City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal - a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant.

I want to refer to a current film that I saw at the weekend that illustrates this mental health thing.  It was American and mainstream, not arthouse, called "Silver Linings Playbook" (I think) and it was about a guy who was very definitely mentally ill, and needed medication and counselling to live at home with his parents rather than in a mental hospital. He had been diagnosed as bi-polar and that is a condition the cause of which may be nothing to do with the way we have arranged our society. Or..?

However, his father's disorder illustrates Huxley's and Fromm's arguments nicely. The father was a completely obsessive sport fan, whose team had become a religion for him, and because its wins and losses meant so much to him he believed he could influence the outcome of the game -  by having his sons there watching the TV with him, and having the remotes lined up beside him in a certain way, and holding a green handkerchief. He had a legal restraining order which did not allow him to attend the games in person because he would so often get into fights with fans of opposing teams. This is a man in his 60s/70s. So a supposedly rational man who functioned reasonably well in society, at least to the point where he could run a book (gambling) that made enough money to keep his family, had also symptoms of an inability to rationalise, which everyone else recognised as a kind of insanity.

The interesting thing about this film was that everyone in it was familiar with mental symptoms, knew terms like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and the audience also participated by understanding these terms, and the reason why the best friend had his repeated feeling of being strangled, while his wife, with her cast -iron certainties and acceptance of societal norms, was seen as the least attractive character.

So I think Fromm's ideas about how we externalise all this stress has now become mainstream. Everyone knows that modern life drives them nuts. It is accepted. But how powerlessly and pathetically we accept all this and we do nothing at all to drive social change.

End of Part 1

Allergic to swimming?

Every time I swim, I get a runny nose and sneezing, which is very annoying as I love swimming. Will I get over this or will it get worse? Is there anything I can do to avoid it?

A fine day- Saturday

I thought that I should like to make use of such a fine day, and go for a walk. But my husband did not want to come for a walk with me. I was angry with him for not prioritising his time, right now, while the weather is fine. So I drove down to the river and walked there, listening to Moby Dick. I saw other parents, both male and female, without their partners and their offspring in pushchairs. But even if you have a child in a pushchair you are not alone. Later I saw many other middle-aged people walking briskly on their own, or walking as husband and wife.

I also saw ducks and geese, seagulls and swans, and many young crews out rowing, all of which were beautiful and made me glad. I took a detour and saw the house where I grew up; my grandparents lived there before I was born. When Grannie and Grandad lived there the house was well-kept and so was the garden - a long herbaceous border down one side that later my father took out and replaced with roses. We had dark green paint around the windows. Now the window frames are all cracked and peeling and the house looks almost derelict. Only a Sky dish on the side of the house shows you that it is lived in. What a waste! Rivermount. All the other houses in the road seem to have been extended - an extra garage and a room over it for the au pair, at the very least.

I think I want my house back, but if I had it back, would it make me happy? Maybe bad memories would come flooding back.

The war against evil

The evil I am referring to is child molesting. A local celeb has been arrested. Obviously I hope he can prove his innocence and that it is all a mistake - but tonight he is still in custody. Recently a number of celebrity men have been arrested and charged. Can it be a witch hunt? It makes you raise your estimate of how much perversion is out there and how creepy men are. These avuncular, family-loving men, why do they want to have sex with little children? It's not as though they were sad social outcasts. These are people who seem well-adjusted to social norms. What is going wrong in the world?

It's a good thing to find all these criminals and bring them as low as the law allows. But surely they cannot all be criminals?

Moby Dick the big read.

Last evening I went for a good walk and listened to Moby Dick, which is a podcast you can download through itunes. It is beautiful to listen to, like poetry. The chapters are all read by different readers, so one is not annoyed by hearing the same voice all the time. Yesterday I was on a particularly long chapter read by Simon Callow. I didn't recognise his voice at first because he managed to sound like Bill Bryson until he got into his stride, when he seemed to hit the New England accent, as far as I can tell. What a remarkable gift the man has! It was a long and difficult chapter where he took the part of a preacher telling about Jonah and the Whale, and it was like rolling waves of language, crashing in my ears as irregularly but as inevitably as the waves of the ocean.



here is the linkTHE SERMON

As I came back down the muddy path it was almost completely dark and there was no streetlight, and it was such a joy not to be able to see! It was damp and foggy too.

Memento Mori

I read a novel with this title, by Muriel Spark. The characters were all old people and someone - a mysterious voice - telephoned them one by one and said "Remember you must die." They were all terrified and panic stricken, like chickens when a fox is about. But one lady received her phone call and said "I hadn't forgotten, thank you." Because she really hadn't forgotten.

I go to Church every week and this probably helps one to remember.

Muriel Spark was a very interesting writer, when she was young. Youngish.

Down

Wasted and wounded,
It ain't what the moon did
and I got what I paid for now...

It is a long time since I woke up singing (in my head) a Tom Waits song. I am right down low and feeling rejected - out of work and out of the loop. Yesterday I went to sign on at the jobcentre. This is not a terrible experience. I am sure a lot of the unemployed look forward to it, as the people are polite and sympathetic, to me anyway. I do remember certain of our learners at Redhill who used to get very angry at the jobcentre, feeling that they were being told to apply for jobs which did not exist, which I can certainly believe.

While I was sitting there waiting, a young man came in and he did look morose. He could have looked upbeat without his black beard and shaggy hair and his tendancy to sag his shoulders. He reminded me of a character in Cancer Ward called Oleg, but Oleg was big and this young man was slightly built. While I was sitting there I decided to pass the time by saying a prayer for him. I closed my eyes and said silently the blessing that goes: "May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face... etc) Then when I opened my eyes the young man was smiling and laughing at me. How strange. I was wondering if he could read my mind, because there seemed to be no other explanation. I do not move my face when I pray. I was quite annoyed with him for reading my mind and then for laughing. Still, it was nice to see him happy. Then I was called away.

Another rejection yesterday. Sometimes I try to ask other people the reason for the rejection and they give me answers which I accept, but they don't know the whole story. The truth is, only I know the whole story, and in this case, I don't know what happened at the other end.

Yesterday I swam 40 lengths = 1000 metres.

Places you must see in England

I think to start with everyone should see Hadrian's wall, which the emperor caused to be built to mark the northern limit of Roman territory and to keep the Scots at bay. Not just to see the very fine fortification that the Romans built, but to see the bleak moorland on each side stretching away with the shadows of the clouds on it. There is a fort called Housesteads up there with a very fine latrine for the soldiers, you can imagine them sitting there chilling their bums off. Brrr.

Lindisfarne is a small island off the east coast which had an important monastery. After the Romans were vanquished in Europe the Vandals destroyed their books (this is a simple way of putting it) and Roman literature was largely saved by the early Christian monks who lived on little rocky islands off Britain and in Ireland, and who made copies of the Roman books that had survived. There is not much to see on Lindisfarne but that is probably the point. The monks lived with the rocks and the sea and the sky. These remain.

Then there is the Lake District. This is an important place for the contribution it has made to literature - take a bow, Wordsworth and Coleridge, also Beatrix Potter -  but also because it is Not Like England. It's a volcanic landscape inhabited mainly by sheep, and hikers can walk at will. I think a couple of days walking in the Lake District would cure people of thinking that England is London. they would also enjoy real independent pubs and tea shops, which are no longer part of towns, where they are generally "outlets".

I think a trip to Manchester is worth while, just to see the City Hall, which looks like a Disney Castle, and is very fine inside as well, and the Exchange building, and perhaps to visit night clubs, about which I know nothing, but they are big in Manchester.

Ironbridge is a world heritage site and anyone who is even slightly interested in science or technology should go there, because this is the place where iron-making began as an industry. There is a visitor centre with everything well-explained and there are many old works.

Saltaire is also worth seeing - it's a town built by a mill owner called Titus Salt. He built everything there for his workers - no pub, because he was a teetotaller - but all the row houses and schools and recreational facilities. And now the mill has been taken over by a display of David Hockney's art, which is admirable.

Stratford is good for its historical buildings - it's amazing what remains of Shakespeare's time. You need to do a walking tour.

Henley on Thames is lovely with or without the regatta, for a peaceful day in a very well-off market town and a walk by the river.
Surrey is interesting too - there is a long path called the North Downs way which I would recommend for a day out. On the sandy hills there is a lot of horse-riding going on, and there are pretty villages off the path.

I think everyone should also see Bath - which has a fabulous new visitor centre and many Roman remains to see - and also Avebury, which is a pre-historic stone circle, much more elaborate than Stonehenge, and also Salisbury plain and the town of Salisbury.

I am sure I will think of more. But then the visitor should go to London in order to be able to say, Oh, this isn't like England at all!

Not that I don't love London. it constantly surprises me. There is so much to London you could be excused for never going anywhere else, but you would be wrong to think it was everything.

The Infinite Monkey Cage - a radio 4 recording at Broadcasting House

We were lucky! We had a very good edition of monkey cage with some very interesting talk about neurobiology (the brain) and Jo Brand was on. Our scientists were very good communicators and the conversation flowed very well. The only trouble was we had to stand up – the show took about an hour and 20 to record and for the radio they cut it down to a thirty minute discussion, so some of the coherence and flow will be lost in the edit. I find that sometimes I listen to shows and lose the thread and have to rewind and still find the talk difficult to follow, and clearly that is why; - because it was over-edited.

We went into a new entrance to the Beeb in Great Portland Street and you look straight down in to a huge hub of desks and computers and all the studios up above have glass walls onto this hub area. – it’s very exciting and modern. Florence thought it was very cool but Ashley and I rather missed the old days when it all seemed smaller and friendlier.

Link to the show: It was really, really interesting - http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/timc/rss.xml

HG Wells

There is a great deal to say about HG Wells, possibly because he wrote too much. He was full of himself. His voice adds a huge amount to his fiction and the most important element was energy: the vitality of the man who knows he is intelligent and that, without belonging to the establishment (Wells' mother was a servant), he could make it in the world.

I have just finished Tono Bungay, a novel which I have been meaning to read for some time. It gets great reviews. But I here and there thought - now he is trying to be Dickens - now he is trying to get the effect of Rice Boroughs or Conan Doyle writing an exotic adventure - Conrad even! and he is trying to get away from the limitedness of his world view, his view which is so English and class bound. Even at the end where he tried to describe his vision of England, it is not England he describes but London, and the very centre of London at that.

Having just read (March 2013) about Charlie Chaplin, I see that he and Wells had a huge amount in common. They both grew up poor, insecure and hungry, worked incredibly hard to get success, and became terrible romantic womanisers even as they were trying not to be - but to strip away all that seemed mythical and bunkum and get to the truth. Their private lives were interesting but messy. Chaplin seems always to have liked very young girls, and found older women frightening, and this may be because his mother, at a young age, went insane through malnutrition.

You see in both that pre- WWI physique - short stature, narrow shoulders and chest.