Teaching...

So, one of the things I've begun to notice about my mother over the last few years is that if you ask her for information about her subject area (Shakespeare, and the Renaissance more generally), she involuntarily falls into a kind of teaching mode.  This means:  she lectures you the way someone would lecture you in a classroom.  This makes it slightly dangerous to ask my mother a question like, "Where did the playgoers SIT?" because you'll get a half-hour lecture (although, oddly, if you ask her a question like, "Who was that guy Ben Jonson shot again?" she will answer you in a perfectly normal tone.   I think this information counts as gossip, which is why it doesn't come as part of a lecture).  Now, to be fair, although I love my mother, she does favour the monologue as a mode of communication generally - my friend J.W. once said her style "kind of takes the con- out of conversation" - but nonetheless my sudden observation of this style of answering on her part has led me to wonder if, after a while, teaching just becomes your habitual mode of communication.  If you normally talk to people about a certain subject in the style of lecture, do you just fall into that style whenever you talk about that subject?

I contemplate this tonight because at the dinner table I happened to tell some people the plot of Lamia, a superwonderful poem by John Keats that you can find the text of here.  And as I was telling them the plot I noticed my voice taking on its teacher tone.  Yeep!  Will I start to bore people by giving them long lectures when they just ask a simple question?  I'm definitely going to have to keep an eye on that.

Gosh, I miss teaching, though.  I miss getting to talk about literature I really love with people who've also read it.  

Because I can't do that, and because it's my blog and I can do what I like, and because I figure maybe I can entice people into reading some Keats they wouldn't otherwise read if I quote a good bit of it, I quote below almost my favourite moment of Lamia, the moment when Keats describes what the beautiful Lamia looks like in the eyes of the man she is trying to seduce:

A virgin purest lipp'd, yet in the lore

Of deep love learned to the red heart's core....

Clever man, John Keats, and daring, too, to describe what so many men secretly want in a woman:  someone who knows everything about how to supply sexual pleasure (that "red heart's core" is no accidental choice of words) without ever having been touched by another man.

Lamia was a very popular subject for Pre-Raphaelite painters, and here is a version of it as today's illustration:

The answer to the Jonson question, incidentally, is, "[My name here], he didn't shoot anyone. He killed Gabriel Spenser in a duel, and he beat Marston and took his pistol." If you say this in the weary and exasperated tone of someone answering a person who's asked them this same question ten times before, always getting it wrong, you'll sound exactly like my mother.  A patient woman.

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I'm Darren Nichols: Deal with THAT!

I have been watching "Slings and Arrows," one of my favourite TV shows, so I'm pretty cheery. Plus, it's snowed!  And it's snowing!!  It snowed a bit last night (here's a photo of me in the snow with my friend H.  Isn't he handsome?  Well, I guess you can't really tell from the photo: he's handsome)...

...but when I woke up this morning it had snowed even more.  England is, of course, in crisis (I already know how this goes from where I live in the US.  It snows very rarely there, too, so I have plenty of experience now with people who have no idea what real snow is, panicking when they encounter a relatively small amount of snow), but I am in ecstasy.  I got out of bed, put my clothes on, and walked to Granchester, just to see the fields in the snow and to move my body a bit.  Being me, I got confused and lost on the way, but since that involved quite a bit of trudging through snow I was very happy (I've realised over the last couple of months that I r

eally like making my way through difficult landscapes.  A walk in the lovely warm fields is nowhere near as appealing to me as a walk through muddy terrain, and I have always loved walking in snow.  I like the squeaking sound it makes, but I also just like the way you know you're using your body).  And I took some pictures:

That second-to-last one is almost Thomas Kinkade-esque, if you ignore the plastic netting in the foreground.  The last one:  those are my new walking shoes.  I think they make my feet look like little paws.  

Meanwhile, in other news, my friend M. has been telling me all about her adventures in dating. The life she leads:  it's all go in her neck of the woods!  Among other things, she went out with a man who, very wired, spent the whole of their date saying to her, "You can just relax and be yourself!  Just be yourself!" which M. and I agreed was a surefire way to make the other person tense up.  He also said, "Whatever you want to get out of this relationship, you can get!  I'm willing to give whatever you want!" At the time that she told me this I thought two things:  

1. He was very nervous, and

2. He just wants to go to bed with her,

but thinking about it afterward I was also struck by the way those comments, too, seemed to me to bode ill for any relationship - or at least they would with me.  And then I remembered when my friend Jennifer and I once amused ourselves by going through some personals ads together; I remarked to Jennifer that I always thought (and indeed still think) it was creepy when men said they're looking for "a special lady," or just "a lady," because I think the word "lady" in that context reveals a whole mindset about what women should be like, and reveals a good deal about what the advertiser is like (i.e., vaguely prissy) - I would think the person would be a much safer bet if they said, "woman."  Jennifer, for her part, hated the men who said they were looking for "a female," because she thought that revealed that they didn't think of women as human - in Jennifer's words, "They think of them as dogs, or something."  

Who knows if any of this is correct, but for what it's worth I have been mulling over a couple of broad policies regarding potential dates.  The first would be, If someone refers to women as "ladies," that person has problems with women (not if they say, "After you, ladies," but if they say, "I'm looking for a special lady."  Bleurgh).  The second would be, If someone keeps telling you you can get whatever you want out of your relationship with them, especially if they do that right at the beginning, that does not bode well.  Don't ask me in what way it doesn't bode well - I think perhaps it puts me off because it suggests they're desperate, or too clingy, or don't have any emotional boundaries - but I think it doesn't bode well.  But the third would be, Making juvenile or what I would call dimwitted sexual innuendo is flesh-crawlingly pitiful (like the guy who said to me, "I don't really like to run or to cycle - mind you, there are other forms of exercise that get your heartrate up").  The thing there is not that it's offensive, but that it's feeble and thus loser-y.  Plus, I think you should save your sexual innuendo until you know the person is interested in you (inneunyou, as it were); I like a good double entendre, but only with people I know have more to offer than just that.  And finally, I'd have to say that if you say in a personals ad or on a first date that you "don't think having things in common is important," you are heading for sorrow.  Having things in common is incredibly important (since it's how you build a relationship), and even though it just means having stuff in common like, "I like to talk," and, "I like art," and "We're both polite," it's still way more important than "having that spark," which a lot of men, in particular, seem to go for (although perhaps that's code for, "I REALLY want to get laid").

How the hell did I get onto this?  Because I'm now reminded of those two scenes in Tootsie, the first where Jessica Lange says to Dustin Hoffman, when he's dressed as a woman, "You know what I would love?  I would love it if a man came up to me and said, 'Look, I could lay a big line on you, and we could do a lot of role-playing, but the truth is, I find you very attractive, and I'd really like to make love to you," and then the second, where he comes up to her at a party, as himself, says precisely that to her, and she throws her drink in his face.  

You know what I think there should be a whole bunch more of in the dating world, though? Asking questions.  I think I'd respond very well to a first dater who asked me a lot of questions. Not non-stop, or intrusive, but just things like, "Do you like the soup?" or, "Why do you think that?" or, "Where did you get that necklace?"  Because questions, particularly those kinds of questions, suggest that the person is actually interested in you, and in paying attention to you. So I think there should be a lot more questions on early dates (if I ever get another date, I must remember to ask some, too).  And you know what else I think there should be a lot more of? Hand-holding.  I really love holding hands, and not just when you're standing up and walking.  What a pity that you can't hold hands with your friends! - Or, I suppose, what a pity it's something I associate with romance, not friendship!  One of my nicest memories is of my friend T.M., when I'd just broken up with my last boyfriend.  I was telling him about it, and I said, "The one thing that really makes me sad is that I might never hold hands with anyone again." And later that night when we went to the movies, he grabbed my hand and held it, just for a minute, when the lights went down.  So I say, more hand-holding, and more questions.  In fact, you could combine the two:  if I went on a first date and liked the person, and he said, "Can I hold your hand?" I'd be so charmed I'd probably just melt (as evidence, the last time someone kissed me, he did in fact say, "Can I kiss you?", and let me answer, before he did so.  And I thought it was adorable).

Of course, I suppose in reality I might just throw a drink in his face.

My goodness, this has been a load of silly rambling.  So to end I'll just say, I got granted approval to use a specific image of Byron for my book!  It's owned by the Byron Trust, in Nottingham, and I was afraid I'd have to pay bucketloads, but as mine is a scholarly project they gave it to me for free!  Huzzah!  And here it is:

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Pretty Bad Things Are Happening

Today I got turned down for a job at Oxford.  This isn't really a very big deal, since I wasn't really right for it, and since I'm not at Oxford's level, anyway (maybe not yet, or maybe just not), but it raises a number of unfortunate ghosts.

My life in America pretty much stinks.  I hate where I live, which is a major problem.  I like my job, but I'm not challenged by it, and I really have no one at my level to discuss my work with - I'm pretty much totally unstimulated mentally.  I have no partner,

which means not just that I have no one to love me as a partner loves you, but also that I have no day-to-day or even week-to-week support, and also means that at the age of 40 my closest emotional-intellectual relationship is with my parents.  I've never gone out with an American, except for six months in my sophomore year of college.  I don't

like most Americans, and I don't like most aspects of America.  

When I went out with my ex-boyfriend, J., we made each other unhappy a lot of time.  I don't know if it was more often than not, but it was a lot.  The summer before we broke up, though, he took me with him on a trip home to Ireland.  And we were both so happy there, and so content with each other:  indeed, we both said so to each other.  Of course, going on vacation is relaxing, and being on his home ground no doubt soothed J., but these days I do wonder to myself if it wasn't just something about being in Ireland, or out of America.  I'm just not very happy there - or at least, I haven't been very happy there since I moved back 14 years ago.

The problem is, I have no choice:  it's looking more and more like I'm going to have to return to the States, and more and more like I'm going to have to live there.  There aren't very many jobs here doing what I do, and although I keep applying to the ones there are, I also keep not getting them.  Once I leave here, it becomes distinctly less of a possibility that I'll even be considered for one, given that Britain is full of people like me desperately searching for jobs, and many of them have books, too.  

It's not as if my life here is any greater than my life in the States:  I still don't have a partner, and it's still pretty unlikely that I'll find one.  I don't even have a job, and you'd have to be an idiot to leave a tenure-track job in this economy - I fear it would destroy my career.  And my life in America is objectively good:  I have a job, and a fine salary, a nice place to live, and students who love me.  But I'm not an object; I'm a subject.  And subjectively, I feel that I belong here.

I'm not making sense, and I think it's because I don't see any way out of this.  By getting a Ph.D. I narrowed myself - I can't be a secretary now.  And I can't pick up and move here hoping to get some kind of job, because for sure I'll starve to death.  So I'm going to have to go back to America, where at a very basic level I'm deeply unhappy; even when I think about going back I become so unhappy that I can manage to function, but not much more.  But I have to go back, because nothing's working out here.  And I suppose you could say, "There are good jobs in America, and some nice men."  And of course you'd be right.  But do I look petty or extreme when I say, "Time has shown me I'm not attracted to American men, and I suspect that any job in America might make me unhappy, because it's in America"? (at this point my mother might say, Look at how your relationships with non-Americans worked out.  Maybe you should give Americans a try.)  I feel terribly terribly trapped, and in some awful way just...doomed.  And incredibly alone.  I'm 40 years old, and I have to figure out my life alone.  It's all somehow just one big ball of wrong, and surely this can't be how it's meant for my life to be?  I try so hard, so repeatedly.  I work what would be like a dog, if it weren't for the fact that I choose to do it.  I've written stuff I didn't want to write, and been nice to people I didn't want to be nice to, and done things I didn't want to do, because all of that contributed to my career, and because I figured that doing it would open up avenues to success and happiness that would otherwise be closed off.  Can it be that the outcome of that is still the kind of life I would have if I didn't try at all?

Other people have happy blogs, or witty blogs, and the funny thing is if you met me you'd find me funny, and full of life and wit.  So I apologise yet again for the persistent tenor of this blog.

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Hmm...

I'm probably going to spend my whole life wondering if I'd've had more relationships if my breasts had been bigger, or if I had been prettier, or if I'd been whatever sexier is, or had possessed the Mysterious Magic Pheremone that makes people desirable.  But, in a moment of possible lucidity, I think the truth is that I would've had more relationships if I'd just stayed in the same place for longer periods of time, or had the same circle of friends for a long period (so that I'd be known by a steady group of people, with all the possibilities that entails), or, probably, looked a little less intelligent, or sounded a little less so.  And, perhaps, realised that the wrong ones were wrong ones a little sooner.

Oh, and been better.  For sure just...been better.  (There goes the moment of lucidity...)

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The End of the Week

Yesterday I went into London for the day.  I was going to the ballet, but then it turned out I also needed to do some research for my mother.  So that's what I did.

My mother needed some more portions of an M.A. thesis I'd photocopied portions of before, and it was quite easy to order it up and go collect it now that I knew the ropes.  The unfortunate part came when I had to photocopy it.  You have to get a permission slip to do this, and last time I went there was an experienced librarian who was pretty loose about it ("Yes, photocopy, here's the slip").  This time I got a much younger, and I think much newer, librarian, who was very conscientious:  she flipped through the thesis, and filled in my information on the slip very carefully; whereas before when I'd specified page numbers the librarian had said, "I only need an approximation," this time when I gave only an approximation she got frowny and asked for specific page numbers.  As a result, we had one of those strange conversations I sometimes have where you start off on the wrong foot and can't salvage it.  I kept trying to hurry the process along because I knew the ropes, but she didn't like those ropes.  After a few exchanges she actually said to me, "You're being very snappy with me.  I'm just trying to help." And I saw that I was being very snappy with her, and was appropriately humbled.  I did apologise, but it still reminded me that I need to remember to play by other people's rules, rather than trying to impose my own.

What this librarian didn't know was that just before I'd gone to collect the thesis I'd walked from the tube station to the library - about a five-minute walk - crying all the way (just for the usual reasons).  Indeed, while I was photocopying the necessary pages I cried the whole time, too, and then I went and had a half-hour long cry in the ladies' room.  But I'm not sure misery is a really a justification for rudeness or off-handedness.  Surely if you're miserable you've earned the right only to be rude to what's made you miserable, and since in this case it was circumstances that made me miserable I had no right to be rude to anyone.  What made it sort of worse was that my half-hour cry in the bathroom made me late for a meeting with a friend of a friend, someone the original friend had thought I might like (I only liked him as a friend, as it turned out).  It's terrible to be 15 minutes late for a meeting, and I feel worse about that than about the librarian, really.

The ballet, for its part, was La Bayadere, and it was pretty silly.  It's not the silliest ballet I've ever seen - that title goes to Le Corsair, and I think even those who love Le Corsair, even those who dance it, would agree with me that it's very silly indeed - but it was perhaps the second silliest.  La Bayadere is famous for the opening of its "Kingdom of the Shades" scene, in which 32 female members of the corps de ballet descend a ramp, following each other down the ramp performing a simple series of steps (arabesque, plie, temps lie onto arabesque leg, backbend, three steps onto arabesque, repeat sequence).  The stage slowly fills with women in floaty white costumes performing the same steps, and if the steps are done with the precision they ought to be (as they were last night) the effect is both eerie and magical.  You can get a sense of it here:

and you can watch it here.  In any

case, once you see a full-length Bayadere it's easy to see why they tend to extract the Kingdom of the Shades portion.  The rest of the ballet is more a collection of divertissements and melodramatic mime than anything else.  That being said, the woman dancing Nikiya, the Bayadere, was very good, and Ivan Putrov, who played Solor,  was dynamite - much better than he was when I saw him Manon.  Putrov is the Royal Ballet's newest sex symbol/star male, and he fills both roles amply - particularly, last night, star male.

Then, in the lift after it was over, a  madwoman started telling me that all ballet stars had had "their faces fixed."  So all in all, a lively day.

 

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Bitterness

Since I've been here, I've had what I would consider to be a notable number of encounters with a particular type of person.  This person - or, in this case, these people - seem to devote themselves to, and take a fierce kind of pleasure in, charting the negative occurrences in the careers of those they dislike, or who they feel have somehow injured them (actively, or in some cases just by being better known, or having achieved more).  Now, I can understand hoping for something bad to happen to someone you think has done you wrong - or even, although I understand it less, someone you just dislike - and I can understand feeling cheerful, or even downright happy, when you hear that it has.  But I can't understand keeping your ear to the ground for just such happenings, or poring over such things and gloating when they do.  That's a lot of time to invest in someone you don't like.  Plus, something about such determined schadenfreude-seeking seems odd to me. Surely the way to deal with your sense that someone has cheated you out of your just desserts is to do even more to get those just desserts, not to (as it were) nega-stalk the person (that is, stalk after negative information about them) and use up your time in rejoicing when they fail? (since this rejoicing doesn't seem to be the "HA ha" of a moment that it would be with me, but rather an activity that takes up considerable time, or at least involves considerable preoccupation - by which I mean more than three minutes.)  One of the people I know who does this even nega-stalks for me by proxy, delighting in bringing me negative information about people they think I dislike.  Usually, I don't dislike these people, but even when I do, I look upon this information as news ("So and so got a lousy job"), rather than as an opportunity to gloat ("Nyah nyah; you got a lousy job!").  As my last post makes plain, I'm not above a gloat at someone else's misery every now and again, but the person in the last post really hurt me - it wasn't just someone that people like better than me or something.

The people I've encountered here who perform this behaviour are, not surprisingly given where I am, all English.  This leads me to wonder, are there such people in the States?  Britain has a smaller population, and I think this makes it more likely that one will encounter one or more of every type of person; in the States that person could live in Dakota, and you might never meet them.  But perhaps this peculiar type of stingy spite is limited to the British, to those British whose tendency toward suppression has resulted in this kind of para-hatred?  Hmm...

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Happy New Year!

Portions of this post will not reflect well on me.  Well, just one portion, really.  

First, though...Tonight when I mentioned Ed Thornton at dinner my friend S.A. asked me if he was that guy on my blog with the girl, the one whose dress sense I talked about.  That person is David Tennant!  Ed Thornton gets his full name printed here because he remains hands down the best looking in-the-flesh person I've ever seen.  Ooooo, he was good-looking!  He was a friend of a friend of my then-boyfriend J., and I just thought he was the best-looking thing EVER.  He had brown hair and blue eyes, and a lovely sharp nose, and high cheekbones, and pale skin.  I remember the first time I met him, I was just completely bowled over by him; I can still feel the feeling now.  WOW, he was good-looking.  He was so good-looking that he was actually glossy - he shone, like a page from a magazine. He was 5'8", I remember, and although that's neither here nor there in the good-looking stakes, I also remember that about him fondly:  I could see him when I talked to him.  Although mostly when I talked to him what I wanted to do was giggle with delight.  He had a good line of chat, too, did Ed.  

In any case, as it happens I do not have a photo of Ed Thornton, and while I at first considered just putting up a photo of someone else named Ed Thornton, so there could at least be a photo of an Ed Thornton, in the end I decided that neither that nor my second idea, which was to put up a photo of David Tennant, was a good idea.  So you'll just have to imagine Ed Thornton. Man was he good-looking.

Soooo...for New Year's Day my friend Jennifer came to visit here.  This was an excellent way to start the new year:  superfun.  We went out for lunch and talked and talked.  Jennifer's quite good at sympathising, which makes her someone restful to confide your worries to.  I did tell her about my concerns about being single - not that I'll be single forever, but that it's probable I'll be single for the next two years, and that upsets me.  I don't particularly want to waste two years of my life in that department.

In addition to Jennifer, a couple of other things happened to make me happy. First of all, I'm making real headway on my book.  This revising is a very interesting experience, because it's forced me to grow up in certain ways, or maybe to practice forms of being grown-up I already knew I possessed but didn't want to practice.  The original book manuscript is full of jokes, and lovely turns of phrase (they should be lovely; I worked on them enough), and just generally a lot of self-indulgence designed to amuse myself and my audience.  But at a certain point very early in these most recent revisions I had to accept that my goal was not to amuse my audience but rather, if not to educate them, to write a book that would stand up as a plausible work of criticism by a smart critic.  And in order to do that I had to cut the self-indulgent junk, face the fact that I wasn't as witty and instantly appealing as I thought I was, and write a book that would appeal not because I was fab but because it was.  Out with all the jokes (except a couple of puns I couldn't bear to part with); out with the general sense that I was awfully pleased with myself.  In with the discussion; in with the humility that makes you know you need to explain something rather than assert it.  Is it painful?  Oh, yeah.  Does it make me sad to see my deathless prose hit the dust?  You got that right.  But at the same time I find it fascinating to watch myself grow in this way.  It turns out I'm not as shallow as I thought I was.

Now, here is the bit that doesn't reflect well on me.  Today I learned that my home department's eighteenth-centuryist is leaving; she has another job.  Now, remember the person who parted ways with me early last year?  The only reasons he gave were that he couldn't live in America long-term, and he didn't know what would happen once my year here was done - he didn't know how we would have gone on.  Well, he works on the long eighteenth century: Romanticism, but also the whole eighteenth century.  And my department will almost certainly be looking for someone to fill the spot for next year, the year I'll be returning after my year in Cambridge.  Do I recognise that this is a kind of grim irony for me?  Hoo boy, yeah.  But when he chose to let me go and to go to someone else, he also signed himself up for a future that involved his remaining in Britain, with a part-time job that comes to an end at the end of this academic year, with no time to work on his academic book, and with a very poor salary.  Did I mention that my department offers a 2/2 load, which leaves you plenty of time to write (as I well know), has superb library facilities, and pays £30,000 per year?  So I'm thinking the irony is perhaps greater for him.  And here is the part that doesn't reflect well on me:  What do you think about that, Mr. Fallen?  It turns out you could have had a job infinitely better than any prospect before you, and you could have had me too; it turns out it all would have worked out, and worked out damn well, after all.  Still, I expect that girlfriend offers enough to ameliorate a grim job situation, a stagnating career, and very little money. So that's all right, then.

(...let me say here that I'm aware he could have had vastly different reasons for making the decision he did -- such as loving that person and not loving me, which makes an unassailable difference -- and let me also say that I've never blamed him, although I have been sad and angry.  But, you know, distance was the reason I was given, and he broke my heart [italicised to show intensity of breakage] so I think I'm entitled to find a certain pleasure in this turn of events.)

Right, it's time for me to go to sleep.  It's now so cold here that when I think about having a partner, I think about it largely in terms of how helpful it would be to have someone to curl up to in bed.  In fact, years ago I told a friend that I thought there was a niche business to be started up in supplying platonic bedmates in winter, and I still stand by that.  So, if you would like to come and combat the icy cold by sharing my giant bed, make yourself known!  I would wear pyjamas with gnomes all over them, and I would be saintly in my actions.  But just so you know, my hair is huge in the mornings.

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