24 hours a day the academic way

From Mary Beard's Blog:

This is how an academic called Arnoldo Momigliano spent his day: according to himself:

In my 24 hour continental timetable I divide my time each day as follows:

2 hours of pure sleep

1 hour of sleep dreaming about administration

2 hours of sleep dreaming about research

1 hour of sleep dreaming about teaching

½ hour of pure eating

1 hour of eating with research (= reading)

1 hour of eating with colleagues and of conversation on teaching and research

½ hour of pure walking

½ hour of walking with research (= thinking)

12 ½ hours of research with preparation for teaching (= reading, writing or also thinking)

1 hour of official teaching without thinking

1 hour of official administration without thinking

___

24

What is interesting is that his down time is not really down time in that the mind has to be occupied with something (unless you are absolutely gaga), so really he is working a 22 hour day, the mind being active (not really dreaming) even when he is asleep. I find it takes some sleep before you know whether yesterday's work stands up well today, or before you can see the next small step. I am always finding I have resolved something in my sleep, or I wake up and immediately remember something I have forgotten to do. When he teaches he isn't thinking: but I think this must be lecturing, which is not the same as teaching. However, he is dead right about administration, which is tiresome and doesn't involve thought. 12 and a half hours of research with preparation for teaching is a long day though. He could do with knocking off a bit earlier. 

Poem by Harry Clifton

Doctor Benn

(Gottfried Benn, 1886–1956)

Practitioners in poor neighbourhoods
Everywhere, in the aftermaths of wars
And reputations, Doctor Benn,
Physician and poet, soldier and survivor,
Is open for consultation.

It is not you, he says, who are sick.
It is the age, inside you,
That is sick. Your waiting rooms
And patients, grains of insulin, morphine,
Are all beside the point.

Professional ethics bore you.
You would love him, just once, to talk about Poetry.
He smiles politely,
Changes the subject. ‘That garden’,
He says, ‘You see it? On the plot of wasteland

Between ruins, its smoke-drift of autumn,
Compost fires, potato drills in leaf –
The woman who tends it, far gone in years,
Her gabardine belted with old rope,
Her headscarf, veteran’s scars,
Is everything to me . . .’

Sometimes he helps her, smoking a cigar.
No one reads him now, of course.
He would sleep, he says, through whole bombardments,
Believing in nothing any more –
Untouchable, pure.

Harry Clifton (2005)

There is something of the Wasteland about it, isn't there?  He gives us a quiet story from the other side of the mirror, where there are no trivial events, but only the slow-moving essentials, taking whole lifetimes before they choose their direction.

A plant collector and potato/ tomato expert

Interesting programme from the Life Scientific, Sandy Knapp: wants to save potatoes from disease.

Radio programm should be here for 1 year

Evening and the scent of orange blossom coming through the window

it has been hot and hectic and the breezy evening is wonderful. Beautiful yellow light.

A good summer for plants

Because of the rain in the winter, there is a lot of growth this year, and if you have taken a risk by planting something in soil that is usually too dry, your experiment will have been successful. Some of the trees are overheavy, and in our road a large branch crashed down from a hollioak because it had become overburdened. The sweet chestnuts have innumerable flowers on right now.

There is a huge tree next to the hut. It's an ash. I have looked for signs of die-back and they are there, but it's in early -onset, if  you can say that, and one of my plans for the summer is to go and live at the hut for a while and stay near the tree before it dies.

sadly many of the trees nearby are at this stage. Most riverside trees are ash or willow.

The ferns have recovered from being split up, although last year it seemed that they were at death's door. The magnolia is supposed to be a small magnolia but it is becoming very wide and when I cut it it doesn't flower well the following year. I am progressing a long term re-shaping of the philadelphus, (it's a battle because it doesn't like growing from old wood) and I feel the weather has really helped my cause. The castor-oil plant is huge. I want husband to cut it because I am intimidated by large plants but I think It is actually down to me, because he says things like, "But it looks so healthy!" and doesn't want to cut it, even if it steals the light from everything else.

He is also funny about flowers. Whenever he looks at the garden he says, "Pity there aren't more flowers" as if he expected everything to be in flower all the time. (He also says the birds sing because they are happy. Ah, sweet.) There are plenty of pollinators this year, but few honey bees.

Some things in my garden look like alliums, thin and scrawny, just a globe of blue flowers on a slim stick. What is this? I don't remember planting it. Where would it like to grow?

Saddest song

Long ago I had a boyfriend who played the guitar and he sang this song to me. He sang it so beautifully, but I couldn't understand the lyrics. "It's sacrilege for us to take advantage of the blind."? Today I found it on Youtube with a comment, saying that Graham Nash wrote it about how bad he felt for a man whose wife he was having an affair with. It's about guilt and shame. Now it all makes sense.

the ridiculous thing is that this song is very short and only gets going after 1 minute 30, but if you have the patience give it a listen. The harmonies are outstanding.


new link - old one had been removed, but no Crosby harmonies on this one :(

Skiffing up the Wey Navigation

How to have a good day. Convene at 10:00 with lots of water and a packed lunch. Skiff beyond Shepperton lock to the little travelled Wey Navigation. Go to pub, lunch, skiff back in glorious sunshine. Sadly I have now got a skiffer's suntan, which means, red knees.

Back of the hut, Thames Lock

Note the date - 1653 - without the Navigation Weybridge wouldn't exist

Thames Lock is a double - and the last manned lock

All this was underwater  in the floods last time I posted it here

I recommend the beer

Had to go under the road bridge

The Town lock - 

Ghastly crowded suburbia and blooming raining too.

This weirstream makes getting into the lock difficult for a skiff, we had to take two shots at it

The Sun - and petitions

One of the petitions I have signed is about taking the bare boobs out of The Sun newspaper. I think it is sad to encourage young girls to think their tits give them more value than any other thing about them. There is more than enough encouragement for young girls to think that way and it would be great to prune it back a little. Sadly, girls judge themselves by what boys/men think and eventually they fall under the spell of judging themselves by what one boy/man thinks. (Until they are older and wiser - but sometimes there's no chance of becoming wise.) However, when it came to explaining why I signed up to take the boobs out of The Sun I just couldn't do it - it seemed so self-righteous. So I never tried to spread that particular petition. I have also signed one against FGM. It is illegal in this country so the Muslim communities who want it done (African) take their girls back to Africa for them to be mutilated in this way. So the petition is to spread the word that this is happening and by teaching about it in schools, make it socially unacceptable.

A lot of the petitions do have a good effect! For example, the petition to keep searching for the crew of Cheeky Rafiki, that was lost in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, had an immediate effect.

I signed a petition to stop Michael Gove making the English Lit curriculum so "Little England" - everything on the GCSE syllabus has to be English, ridiculous. No more "Of Mice and Men", or "To Kill a Mocking Bird" - these are stories with a bit of real meat to them which show young people how powerful a story in a book can be. Who cares that they're American?? It doesn't matter. Young people have to do Shakespeare and a 19th cent novel - this is hard enough for them: let them have at least one book they can just enjoy.

Another petition I tried to spread is the Stop the Funding Cuts to Kew Gardens one. it's still short of signatories. But the organisers have taken it to Downing Street by way of getting it in the news. Needs 1200 more to cause a question to be asked in parliament I believe. It's so close.

the Sun newspaper came through my door (a free marketing strategy) and it has a lovely montage on the front of 117 English people we are proud of. The Queen is there in front of the mob and there are many, many popular entertainers, Prof Brian Cox is near the front with David Attenborough to represent science. Stephen Hawking is squeezed in at the back. But we seem to be mainly a nation of pop singers, actors and footballers. They even have a pixellated image of someone you have to guess is Banksy.   It's not racist as there's a smattering of black musicians and footballers and Mo Farrer - suddenly he's English. But inside we have a poem by Katie Hopkins, an erstwhile contestant on The Apprentice who looked as though she would give the patronising Alan Sugar something to think about and then became a journalist.

I'm not naturally distrustful

I just like my own

Proper English lads - strong and brave

Perfectly home grown

Whatever happens at the World Cup

I know this to be true

If you cut me to my core

My blood's red, white and blue.

Racism is never far from patriotism and I haven't seen anything like this for ages. But then, I get the Guardian free from Waitrose, don't I?  (This means, a liberal paper from an upmarket supermarket.) I have no idea what most of the country thinks, because I live in a prosperous part of the country. Some of my family is pretty right-wing and probably reads this sort of thing every day quite happily.

The History Boys by Alan Bennett

I turned on the telly and found myself watching this film, so I stuck with it. When I watched it before I thought it was about attitudes to education. Do you teach young people to value the treasures of your civilization, or do you teach them to know some tricks of argument and "gobbets of knowledge" that will enable them to impress others, e.g. to pass the entrance interview for Oxford or Cambridge? What about "facts, facts, facts" - is that the right approach?

But this time around I wasn't so struck by the arguments of the educators, I was more interested in what they now call "sexual politics". I don't think it used to have a name. In any group, there is one who stands out as seeing themselves as a sexual "prize" and whom others lust after. And because others lust after that person, he is in a strong position, while those who desire are weak and vulnerable. Being weak and vulnerable is painful for anyone, but for a schoolboy it is surely terrible because it's new. It's a great burden to carry around.

Then the teachers who are in the same (desirous) position can look ridiculous, faced with a strong feeling that they have to master. (Can anyone control their blushes?) Carpe Diem is a young person's watchword, because for anyone in a position of responsibility there is also the need to "keep it in your pants".

One reviewer pointed out that teaching can be an erotic thing and this is true. It's a sexiness of the mind, I think. On the teacher's part you have something valuable to share, and in response, on the students' part, there should be a striving to impress. As a teacher, you have to be disappointed by bad work and reward good work. You are the judge, standing slightly aloof, whose approval has to be won. Therefore, it is vital not to appear weak and ridiculous. Luckily, I have not been in this position but I am sorry for the teachers who fall, especially the gay ones.

Maus, a survivor's tale by Art Spiegelman

I re-read this work which I first read I think in 1989. It's brilliant. It tells one Jew's story of being deprived of his comfortable life in Poland, fighting the Germans, being rounded up into a ghetto, people being taken away batch by batch, hiding away from the Nazis in desperately cramped conditions and finally being betrayed and taken to Auschwitz. It tells a terrible tale of loss.It also tells the tale of a son who finds his old father very irritating and irrational, especially in his fixation with money, but from the story of the father's traumatic experiences we find out how much, in the end, money does really matter. It bought them time.

All the Jews are drawn as mice, and yet... we understand their emotions from their body language. We also understand from the drawings who are the virile young mice and who are the elderly.

"a remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution ... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant." 

Jules Feiffer 

 From the Guardian: 11th June 2009

Art Spiegelman has found it difficult to produce another long-length work since Maus.

Spiegelman, 61, looks just as he draws himself - a waistcoat, a constant cigarette; he is self-mockingly neurotic but infinitely wise, still carrying the heavy burden of guilt that plagues survivors' children. His vast career has ranged from the grotesque Garbage Pail Kids, to In the Shadow of No Towers, his comic-strip journal about September 11, and last year's reissue of Breakdowns, a graphic memoir described as "the Citizen Kane of modern comics".

Despite the awful details of his life, Spiegelman's confessional style makes his works almost impossible to put down. His parents were forced into the Polish ghettos in 1941, reluctantly handing their eldest son - Spiegelman's brother - over to relatives to hide him. The little boy was poisoned to death by his aunt during a Nazi raid; she thought it better than letting him go to the camps, and killed herself, too. His grief-stricken parents ended up in Auschwitz, which they survived. Spiegelman was born after the war and raised in New York, an only child with a "ghost brother". His father was brutalised and damaged; his mother took her own life when Spiegelman was 20 and didn't leave a note. All this is laid bare in his work. To him, Maus, published in 1986 and 1992, was, "as a blues musician would say, my crossover hit"; but he sees all his work on a continuum, "made from the same fractured psyche".

..What he calls his "efficiently casual" drawings in Maus took 20 to 30 drafts. He is so paralysed by the pressure of creating the perfect sketchbook that he prefers to draw while on the phone, on Post-It notes or envelopes, which he usually throws away. If he is drawing on a newspaper scrap, it is easier to shut down the left side of the brain, so the right side is free to move around; he won't know what the drawing is until it is finished.

Spiegelman tells me this in a stream of rapid-fire, Woody Allen-style self-deprecation as we walk down a Paris street. "I have too much respect for books, so to make a mark in a blank one seems like a violation," he says. "Then the neurosis compounds itself, because if you make a good drawing, you don't want to screw the book up by making a bad drawing after. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one drawing in them - a whole shelf full. And then if you make a bad drawing, you never want to look at the book again. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one page torn out that I never went back to. It's very rare that I can just get myself engaged and overcome all these strange inhibitions I've set up for myself." Still, he loves these drawings for their quality as "electrocardiograms, recording thought very directly". Publishing the sketchbooks has been liberating, he says. "When you've been revealed in all your pathetic nakedness, there's nothing else to lose. So yes, finally therapy that worked!"

... This was an experiment in forcing himself to sit down every day and draw in a sketchbook in 2007. The self-analytical sketches include bloodstained "finished" drawings on a battlefield. "It was a kind of, 'What's your problem, Jack?'" he says. "And what the problem has tended to be over many years now is that ever since Maus resulted in this bright Klieg light always aimed in my direction, which has its benefits, it has also created this discomforting sense of always being observed, as if I had little eyeballs sitting on my shoulder with arms and legs, and all the eyeballs are saying, 'Oh look, look, he made a line!' That's not the best way to make lines." Will he ever escape the shadow of Maus? "It's even worse than that," he says, lighting a cigarette. "Most other cartoonists are afraid of the same thing." He means that every graphic novel is compared to Maus. "As a result, it's sort of a curse on me and all other cartoonists I know."
...
Spiegelman worries that this makes him sound like one of his drawings ("megalomaniac with an inferiority complex"), but he hates critics using Maus as a measuring stick for new work. "The thing is, Maus was not made to teach anybody except me anything. I knew I had a story worth telling. But it wasn't like, 'I know, I'll take the heaviest subject I know and turn it into a comic - that'll show the bastards.'" His aim was to "build the damn thing to last", by making a well-structured comic. Now, he feels, structure has been eclipsed by subject matter. "On the other," he says, "I realise I'm very fortunate. Maus has given me a licence to kill. I can even publish my sketchbooks."

Spiegelman, who prefers the spelling "comix" (a nod to the underground comics movement he emerged from), remains the champion defender of the form. His third sketchbook in this collection, Nose, was made when he and his wife, the French art editor Françoise Mouly, ran the 1980s comix magazine Raw, when comics were at their nadir of respectability. The underground comics explosion of the 1960s and 70s had come to an end, and even mainstream comic books were dying off. Spiegelman argued that when a mass medium, such as the comic, stops being so, "it either has to become art or die". He is currently compiling a vast anthology of American children's comic book literature from 1938 and 1961; this has meant unearthing the comics put on bonfires in the 1950s "when comics were the Grand Theft Auto of their moment", seen as causing delinquency.

With Maus, Spiegelman says he wanted to make "a long comic book that needed a bookmark and would have the density I associate with novels"; but he never used the term graphic novel. "I kind of like the unsavoury roots of the form," he says. "It's not like I want it all dressed up in a tuxedo so it can be in public. Comics are the hunch-backed dwarves of the arts and they should be proud of the fact." Recently, he was reading Posy Simmonds on a plane and a man said, "Oh I've heard of that graphic novel, is it good?" Spiegelman grins. "Ten years earlier, people would have given me a wide berth: that guy's a moron, he's reading comic books and he's a grown up. So I realise things have changed and as long as you call them graphic novels, it's OK to read them. If that's the case, so be it."

He has just had three sketchbooks published, exquisitely tied up with an elasticated leg band (at least, it was too small for my head). I've never met anybody as painstaking as Spiegelman, nor anyone who has come close to producing a sustained masterpiece like Maus. These sketchbooks may explain why it is so good: he took infinite pains to get it right. It also explains why he has done nothing like it since: he just takes so long to do anything.

...
Drawing comics (as Spiegelman puts it, "make boxes - fill them - cartoonists and undertakers - same business") is one of the most constraining art forms. "By pencilling and inking my comics," writes Spiegelman, "I cover my traces, dressing up my demons before they reach the public. The rehearsed snap of a 'professional' line replaces raw and intimate seismographs of thought." I couldn't have put it better myself. Drawing has to question, to record, to speculate - but above all, it has to breathe, free from the pressure to perform. Whether it's bound in books or not, that's what happens in sketches.

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton part 2: Character in realist fiction vs modernist fiction

Here is Prof. E. writing about an important change in literature, and he makes the changes seem clear and easily understood. I have edited drastically taking out some of his examples:

One of the achievements of the great European realist novel, ... is to illustrate this weaving of character and context. Characters in this kind of fiction are seen as caught up in a web of complex mutual dependencies. they are formed by social and historical forces greater than themselves, and shaped by processes of which they may be only fitfully conscious. ... As George Eliot puts it, there is no private life that has not been influenced by a wider public one.

 Characters in the realist tradition are generally presented as complex, credible, fully rounded individuals. Many of them seem a lot more real than the people next door. 

The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation, suitable to a post-Victorian age. ...The typical realist character tends to be reasonably stable and unified, ... As such, it reflects an era when identity was felt on the whole to be less problematic than it is today. People could still see themselves as the agents of their own destinies. they had a fairly acute sense of where they stopped and other people began. their personal and collective history, for all its ups and downs, seems to represent a coherent evolution, one which was more likely to issue in felicity than in catastrophe.  

 Modernism, by contract, pitches the whole concept of identity into crisis.... Once you start to see human consciousness as unfathomably intricate, it is hard to contain it within the well-defined limits of Walter Scott's Rob Roy or Robert Louis Stephenson's Jim Hawkins. Instead, it begins to spill out over the edges, seeping into its surroundings as well as into other selves....Woolf's fiction, where identity is more elusive and indeterminate than it is in Trollope or Thomas Hardy. ...It can involve a traumatic sense of loss and anxiety. Having too little identity can be quite as disabling as having too much.

If the self is bound up with its changing experiences, then it no longer has the unity and consistency of Bunyan's Everyman or Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It is less able to recount a coherent story of itself. Its beliefs and desires do not necessarily hang together to form a seamless whole. Neither do the works in which such characters appear. 

T.S. Eliot is also disdainful of mere consciousness, and largely indifferent to individual personality. what seizes his attention are the myths and traditions which shape the individual self.... and these forces lie far below the individual mind, in a kind of collective unconscious. It is here that we all share in the same timeless myths and spiritual wisdom.

There is another reason why the idea of character as Balzac or Hawthorne knew it no longer seems feasible in modern times. This is because in an age of mass culture and commerce, human beings come to seem increasingly faceless and interchangeable. We can ... not distinguish easily between Vladimir and Estragon. ...Leopold Bloom ... is sharply individualised, yet he is also an anonymous Everyman whose thoughts and feelings could be almost anybody's. His mind is magnificently banal.

So interesting, because one thinks that both views are true at the same time!  Is that possible? I don't know about Bloom because one book I keep meaning to read is James Joyce's Ulysses. will I ever? When there are so many great books to read?

There was something I was going to write about and I forgot what it was before I had time to write it in my blog, and now I feel very cheated, because whatever it was is now lost forever. I do fear I have the dementia that comes from having too much to do in the way of dreary job tasks. But my mother's dementia is worse than it was, because she is confused about her money now, and I am afraid that she will start to give her small pot of money away to an undeserving cause. She will then forget she has done it and wonder what has happened.

I have spent a week tidying up

this half term we had to clear up the hut after the flood last winter, and due to our other commitments and the bad weather it had been damp for a long time, so this meant tearing off wall paper which had been infested with black mould. People make a lot of fuss about black mould but I'm not sure it's really so serious that you have to wear all over body protective suits and masks. We didn't anyway.  We packed up the mouldy paper, (up to about 3 feet high, the rest was fine) and washed the walls. We painted over with anti-damp paint and then painted a top coat. That's where my contributions ended though next we are onto re-covering the floor with vinyl stuff and I will try to do some of that.

One day at the hut it was very cold and so we went out for sticks and wood and got the cast iron stove going. It was going well but the room filled up with smoke, and we had to lean out of the windows to stop our eyes from smarting. When we could see we found a huge great crack in the stovepipe! So husband bandaged it with a dustsheet.

We also had to clean up the caravan and sell it to my brother-in-law, who can keep it in his field in Sussex. So that was a whole day driving in a big strong truck to get the caravan, clean the caravan, which was filthy outside, not too bad inside, have a nice dinner with H & T and family, have one last sleep in the caravan bed (which was too hard: I won't miss it) and then rush home because I had a lunch date with my friend the vet, who told me she voted for UKIP. it doesn't surprise me at all. I belong to the social group who would vote for UKIP. But most voters for UKIP are in the 70+ age group. It's the older people who still believe that voting is a duty and a privilege, so all the parties angle for the grannie vote.

I have also tidied away piles of paper that were in the study, but I also have a bit more to do. I do feel that I can now see the wood of my desk again, which makes me feel as though I can think more clearly, but I am now re-writing a lesson plan, which makes me think I am more muddled than ever.

Today I went to help Helena, our friend who lives in Geneva and the man from the World Service, who were skiffing up the cut to clear up the rubbish - Helena's idea. We were pulling into the trees to pull off bits of plastic bag and other horrors. Very tricky skiffing, but just the sort of thing a skiff is good for. We got a huge blue tarpaulin out of the water that had been niggling Helena for weeks. So we actually tried to tidy up the Great Outdoors as well.

I also tidied up the garden today which was great. Very tired now.