Thanks to the BBC and their craptastic Olympics coverage, I didn’t get to see Evan Lysacek beat that whiny Russian jerk at the men’s figure skating. [What's up with the haircut, Russian dude?] I don’t care about the Olympics that much, but I do like the skating. It seems that the Winter Olympics are not popular here at all. Most of the coverage is on in the middle of the night and even then they just show bits of it. I guess because no Brits are really in contention, no one cares. Also, this isn’t really a snowy, wintery place. If they had the Spring or Autumn Olympics, where all the events invovled being soaked with rain, then the Brits would have something to relate to and want to watch. Snow and ice and mountains? Not so much.
Oh well. We miss out on a lot of things here. The Oscars too! Maybe people with cable TV get to see all this stuff, but I’m just a plebeian.
I do think the male figure skaters are awesome though (with the exception of that Russian guy), because we live in a world with such rigid, bullshit notions of “masculinity,” yet these guys are out there on international TV wearing sequins and feathers and skating to music. It’s a big eff you to all the macho assholes in the world and I love it. I love to see guys who have confidence like that, because you know they were probably beaten up a lot while growing up for wanting to figure skate. It’s what annoys me so much about the Russian guy with the hideous haircut – he’s basically saying Evan Lysacek isn’t manly enough to win the gold, because he didn’t do a quad. I’m glad this jerk and his neanderthal notions of what’s “manly” got a big ass whooping on the world stage.
Just to follow up on my post about the pedestrian that was struck by a bus I was riding on – I wrote to Transport for London to find out what happened to the guy. It took a couple weeks, but they wrote back. It was a lengthy letter, including the following sentiments:
“I am grateful for the time you have taken to get in touch. Please accept my apologies for this regrettable incident and any distress that you suffered as a result of this…I can sympathise with how you must have felt after this experience. We appreciate your concern regarding the pedestrian’s wellbeing.”
The woman who wrote to me seemed genuinely touched that I had taken the time to write. See, I’m not some cold-hearted monster, everyone. So anyway, the guy survived the accident and has recovered. It’s really amazing that he survived. The moral of this story: Street drugs make you indestructible, kids.
If I had been in his place, I think I’d be dead. After this incident, I didn’t get back on a bus for two weeks. It really freaked me out. Even now, I am very careful before I cross the street, which is a good thing.
It’s Friday night and I’m livin’ it up. Oh wait, no…just the opposite. I’m home working on my dissertation. I’m currently writing my Fight Club analysis (while listening to the soundtrack of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and I’m going to throw two questions out there:
[1] This first one is just for the Yanks (and I know those of you on the East Coast are nearly snowed in, so you have nothing else to do but help me). There’s a famous scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt’s character makes a big deal of the fact that he and Edward Norton’s character know what a duvet is. It’s apparently a bad thing that men know what this word means – it’s a sign of their figurative castration! I have transcribed this scene from the film and added the following footnote:
-“Duvet” is more commonly used in British English than in American English and many Americans (male and female) would not be familiar with this word.
I added this footnote for two reasons: I’m doing my PhD in England where the word duvet is common, but it’s not as common in the States (which is why it was an issue in Fight Club). But the key point for me is whether many women would not know this word. I think there are plenty of American women who would not know what a duvet is. Thoughts? This might seem trivial, but it’s important to my analysis.
[2] This will be for the more academic-minded amongst you. Is anyone out there familiar with the work of Max Weber? One of the profs in my department said that Weber might be able to help me with my Fight Club analysis, particularly the idea that consumer culture is traditionally considered something female, which is of course important to Fight Club. I have no idea where to look in Weber’s oeuvre to find this (nor do I have a lot of time to read much of his stuff). Does anyone happen to know about this – or, alternatively, know of another writer whose work might be helpful?
All right, I better get back to work, where I get to write sentences like this: “This reference to Lorena Bobbitt, the Ecuadorian-American woman who famously sliced off half of her husband’s penis and threw it from the window of her car, inserts the issue of literal castration into the narrative.”
It’s that time again – I must dust off the academic portion of my dissertation and begin working on it again. Chapter 1: Fight Club. You all know I love Fight Club. It’s a brilliant indictment of capitalist-patriarchy and the damage it does to men. That’s not the dominant interpretation of the film, but that’s how I read it. All of the issues in Fight Club are relevant to women as well, even if on the surface it’s very ‘male.’ Anyway, the next month will be spent writing the novel and finishing this chapter on Fight Club. How I’m going to do all of this work on top of teaching remains to be seen.
Perhaps in related news, my novel is becoming increasingly violent. It’s always had shootings and bombings, but you can distance yourself while writing about that kind of violence. Now I have beatings and torture, which is very up-close-and-personal. At first I found it difficult to write about such things because I was disturbed that these ideas and images existed in my mind, but now I sort of enjoy it. The people being beaten and tortured are really vile, so they deserve what they get (think Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’). Because of that, it’s sort of cathartic. I’m not sure how I’ll reconcile the feminist ideals of my novel with the violence, except to say: Why should women have to play nice? It certainly hasn’t gotten us very far.
On Tuesday night I was going home on a double-decker bus from Bloomsbury. The bus was speeding down Kingsway when all of a sudden the driver slammed on the brakes; this was followed by loud, multiple thuds as the bus crashed into something. As often happens in the midst of an accident, time seemed to slow down; even though it all happened relatively quickly, it felt as if it were happening in slow motion and a million thoughts ran through my mind: Is the bus going to flip over? Are we plowing into a bunch of cars? Have we run off the road? I was facing the back of the bus, so I had no idea what was happening.
Once the bus came to a halt, it was clear that we had hit a pedestrian. People were screaming. In all the confusion, the bus driver opened the doors, the guy we hit stumbled onto the bus, then collapsed and lost consciousness. People were shouting that an ambulance needed to be called and multiple people called the emergency services. A student nurse was on the bus and was examining the guy where he was at the foot of the stairs, totally motionless. He looked dead. She said he had a pulse and was breathing, but that his eyes were fixed in space. She thought he had a serious spinal injury. She lifted up his shirt and we could see the wounds from where the bus had hit him.
I was really stunned and along with the other passengers, got off the bus and stood on the pavement. All of Kingsway was backed up behind us, since no one could get by. If you’re familiar with Kingsway (near the London School of Economics), then you know it’s not possible for a pedestrian to cross the street; between the northbound and southbound lanes, there are iron gates and a steep drop down into a tunnel. So the guy we hit should not, under any circumstances, have been in the street. This is why cars and buses speed down Kingsway and what makes it so dangerous.
As we stood near the bus, we all thought the guy was on the verge of death (or possibly already dead). About 5 to 10 minutes later the paramedics arrived. As they stepped onto the bus, something completely bizarre happened. The victim leapt to his feet and ran to the back doors of the bus, where he manually opened them (which takes a bit of strength). The crowd gasped in shock. A minute before he seemed dead, now he was on his feet and ripping the doors open. He jumped off the bus and was acting crazed; he ripped off his jacket and threw it in a rubbish bin, then began to run down the street. I cannot tell you how surreal this was. A woman who had been on the sidewalk and witnessed the accident said the bus had slammed into him hard and that it was unbelievable he could even stand up, let alone run. At the end of the block, he collapsed. The police and medics ran to him and as they were examining him, he jumped up and attacked them in an extremely violent way; it took 5 or 6 people to restrain him. He was screaming like a madman; I don’t know what he was saying, but it sounded really scary echoing into the night, especially given that it seemed he had just come back from the dead. He sounded demonic. A police officer walked by and said the guy was “off his tits” on some illegal drug – I can’t remember the name.
It seemed to me and everyone else that this guy had to have suffered major internal injuries when the bus hit him. Even with powerful narcotics in his system, I don’t understand how he could have gotten up, especially because he had lost consciousness before. He probably hurt his chances for survival by running around like that, particularly if he had a spinal injury. I don’t know if he survived or not, or what his fate will be. In London, it’s very difficult to get local news of this kind, so I may never know.
Our bus driver went into shock and had to be wrapped in a blanket. The police didn’t take witness statements or anything, which I thought was odd. As soon as it became clear the guy was a druggie, the mood of the crowd changed somewhat. There was less sympathy; the police and medics were very hardened with him – I’m sure they must deal with people like this everyday and it’s exhausting and a drain on the system. [I'm sure being attacked doesn't help their mood.]
This area of London is extremely dangerous for pedestrians. About three years ago, I stumbled upon the aftermath of a horrific accident at Holborn, where a double-decker bus had lost control, driven up onto the pavement, hit a woman and dragged her under the bus. Of course she died. If you have occasion to travel through this area (Southampton Row/Holborn/Kingsway), be super careful. And if you ride a bike through this area, you’re insane.
This incident left me feeling quite shaken and I ended up walking home afterwards, the sound of the thuds when we hit the guy ringing in my ears. It’s scary to be sitting on a bus reading Henry James one instant, and then the next a person is violently injured and perhaps even killed right in front of you. My sense of safety is still shaken by it and I haven’t been back on a bus yet; when I’m waiting to cross the street and a bus or a big truck races by, I feel my stomach clench. Accidents like this can happen anywhere, but city life just seems to be pretty brutal sometimes. Life and death in the cold, dark streets.
I guess you can throw anything up on the side of a bus nowadays [via the Guardian].
The blatantly anti-woman agenda of the mass media never ceases to amaze me. I think the British media operates in a much more overtly sexist and hostile way towards women. I’ve been living here for nearly 4.5 years now and despite the internet, I’m not exposed to as much American media as I am to British media, but it seems to me the sexism of the American media operates in a different way. Sexism is sexism, of course, and however it works doesn’t make it less offensive and harmful. I’m willing to concede that I may be wrong about the media differences, but what I can say for certain is that I feel “assaulted” by the media as a woman here in a very real way. And at least in London, there is also pornography everywhere – in telephone booths, in mainstream shops that sell newspapers and magazines and sadly, even in the newspapers themselves. You simply cannot escape it. I believe it is a form of sexual harassment against every woman who lives in this city and a human rights issue. (I’ll have a more detailed post on this coming up.)
I’ve already written about how, in London, I’ve experienced much more street harassment and abuse from male strangers – my experiences living in New York City, Boston and Paris combined do not match it. I can’t help but think that all of these issues are related.
One of the big news stories of the day is the announcement that travelers from 14 mostly Muslim countries will be facing additional screening measures before they board planes to the U.S. I suppose Obama is responding to criticism that he’s soft on terrorism. The countries targeted include Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba. Cuba?
The country I don’t see on this list is the UK. Most of the major airplane bomb attempts since 9/11 have involved British citizens. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” is British. The liquid bomb plotters of 2006, who planned to blow up 7 airliners heading to North America, were British. The guy who tried to blow up the plane on Christmas Day is Nigerian, but by all accounts seemed to have been radicalized when he was studying at University College London, where other students have also become radicalized and then committed acts of terrorism. So as for real terrorist threats to American airliners from foreign citizens, the UK seems to be the biggest threat of all. A British passports gets you right into the U.S. without a visa, unlike the other countries on the list, thus making the threat even worse. Thousands of British citizens travel to the U.S. each day. I doubt that many citizens of the 14 countries on the watch list can even afford to leave their own countries.
My point is not that UK citizens should be subjected to extra profiling based on nationality, though I can’t help but wonder what the fall out would be if one of these British-born terrorists is actually successful one day in carrying out a catastrophic attack. My point is that in light of the new measures, it’s important to point out that the immediate threat posed by a small segment of British society is much more serious than the threat posed by Cuba or some of the other countries on the list, making these new security measures ineffective, politically motivated and hypocritical.
I’m horrified – but not at all surprised – that when several Eurostar trains broke down in the Chunnel last night, Eurostar employees left many of their passengers to rot on the trains for upwards of 16 hours. If you’ve ever been on Eurostar – or any train at all – you can imagine how terrible that must have been, particularly because there didn’t seem to be any electricity. Apparently Eurostar has no contingency plans for emergencies. What if there had been a fire, accident or terrorist bomb? Everyone would have perished, I guess. That’s a comforting thought. The explanation Eurostar has given for the breakdowns – the trains going from extremely cold air outside to warm, humid air inside the Chunnel caused the engines to fail – seems strange to me, since it’s cold every winter and this has never happened before. Many of the Eurostar train drivers on the UK side started a strike yesterday and I hope that sabotage is investigated.
The rail service between London and Paris is run by amateurs, by incompetents, by rude, lazy people. I’ve written on this blog many times before about what Eurostar is like and how rude their employees are (particularly on the Paris side) and how utterly useless the whole company is. That has been proven by this incident. They act this way because they can. They have a monopoly on the London – Paris rail service and they know it. Why try hard? There’s no need. Taking the ferry is a hassle, flying is a hassle, particularly out of London; the train is the best option for many people and those of us who live on this side of the Channel rely on it to get to continental Europe. But Eurostar makes the experience as miserable as possible. This rail line needs to be opened up to other companies because passengers should not be held hostage by Eurostar any longer. I’m glad I decided not to go to Paris for my birthday or Christmas – it’s doubtful I would have made it anyway because of the massive disruption to their services now, plus more strikes.
There is a large Muslim population here and so it’s common to see women and girls wearing headscarves. Sometimes I also see women wearing niqabs, which is a veil that covers the head and also the face, with just the eyes peeking through. This isn’t that common in the areas where I circulate, but I do see it sometimes. However, the other day I saw something I’ve never seen before. I was riding the train and there was a young woman wearing a gold, embroidered scarf covering her head. She was very stylishly dressed from head to toe, wearing a black skirt, boots and a black coat with a belt. What was strange was that she had taken the bottom part of the thick gold scarf and pinned it very tightly over her mouth. Her nose and eyes and the entire upper part of her face were completely visible, as was her neck. She was fashionably dressed in figure-hugging clothes, her body not restricted in any way. But her mouth was covered up.
I was disturbed by that image for the rest of the day and even now I don’t like to think of it. This is no different than a woman being gagged or having tape over her mouth – no different at all. I write a great deal about patriarchy and the way that it silences women, in western culture and cultures around the world, but rarely do I see such a literal manifestation of a woman being silenced. In a free country, in Western Europe, no woman should be walking around with her mouth covered up; this shouldn’t be championed as multi-culturalism and people shouldn’t say “oh well, it’s not for me to judge.” You know what – fuck that. This woman had her mouth covered up and that’s not cool. She is an abused woman, robbed of all human dignity.
If it were legal to have a gun here then I would buy one and carry it with me. I’m totally serious.
Tonight I was walking home and some guy started to follow me. I know when someone is following me. I went into a shop to buy something and he also went into the shop. As soon as I came out, he was waiting outside and started to follow me again. Though it was only around 6pm, it was pitch dark, no different than if it were midnight. While the high street had a lot of people walking around, I was heading into an area with not enough street lights and with abandoned buildings and far fewer people (which is why I hate this neighborhood so much). Thankfully, Southwark Police Station was nearby. I could see it about a block away, so I turned around and said to this thug very loudly, “Stop following me! The police are right there and I’m going to the police!” He was a bit stunned, but then started to speak, saying something like he just wanted to talk to me or something. Unbelievable. So I screamed “GET AWAY FROM ME!!!” I walked off and headed towards the police station, then I turned around and he was gone. After this I walked home through the very dark and semi-deserted streets and felt very afraid. If he were somehow following me and approached me at this point, who knows what would have happened.
Less than a week ago, I had another unpleasant experience. I was outside of London in a small town and a guy said something very rude and misogynist to me. Then he drove off. This particular guy was white British, the guy in the previous story was an immigrant from somewhere in Africa.
You know what – I’m really sick of this shit. I’m sick of not feeling safe and I’m sick of abuse – all coming from strange men in the street. I will start to carry some sort of weapon with me, but I don’t know what. Any ideas? It’s really ridiculous that pepper spray is illegal here, because that would be ideal. Whatever I start to carry with me, I will use it on anyone who makes me free threatened and anyone who treats me in an abusive way. I’ve had enough.
My current Facebook status is that I want to run away from home. Here is my current fantasy: I go to some remote continent and live in a cave where no one can find me. I wonder if it’s possible to book such a thing on lastminute.com?
I am having one of those weeks where I’m thwarted at every turn, where everyone is pissing me off, where nothing works. This sums it up perfectly: I have to go somewhere tomorrow by train early in the morning…but a bridge on the train route has collapsed because of rain. So now the rails will be even more chaotic than normal, I’ll have to take multiple trains, it’ll take forever. How is it that a bridge in the rainiest country in flipping Europe can’t withstand a little rain, for crying out loud? I am tempted to use the F word now.
London, I have totally fallen out of love with you. I never expected this to happen, but really…I cannot take it anymore. How will London host the Olympics? I can’t even imagine it.
Anyway, I am leaving tonight and will have to stay overnight at my destination to make sure I arrive on time tomorrow. Because if I’m late for this thing tomorrow, that’ll push me over the edge. I’m teetering on the edge now, in case you haven’t noticed. My hands tremble all day. I have a constant headache. Where, or where, is that cave?
P.S. Do not even consider getting a PhD at a univeristy that doesn’t offer you funding. It’s not worth it.
Today I put Chapter 7 to bed. All 107 pages of it. I moved about 30 pages from it to another chapter a few weeks ago, so I’ve completed at least 137 pages since I returned from Paris in mid-August. Of course the chapter is not really finished – it needs a lot of work – but I’ve written it through from beginning to end. Time for Chapter 8. Chapter 7 was pretty fun to write. I realized that one of the characters will murder someone before the end of the book. Oh – and I know the ending of the story now. I came home one day a few weeks ago and in a white heat, wrote most of the last chapter (but not the very, very end). So I know my character’s fate. It made me cry.
I’m starting to worry that I can’t keep up this pace all throughout the winter. Where will I find new reserves of creativity and brainpower? Are these finite resources? My head hurts. It’s completely pitch dark here before 5:00 p.m. I’m starting to sag a bit. I have to wear my glasses all the time now too. That can’t be good. And I have pains in my hands. This really can’t be good. What are the early signs of carpal tunnel? I’m too young to die.
I recently watched The Hours again, one of my favorite films. I love this scene on the train platform. Whenever I take the train through Richmond, which I do quite often, I always think of this scene. “If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.” Not a motto for the town to adopt, I don’t think. [Richmond is lovely, by the way. I'd gladly move there.] But anyway, this is a beautiful scene from a beautiful film. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” Lovely.
I quit my job at the language school. I just finally had enough. I had already given up one of my classes there but had one left. In my remaining class, half the students were Spanish and they just did not like me one bit. They would come to class late each day (I’m talking 30 or 40 minutes late), they’d talk all during class despite me telling them to be quiet repeatedly, they’d skip many classes then complain they didn’t understand the subject matter. Finally, I began to throw them out of class for behaving this way. They were extremely upset about this and claimed that in Spain you can come to class late, skip class, etc. Well, terrific, it sounds like a fab system, but we’re not in Spain, we’re in England, where you must attend class and show up on time. After five weeks, this message should have sunk in. If you don’t like it, hit the road.
Not surprisingly, they complained to my boss that I am too strict. The spoiled little rich kids didn’t like being told off. [I call them "kids" but they're in their mid-twenties and should know better.] My boss defended me, apparently – I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but that’s what he said. But it doesn’t matter, because I quit. The fact is, I didn’t want to teach this class. It ended up being too much work, way more than I had anticipated. The class was spread over three days and it took away a tremendous amount of time from my PhD work. The lesson prep and marking ate into my day, then there was the actual class, then afterwards I felt drained from having to deal with all the attitude I got during the class. Even on my ‘off’ days I couldn’t switch off from it. But you know, I would have stuck with it, to the detriment of my PhD and my mental health, because I do have a sense of loyalty. I didn’t want to let the students down. But after they stabbed me in the back, the whole equation changed. I’m going to push myself to the brink and let my PhD suffer for 8 more weeks because of these brats? Nope, sorry. Not going to happen. So I left. See ya later kids, good luck to you, buena suerte!
And you know, I feel like I’ve been reborn now. I still have the university class I teach on Fridays, but that is a pleasure. [I also still have my American job.] But getting rid of my job at the language school has freed up my days and it has made me feel so liberated and alive. Yesterday I was at the library all day long! I read! I wrote! I lost myself in ideas and creativity. It was intoxicating. I am grateful for these last five weeks of hell at the language school, because I came to realize that while this PhD is a nightmare in many ways, it’s also a gift in other ways. Having time to read and to write is something that should not be taken for granted. Now, to be able to lose myself in my novel nearly all day, everyday, is an opportunity that I should cherish. My time as a student and with this novel is coming to an end and I’m not going to take on any more responsibilities that distract me from this. I am putting myself first and that’s that. I’ll have less money, but I’ll survive.
Now, I am going to finish writing this goddamn novel if it kills me.
One of the things I’ve always liked about England, particularly in comparison to certain other European countries, is that things seem to run relatively efficiently here. We aren’t normally plagued by strikes and the sort of chaos that can make living in other European countries difficult.
However, lately I have lost a lot of faith in the way this country functions. I hate to write this, since I am in many ways a guest here, though I do pay more in tuition fees than the average person pays in taxes each year and thus, I contribute just as much if not more to the economy. I also work and pay taxes, so I’m not a freeloader.
It just seems that over the past several months, I have repeatedly faced problems doing routine things through the public services, to the extent that it negatively affects quality of life. Recently I’ve written about calling an ambulance and never having it show up. I had a cervical smear done last spring on the health service and just recently got the results, since my sample was sent to the wrong lab (I have no faith that I’ve received the correct results now). I’ve also had many other difficulties with the health service. A few months ago there were tube strikes that paralysed the city. Etc. Etc.
The first item of news: A former classmate of mine from the MFA program at Bennington has just published a memoir that is scandalous enough to make it into the Daily Mail.
No comment!
And now the second item. We’ve learned a few stomach-churning lessons today courtesy of the British ‘justice’ system:
1] You can strangle your wife to death totally by ‘accident,’ not even realize you’ve killed her and then you can go out running errands as if nothing has happened. This chain of events is, apparently, perfectly reasonable to the average juror, even those who are not clinically insane.
2] You can admit to strangling your wife, but you won’t be convicted of murder if she’s a ’slut’ who is having affairs with other men.
3] There is apparently no shortage of jurors who hate women.
No, this is not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan I’m talking about, this is the United Kingdom. The message today from the British ‘justice’ system to women is loud and clear: YOUR LIVES DON’T MATTER. Not that we haven’t already heard this many times before.
The most heart-breaking part of this whole thing is that the murder victim, Kate Ellerbeck, has a sister who felt compelled to make this statement to the BBC: “She has done nothing to be ashamed of. She should have had a future watching her children grow.” It’s sad that she needed to tell the world that her sister didn’t deserve to be murdered by her violent, psychopathic husband.
I knew I’d have a meltdown during the last year of my PhD, but I didn’t expect it to come right at the beginning of the first term. This past week was not good. Once again, I have gotten in way over my head with too many responsibilities. Three jobs, for crying out loud, on top of a full-time PhD that’s in its last year. This wasn’t intentional. I have my American job and then I accepted two classes at the language school where I’ve taught for years. I’ve never taught two classes there at once, since one class alone is about 7 hours of teaching time. But since I have to pay rent now, I accepted the two classes. Only after I accepted the classes at the language school did my university offer me the teaching job that I wrote about in my last post. I obviously couldn’t turn that down, so voila – three jobs.
The two classes at the language school equal about 14 hours of teaching time, not counting marking and prep (which is, of course, unpaid). The university job is only 2 hours a week, but those two hours pay more than a seven-hour class at the other school, which is the educational equivalent of a sweatshop. British university lecturers have it made, let me tell you. I’d love to see the lecturers I know survive one week at the language school. Anyway, the language school job was just too much even on its own. I knew I had to do something about it, but I had committed to the classes. Once the term starts, it’s really crappy to back out of a class. So I felt conflicted, but my PhD and novel were on the line – if I kept the 14 hours, I could kiss my PhD and novel goodbye, because in my time away from teaching, I was just too exhausted to write. The PhD/novel requires dedicated, concentrated work and a level of mental energy that is not easy to sustain if there are too many other distractions. Last Wednesday I was in bed with stomach pains and couldn’t move. Everyday I just felt like crying. Finally I was honest with my boss at the language school – I told him I felt as if I were drowning. I thought he would be angry or fire me, but for whatever reason he was nice about it (in some way, it must benefit him). So now I just have one class there, one class at the university and my American job, which I can take time off of if I need to. It’s still too much, but this is one of the most expensive cities in the world and living here ain’t cheap. I’ll have less money, but at least now I’ll have time to write each day.
When I think about all the the sacrifices I’ve made for this novel and PhD, I feel sick. If it were just the PhD, it wouldn’t be worth it. But the novel could be something really great, so I’ll finish the damn thing, even if I’m poverty stricken and my life is in shreds by the end of it.
I finished the week with a terrible sinus cold, but even still I managed to get some writing done this weekend. I hadn’t been writing for a while. I still can’t write at home, so went out to a cafe this afternoon and wrote five pages while drinking hot chocolate (okay, and eating a brownie). I really missed my character so much. Writing and spending time with her this weekend was like being with an old friend. It’s strange to have feelings like this about someone who doesn’t actually exist in any way except in words, but the fact that I have such strong feelings about her and that I feel she is real on some level perhaps means that I am doing something right. I still have a few months of writing left to go and then the revisions, but I have this sense that I’m nearing the end of my time with her. I think the next few months are going to be about that – sending her out into the world on her own, my little girl.
Today I started my job as a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at my university. I’ve been away from the the American university system for too long to remember what the American equivalent of this title would be, but I doubt it’d sound as grand Visiting Lecturer. This title makes me seem important in some way – I’m just visiting, too good to stick around for the long-term. Appreciate me while you can.
This job was a last-minute surprise and though I had already accepted two classes at the language school where I’ve taught on and off for two years, I obviously couldn’t turn down this university job. It’s very difficult for PhD students to get any teaching in my department, particularly in creative writing, and I’m the only creative writing student who is teaching. [I should note that I don't actually consider myself to be a student of creative writing, though I am technically a student at the university. However, I have an MFA in creative writing, a 2-year terminal degree that entitles me to teach any creative course that I damn well please.] So anyway, I’m very lucky to be teaching and it’s a big break. I’m only teaching one class, but it’s for the whole year.
I went to a conference at Oxford last weekend. Stayed overnight in the student halls at Balliol, which cost £66 ($110). Good crimeny, this country is expensive. The rooms were just average (though they had heated towel racks in the bathroom), but the dining hall where I had breakfast was cool: long wooden tables, lamps, stained glass windows, oil paintings of white dudes, real place settings…servers! How the other half lives, eh? My friend said it was like Harry Potter, if that means anything to anyone. And the quad was gorgeous – American-style grass (bright green on steroids), flowers, beautiful stone buildings. I wouldn’t have minded moving in there for a while.
On Friday night, the streets of central Oxford were filled with groups of loud teens and extremely aggressive homeless people. I wanted peace, so went back to my room and had a bath and then read Lady Oracle in bed. It was lovely. No internet, no TV, no mobile phone reception, just silence. The next morning, I was up early (imagine that!) and the streets were totally transformed – beautiful morning light through the trees, autumn chill in the air, people riding their bikes down the quaint, narrow streets. I wonder what it would be like to be a student in that kind of environment? Sometimes I feel bad that I missed out on a real campus experience as an undergrad. Where I did my BA was the exact opposite of Oxford (or anything remotely close).
The conference was on writing/reading the body in contemporary women’s writing. All the presenters were post-grads (in American English, that’s “graduate students”), so the quality varied, but overall I found it a worthwhile experience and left feeling inspired. As a fiction writer, it’s strange attending events like this because it’s very much about picking apart novels from the reader’s point of view, rather than a writer’s point of view. I feel as if I’ve crashed their party and don’t really fit in. On the other hand, I felt happy that I am writer, rather than someone who only comments on what other people have written. Sorta reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from When Harry Met Sally, when Harry tells Sally that by becoming a journalist, nothing interesting is going to happen to her, she’s just going to be writing about interesting things that happen to other people.
I’m afraid I may have annoyed the presenters on a “chick lit” panel. This one woman did a presentation on Irish chick lit, during which she made the case that chick lit is empowering and feminist. (All the examples she read contradicted this, including one in which a Nigerian woman with a “big butt” inspired the Irish women in one novel. She didn’t even see how offensive this was.) She also said that chick lit explores issues like menstruation and childbirth, which are normally taboo in literature. Huh? Absolute insanity. I had to challenge her on these ridiculous assertions, since she’d insulted my intelligence in such a way. It was clear she’d never really been challenged before, since her defense was that for women from small-town Ireland (including her), chick lit is feminist. Oh, okay. Perhaps she can put a disclaimer on the front of her dissertation that says: “This dissertation uses a feminist framework that is only relevant to women in rural Ireland.” And then while she’s at it, she can replace The Second Sex at the library with back issues of Cosmo.
Some things get under my skin, clearly. My dissertation (the boring academic part) deals with chick lit a lot, so I have strong feelings about it. If my fellow post-grads are producing this kind of garbage analysis, then I suddenly feel much more confident about my own work.
Some of you may be surprised to learn that if you’re extremely ill and you call an ambulance in London, there’s no guarantee that an ambulance will actually come to help you. I found this out during my two years working in the student hall of residence, when I had to call ambulance/police/fire numerous times. Though I’m no longer in that job (thank heavens!) I had to call an ambulance last night for my friend, who was very sick with potentially serious symptoms, yet no ambulance ever came.
I called 999 around 12:30 a.m. I explained the symptoms to the dispatcher and he said he’d send an ambulance. I knew this wouldn’t actually happen, mind you, and 5 to 10 minutes later I received a call from the NHS wanting to know more about my friend’s symptoms. I explained all the symptoms and the woman said it didn’t seem as if an ambulance were urgently needed, so she said that a nurse would call us back within 45 minutes. Meanwhile, my friend was acting delirious and kept asking when the ambulance was coming. Finally the nurse called; I spoke to her for a while, then passed the phone to my friend who spoke to her for a while, then the nurse asked to speak to me again. The nurse said my friend’s symptoms were worrisome. She asked if my friend was registered with a GP. My friend is registered, but she could not remember the name of the doc or anything, only the street where the clinic is. Finally, after an exhaustive computer search, the nurse seemed to find the GP surgery where my friend is registered. She then informed me that she was sending through a request to the GP’s out-of-hours service for the GP to call us, which she said would happen within one hour.
Anglofille is an American living in London, finishing up a novel and a PhD, taking photos, and blogging about expat life, books, feminism and perpetual angst.
Spring…wishful thinking.
Dorothy: I don’t know whether you know the international magazine “Paragrana” already, but it might...
Jan: Hey, sounds good!!! Wanted to tell you I am currently reading Elizabeth Strout “Olive Kitteridge”...
Jan: Neither West nor Bundy were child murderers, even if they displayed “cruelty” as kids. Their example...
Anglofille: You are all making me work hard tonight! I think you are mis-stating my views. I think that gender is...
Dorothy: Anglofille: I’m with you on some points there, and I’m not with you on others, but more with Jan...
Caroline: It is well-known that serial and mass murders often start showing gratuitous cruelty very, very young. Fred...
Anglofille: I’ve never read that they are required to tell any certain people about their new identities....
Jan: OK, if by “child killers” we mean boys torturing cats, then I rest my case. I meant child murderers...
Anglofille: There’s a lot of evidence that adult killers have a history of violence as children, particularly...
Jan: Anglofille – I read the interviews with the judge / lawyers who claimed details of sexual assault...
