Such cleverness!

I've just learnt to add some links. It took me all night. I thought you had to make the links as Page Elements, but no, one does them as links! I've got three degrees but my ineptitude never ceases to amaze me. Now at least I can have something more like a normal blog.

Literary Meme

(taken from cestchic.blogspot.com. Thanks!)

1. One book you have read more than once.
Diary of Virginia Woolf

2. One book you would want on a desert island.

War and Peace

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3. One book that made you laugh.
Catch 22

4. One book that made you cry.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

5. One (or more) books I wish I had written.
Sebald, Austerlitz; Naipul, The Enigma of Arrival; Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

6. One (Two) book(s) you wish had never been written.
Protocols Elders of Zion; Hitler, Mein Kampf

7. One book I am currently reading.
Woodrell, Winter’s Bone

8. One book I have meant to read.
Richardson, Clarissa

9. One (Two) book(s) that changed your life.
A. S. Neill, Summerhill; John Seymour, Self Sufficiency

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I feel there should be a tenth item, but can't think of one.

Self-serving Students

I have to qualify my post about bad students (see March). There are also self-serving students, who have no sense that learning in groups is a collaborative venture.

They don't prepare for seminars and say nothing in them and contribute no goodwill to the course or to their fellow students, but then use up a lot of my energy in asking for special help when essay time comes round. Then they turn in their good papers in the end and get a lot of credit -- even first class degrees. I hate them. Self-serving types.

In the old days students got 10% of their degree for their contributions, goodwill, hard work, etc., but now any surly, non-contributing student can get through without those good qualities.

That reminds me of the student who, when a lecturer asked if he would open a window, retorted, "Open it yourself." But that leads me to a larger train of thought about their upbringings. Is it their fault that their parents have given them that horrible attitude to life?

No, but from about the age of 18 I believe that it is incumbent on every adult to get some insight, to shape up, to evolve.

The postscript to this is that I am very aware of the seriously shy students in my seminar groups and would never put them under duress. Poor things. The most gentle of encouragements is needed here, as is working in tiny groups where I can spy on them flourishing, smiling, even using their hands to express themselves.

"The way to . . .

. . . rock oneself into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw."

So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on Tuesday 22nd August 1922. She walked on the beautiful Sussex Downs and that week she was reading Thackeray and Joyce, and that month was reading Homer, Joyce, Proust, Ibsen and all the rest for The Common Reader. And, as for writing: that day she wrote in her diary "It is only 11.30 and I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street."

Firle Beacon by Duncan Grant

My fresh air was to go out and find that my broad beans have all germinated in the greenhouse (where they have to germinate, as mice will eat every last one in the garden). Cheered by that, I read Virginia Woolf's diary. And now I am settling down to write on a lovely poem by anon. And this blog is the equivalent of that diary. Here I am saying that oh thank goodness the end of that horrible RAE period is in sight. I see the chequered flag -- not with the success that I was aiming for, but with a far greater thing: the peace of mind that comes from a complete change of attitude to it. I have done my best, and somehow that always does the trick. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare.

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.

Mary Oliver: *Thirst*

Another blip in the vow of silence, but it may be that blogging can be part of the fabric of the heads-down life this summer.

I can't get on with my work until I have savagely processed everything that comes in my door. About the only junk mail not utterly hated by me is the publicity from Bloodaxe Books, as there is usually about one good poem in their flyers that I might keep. I think I love poetry but I don't buy much or read much, so actions speak louder than thoughts.

This time the poem that lifted off the page was by Mary Oliver, much loved American poet. You can read about her and her lover, Molly Malone Cook, if you google about a bit. Sapphie isn't too big on love, having been love's fool all her life, but this poem is cool. I don't think that Bloodaxe will mind me printing it out here as it's on their own publicity material. You can buy the volume, Thirst, from September for £8.95. ISNB 9781852247768.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

"Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills"

What a gross new title. Universities have, for hundreds of years, been the disseminators of the precious life blood of our civilisation. Now they are places where academics spend more time sweating over grant applications than they do thinking, reflection, writing. They are places that should be called .inc/.org/.plc and the like. They are places where funding to departments is given in direct relation to how many foreign students (read "big payers") are recruited. So business schools get all the money. Classics and Philosophy get nothing.
Can't there just be a Department of Education where Universities are a part of it? -- somewhat at the other end from kindergartens.

And I have no opinion whatsoever of John Denham, another great burly white male in a suit. Everyone please note: he was a great proponent of top-up fees. MY POOR students. Education should be free for everyone, as it was for Blair's and Brown's and Denham's generation.