Selfish Academics

I have been editing up other people's work all week. Some people are totally decent. They present their work in the house-style you've asked for, and put all the publishers, etc. , into their footnotes. Sometimes it is young, thoughtful academics who do this. Sometimes it is the totally professional professors. Others are about as selfish as they come. Sometimes it is the most stellar academics who are these others. So that's how they got to be so stellar is it? Must be amazing to be swanning off to conferences, feted everywhere and leaving other schmucks to clean up after you.

They are like vile, spoilt kids that you have to clean up after. Well, in the old days I could hit my kids and make them clean up after themselves. This is why everyone says to me, "Sapphire, you make the nicest children I know." Today you can't hit your kids, and if you are lucky enough to get a stellar academic contributing to your book you don't even ask them to clean up after themselves, you are so damned grateful. I was weeping today, tied to my desk on the loveliest day of the year, changing his stupid Chicago style to MLA, looking up every book in his 80 footnotes to get the Christian names of the authors, because he'd been so lazy as to just put their initials, and then again looking up each publisher, as he'd been too lazy to see that my house-style demanded it. This took me four hours, and I made a big discovery about my life today: that I have spent it sorting out other people's messes. Time I made a big mess of my own.

********

Two hours later, sitting down to write: sometimes a girl just has to look after herself. How about a bath with three candles, Floris Florissa, a glass of champagne that's been languishing since my birthday, Radio 3 play? Some synchronicity (see the bottom of this post). The world is a different place. Sapphire has decided that she will be a bit better to herself from now on. More perfume is in order. Last week at a catatonic-inducing meeting in the Dunciad that is now our university, everyone kept saying, "Lovely perfume, Sapphire. What is it?" It was Madame X by Ava Luxe. Lovely indeed.

Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out - then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.

(John Keats, letter to his brother, George, and sister in law, Georgiana, September, 1819)

The synchronicity was that I had already decided to snap out of it by seeing what Clive Stafford-Smith was up to, and perhaps writing to someone on Death Row. I have done this before. How ridiculous to think that I was in prison, when I was simply tied to my desk, and could get up and leave it any time if I really wanted to. Then I turned on the radio and the play was about prisoners on Death Row. Written by Pearse Elliot, it was called Last Suppers. I don't think you can "listen again" which is a pity as it was so well conceived, written and acted. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, is just fantastic on Texas, the death penalty, George Bush and his executions. Nothing like a bit of synchronicity to make the world a meaningful place again.