Pc Plod's not doing such a good job if Noddy's head can be stolen from right under his nose. (nb: This is my first attempt at blogging from my phone.) (The phone blogging was pretty pathetic.)

Labels: christmas, leicester

My final meeting of the term is over with and I can breathe out at last. The meeting was brief, in accordance with the character of my preparation; but nevertheless, it served to reassure me that I am on the right track with my thinking as regards my MA thesis and, momentarily, aroused in me a flicker of enthusiasm. The presents I ordered for my relatives arrived by courier just as I stepped in the door, fortunately, and, as far as is possible, the world feels in order. Tonight is compline and rehearsal, tomorrow are two carol services for the school, a friend's coming over for dinner, and then we're going to see The Wizard of Oz on Thursday. I have bad memories of The Wizard of Oz: the only time I ever saw it (in Leicester's Haymarket Theatre) was on a poorly engineered date, with my lifelong best friend, arranged by our mothers, and accompanied by a complete lack of physical chemistry (me towards her). The only outcome was a freezing of relations between me and my friend (which never thawed) and a seething resentment of parental interference on both sides. But these are better days, and I'm sure there's some kind of bizarre symmetry to the fact that this, the second time I'm seeing the Wizard of Oz, I'm going with a boyfriend I'm divorcing for the dubious and illusory promises of heterosexuality.

It's a funny old world.

Labels: christmas, relationships

When I leave your postcode and your commuting station,

When I leave undone the things that we planned to do,

You may feel you have been left by association,

But there is leaving and there is leaving you.

When I leave your town and the club that you belong to,

When I leave without much warning or much regret,

Remember, there's doing wrong and there's doing wrong to

You, which I'll never do and I haven't yet,

And when I have gone, remember that in weighing

Everything up, from love to a cheaper rent,

You were all the reasons I thought of staying

And you were none of the reasons why I went

And although I leave your sight and I leave your setting

And our separation is soon to be a fact,

Though you stand beside what I'm leaving and forgetting,

I'm not leaving you, not if motive makes the act.

—Sophie Hannah, Leaving and Leaving You

I first found this poem while lying in my friend's bed looking through books about five years ago, and I suppose this is the first time it's actually been relevant. Thus I start the hunt for a new place to live, in every sense, and it's exciting and frightening. But it's the way it must be.

Tagged: sophiehannah, leavingandleavingyou, separation.

Labels: poetry, relationships

I was shocked to find that indisputably the best comedy programme ever made, Green Wing, did not even get a mention in the BBC's report on the British Comedy Awards. Nevertheless, I suppose it just shows that its greatness is lost on most people.

/elitist

Tagged: greenwing , comedy , british .

Labels: greenwing

The run-up to Christmas this year seems to be even more fraught than usual. I miss the days (even though I complained petulently through all of them) of just singing two big carol services in Leicester in front of congregations of six hundred and a couple of extra services on Christmas Day. There was real structure to the festive period then; I knew that, singing on Christmas morning, my brother and I would be picked up by my aunt and that after that we'd go and have a drink and a biscuit at her house, before going back to ours for dinner. Now, here in Manchester, it's one crazy concert after another: last week I was drafted in 48 hours previous to Salford University's Christmas concert because they'd forgotten to book an organist. On Saturday I was given the shortest notice on record to provide accompaniment for a choir — in the actual live introduction before the piece! Tomorrow is practice with the school choir, then the day after is their concert, then on Saturday is another concert in Macclesfield (not done any practice yet), then on Sunday is church carol service, then next Wednesday is the school carol service, then there's four services over the Christmas weekend.

All the short notice accompaniment is no doubt very good for developing my sight reading and coping mechanisms, but it registers very low in the enjoyment and satisfaction stakes and you're left feeling like you just had to stand naked in front of an assembled audience for an hour. Playing without any idea what's happening over the page is still a nightmare for me. It would be so nice to have the time again to practise properly for something and then experience the satisfaction of a coherent end product rather than something thrown together.

Tagged: tagname, tagname, tagname.

Labels: christmas

Most of the time these days I find it hard to write here, or in fact to speak to many people. I think this situation results from a desire to be meaningful; sometimes so many thousands of words can be exchanged meaninglessly, and so often relative silence can be far more portentous. So what is meaningful and why? What is worth writing about? How do we distinguish between good and bad writing? Does good writing have to be meaningful? Speech is a realm more immediately social, interactive, repetitive; symbolic rather than substantive. The inconsequential content of conversation can be justified on the grounds of its social outcomes. Yet is there good speech? Are there bad things to say? Is it always sociopathic to reject small talk?

I feel there is quite a sharp division amongst academics: highly sociable ones, and completely antisocial ones. Each are equally, if opposed, responses to this conundrum. Some are able to separate (quasi church and state) work from social life, even to the point of absolute contradiction (I can think of some theologians who say one thing and do quite the other), while others seem to be unable to escape from the world of study, and its pursuit becomes total, to the point of the exclusion of speech and relation.

Both of these, understandable, responses are problematic. The first so excludes the possibility of meaningful connections between study and life-as-lived that each becomes meaningless. Meaning is created in interconnection, in conversation, in negotiation. The second so excludes the possibility of any action in the 'real world' of speech, personality, and encountering, that study becomes similarly meaningless, wantonly apolitical; or at least delegating political action to an anonymous third party to act on his/her behalf.

Derrida writes about 'aporia', a 'no-way' or 'no-crossing', the idea of a suspension between two exclusive, necessary but mutually impossible positions. I believe there is no middle way between these two academical archetypes: a 'dialectical' engagement between the positions is not feasible or logical. The logic of logic is logic of separation and opposition: and the extremes in academic personality, indeed often within the same personality, are separate and not bridgeable, driven apart as they are by the same logic that would wish dialectically to drive them together. The logic of separation (church and state) is not rectified by concrete engagement (academics in political parties) because the violence of separation is theoretical, primordial, 'originary' (Derrida).

Let me pull back. There is a schism in academia which is not really a schism but an expression of the meaninglessness of logic: logic drives us to impossibly violent positions in the search for meaning. The schism should be an aporetic one: begging us withdraw from the logic of logic and to search for meaning outside the formalised institutions of thought which currently give us meaning. There is no church, and no state.

Tagged: logic, derrida, jacquesderrida, church, state, schism, academic, university, tagname.

Labels: metathought

Today is one of those very rare occasions when I find myself in complete agreement with Ann Widdecombe, whom I have just watched on Newsnight arguing the only sensible position about today's headline-grabber of a story about persistently low conviction rates in rape cases, which crazy women-are-always-victims-men-are-all-rapists people argue needs to be changed through a change in the law.

Dearest Ms Widdecombe was putting the self-evident position that 1) women have to take responsibility for their own behaviour and levels of intoxication and that 2) juries can't, and shouldn't, presume any man accused of rape to be guilty unless it can be proven that consent was given, which is clearly going to be almost impossible since there are usually only two people in the room, and women are generally not well inclined to men filming sex for the needs of evidence in court.

So conviction rates for rape are at 5 per cent? Rightly so. I would guess that 5 per cent is a pretty accurate figure for the number of cases where women crying 'rape' is actually merited.

Tagged: rape, women, widdecombe.

Labels: politics

Eschatology is archaeology of

Ages still to come.

We are digging down by building upward,

Asking where our lives are leading,

Filling in our fuzzy logic

With visions of the apocalyptic.

Hindu ragas, Christian hymns,

Evolution, quantum physics,

Tell us all The Way Of Things.

Don't be fooled, my boy — you know

That poets, not Smarties, have the answer.

Labels: poetry

Why one word over another?

There is no reason.

Labels: metathought

That time of year again, I'm afraid. Did a recital today, which went OK considering lack of practice. Christmas three weeks today. Presents to buy. People to see. Music to learn. Essays to write. Dog to get. Work to do. Etc. Eep.