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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "On Margate Sands I can connect Nothing with Nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people, humble people who expect Nothing. la la To Carthage then I came" (T.S. Eliot, --The Waste Land-- ).
22/06/08: Whew. Now THAT'S a long gap between updates. As incredible as it seems, the last time I had sufficient motivation to do anything on the site it was coming up to New Year and I was talking about buying a new laptop (I had another laptop before this one? It all seems so long ago...). I've hardly been idle, though - due to the way my modules were set up, I had to backload the year's work onto the second semester to get the subjects I wanted, with the result that my second term featured coursework for four modules and two work placements. In fact, suffice to say that I've been quite busy.
From what I've seen thus far, I'm happy with my marks in two modules (Into Print and, incredibly, PAD, which has featured in --previous updates-- as the bane of my life) and not so happy with the other two (Sudden Prose and Life Writing). I don't know how much of this is genuine lack of talent on my part and how much is spite after I delivered a scathing review of the courses in question on the feedback forms - yes, they made us fill out feedback forms BEFORE, in most cases, a single piece of coursework had been marked. And there I was, wondering how the university could get such good reviews and still be so cr*ppy; whilst the forms are theoretically anonymous, everyone knew --bleeping-- well the tutors could work out who had made the comments (come on, people! This is a CREATIVE WRITING course; it's the marker's JOB to know our writing style). Other students even made comments about how they had better praise the tutor if they wanted a good mark. Well, unfortunately for me I have absolutely no sense of self-preservation when it comes to speaking the truth, which is why I'm going to spill my guts here as well. So without further ado, it's Ill-Advised Rant Time™!
Sudden Prose: At the beginning of the semester, our "American-language" (!) tutor gave us a huge list of set texts, absolutely none of which are available in the UK. I got my hands on "The Tunnel," a compilation of prose poetry from the supposed "greatest prose poet in the world" Russell Edson after waiting for SEVEN WEEKS. When I challenged the tutor on this matter, I was told that they were all available online second-hand. She was unable to answer me when I asked whether she meant that a credit card was required to complete the course. A rewarding --sample-- of Edson:
"THE TURKEY HAPPENING
- Russell Edson
There were feathers growing on his wall. Thickly. And with pink turkey flesh beneath. The feathers were spreading across the ceiling. And the floor was beginning to protrude in scaly bird toes like the roots of trees. He could not tell if he had not now become himself feathers and turkey flesh. He wondered if he was not now feathers and turkey flesh."
Stirring stuff (sarcasm alert). Yet the tutor had the audacity to critique pieces in my folder because she felt they portrayed 'unrealistic situations'. For example, my prose poem "The Four Suburban Visitations" features a man climbing up a radio mast to interview a group of pigeons (who she completely failed to realise represented travellers/gypsies). She complained (with bewilderingly inaccuracy) that no real radio mast would be sturdy enough to support a full-grown man. This part of the poem, incidentally, follows an angel spontaneously combusting on the top of a multi-storey car park and a talking tree complaining about racist stereotypes on a train, so you would think that she would have twigged to the fact that the piece tends to value memorable imagery over realism.
In the short story "It's A Wonderful Lie" she again completely missed the point, taking a completely literal reading of the narrative, and advised me to change the title to "Plagues," focusing on the Biblical metaphor I used rather than the underlying idea that people look on the bright side even when it's wildly inappropriate. Her principle issue with this piece was that after I had the wallpaper turn into locusts they are depicted as eating all the Quaker's Oats from the "tin" opened by the bewildered family patriarch ("how did they get into the tin? it ruins the piece for me"). Perhaps the best example of her fine critical sense comes in response to my six-word short-short "And Now Back To The Sports...", a self-reflexive piece intended to satirise the form itself as ultimately harmful to our ability to focus on and discern the true meaning of literature:
"Attention spans improving, say boring scientists."
"Why 'boring'?" asked our clueless professor, evidently missing the irony inherent in her own comment.
Life Writing: Before I get started, I must confess I have absolutely no interest in learning how to become a biographer, and no particular natural genius for it. I chose it because it was the "least worst" of the modules on offer, none of which were especially germane to my interests. However, I harboured some hopes that it might assist me in constructing more compelling journalistic pieces, improve the flow of my fictional work, etc. What I got was an interminable set of mind-numbing workshops characterised by near-illiteracy, sex, and drugs (I feel compelled at this point to point out that the latter two appeared only in the works under study). Students freely confessed that they had made up details about their subjects ("Did Katie (or whoever) REALLY deliver a calf on her own whilst locked out of the house by her parents?" "No, but she COULD have - she lived on a farm for a while."). Pieces with no closure - no ending at all for that matter, even a cliffhanger, just a blatantly unfinished piece of work - were justified because "it's real life innit" (actual quote) "you don't get endings in real life". Yes, you pustulent wretch, but you do in Life WRITING, which happens to be what you're studying!
Other students admitted to taking crack cocaine, speed, and other hard drugs, yet were (quelle surprise) not immediately turned in to the authorities, despite a police Community Support Center being on campus the same day. Students discussed the smell of "crack breath" whilst submitting pieces with sentences lacking nouns or verbs and with commas in seemingly random locations. This was justified because "what about Jack Kerouac?" Yes, they actually thought that because they had taken drugs and chosen to write about it they were except from normal rules of grammar because "the Beat Poets". (sic., no argument, just "the Beat Poets") The tutor had no objections to this line of argument. Yet when I made a deliberate choice to place dialogue on its own line, sans speech marks, but italicised, indented, and preceded by a long dash (inspired by "Ulysses") I was told "until you're James Joyce, use regular speech marks".
This, incidentally, was the tutor who every session subjected us to the horrors of "Grammar Corner," where my junior school-level compatriots were provided with junior school-level advice on how to use tenses and full stops. One questions whether the tutor was the best person to provide this advice, illustrating as she did one lesson on punctuation with the example "I like dog... and cats" (outside the context of Thai cuisine, this could well be seen as laughably poor grammar) and suggesting that where dialogue trails off at the end of a sentence four periods should be employed, as in |"It wasn't over...."|, which has to rank as one of the most ridiculous technical statements ever made by a Creative Writing tutor. A light assortment of quotes I scribbled down over the semester from students and tutors alike:
"I would have thought you'd be able to get good coke [sadly not the soft drink] for a decent price in Amsterdam."
"My joint of high-grade skunk."
"These words live in different worlds." (this is the second year of a British University - a half-hour grammar workshop teaching students the difference between "lie" and "lay")
"In the past tense, things get k-raaa-zzy!"
"...films, they are just sh*t, personally." (yes, "films" in general)
"money shot", "deep throating". (trust me, you don't want to know the context)
"like, minus one percent of people who have surgery." (brain... hurting...)
Deep joy.
Not that I've been too happy with my other subjects; my feeling on PAD must surely be a matter of public record now, whilst our Into Print tutor gave us incorrect information on the assessment criteria then confessed she hadn't spoken to the Module Co-ordinator all term because "she's been very busy". Said tutor went on to mark 1/4 of my submitted work, along with the email correspondence I attached and the sample piece from the book review service for whom I was working. She initially denied she had marked this latter section, claiming she was "just doodling". I pointed out that she had made negative comments pertaining to the sample piece in the overall folder comments, whereupon she expressed confusion as to what exactly I wanted marked. After I directed her to the first page of the folder, which comprised an index page with page numbers, a brief description of all four submitted pieces, and http addresses for three of them, she admitted I had signposted it all sufficiently clearly, and promised to "take another look at it. But give me a break, I've got dozens of folders to mark!" Yes, you've clearly got too much work to do it properly. It occurs to me that absolutely no other profession could use that as an excuse. I'm PAYING to submit these pieces; I want them marked fairly and intelligently. It's no different to engaging the services of a lawyer - I don't want to be told he's messed up my case because he's taken on too many other clients.
For my PAD (Professional and Academic Development) module placement, I produced promotional material for --Invention Studios-- , a Bath-based venue and arts promotion agency. In general, I enjoyed the experience - for once I was given considerable free rein to improve a company's image as I saw fit, and I honestly believe I made a huge positive impact. I was effectively given run of the entire website, and under my control it was kept thoroughly up-to-date, with highlights of upcoming events, reviews of recent events, and articles reflecting the changing emphasis of the company (I note that since my leaving no articles have been added or removed, so the site's already two weeks out of date). I also kept their Myspace page updated for the first time in over a year. Unfortunately, despite offering to take me on full-time about half-way through my placement, they waited until the end of term (benefiting from an additional three weeks of my services as a volunteer beyond the end of the placement) before seeking additional funding. As a result, they said I would have to work for them over the summer for free. Things were also complicated by the fact that they had roped me into helping the resident Icelandic bard and playwright, Svanur Þorkelsson (yup) produce a feature-length film; after creating a 10-page design document and bringing it to the final meeting only to discover that Svanur hadn't done anything, I wasn't feeling in such a charitable mood. As it stands I've pretty much severed all lines of communication with them - if they do get the money I'll be delighted to work for them, but in the meantime I really can't afford to volunteer any more time.
UPDATE (16/12/08): ...aaand now their site has gone altogether. Because if there's one thing that screams "we are a professional arts promotion agency with a sideline in web applications" more than "our site is four months out of date and dropping to bits", it's "erm, we have no website".
Anyway, I've finished my second year at Bath Spa University and am taking a weekend out before beginning the grueling slog of the summer holiday. Having impressed upon Certain People that whilst it may be extremely useful to them to once again have an unpaid wage slave to do all their gardening and redecorating, I might be better served actually getting some kind of job, I've been plunged once again into the insanity that is the British employment landscape. Hundreds of people applying for a single checkout job at a hotel? Yep, sounds reasonable. Write an essay on why you deserve the position to qualify to stack shelves in a DIY store? But of course! The fact that last summer I gave up after discovering that three A-levels apparently just barely qualified me to pick strawberries up to sixteen hours a day (six days a week, natch) doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. Perhaps a projected first-class degree will entitle me to sweep chimneys or something. Since grade inflation seems to have followed me up the educational system, I'm rather adamant I shouldn't attempt a Masters degree, given that such would almost certainly result in the --Daily Mail-- reporting how a 3 year-old is taking seven PhDs and how a Masters now qualifies you to eat excrement for a living.
The Thought For The Day above is from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which I fairly sure I'm willfully misinterpreting. But when I took a day out towards the end of term to explore --Bath Abbey-- I couldn't get it out of my mind. Invention Studios is based in St. James Memorial Hall, which was originally a church. The cornerstone, visible only by moving aside the company's rubbish bags, originally bore a dedication to... well, you can no longer tell. The name of the person who laid the cornerstone has been left unmolested, but the shortish word following the phrase "Dedicated To The Glory Of" has been crudely hacked out with what looks like repeated, frenzied chisel blows. There's another deep gash underneath at the centre of the block, where what appears to have been a symbol has been hacked away. Now, who wants to guess what it originally said? And who wants to guess when and why it happened (hint: when it became public property and therefore improper to be devoted to anything else apart from the abstracted deity of humanism)? I started to wonder; if the church was "hallowed" by the laying of the cornerstone, has it now been "unhallowed"? Profaned? In the same way Bath Abbey seems to have been unhallowed, but spiritually rather than physically.
I wandered up and down the aisles, looking for some evidence that the Abbey was still being used as a place of worship, but in the words of the bizarrely gurning --Spectre-- , "I can sense no hint of God here!". I couldn't find a single Bible in the whole Abbey - the only religious literature in the entire building was a Book of Common Prayer on the lectern. Now, maybe they lock the Bibles away during visiting hours (what that would say about them I leave to the discerning reader), but how appalling is it that a British cathedral could be said to be a place literally "without the word of God?" The seminars advertised on the plasma TV screens hanging from the ceiling were about as inspiring as a wet dishcloth to the face. They had a lovely series entitled "Barriers to Faith" in which they invited biologists and psychologists to come and talk about how science disproves religion. So edifying. The stained glass windows still bear mute testimony to some vestige of faith - of course, now laws are going up to prevent the expression of "hateful" truths outside religious "sanctuaries", I suppose the neo-Cromwellians in the council will be sending up work crews to break them. After all, they can be seen from the outside, right?
In other news, I've become a convert to the --Opera-- browser, which I now use almost exclusively with the exception of a few sites which still require IE. I tried Opera a few years ago and didn't like it - I got the distinct impression it was a calcified relic of the Netscape era. Until fairly recently I was a die-hard IE6 user - in the time it takes me to load one Firefox window I can open about ten instances of IE for less memory usage. Plus I honestly preferred (still do) the taskbar interface to a taskbar or dock with an additional bar with tabs. It amuses me that Mac fans claim OS X is so brilliant at multi-tasking, then extol the benefits of tabbed browsing, which allows for only one site to be viewed at a time! Anyway, after giving Opera another try, I can firmly say it blows any other browser out of the water. I can't live without mouse gestures, and the wand is just amazing. I also love the recycle bin, which allows you to instantly recover any tab you've already closed, and the Links feature, which lets you instantly grab all the hyperlinks out of a page. As for the tabs, I don't mind them in Opera, since you can tile or cascade windows to view sites in split-screen, or drag them around to compare versions of an HTML page. I gather that you can get third-party plugins for Firefox that duplicate much if not all of this functionality, but Opera already uses less memory than Firefox; I hate to imagine how much of my system's resources Mozilla's offering would use up trying to get all of Opera's features. Plus, since Opera comes with all this as standard, it's been beta-tested and all features integrate perfectly, whereas a Firefox cocktail is just asking for something to go wrong.
What I'd like to see in Opera: although woefully bland in every other respect, Safari has the very cool feature of being able to drag images and links straight from the browser to the hard drive - a thumbnail of what exactly you're saving appears under your mouse as you drag. Opera appears to lets you drag items in this way, but only saves it within an HTML page, which is kind of annoying. Similarly, I'd like to see IE6-style options on which image format to use when saving - it's quicker for me to snap through a drop-down menu than highlight the file extension and replace it with ".bmp" for every single image in the "Save As" dialogue. No other browser has this functionality though, even IE7 (which I despise). Likewise, why isn't there a button to auto-maximise all tabs within the window? You can do it if you know the keyboard shortcut, but otherwise you have to maximise them all separately; not very newbie-friendly.
My two oldest email accounts, sregan@bluebottle.com and mrjelly@bluebottle.com will shortly be closing, as --Bluebottle-- has decided (with a generous SEVEN DAY'S NOTICE and no way to export the list of approved senders) they can no longer afford to keep the Freemail accounts open. Of course, this is every small-time email provider's dream - get a wide user base, mostly through word of mouth, then force them all at short notice to pay up or lose their contacts. Fortunately, Bluebottle has been so unreliable of late that I moved all my important stuff over to --gmail-- well before this recent drama. That unreliability, coupled with Bluebottle's claim that they couldn't put it off any longer because another month's bandwidth payment on the Freemail accounts would bankrupt them, and the fact that they wanted to offer two weeks notice but "lost" seven days owing to circumstances they refused to explain on the forums doesn't leave me particularly confident in the company's future.
Well, thanks for the good times, Bluebottle. I was recommended you by a fellow student who went on to screw me over royally, and your challenge and response system was generally reliable, if confusing to feeble-minded relatives. You were understanding when I was deluged with spam as a result of a hilarious WHOIS cock-up by --Registerfly-- , and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But the fact is, email these days is free. End of story. I do not believe there is still a place in the market for a pay-only email service, and I don't intend to go down with that particular ship. Since getting my first email account, my parents (who use their ISP-provided addresses through Outlook Express) have had to change emails twice and lost their emails countless times. I still have the replies to the emails I registered the account to send (namely, my outraged communiqués to local MPs over the proposed plan to fence the Valley Gardens in Windsor Great Park), so I can't really complain for the service I've received.
OK, then, since this update is proving to be about twice the size of War And Peace, I'd better cover everything else in ultra-condensed format: Certain People? Still infuriatingly irrational. Reality and Reason rant? Still teetering on the verge of "fuggetaboutit." --Abyss: Scorched Earth-- rulebook? Hovering on the edge of completion, with just the Blast and Flamer Template weapon Special Rules and an extra scenarios section to update/add in. Then it's onto the army book and trying to find some artists to pitch in on a submission to a major wargaming company (sh'yeah right). The abandoned game I based Abyss on, --VOR: The Maelstrom-- , has just recently shown signs of revival, so I'm wondering if I shouldn't just scrap the whole idea. Website? I'm putting in another push to tidy it up, check all the links, and add new content (like my CV and a new gallery, both of which sections have been languishing in the presence of --Bob the Schizophrenic Lego Knight-- for ages), so look out for that, as well as the evolving look I discussed in the updated site intro. Signing off, blessings all round, check your cornerstones, etc.