Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

There is a very good analysis of the character of Sue Bridehead in  Jude the Obscure in How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton pp71-74.

He starts by stating how he once branded her as "a perverse hussy" and goes on to see her as a woman of her time:

 "her advanced sexual views are inevitably somewhat theoretical. Women's emancipation is still at an early stage [has hardly begun]. So her beliefs can easily succumb to social pressures."

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

There is an absolutely brilliant analysis of this in How to Read Literature, by Terry Eagleton, pp149-168. Goes into an analysis of Harry Potter afterwards.

I searched for an image of this work and found that all the pictures for the films are simplistic and misleading. It isn't about anything erotic: there's no kissing in it. It's about something much more complicated than that: it's about where the money comes from. Does your money have murky origins, morally speaking? It's about how wealth can taint character and relationships, and it's about having no parents and having to choose parents with the right values who can form healthy and positive relationships. It's no good hanging onto, or longing for parents who can't do that. And in the end the child has to be his or her own person, live by his own values and judge himself/herself.

The private happiness of good families needs to be defended from the morally compromised Victorian public world, in Wemmick's case, his tiny house is surrounded by a moat and entered across a drawbridge!

It is a superb book that I knew while I was reading it was the best novel I had ever read, but this analysis seems to understand it very well in its substance, rather than poking into its methods.

Petition to stop funding cuts to Kew Gardens

The government wants to cut funds to Kew Gardens. This would stop some important projects. The petition has been running for about 6 weeks  and has 75,000 signatures, but they need 200,000 to make a difference. Please have a look at the petition at Change.org and sign if you agree that cutting funding there would be a false economy.


look at the petition here

Terry Eagleton - How to Read Literature, Young People, and Voting

If I find a book that's clever and witty and tells me something new I am so happy. Or even a book that's shown me something I know from another point of view. I want to share it with someone I love. (If you've received a book from me, and you didn't like it - I am philosophical. I still think it's better to try to share than give up hope.) I loved sharing books with the children when I had children, and we still go back to the old ways when we stumble upon a Dr Seuss, (as we did in the Youth Hostel) or a Mairi Hedderwick.

I really like the cover art too.

Anyhow, here is Terry Eagleton explaining how to appreciate literature, and I'm finding it really helpful. I always suspected, when I did my degree, that I didn't quite understand  how the writers had mixed form and content to create meaning, and this book is very helpful with understanding that, giving plenty of examples from classic literature to consider.

But this is Terry Eagleton and rejoice with me, for Terry Eagleton is witty. He is so un-pompous.

On stereotypes:

A type is not necessarily a stereotype. .... Stereotypes reduce men and women to general categories, whereas types preserve their individuality but lend it some broader context. A cynic might take this to mean that Irishmen are forever engaged in drunken brawling, but that each does so in his own unique way.

We can identify objects only by language, and language is general by nature. If it were not, we would need a different word for every rubber duck and stick of rhubarb in the world. ... there is no special word for my particular pair of eyebrows or fits of sulkiness. .... In fact, there is nothing that does not resemble something else in some respect. The Great Wall of China resembles the concept of heartache in that neither can peel a banana.

Character:

It is not that Aristotle thought Character unimportant in general. On the contrary, he regarded it as supremely important, as another of his books the Nicomachean Ethics, makes clear. this work is all about moral values, qualities of character, the difference between virtuous and vicious individuals, and so on. Aristotle's view of character in the real-life sense, however, differs from some modern versions of it. Here too, he sees action as primary. It is what men and women do, the way they realise or fail to realise their creative powers in the public arena, that matters most from a moral viewpoint. You could not be virtuous simply on your own... Ancient thinkers were less likely than modern modern ones to view individuals as existing in splendid isolation. They would no doubt have had some trouble in understanding Hamlet, not to speak of being utterly bemused by the work of Marcel Proust or Henry James....

Actually, I think you can still divide people into ancients, who naturally fulfill themselves in the public sphere, (e.g. my husband) and the moderns, who are interested in their own consciousness and the way their own perceptions of the world add up to what they know. I guess we are readers. There are fewer of us now, as Will Self wrote in the Guardian not long ago, young people don't read novels.

But you can't say they don't like a good story! Look at "Game of Thrones". I am not able to comment on this work because I haven't read it. I know S gave up on it but F's friends discuss it excitedly and she says she is going to read the whole multi-volume saga as a post-exam chillout.

But they don't want to have to work at anything. I saw on the news yesterday clips of young people explaining why they hadn't voted, and they said: we don't know enough about it. Well, I felt the same so I went and searched for info on the web, the way that's so easy and natural these days. then I was able to brief my daughter while walking to the polling station (her first time voting, we insisted that she vote for something, - anything!) But if the young people feel that they can't make important decisions for themselves, it's as though they are saying; "We are children, please decide for us, because you know best." They are passengers, and modernists, with their headphones on blocking out everything but their own consciousness, and they need a more Aristotelian point of view.

In the end I voted Green in the hope that there would be enough Green people acting in concert in Europe to protect the fish. Yup, I voted to save the fish.

My two German girls don't want to continue English lessons with me. I think that's because I kept wanting them to discuss things they have no ideas or opinions about. It is amazing that these intelligent young women (20+) have no ideas or opinions, and I'm not sure I will really miss them. But I said I would. Of course, they gave other reasons for not continuing, :- their plans had changed and they were returning to Germany earlier and they had decided not to take the Advanced exam after all.

Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart

From the New Statesman, by Alex Hern

Joff Winterhart's debut comic, Days of the Bagnold Summer, has become, along with Mary and Bryan Talbot's biography/memoir Dotter of her Father's Eyes, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a Costa Book Award. The news was undoubtedly a significant moment for the medium, and raised a number of questions about the role of comics in relation to prose [...]- which will clearly be argued over for some time to come.

The book covers six weeks of the summer holidays of schoolboy Daniel Bagnold, 15, and his librarian mother Sue, 52. It is as neat a slice-of-life as you will find; Winterhart captures teenage angst perfectly, as Daniel mopes around the house, daydreaming about being in a metal band ("Skullslayer"), and occasionally leaving to sit with his one friend in the park, dressed head-to-toe in black in the hot summer sun.

The book is structured as though it's a collection of never-before-published newspaper strips. Each page stands alone as a vignette in the Bagnold's lives, and many small events are never picked up on again. Daniel, unable to sleep, drinks a two-litre bottle of coke at 2am; Sue mistakes a page of copied-out Metallica lyrics for a heartfelt poem by her son; the pair of them discuss their memories of Sue's American father, who left the country when she was young. But these moments build up to an impressively full portrait of the two leads.

The economy of the book extends to its art. The comic-strip-style layout leads to a deliberately formulaic page -– six panels, with a one-word title -– while the panels often contain nothing but scratchy headshots of the characters. Backgrounds are rare, filled in only when they are necessary for the point of the scene. The style lends an air of theatre to the whole book, as though there are stage-hands running on with the props for the next scene between each page.

Me: The above was the review I read that tells it best. The characters are outlined in a very telling way, the body language conveying so much, but sometimes the faces are fudgy, as though the characters were expressing their own blurry responses, the way they are feeling not quite complete, in Daniel's case because he is half way through growing up and in Sue's case because she hasn't got enough in her life. They are so lovable, and at times funny, but they lack positivity. Some people will find their story depressing, and others will find it too small and too subtle. There are no momentous events here, but there is a tiny bit of development which would appeal particularly, I think, to mums, who know how every day there is a little change in our offspring, and it goes on, and it's hard to pin down any particular time.. This book attempts to do that.

This book made me look at my daughter to see if she was well-defined, as though her positivity would reflect back well on my own, and my word, she looks so clear and vital to me, even when she wears a hoodie and baggy jeans, but that might be just my view of her. So you see, the little book set me thinking and I liked it very much. It's nice to open it up anywhere and read a section. (I like putting nice in sentences because you are not meant to.. I mean it's a pleasure.)

More strange facts about octopuses

From the Guardian 16th May: by Ian Sample, edited by me:

Octopuses can regrow limbs lopped off by predators and mean scientists.

"~But for all their impressive feats, the octopus's walnut-sized brain cannot keep track of what its eight arms are doing. The problem is too hard. Since each arm is studded with suckers that act on contact, the mystery is this: how do octopuses not get tangled up in knots?

Researchers in Israel set out to answer that questions in a series of experiments that grew steadily more gruesome..

The limbs are intriguing for roboticists, because they are autonomous: none knows what the others are doing, and they make many of their own decisions. Of the octopus's 500 million nerve cells, more than half are in their arms.

...The arms can survive for around an hour after being amputated. Lone limbs have been seen to grab food and even pass morsels to where the arm thinks its owner's mouth must be.

It was a student of Hochner's who first noticed octopus suckers attached everything but octopus skin. ... On more that 30 occasions, Hochner noticed that amputated arms never latched on to themselves. ... The only time one amputated arm grabbed old of another was when the latter was peeled. [Urggghh]

Presented with dismembered arms, some octopuses grabbed them as if they were lumps of food , and brought them to their mouths. They were less likely to do so if the amputated arm was one of their own.

The scientists now want to learn which chemical is responsible for blocking the suckers, and how the animals can tell their own flesh from that of others.

British comics at the British Library

On Sunday I went to see the exhibition of comics at the BL. It wasn't as popular as I had expected. It was reasonably busy - I must have missed some of the exhibitions as I jumped the queues around the most popular showcases, and surely somewhere they had some issues of Bunty in its heyday. That was a terrific comic, still quite stuck in the 1950's in its styling. I guess those comics trained the readers' eyes to understand the huge range of compositions that go to make the comics interesting visually. I think they are a terrific medium for a story. They get into our heads.

The oldest book on display was a religious book from Germany that was more pictures than words but showed how old some graphic ideas are: four flying angels holding a rectangle for a written message. The maddening thing is that all the exhibits are in glass boxes and you can't turn the pages. You just get to look at 2 pages of each publication, when the whole thing looks so interesting, but is out of bounds for the likes of me.

The curator, Paul Gravett, points out that comics can be a powerful tool for education and propaganda, used for example, by the Young National Front, and the anti-Nazi League. They are also used for military training manuals.There was a good political section.

At times comics have been regarded as harmful to the young - they do seem mostly to be very sensationalist in content.  Judge Dredd and Tank Girl are both British creations, while they both look very American. But I was rather sad that the exhibition's parameters meant that there were no Marvel comics, with their garish colouring and perfect line drawings.

Neither was there any mention of Maus by Art Spiegelman, which is the brilliant graphic telling of his Polish Jewish family during the Nazi years and something of their later years in the USA, and that is the only adult graphic novel I have bought myself.

There are comics with graphic sexual content, which I had never seen before. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie have done some fearless work there, the only trouble being their fantasies involve very young girls and at this more healthy time when women are at last able to talk about the shame of being groped or sexually abused as children, publishing these fantasies is wrong. Why don't sexually mature women appeal to the imagination? Why must it prey on children?

I decided to buy V for Vendetta, because it is so famous. I noted that Alan Moore, "in Marvelman, 1982, investigated the psychological impact that superpowers would have on an ordinary person, and generally subverted superhero cliches." Well done him! Because he started a new crop of stories and films for all the old superheroes (the Spidy films with Toby McGuire) even including James Bond, not a superhero but finally discovering his vulnerability, starting from Casino Royale.

In short I made a long list of titles that look interesting, which I also did when I went to the sci-fi exhibition at the same place, and I came away with "Days of the Bagnold Summer" and "V for Vendetta", which I am reading at the moment.

Topics this week:

From memory: the German au pairs are on the Science chapter. This is very good for them as they have absolutely no interest in science, and no curiosity about it either. I was exactly the same at their age but I find it astounding anyway, especially as these are well-educated girls and you would expect them to take a bit of interest in something so significant to the future. I have taught a number of English language classes the rudiments of the greenhouse effect, drawing a diagram on the board, and they have all gawped, because they knew nothing whatever about it - also astonishing. A Thai lady asked me a couple of months ago why the carbon dioxide doesn't escape into space, and this is the first time I have even had a good question about it! You think something is common knowledge and they it turns out it isn't, at all. The advanced ones like grammar. This week they did more advanced conditionals, for example, with inversion.

Science is often scary - for example, Headline in Guardian 8 May: No longer as simple as GATC. Scientists give genetic alphabet a two-letter twist. New code created in lab in replicated by organism. DNA challenged as perfect molecule says US team.  When I showed this to my daughter she said: This is terrifying! and read all the science part very closely, frowning worriedly.

So I showed this to the German girls and they went: uh.

The Maybury group did a reading on caffeine and its effects in order to clarify the grammar of used to, be used to, get used to, which they found difficult to understand, and now I am going to go over narrative tenses with them and they are all going to write about something from their childhoods.

The Level 2s started with a QI quiz and then talked about installation art, they had a listening on the good qualities it has and then they discussed it mainly from the sceptical point of view. Most of them did not know much about art, so it was good for them. An effort to open their minds. then we did verbs of the senses and then we did preparation for writing a report.

The Tuesday group did a reading on teaching a chimp to talk, and their grammar is present perfect simple and continuous. The afternoon was spent on exercises about preparing for an interview. We rehearsed small talk and making a good impression. Next week: tackling interview questions.

Bellfields did target setting, plus a reading on a con-man, and a listening, and lots of phrasal verbs, and that went quite well. Next week : question tags

Anyway: all this planning and changing from book to book and topic to topic is terribly tiring, and I feel I would like to focus on just one thing for a while. I am hoping to get out somewhere this weekend. Apart from that it will be half term soon, and I desperately need it. And the inspectors have STILL  not come!

Kate Atkinson - Life After Life

I am a Kate Atkinson fan. I love her funny insights into the way her characters think. She brings them to life from the inside. I love all the novels featuring Jackson Brodie, even though I don't understand why she gives him such a hard time, and in the last book he quoted from the poems of Emily Dickinson like a postgraduate in English Literature, and he is supposed to be ex-military, ex-policeman. I mean, if he was keen on poetry, it would hardly be that of the fey Emily Dickinson, would it? Really?

Anyway, Life after Life. It is a long book. It's like a computer game where the central character dies and then comes alive again! and this time makes other choices and therefore does not die in the same way. On subsequent lives, the other choices may be better and lead to a happier life and fewer deaths in the cast of characters, or may be worse and lead to an awful life and a worse death and a worse outcome for other characters. However, she is always born in 1910, which means she is always 29 when the 2nd world war breaks out, and much of the action takes place in the Blitz. It's very unpredictable, even when the same things happen in subsequent lives, the central character (Ursula Todd) may or may not be involved in the same way.

I think the reader's understanding may be supposed to be informed by other literature of the same period, for example, the Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Or any biography of the Mitford sisters. Literature now bounces off other literature and telly programmes you may have read or seen, and this may have once been serendipitous, but now there is consciousness on the part of the writers, who have read the theory of this, originating with the writings of a Russian called Mikhail Bakhtin, who put forward the theory of the polyphonic novel. To give more detail:

 "The French psychoanalytical theorist Julia Kristeva has argued that all texts are interdependent and that every individual work is actually a tissue of quotations and cross-references, allusions and rewriting." . 

From "The Popular and the Canonical, Debating Twentieth-century Literature 1940-2000, ed by David Johnson, p 181

Then there is a pattern of Foxes and Woolfs and of course, Ursula means bear which is supposedly significant but I could see no significance in this at all. But I don't mind reading the whole thing again when I have more time. I had to keep putting the book down and thinking of job-related things so I lost the thread - lost the plot, in fact.

Of necessity, the view this book takes of life has to be the long view, and the characters have to come across strongly but in a kind of shorthand. Therefore they seem a bit stereotypical, similar to characters in other novels from the same time. The story told and retold and told again takes the power away from any single version of the story. Events are all-important. And for me now, at this time in my life, it doesn't feel like something I can relate to. I find I like focusing on feeling or listening. I concentrate on the tiny moments that make life sensual. So for me this book is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope (- but who's to say which is the right end?)

I blame Freud

I think Freud was right when he published his thought that a lot of the neurotic cases he had seen had been caused by childhood sexual abuse. However, this idea was badly received so he changed it: he said that the children wanted their parents sexually. Electra complexes, Oedipus complexes; in a nutshell, that the children were subject to sexual desires, even babies. People got him all wrong. He was talking about the unconscious.

If you fast forward to the seventies and watch Woody Allen's "Manhattan" it it clear that a grown adult (40 ish?) is in a sexual relationship with a teenager and is treating it almost as a teacher/ pupil relationship - it has always made me uncomfortable, especially the way he messes her around and tries his best to get her back at the end. Selfish or what? The guys in "Annie Hall" too, make salacious comments about young teenage girls: it shows the way it was back then. Preying on the young was becoming mainstream. Normalised. O.K. Talking about Freud all the time (the way people did) seemed to be a way of justifying - intellectualising -  something that was actually a creepy desire for forbidden (innocent, vulnerable) fruit.

I remember dancing with an 20-something adult man when I was 13 and he asked me if I was a "woman", and I said I was, although I thought it a very personal question. He asked me how I managed! He meant: How do you manage for sex? I had just had my first kiss and I was very happy. And drunk. My parents (and their friends) let us drink Martini and Lemonade, which was an early version of an alcopop. Also, Dubonnet and lemonade. All quite enough to make us tiddly. I said "oh, I manage fine", trying to keep the party happy, as girls do, and thinking about the boy who had kissed me. Lord knows what he thought I meant.

I was thinking about this because I read all the details about the Max Clifford case. Our local celebrity got eight years (will serve 4) in prison for sexual abuse. Sure he deserved it. But in 1977 it was all over the place; people talked about sex with teenage girls all the time. I am so glad the tide turned: sadly the corrosion has gone deep and the law is touching only the surface.

Better to bang up the abusers who are currently abusing rather than historical cases. I read in the paper some years ago that there are so many perverts abusing their children that the judges get bored of hearing the cases. Boredom! Boredom is not the right response.

NOTE: crossword clue in Guardian no: 26,249: In terms of habits, not getting any less anti-Freudian?

Quite a hard one and I gave up and looked up the answer: heeheegroan: shrink resistant.

More about the Lechlade trip

Helena, who rowed at stroke in the crew that I coxed, wrote a blog about the Lechlade trip, and it is very good. She is a talented writer who absolutely loves doing this sort of thing (physical challenge, small boats) which comes across quite clearly, and I just sat and steered, somewhat against my will as I would have liked to have done some skiffing too! She put everything into it but she has rowed across the Atlantic with her husband and I suppose rowing down the Thames is a breeze compared to that. She is a small but fit woman in terrific shape. I come into this blog only as a bit of a know-all who has all the low-down on William Morris. I just couldn't do justice to William Morris!

Helena's blog how-thames-grows-up-from.html?spref=fb

Notice also that the Thames was a "total mess". The effects of the flood need serious effort to remedy, and this will take some time, for example, collecting rubbish from weirs. We were out on the river yesterday and floating islands of organic matter were still coming down, at quite a pace. Also, in the case of boats that have floated away onto land and become marooned, or have sunk at their moorings, the owners need to be interested enough in them to retrieve them, and in many cases they are not.

Stuck into work, thinking about Germany

Recently I have been stuck into work and, apart from walking around the garden (this doesn't take long as it's only a small one, but longer as I have to pull up hundreds of sycamore seedlings), admiring the amazing spring transformation, I have been concentrating on that. I have 3 small classes and 2 big ones. So there are a great many individuals to think about when it comes to target-setting - which I have been slow to do but have started now and will finish next week: I need to manage some tutorial time. I have to write something up for all of them in their plans so I'm doing that and updating group profiles. Nice to get it all done so when the inspectors come you can say there: it's all there. They have not been to our college since 2007 and that is ridiculous. Many things have improved. But at the mo I think the way the management is treating the staff is appalling, they want to make many of us redundant and on top of that, they have made it difficult for us to park our cars. I have got my union details here and I am thinking of joining, but it is so expensive!

My friend in the Neths has sent me the website for Deutsche Bahn, and you can book your trains all in English. I feel really excited about going to Germany. I hope it's not too expensive to eat there. In Vienna we always bought breakfast in a cafe near the hotel and divided it into 2 as we had enough for lunch as well, and packed all the extra bread and cheese for lunch. We also ate in McDonald's as it was the cheapest, but we tried to find other places like kebab shops! which are always cheap. It's a good thing that I am into the art and the culture and not so bothered about the food, otherwise travel would be very painful. It was lovely in the Czech republic as eating was quite reasonable and the beer was cheaper than the coffee, and just what you need to drink in the heat.