Cherry Cola and some other business

Storm Orphelia blew away my words but Brian has blown them back again. I’m back and I think this format works for me. A long post at the weekend, a short one during the week.

So we start with Tuesday, which again came after half a night of sleep. It was a drag, so I beg your indulgence until Wednesday arrives. The 9.00 am lecture was Ben Jonson’s Penshurst- this time with Alex. He gave us his Marxist-feminist interpretation of it and in fairness, I think it was accurate. I would only question his repeated suggestion that ‘ripe’ (used to describe girls coming of age) means ‘promiscuous’. Even in the context it apparently means ‘ready to be taken’ but if ‘ripe’ was a term for promiscuous at the time- as ‘fit’ is now for sexually attractive- then fair dos. I just wonder if he was reading something that wasn’t there.

The child lit lecture at 11.00 was not that interesting. Probably not on grounds of content, simply because I’m just itching to get on and write about things and less interested in being given suggestions about what to think. Thankfully, two weeks running they’ve ended these a little early.

Part of what made Tuesday a slightly shitty day was its little niggles. These tend not to be easily recollected once negotiated, any more than a map of Britain records every twist and turn of the ever turning coastline, but they are the squiggly stuff our little plot of life is rounded in. So here is one example. In the afternoon I picked up my new second hand laptop from the delivery office. My 10 or 11 year old Compaq is fine and I’m using it now to type this and watch DVDs but it’s a bit slow feeding my YouTube addiction and loading Blackboard and the Dell will now take some of its workload.

When I opened the box there was no way of getting the laptop out without dozens of bits of shredded magazine used to pad out the box going everywhere, which I then spent a long time hand hoovering up and then the laptop didn’t work anyway. In hindsight, I’m glad about this. A typical week is full of blessings that come wrapped in unattractive packaging. But I was little down about it at the time. I took the laptop to IT to borrow a screwdriver, but there was a Chinese student having his laptop seen to and an IT guy with tunnel vision fixing it and after 10 minutes I had to go.

I was on my way to Laura Dryer’s writing children’s stories seminar at 5.00. Because I missed her seminar in week two and joined the 5 and not the 4 o’clock seminar when I returned in week three I was excused the first task of writing a fairy tale with another student. On Tuesday the entire seminar simply consisted of students reading out their stories, so I was just a spectator. In all honesty, the stories were not very engaging. To me, at least. Laura seemed really enthusiastic and interested and I thought that was a valid approach. She was seeing what these young writers could be and getting excited about it. But I would have constructively ripped the stories to shreds. But not as many as were in the box my laptop came in.

At the end of class Laura gave me my I’m not tired story back. Now, in my email I had asked her what she thought of it as a concept, because I knew the verse was rough and not ready but she kind of critted it as if I were presenting it to her as something complete. I’d told her I’d written it in an afternoon (okay, an afternoon and an evening) and that I was looking for a kind of analysis of it on that basis. A sort of, think this is heading in the right direction? How’s this for a children’s story concept? In pop parlance, it was nothing but a demo. And though I say so myself, reasonably good.

However, in contrast to the volcanic enthusiasm she gave to the students, I noted a distinct coolness in her manner. I could be disheartened by that, but I could also take it as a compliment that she acknowledges I am not one of them. I have life experience and I should be further down the road in my development as a writer, so she’s not going to give me the kid-glove treatment. True, she did say she liked the story but my overall feeling was I probably should have held it back. My bad. Anyway, I’m working on new ideas: My universe for a day and Mum and Dad are kidnapped by aliens.

After Laura’s class I hotfooted it to the IT department, but as suspected they were closed for the day. The building was still open as a study centre and a guy on reception lent me his penknife so I could open my laptop and try and fix it myself. I came pretty close, it was just a loose hard drive, but a piece of the hard drive connector got stuck and I couldn’t get it loose. There was a nice moment wrapped in the unattractive packaging, though. The guy who leant me his penknife saying it was the only useful thing that came out of his relationship with his ex, and he and the lady on reception with him trying to be as helpful as possible. I don’t get much actual contact with human beings, see, so things like this resonate and get stashed away somewhere.

In the evening I walked the walk of shame to salsa. Once again, I was without a permanent partner and when I got back I checked Plenty of Fish (a dating app) and saw that the instructor is on there. That was mildly embarrassing. There’s no chemistry between us- though both 42- but I’m sure we could both do without seeing that the other one of us knows we’re on POF.

Wednesday was a little brighter but still had some clouds, as I pulled my turning-up-to-class-without having-done-my-homework trick. God, it’s just like my teenage years all over again. Only now I’m 42. However, I now have a system in place that will hopefully ensure this never happens again: I’m going to write it down.

Every time we were told what we had to do for the following week I somehow thought I’d remember it or it would be on ‘Blackboard’, a place online where they stick all that pertains to our course. Timetable, notices, course materials. In fact, when Matthew Durham gave us the assignment last week I asked, “Will that be on Blackboard?” and he said, “Yes,” so I didn’t write it down and then I couldn’t find it on Blackboard. This week he claimed he never said that, which he probably didn’t. He probably thought I was asking him if he wears Doc Martins. As for Diane’s writing class, I simply forgot. I have no excuse at all, except that I am a scatter brain, which is a folkloric term for a brain that is not wired to deal with methodical behaviour.

Of course, writing things down seems like an elementary concept. But I was procrastinating and overwhelmed on that score because I hadn’t made up my mind where to write things down. Now I’ve decided to do a quick summary of a lesson in my diary and write down assignments therein.

So these cock ups- which my wife would be happy to explain (if I had one)- worked out okay but only just. I speed read the poem in Matthew Durham’s class, and in Diane’s class I improvised. She had asked us to read a story called Hitting trees with sticks. Normally, I would shoot my mouth off in the class. I would have read it and had loads to say about it. But today it was really frustrating because I had to stay silent and look stupid. What is piquant is that’s exactly what happened last week. I had to stay silent through The North West Passage and the humiliation of doing that was one that burned so much that I thought, I’ll never turn up to this class again having not read a story.

All I knew about Hitting trees with sticks was that it was about dementia. A story about a person who forgets things. How very apt. Still, I didn’t do too bad, all things considered.

“Why does the narrator view herself as a ten year old girl?” Diane asked.

Nobody answered. There was a pregnant pause and a door closed somewhere.

“It’s a tough leap to get to, but it’s there,” Diane added, as the classroom sounded like a morgue.

“Could it be that she’s so worried about being just like her mother? She mentions, ‘Am I like my grandmother?’” asked a perceptive, Merlinesque boy who does virtually all the answering on texts we’re supposed to have read. It was 90% him on The Northwest Passage last week, which of course I hadn’t read.

“Yeah,” Diane said, in her well-done-for-trying voice. Then her eyes slid across the room to me.

Somehow, my hand had crept up. The fact is, I love to be involved in discussion, even when I have no idea what I’m talking about.

“Is it to do with the way memory works, as well?” I asked.

Diane beamed at me. “Very good. Very good. She is actually conflating two memories,” Diane replied.

But I wasn’t by any means off the hook. Diane later asked us all to tell her what we thought the saddest part of the story was. Oh dear, I quickly scanned pages of the copy of the story the person next to me had but it was no good. She was coming round the table too quickly.

“I know it’s been said, but it has to be her not knowing her daughter,” I ventured, echoing what another student had said.

“Yeah. That’s okay, we can repeat bits,” Diane chirped. Phew. Off the hook.

Diane noted that one of the good things about this story was that it doesn’t tell you to be sad but shows you by relating events in an unmelodramatic way. I think I’ve already achieved this with my story Tears in Hailar. Available from Amazon, folks, and probably the second best story in the collection, though it came third. I’m familiar with the concept of being told to be sad, I find it annoying and I appreciate that events should speak for themselves. This would be an example of something I understand innately but if I am to be a good little degree student and play the game I must pretend I’m learning something on this course. So I’ll file that one away.

Diane also asked us if there was anything we didn’t like about the story. Had I read it, I probably would have torn it to shreds, though not as many as I found in that box my laptop was delivered in.

After Diane’s class I went to the IT department (third time lucky) and they showed me that the connector wouldn’t come unstuck because I’d being trying to remove it horizontally, rather than vertically. More contact with humans and the Dell is now alive and well.

Poetry on Thursday with Catherine Rullens is the easiest class in the week. She is in the sunset of her life and the lessons have a very relaxed, sunset quality to them. She gives us really simple tasks and really simple poems. We read out our Cinquains this week, we made some observations and it was all pretty la de da. No big arguments. Never any haughty sense from Catherine that she is an authority, though she is very well versed in all things poetry.

After class, I asked one of the students if he had had a chance to look at Hour of Writes. I’m not keen on the website overall, but I feel duty bound to give budding writers a heads up on it because it’s a good one to get started on. He hadn’t looked at it but I ended up stalking him as far as ASDA whilst I sold its virtues and he is maybe only the second student I’ve had any kind of a conversation with since I’ve been here.

In the afternoon, I went to Alex Weaver's lecture on close reading extracts from The Road to Wigan Pier. Just before the lecture began one of the students who was in the morning poetry seminar called my name and came down the stairs to me.

“Hey James. The poem you presented in class, it was so sick. I really loved it, man.”

I was touched. I think more by him calling me by my name and making a point of coming up to me when he had already sat down than by his opinion of my poem. Oddly, I had noticed something about this young American (or Canadian) boy for the first time in our poetry class, which is that he wears a woolly hat to class, though it is not cold inside or out.

In the Wigan Pier lecture Alex said two or three times that he thinks Winston Eliot (his name temporarily escapes me) is (ah, it’s George Orwell) “really really clever” because he used the phrase “I suppose” to give his slightly fictionalised memoir the imprimatur of verity. Quite honestly, I think that is overstating the case and then some. It’s a stock phrase, there are probably hacks up and down the country who if have used it, but Alex is very very certain that somebody who uses ‘I suppose’ is a literary clever cloggs.

After the lecture I went back to my room, so I’d already been back home twice- think down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill- but there was a poetry recital in Pontio with Avner Pariat and Rhys Trimble in the evening. That would mean another down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill. It wasn’t compulsory but Catherine Rullens said we should go, it promised to be entertaining evening. I didn’t want to go. I looked at some of Trimble’s work. I still didn’t want to go. But I decided I would because it was the right thing to do. I’m on a poetry course. Poets need support. And Catherine might see me there and think I was a serious student.

In the event, the poetry was worse than I thought. The room was packed and I didn’t need to be there. Catherine didn’t turn up.

Before the professional, guest poets read three poets from a student writer’s group called ‘Words Aloud’ read a poem each and said please come along to their group which is starting again in November. The first effort was by a mature student who had written a sestina in praise of Bangor University. It wasn't at all bad metrically but she described Bangor's ‘college on the hill’ as rescuing students from ‘the depths of ignorance’, and I grrrr at the well worn suggestion that those who don’t go to university are ignorant, those who go are not. University is also a great place to ignore things, in my view. Then a girl in yellow read a poem that was not conceptually uninteresting but nonetheless my hippocampus has redacted any notes it took. Finally a boy read a poem about a homeless man that for what it's worth I recollect most vividly, perhaps because he was last up, and he thought so sad he practically cried as he read it. Everybody clapped. But not very enthusiastically.

Then the Rhys Trimble came on. Now, I must remind you that I have tinnitus because it’s at times like these that this disability is at its worse. He prepared the stage by placing a shoebox of printed poems in it, with many more scattered around the floor. He carried a staff and wore clothing most charity shops these days would reject. Black slip on shoes, red trousers and a tatty blue suit top. Quite the itinerant poet.

First he began with banging his staff on the floor very loudly and then he screamed in Welsh at the top of his voice. I mean ear-jarringly, voice hoarse-ingly loud. I seriously considered leaving the room. It was an awful experience. Most of the poems were in English and sometimes he spoke softly, but the screaming and raging was part of his act, as was the picking poems up off the floor at random and generally acting like some especially demented version of King Lear. I was so pleased when it was over, although unfortunately later there was a reprise.

The Indian gentleman, by contrast, was very moderately spoken and a pleasure to listen to. He had a very sharp and ‘meta’ sense of humour, noting bleakly that he was the third choice for that evening, the other two having dropped out. And he spoke constantly in erudite and funny terms. I'm not being polite, he was a rare speaker. Sadly his poetry was only adequate, nowhere near as clever as his natural speech. In essence, I would rather he had just stood there speaking to us for a while. He’d probably make a better stand up comedian than poet.

The take out from the evening? I have a ‘Words Aloud’ leaflet and I’m thinking of joining the group. It says that I would be joining ‘like minded’ people. What do they mean? Do they know me? Do they know what sort of mind I have? I fear not.

On Saturday I went to The Castle and sat on my own drinking a pint of Stella and watching Southampton. It was uneventful until the 85th minute when a substitute had a real point to prove to his manager about being left on the bench. Typically, that’s how I felt last night. Very depressed about being left on the bench. Week in, week out.

I still managed to drag myself to Tesco late evening. It’s all about the Cherry Cola. 50 pence for 2 litres.