Heart of Darkness

The first semester is almost over and the method in my madness is slowly closing in on Bangor University, like a python on a hamster or Columbo on his next unwitting murder suspect. Or maybe like an old man with tinnitus closing in on the job centre? I’m not sure. There are just five more semesters to go after this one. After that I can’t imagine what I’ll do with my life. I quite like the idea of being a millionaire, I wonder if there are any vacancies...

On Monday I went to Raisa and Laura’s child lit lecture and played Words with Friends on my phone (if you play as well, hit me up), occasionally looking up and tuning into what they were saying and then tuning out again. Raisa singled out a passage in Philip Pullover's Northern Lights where he said we should make the most of the now and that thinking about the afterlife can distract us from that. It's a good point. A life could certainly be wasted focusing on the hereafter to the detriment of what we certainly know we have and should make the most of; that is a material existence. She described his insight as "genius", but isn't it a common humanist trope (perhaps in sympathy with her outlook)? Even believers in the afterlife (or sometimes just mindfulness) have a similar one, 'Be Here Now'. The fact is, common new age belief is that if you don't get the now right you are sent back to Earth until you do, so focusing on the now is very important. And is the average liberal atheist really attending to the here and now, anyways? Or are they worrying about Palestine and Israel? (You could waste a life trying to solve the Middle East conflict). 

I wonder if Philip has considered that if there is an afterlife, perhaps it's so well hidden to him so as not distract him from his tasks on Earth? At least perhaps, unless he thinks it's impossible for a super intelligent force to theoretically build a virtual reality in which the dramatis personae are unable to verify or even think of the super reality that underpins it. (It's catch 22 for him if he is designed to be an atheist). After all, there is a certain utility to believing that this life is your last. For one, it tests how well you behave, despite thinking that nobody is keeping score. 

Fun fact, I often think of that Michael Hutchence lyric, All you got is this moment when my mind starts to monkey around. 

The take-out from Laura was that one should be “endlessly curious” but then she always retreats to her comfort zone at the end of lectures, which is close conference with Raisa and I to mine, which is the exit.

I skipped Alex’s Heart of Darkness lecture (I know what I want to say about books I read, er, I think) on Tuesday morning and the 11.00 lecture was cancelled because the children’s author Philip Pullover delivered a lecture on Friday morning, followed by a book signing. At lunchtime I drove over to Morrison’s, parked in their 2 hour car park and then nipped over to the English school, where student reps were in a small room inviting feedback on the courses in return for a mince pie. There was a student there I see in poetry (he looks likes a Viking and, curiously, is interested in Norse mythology) who had a deck of Tarot cards. I picked one. It was the chariot.

“Glory and success are coming your way,” he said. Then the gentle and actually rather learned giant put his big Marshall headphones back on and engrossed himself happily in some pursuit at a small table he had to himself. I don’t think it was anything to do with the feedback.

I gave some verbally, but I became irrationally uncomfortable with the presence of one of the lecturers. She was hovering in the room having an entirely acceptable and blameless but to my mind inane and vapid conversation in a beautiful-creepy thick Irish accent with the students whilst I was trying to organise my thoughts on a question sheet.

Just imagine the following sentence multiplied by five:

“The North-West feels very far away, but the North-East doesn’t...”

I knew it was me and not her but I had to get out the room fast.

She called after me, “You can keep the pen.”

“No thanks,” I said. I didn’t even get a mince pie.

I enjoyed the afternoon lesson with Laura. We read each other’s homework assignments and commented on them and Laura rightly pointed out that I read out Aurelie’s story very well.

“I can’t decide if it sounded so good because of the way James read it or the way it was written. Probably both,” Laura said, diplomatically. Or maybe not. I’m simply putting the suggestion out there into the ether, where it will somehow always exist.

Later, I had my writer’s meeting. The cruise ship murder mystery so far is mostly me, partly because with the exception of Nicholas and me, personnel keep changing and Nicholas is mostly collating ideas rather than creating. Or maybe mine just keep winning? Anyway, no other writer has attended more than once, whereas I have been to all five meetings. It seems like collaboration means, I write it and everyone will turn up when they feel like it but mostly later and take the credit, but we’ll see.

In Matthew Durham’s Wednesday morning seminar we talked about Heart of Darkness, not that anybody had finished it. In these classes I would guess there are around fifteen students and it tends to be me and two others who do most of the talking. It counts for nothing. You don’t get marks for being the classroom smarty pants. Matthew is happiest when someone says something he agrees with. But then, aren’t we all?

In Diane’s seminar I said Hemingway’s story about an abortion (we had to read for homework, discussed in class) was better if you gave it all your attention, rather than the 30% I’d given it.

“Sounds like a reading problem, rather than a textual one,” Diane said, slap-downish , no right of reply (which is fair enough, the seminars go at a fair clip). So I’ll reply here. No, not necessarily, because the writer generally has a duty to make his story engaging enough to persuade the reader to pay attention. And let me tell you: Hemingway’s story is not particularly interested in wooing its reader as I try to with my pithy blog beginnings, if not the boring bits that come afterwards.

I saw Diane in the corridor after her seminar. I’ve shown her four of my stories and she said that I keep mentioning breasts and I write in my own voice and for that reason she’ll mark me down. I asked for a ball park mark on my story Tears in Hailar, which came third in an international competition with 800 entrants. She said a B minus.

Later, I did a search on my laptop and discovered that out of the fifty or so stories I’ve written only four mention breasts, and it was coincidence Diane read three of them. Second, I’ve written many stories in a voice other than my own but she hadn’t seen them. But I take her point. Sort of.

So after Diane’s class I had a date to be getting to. I went home, freshened up, drove to a cemetery in Carnaerfon, parking in front of some dodgy council flats. My date had arrived first, so she’d got the coffees and was waiting outside the church in her van. I noticed that her business was called, ‘Nature retreats’, and I said, “So it’s about getting back to nature?” She was very impressed that I realised it was about that and not spas.

“You’re the first person that’s said that,” she said. “And my ovaries are absolutely fine with that.”

But what else would it be about? She manages holiday cottages.

It was raining and the cemetery was heavily overgrown, so after a muddy mis-adventure we sat in her Citroen Berlingo, which badly needed a hoover but was warm and spacious. Radio 1 was on silent.

After an hour I had to excuse myself and take a piss in the cemetery. I came back sooner than she expected and she was having a cigarette. A nice woman with large teeth, like mine, looking like they belong to a person ten years older. Has taught in Liaoning province, China, like me. Has never stayed in one place for very long, like me. Has never been in a proper relationship, like me. Her best job was possibly selling tyres. She was very good at it. The job I probably made the least mess of was probably also when I was a salesman, which I too was very good at. She never said it but I know she’s been through a lot of heartache and sadness, buffeted by life's storms and scarred by self-harming. I was looking in a mirror. Her entire existence and that of all her forefathers had brought her to this point in time, as had mine. Here we were, two middle-aged rejects left on the shelf meeting the opposite version of our gender about to not make a mistake. Because although she was up for round two I don’t want to be somebody’s panic buy, I don’t want to mess her around and I’m in no hurry. 

I lied about the ovaries.

Poetry class on Thursday. Nothing much to say. You know what Carol’s lessons are like. Nice, pleasant, gossamer.

I had my first intimation that I do exist as a person in people’s minds in the Thursday afternoon lecture and that they may even talk about me. Andy asked me “You were a teacher, weren’t you?” He must have been told that by Laura.

Then I went to a meeting with four girls in my child lit seminar I’m working with on a story about gang girls pimping themselves out to boy gangs. (One of two topical stories given to us by Laura). They were unsure what to do, so I suggested a concept (a Newsnight parody) and then went and wrote it up in the evening. We were supposed to be collaborate on it via Google docs but only Ruth added some small bits here and there. The 'me' show again, but I wasn’t trying to trample on anyone’s human rights, just trying to get the thing done.

On Friday I’m really humbled and impressed by the fact that my essay has been marked and returned with comments. I got my students to do loads of essays in China, and very seldom marked any of them. They just piled up in my room gathering neglect, along with lots of other half-baked ideas. I’m not sure what the marks equate to, somewhere in the B spectrum, I think. The Keats one was described as highly intelligent, but poorly structured, which is essentially a perfect description of my mind. The child lit essay, which scored higher than the Keats one, was “assertive” with “sweeping statements”, which again describes me. That’s the one I had to knock out quickly and submit half-finished, though.

Friday morning was the famous author, Philip “I’m not going to teach you anything, and if I do, you have permission to reject it,” Pullover. His talk then took on a very teacherly air, which was by no means unwelcome. I would embrace his sage advice to try and emulate a paragraph of Jane Austen, save for the fact that I've already tried it. I certainly won’t reject his exhortation to read The Just So stories of Kipling, which I never did, but one of which I was exposed to in Laura’s seminar and enjoyed. I've also made a note of his admiration for Conrad's Victory. However, his remark that, “Of course, no one ever sees ghosts,” is in the reject pile, along with, “There is no other intelligent life in this galaxy,” (Brian Cox, darling of the masses and serial cuckholder in many women’s fantasies) and people who see ghosts need to “see a good psychiatrist”, (Richard Dawkins, scientist, so they say).

In the Q&A I bit my tongue whilst the students asked some pretty decent questions. Someone asked him about the mystical poet Blake, who he loves. Referring to Blake's 'four senses' Philip said, "The first is Newton’s sense, that of love being created by the neurons and electrical impulses in the brain. The second is imagination which blah blah blah, the third is poetry, which blah blah blah and the fourth -I'm not sure-, esctasy or mystery or something,” with a wave of his hand, as if the 4^th was the a curious piece of decoration. And that essentially is what materialists do. They wave away the 4th dimension and the mystery of existence- and make it go away.

  
For me, the talk was airwave filler one could happily listen to doing the washing up and turn off at any time without feeling that parting was such sweet sorrow. As I had no washing up to do, I was feeling kind of fidgety. Laura said she could listen to Philip talk all day and I can see that being the case. Philip's trusty walking schtick, in the minds of the left wing self-congratulatory Liberal elite is the ideal thinking person's companion to swipe those age-old chestnuts with. Those materialists who have never done any serious research into Near Death Experiences, ghosts, UFOS and those other marginalised exotica that can't even find a dark and unloved corner of Radio faux-intelligent to make their case in. And I bet she has ‘Philip Pullover essence’ in a squeezy bottle which she rubs on herself in the shower to ward away inconvenient truths. This is turning a bit ranty...time to say ta ra?

No wait. Saturday. Had a blast with the girls filming our “News Light” video. My Fiat Punto was christened, I mean this is the first time I’ve given anybody a ride in it, and there were five of us. Instead of turning left out of my halls car park we turned right and within half a minute you’re in country lanes and open countryside with snow capped mountains surrounding. As part of the film I played a gang member picking one of the girls up in the car and I put my foot down to pull away as fast as I could. I’ve never tested my car before in this way and I was impressed by how nippy it acutally is. It’s not really very fast. It does 0-60 in about 19 seconds, but it sounds really goooood. Grace is going to edit it in Premier Pro and, who knows, you may get to see it? 

You've hopefully read all this post. If so, thanks for giving it a fair shake. My heart gets more than a little dark sometimes, but I don't mean any harm.