Highlights and lowlights

So far this year is just more of the same, i.e. me ploughing my socially isolated furrow as a mature student in a university with very few other mature students and fretting about noise. I'm bored with it, you're bored with it, I don't feel I can continue writing unless I have something to say: but on the other hand I feel I just need to keep posting rubbish and let hindsight be the judge of what should be saved for posterity.

An example of everyday ageism: Diane (transformative writing tutor) telling students to pair up with people they like. 

An example of anti-social behaviour:freshers playing American football in the corridor at 3.00 AM (i.e. right outside my door) and often coming back drunk between 3.00 and 4.00 and making the building shake.

And again, sometimes the bar is set so low in lectures I go out wanting that 50 minutes of my life back. The thing that really grinds my gears is the professors really do frame their words as if they are teaching us something new. Actually, I'm thinking of one in particular, who has a penchant for trivia. Her telling us the word 'let' means hinder in early modern English as if that is important or a scarcely known fact (it's used today in our passports as a request to let the bearer pass 'without let or hindrance' and who hasn't killed time reading the insert on their passport?) and raving about how good the speech at the end of Faustus was without listing any cogent reasons why, save one, which was that it was 'psychologically accurate'. 

Course, I'm not much more than a smart alec myself. You would tut at my reading list phobia but there's just no way anybody is attempting it, it's just part of the way universities are set up, essentially as social clubs for the young with a bit of education on the side. You'd certainly need more hours than God sends to read the recommended books.

Yes, we had a five month holiday but not as we know it. You would have thought before the dust settled on the last term they would provided a reading list for the next so that we could use that downtime profitably. Indeed, the English school administrator assured me such a list would be sent to us in June. On July 20th I wrote asking for it and I got a list of all the reading lists for EVERY course (some mine, some not) in August, which was not much help as I wasn't sure what my courses were. They weren't up on Blackboard by then.    

Small print...I spent the entire summer enmeshed in a joint venture with an attention hungry clairvoyant I met on OK Cupid and that it is mostly my fault that I didn't do any reading. But still. The uni were slack as well and I'm sticking to my story.

Highlights...highlights...Well, I'm going to have to scrape the barrel but here it goes.

My new poetry professor- Fenella- is a young woman who seems to like my poetry, though I think she is a bit baffled why somebody who can write something that passes for it is in a seminar learning how to. It's the same old formula, learning how to be creative, essentially. The novel seminar is likewise a bit elementary. We're playing with bits of paper (doing 'mood boards' and such) learning how to drum up an idea for a novel when I've already finished the meagre 2000 words we're required to submit at the end of the term (I've already finished the novel, too). I should be learning how to improve the one I've got but I'm stuck playing with the plastercine.

In other news, we poetry and short fictions module-ists were mandated to attend a seminar by an objectionist poet this week.
He said you could teach a cat to write an iamb but he was more innovative than that and he also had integrity, priding himself on having descended a dangerous gully to check the temperature of a stream with his finger to be authentic. Turns out he had also written a poem about Basra with 'no minow in its streams' and his boast that he'd been to Basra to check if the waters were in fact denuded of minows was conspicuously absent.

His partner in crimes against hearing was Rhys Trimble, who read some of his work in a similar style to last year. Walking up and down barefoot, gesticulating and attacking everything he reads as if every poem is angry.

Anyways, every so often out guest poet would say 'you'll have to buy my book' (e.g. 'the host of this recital wanted me to read such and such a poem but I'm pushed for time so I'm not going to, so you'll have to...') and at the end everybody drained out the room toute suite without him selling any copies. We should be so lucky. He's the guy we have to do a review on in our poetry portfolios.

He also talked about how he comes back to his writing after a few months to be able to be more critical about it. Fenella was really knocked about this advice and kept telling us how helpful it was in our seminar. I find that so depressing. Surely any writer learns at quite a young age that when you come back to your work after leaving it for a while you approach it from a different angle, with a fresh perspective etc.

It seems wrong to end on a high note. So here's another low. I am no longer in any kind of group. I was being politely frozen out of the writer's group, which was going nowhere anyway, so I thought a better use of my time would be to take stock and maybe look for a grown up one outside uni. Here endeth the reading.