Tuesday

Okay, so Monday was a negative day. An emotional day. An 'act your age' day. On the one hand it's embarrassing to read but on the other I believe it's nothing other than a transcription of my thoughts and feelings, be what they are. I can see I am fallible, but I am documenting that just as much as I am the world around me. So hold tight because, there's still a bit of turbulence.

Alex Weaver emailed me a few minutes before midnight Monday to suggest I come at 12.00 after one of the lectures. I attended a child lit lecture Tuesday morning with Laura and Raisa. Laura managed to get in three references to politics. A brief anti-Brexit statement ('wary about Brexit'), telling us she was 'a working class poet', and something about how good the recent adaptation of The Handmaiden's Tale was. Then I went and saw Alex. 

I don't know what he has a PhD in, but I would suggest it might be warmth. He just exudes human kindness. It would be quite interesting to write a farce with him pushed to his wit's end. A road rage incident, perhaps.

My first seminar was held by a 27 year old (Daniel Hughes) just finishing up his PhD. He was very competent and wholesome but spoke very LOUDLY. Like he was a Shakespearean actor projecting his voice to the back of a very large auditorium and in a very deep register at that, when we were all packed into a room the size of a lounge. 

He gave us a Sylvia Plath poem. It seemed fairly easy to get the measure of. A grim, nihilistic affair- essentially intimating that the darkness vanquishes the light (or even the dark is immortal, the light is finite) very reminiscent of Macbeth's brief candle speech, I thought.

 And it seemed to invoke a fairytale like image in the third stanza to contrast with how Plath sees life. In fairytales people live forever, and perhaps I should have noted that you toast somebody's health, but we all must die. There is no happy ending. 

One of the girls in my group seemed to feel alienated by my cocksureness- because she thought the poem had positive connotations. After the class she went up to Daniel and asked him if the poem could also be interpreted as positive. I didn't stay to hear Daniel's answer. Probably he said that a poem can be interpreted many ways, there's no right or wrong way, etc. And that may be true but at the same time Plath probably knew exactly what she meant and I suspect she was doing a variation on the 'life is pointless and then you die' trope, just as I think Macbeth was.

I also made the point that it seemed to be saying unless you're immortal you don't really exist, you're not invited to the party, as it were, and I would actually agree with Plath if it were the case that there is no afterlife. Life is a sacred gift containing infinite possibilities that we only very briefly taste and taste constricted by the physical world, as if being horribly taunted, as if being shown what we can have, only to have it taken a way. And the idea that it may never be fully realised or taken away with no explanation at any second is a profoundly disturbing thought...    

Next paragraph. Then we did a Shakespeare sonnet. It means love is blind said the girl who disagreed with me about the Plath. Correctly, I think. But it's perhaps a little more complicated than that. It's really saying love isn't blind. We can see a person's faults, even as we look past them. And it's also saying people are full of shit, which I found funny.

For lunch I had one of Morrison's meal deals. It's 3 things for a pound and if you go for the most expensive sandwich, snack, drink combination you're getting a very good deal indeed because it's any sandwich at all including one of the luxury ones, any drink at all and all kinds of different snacks. However, a plague of student locusts had ravaged the counters by the time I arrived and I had to make do with a halloumi cheese wrap, still Sicilian lemonade and a fresh fruit shake. You couldn't dream of getting this sort of food in China- they barely know what a sandwich is- but there is lots of propaganda you can eat telling you that China has the best food in the world. Shut up. (Me, I mean).

I had a creative writing class with Laura in the afternoon. It was a bit of a drag. I used the words 'metaphysics' and 'catalyst' and it pissed off one of the girl students, who shouted 'I don't know even know what metaphysics is, mate' proudly, which might have been vaguely fair comment if I'd been using the words to show off, but they were warranted.

Then towards the end of the class Laura asked half us to draw a villain and half a hero. After we'd drawn our pictures she said they would form the basis of a fairytale we were going to write with a partner. Now the problem THERE was firstly I had drawn a picture of Laura with a cape on and called her 'Lisa's best version of herself'. Laura did not look at all amused. In fact, she looked disturbed. 

Second, I underwent the indignity of being the last person who hadn't paired up with anybody, bar a girl who looked distressed to be paired up with me. I went over to her and asked what she had drawn. "I don't even know what it is," she said. 
"You can call her low-self esteem woman," I replied.

At the end I asked Lisa about the novel dissertation we do in year three. I wanted to know the upper limit for words. I was hoping it would be somewhere in the ballpark of a novel length, up to 100,000 words perhaps. She said 8,000. That's right. 8000 flimsy words. I queried that because that's about the length I would expect a mouse to write, not a human being. Well you don't submit a whole novel, she said.