The Poet's Progress

I'm sorry it's been so long since I last updated this blog! University is keeping me busy. Today I have my second concert of the week; next week I'm reading at an open Mic night (which isn't terrifying at all...); on Tuesday I helped with a sixthform assembly... this is just a small sample of the general madness and awesomeness of University. Not to mention the work of course... Normally I blog to procrastinate, so perhaps my absence is a good sign. However, today's blog is different. For my first semester Creative Writing module, I am required to hand in 72-80 lines of poetry/ a 1500 word short story accompanied by a 500 word critical commentary on the development of my writing. The deadline is in about two weeks time, and I'm trying to marshal my thoughts. What have I learned, aside from how not to use a microwave? I am planning a blog on all the accidental things I've learnt at university, most of which relate to cooking or cycling, but you'll have to wait for that thrilling document until the Christmas holidays! :) 

So this post is about how I edit a poem, and the changes I've been making to that process. You will get to see various samples of my unfinished poetry. Although most of the time I'm quite loud, I'm actually cripplingly shy when it comes to showing anyone my creative work; sending off portfolios to get into University was a big step for me. So please be kind...

When I first started writing, I didn't edit my work at all, or revisit it. I just sat in my room with my computer, creating notepad file after notepad file of 'poems'. I still use notepad for this; not only is it simple and uses very little memory space on my computer, it reminds me not to get too sanctimonious about anything I've written. If a poem half-works, the idea of going back and dissecting it to try and get it perfect can seem scary, or even illogical. As a consequence I have literally hundreds of files of poems that are half-good (by my standards!). There's something about each one that I like, or liked at the time, so I can't bring myself to delete them, but I don't believe in them enough to edit them. The thing is, there is no point churning out realms of half-good material that will never be accepted for anything, and you will eventually regret. It's better to edit whilst the original idea is still fresh in your mind. 

So I've begun to develop my own writing and editing process! I still have a long way to go, but by putting more time and attention into my writing, I'm creating poems that I don't want to delete instantly, and hopefully poems I can use for my end of semester assignment. 

So from one rough draft:

multiply yx²,

the untested solution to all relationships,

predictable as a coin rising

and falling, as the number

governing how many times

you can toss two people together

and they still fall apart.

 To the edited version: 

Still it sits on my desk,

untested, as If:

all relationships were predictable

as a coin rising

and falling, as the number

governing how many times

you can toss two people together

and they still fall apart.

The differences are small, but a small change can make a big difference. In this poem, I was thinking about probability, based on the toss of a coin, so it made sense to make each stanza two lines long, to represent the heads/tails yes/no dichotomy. In my first draft, most of the stanzas are three lines, which was inconsistent and served no purpose in the poem. I also reorganised the sentence to use the 'If:' proposition, which is used in computer language to represent a choice and was a motif I used at the start of the poem. 

So did editing it make it any good? I'm not sure, to be honest. Better is not synonymous with good. I did actually send this poem off to a poetry e-zine, but I was rejected - something I'm told I will have to get used to...! :D At first I was disappointed*, but I know now that one rejection doesn't mean the work isn't any good. There are ideas and lines I like in this poem which I will probably go back to, and maybe write something else from.

Tip No.1: If you have a bad poem, and you're not sure where to go with it, choose the best line and use it as a starter/inspiration for an entirely new poem. Or use it to re-write your first attempt. 

So this is how I write:

1) Rough work.

I carry around a little black book with me at all times, in which I scribble poetry, oddments of prose, good words, random phrases, and notes to myself. It's scruffy, full of bits of paper, and I love it to pieces. Also, I try to carry a really good pen with me. Some poems are re-worked several times in the book, and there are plenty of abandoned stubs. I just found the phrase 'How does she feel? / Like Cigarettes & sunshine' scribbled in one corner. This is possibly one of my most private, precious possessions and I never show anyone its contents, ever. 

2) Re-editing on paper.

This is a new phase for me. I copy the poem out, making changes as I go. I read it aloud and try out variants on different lines.

3) Thinking break

I'm most inspired when I'm writing in the heat of the moment, scribbling as fast I can, but what I lack when I'm writing like this is perspective. So usually I leave the poem there for a while, if I can bear it. A few hours, or a few weeks later, I'll pick it up again and try to cast a more critical eye over my work. This is important as things that seemed like great ideas then can be deceptive, and you're more likely to pick up out-of-place phrases or awkward ideas on a second reading.

4) Typing up

This used to be my first, or even second step! I write up all my work onto notepad files, which I then back up on my memory stick. As I write, I re-edit again, mostly for style rather than content. Sometimes I rephrase things and substitute adjectives, with the help of the ever wonderful thesaurus.com, but as I do most of my work on paper now I edit less on the computer than before. At this stage, I'm trying to look at how my poem looks overall, including aesthetically, whereas at earlier stages I work as if through a magnifying glass, focusing on each word individually and slowly joining the dots between them and their neighbours.**

Tip No. 2: Back up everything. Twice. Losing your work is the most disheartening thing ever. 

5) Re-naming and other fussy activities

At this point, whatever I've done is as finished as it will ever be. I have started revisiting old poems, though. There's this one poem I wrote over the summer which is terrible, but I love the expressions I used, so I'm breaking it down into several mini-poems, each working with one of the ideas I conflated in the original. This involves a lot of re-writing and editing, but hopefully it will give new life to a dead poem. I also rename things, check my spelling & grammar (punctuation doesn't matter - if it's wrong, it's artistically wrong). I also keep a record of everything I write, no matter how awful, along with notes and dates. This isn't necessary, but it does help me keep a track of what I've done, and where I think I'm going. 

So now I'm going to be brave, and show you something I started yesterday, as an example of how I edit/create: 

Stage one - rough scribblings:

New Directions                     <-- something one direction need to take

November sinks like

November is sinking.

Around Ely it stops, and frost

frond-like wraps the carriage

up, and we are the lost.

The sky is gone soon the sky

At Thetford it melts go the last call

for tickets, please

At Thetford I watch                                            <-- line length

it wallow in the faces

of the grey people boarders

who board boarders, rigid in their reserved places

who talk who are going west, away

the only compass-point

here. Before Peterborough the day        (misspelled Peterbrough)

is over, and to the east

the last autumn’s fingertips disappear. 

I've actually transcribed that from my book, scribblings out included... :D

Stage two: editing

As the East, as the crow flies

November is sinking.

Around Ely it stops, and frost

frond-like wraps the carriage

up, and we are lost.

At Thetford the Thetford stop I watch

it wallow try to warm the faces

of the grey boarders sitting

rigid in their reserved places

With the From east to west,

West For them, going west is going away,

As fast as we can run away

Wst, November clings on behind

West, to Peterbrough’s lights

and the night ahead

Like the sun we only go                                 unimpeded

from east to west. Soon the day

closes on Peterborough, and like

November, the fens push us away

into December. This is the east                  restless December

where good weather goes to die.

and when you can still see

and the voices telling you home

is near, and the

They told you it wasn’t far from home.

They didn’t mean to lie.  

You can see the point where I tried out lots of different lines, adding one on top of another until I was forced to start a new paragraph! Without the crossings out, it looks like this: 

East, as the crow flies

November is sinking.

Around Ely it stops, and frost

frond-like wraps the carriage

up, and we are lost.

At the Thetford stop I watch

it try to warm the faces

of the grey boarders sitting

rigid in their reserved places.

Like the sun we only go

from east to west. Soon the day

closes on Peterborough, and like

November, the fens push us away

into December. This is the east 

where good weather goes to die.

They told you it wasn't far from home.

They didn't mean to lie.  

 At this stage, it still needs another edit, and I haven't decided what I think of it yet. For one thing, I need to look at the train lines again and work out whether Ely or Thetford comes first on the Norwich-Peterborough journey. There are awkward moments; for instance, the end of stanza three feels too long. I'd like to put a line break in after 'fens', but this would disrupt the day/away rhyme, which took me a long time to settle on. I am pleased with the sudden change of tone at the end of the poem, but I'm not sure how clear the story of the poem is. Can you see that I'm on a train, travelling home, in the late autumn? Can you imagine the fens as I saw them that morning? It's too early to tell yet. But there, it is, and for now, I'm pleased with it. 

Everyone has their own editing process. I'm still working on mine, and I'd love to hear about what works for you. Leave me a comment/or send me a tweet @corybantically - I'd love to hear from you! As always, thank you for your patience in reading this far.
God Bless,
J.R. x 

*really grumpy, and may have had a secret weep later

**I'm sorry for that sentence. I really am.

And so, to Mass

If you'd rather not read all this, but are interested in praying/being prayed for, please skip to the bottom! 

If you'd told me, a month ago, that I would become a part of the Catholic community at university, I would have laughed at you. Maybe, I would have said, but that's not my thing. I mean, it's nice to go once a year, for old times sake, but I'm a Protestant. A member of the URC church. I'm going to find a URC church somewhere in Norwich, first Sunday, and I'm going to enjoy being a dissenter for a bit. Also, I'm going to join the Socialists. (Yeah...that didn't happen. I've never met people who so strongly resembled zombies before...)

The problem with that plan was that it seems God has his own plan for my life. Sometimes I doubt that God is doing things in my life, because it's easy to doubt when you think you have everything sorted, and you're in control. Yet this week has shown me, more than ever, that God is helping me out and guiding me. If this new path hadn't been so surprising, I might not have noticed it. How many times has God done this for me, I wonder? Corny as it might be, I've spent the last few days thinking back to that 'Footsteps in the Sand' poem, and wondering if right now, God is carrying me. I'm trying to manage so many different things, learning to run my own life for the first time, and I have a thousand things to organise and worry about, yet I feel strangely content, even peaceful.It's illogical; I am always worried and stressed. It only makes sense in the knowledge that God is helping me out massively at the moment, carrying me and all the baggage that comes with being a new university student so that I can cope. Tonight's homily (sermon/talk) in Mass was on thankfulness, and tonight, I feel like I understand how much I have to be thankful for. I'm just not sure I have the words to express it.

But I've kept you waiting to hear about this surprise, the sudden new direction God seems to be sending you on. 

I may be going back to Catholicism. 

I say may because, as I'm finding is usual for plans the Big Man's had a hand in, it is almost impossible to predict what is going to happen next. This might just be a temporary thing to help me get through the first few weeks of university. It might be forever. All I can do is trust and hope.

But why should this be so surprising? I've already told you that I'm a member or the URC - the United Reformed Church - but my relationship with denominations has been a complicated one. As an adult Christian, I've found my place in liberal, free church Protestantism, but when I was brought up ecumenically. I was baptised jointly in the Catholic Church, and the Church of England, in a shared service, and brought up as an equal member of both churches. Incidentally, I understand mine was the first baptism of this kind, ever. They're not common; my parents and the Association of Interchurch Families (AIF) worked really hard to bring it about and make it feasible. People still disbelieve me when I explain it, but it's true. To add to the complication, when I was fourteen I was confirmed through our Local Ecumenical Partnership, becoming a full member of the Church of England (or, the Anglian communion), the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, and the United Reformed Church, a move which effectively annulled my baptismal membership of the Catholic Church. Then a year ago, I moved to my local United Reformed Church and became a local member there, and in that Church community I believe I have found where I belong. When I moved there I was spiritually tired. I needed to receive rather than give for a while, and I know God guided me there for a reason. They've encouraged me and supported me in my faith and my personal life, and helped me slowly become an active part of the church again, helping out with an early morning toddler service. 

To cut through the religious jargon: Some churches get on and some don't. They believe in most of the same things, but belonging to more than one is often considered paradoxical, because of their minute differences. Some of us ignore these differences and do it anyway. One of my friends called me 'a mongrel of religion'...I think that sums it up accurately.

So why, after effectively removing myself from the Catholic Church years ago in my early teens am I once again wrestling with it? My relationship with the Catholic church has not been easy. As a child, I thought that Mass was boring, because it had no Sunday school, and this led to my desire to quit Mass as soon as I could, only attending when I was forced to go. I was still a regular church goer, attending protestant services on Sunday morning, so until now I never thought of it as 'leaving church'. I never understood why young people drop out of church till now, thinking retrospectively. I don't blame myself; Mass is not designed for children! 

As a young teenager, I became conscious of the divisions between the Catholic church and the protestant churches. Issues like the ordination of women became important to me, and I realised that the little theology I'd worked out for myself fitted on the Protestant side of things. Within a year or two, I became and angry teenage ex-Catholic. I was angry. How could they be so stupid, and so obviously wrong? I wanted to correct everyone who had made the mistake of being Catholic. I was rude, and it stills hurts me to think of the nasty things I said to good Catholics at the time, at school and in my family. The teenage brain is not programmed for empathy, according to the BBC news, and I was in that respect typical.

But alongside all this burgeoning teenage angst, I was trying to find an adult faith of my own, working things out. A few months after my confirmation, at 14 years old, I had an experience that changed how I think and understand God forever.

I won't go into details here. Let's simply say that I had a private experience of the numinous. I told people at the time and I was ridiculed, which I perfectly understand, so I'm saving that event for my own prayers, and encouragement when I'm struggling. Strangely enough, it happened in a little URC chapel, downstairs from the conference house I'd been staying in (On a Methodist course...). I think this is important. Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm wondering now if God is saying to me, you can find me in the United Reformed Church. By which I don't mean that the URC has a monopoly on God, but that I specifically am meant to be a URC member. 

At the same time, I was at a Catholic school, and enjoying being the one person who refuses to say the Hail Mary in class. Small rebellions are the source of endless pleasure as a teenager! 

Yet the last few years, things have begun to change. Having identified everything I dislike about the Catholic Church, and more importantly, found a place where I can be comfortable and develop on my own faith, I've begun to find my attitude to the Catholic Church changing. It started with a supportive priest, the realisation that going to Mass with my school and taking communion with them was important to me, and a grudging respect for Catholic moral authority. I'm not sure I agree with everything the Vatican says, or the contents of the Catholic Church Catechism, but more and more I find myself respecting the moral teachings of the church, with its sound, loving ground, and turning to it for guidance. After all, it is the bedrock of a third of the world's population, and the morality of the western legal system. You have to respect something that has commanded that degree of authority. 

But it's more than respect, more than acceptance of our differences. At Mass, I find a reverence for God, a sheer state of adoration, that is rare in any other denomination. (Although I think my home church do it pretty well!). There are times when I want to be quiet, to reach out to God in my heart, and to think on how wonderful and awesome he is, and this is so apparent in the majesty of the Mass service. Catholicism, at heart, is simply beautiful. You can criticise it's teachings or policies however much you like, but the beauty is always there, shining through. 

And Mass on campus is something special. For the first time, I'm going to Mass with a group of energised young Catholics who care about their faith, and we have an excellent priest who preaches the most brilliant sermons. I've been twice and loved it, coming back feeling more in touch with God from each one. I've also made it to an ecumenical church once, and tried but failed to make it to a URC church this morning, so it's not just laziness that draws me back to the on campus service. Even when I find a protestant church of my own, I'm going to stay a Mass goer, which I suppose will make me a two-service a day girl... Don't bash me with your bibles or anything, right? 

From one angle, it sounds like the Prodigal Son story, but the truth is that whilst I am returning to the security of my childhood church, the church which has come to mean safety and reassurance to me, I'm not renouncing anything I've done since, or going backwards. On the contrary, to grow in my adult faith I need to belong to a church which is nearer to my particular beliefs, and in which I can participate fully - hopefully a United Reformed Church, although I'm open to any of the denominations I belong to! But I'm glad to have made my peace with the Catholic Church, and I think there's more to come from our brief encounter. God is doing something, sending me to Mass at the very time when I'm attempting to make a new start in my life. I look forward to finding out what it is, and trust that God knows, as always, what he's doing.

Your prayers for me at this time would be greatly appreciated, and I'd love to respond in kind. I remember to pray far less often that I should, so having names would be a wonderful thing. If you'd like me to pray for you/exchange prayers, leave your name as a comment, or tweet/DM me @corybantically, or if you have me on facebook, private message me!

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings about the interior working about the Christian church. Leave any questions in the comments and I'll try and explain more clearly :) 

God bless!

J.R. x 

A short-ish update (You know me...)

It's now under a week until I leave for university. Facebook and Twitter are humming with university posts. Many of my friends moved in this weekend, so today's speciality has been pictures of beautifully decorated university rooms. I have some plans for my own room: I have two rolls of 'Poetry on the Underground' posters, one of my cosy IKEA rag rugs, and a box of multi-coloured, flower-shaped fairy lights. 

(By the way - where does the phrase 'fairy lights' come from? Is it old? I like it. It makes the fire-risks and all that seem a lot less realistic)

Half of my belongings are now in bags and boxes ready to travel. This has not been an easy process. I am a hoarder. I invest deep stored emotions in everything I won. Throwing things away for me is like being Voldemort and throwing away your Horcruxes. Still, the process proceeds, and this move is becoming more and more real. At the same time, we are preparing to move house as a family, and my long suffering Dad has just painted my new room in the exact specification of red-y orange I demanded, a sort of Heinz tomato soup colour. I have decided that I do not feel at home without my orange walls, so although I shall have to survive without them at university, I'm glad that for at least the next few years there will be somewhere familiar, and orange, for me to return to. For some strange reason, other people do not seem to appreciate the radiance of my orange walls. Each to their own.

So what is, or where is home? Moving to our fifth house, it's a question that's ceased to both me. Around the age of thirteen, and living in my least favourite house, I took to reading with great care the property sections of the newspapers, and grading the houses based on whether I'd live there or not, and preference. My ideal house had at least six bedrooms, looked beautiful, ideally included a study, pool and attic conversion, and sat in the middle of a sprawling landscape garden, stables optional. It was a vindictive, childish way of hinting at my parents that what they'd provided wasn't good enough, and it makes me wince to think back to it. Thirteen is a difficult age. But then we moved to our current house, and I turned fourteen, and stopped reading the property section. The worst thing you can do is long for things you can't have, especially whopping great grade-II listed mansions. 

Our family has two mottoes when it comes to 'home'. Firstly, and most importantly, home is where your family is. Secondly, home is where you make it. It could be a flat in Cornwall, a castle in Yorkshire, a suburban semi in London, but as long as we were all there, safe and sound, it could become home for us. More than that, 'home' isn't the building, or the locality: it's where we find ourselves in each other, where we belong. This makes 'homelessness' worse: not only are you without the physical comfort of a shelter, you loose the sense of belonging attached to shared living and to an extent, property ownership. Alden Nowlan, a wonderful Canadian poet, ends his poem 'He sits down on the floor of a School for the Retarded*' with these wonderful lines: 

'It's what we all want, in the end, to be held, merely to be held, to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips, for every touching is a kind of kiss.)  

Yet, it's what we all want, in the end, not to be worshipped, not to be admired, not to be famous, not to be feared, not even to be loved, but simply to be held.  

She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her. We are brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife. We are lovers. We are two human beings huddled together for a little while by the fire in the Ice Age, two thousand years ago.'

These lines never fail to bring me reassurance and comfort. If you're interested in reading the full poem, I found it online here. The Selected Poems of Alden Nowlan was one of the first poetry books I ever bought myself, so it's very dear to my heart :') 

So my physical home is changing drastically, splitting into my university home and my 'base', with my family, but I'm not loosing anything. In fact, I think I'm gaining more than I'll miss. I really love my home here, in my little town, but not one but two new homes offers me the chance for a complete, fresh start. The chance to live the adult life I've been dreaming of and become the person I aspire to be, starting again with a clean slate. Besides which, I am completely in love with Norwich, and I can't wait to live there. The first time I stepped onto the campus I had an instinctual feeling that this was where I am meant to be, and God's been so good to me, guiding me this far. I honestly doubted I'd get there, but I shouldn't have. He's got me under his wing. I think I'll be okay. 

So next time I update this blog - unless I get really bored during the rest of the week - I will be somewhere new! I love the idea of a new landscape and a different setting to work in, with new inspirations, a different atmosphere. (I promise not to use the word 'new' again now, okay!) 

As always, thank you for your patience, your time, and your forgiveness for my enthusiasm for the semi-colon, hyphen, and bracket. 

Until then, God bless.

J.R. x 

* Retarded - This was written in 1982, so no offence meant. 

Backdated books review: LOTR, Rattigan, Economics, Owen Jones, Rilke, and other such ramblings

August 2012

I've been rather lazy with this page. When I realised I couldn't set it up to do individual posts - as on the main page - I went off the idea a little. However, I have been re-inspired to write something at least up about what I've been reading. 

My main project for this summer was to read the Lord of the Rings. The sheer scale of Tolkien's world, with its millions of avid readers, its fanfiction, films and appendices, really intimidated me - I was convinced it would be a whole-summer reading marathon, trekking through interminable passages listing the genealogy of elves. For those interested, there are interminable passages listing the genealogy of elves (and humans, dwarves, the Numenorians etc), but the story itself isn't overwhelmingly difficult. I can understand that some people might not get into it, but I was gripped. For days I raced through the familiar journey, watching Frodo and Sam struggle across Ithilien and revelling in the sheer beauty of the story. It has a wonderful epic quality, a richness of language, which is unsurpassable. I read all the appendices and spent days discussing the lineage of the dwarves with my Dad, who is a long-time Tolkien lover, and fully intended to go and read all the additional books, but then I got distracted reading other things, so I am yet to discover the history of the Second Age  of Middle Earth and that sort of thing. Perhaps its better this way. When you read the Lord of the Rings, you realise you're just skimming the surface of Tolkien's life work, the culminating event in the glorious history of Middle Earth. It's only fair that it should take a lifetime to read it, and savour the pleasure. 

Since then I've read a variety of new things and old. I finally read a Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, which I'm still thinking about, and I'm reading 50 Economic Ideas You Really Need to Know, one economic idea at a time. The idea is to try and make myself sound more intelligent when I'm arguing with politics students. So far, I'm eight ideas in, and I can refer to things like the 'invisible hand of supply and demand' with alacrity. The '50 ideas' series are the most fantastic books for sounding smart at short notice. I read '50 Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know' just before my A-Level exam, and I think it helped. Maybe. I'm slightly terrified that when I start university next month everyone I meet will genuinely understand these things, so I'm trying to polish my few nuggets of knowledge in the brief time left before I start packing... I've also been re-reading Sherlock Holmes for relaxation, because like most literaturish students I'm in love with him. 

Strangely for me, I haven't yet finished my holiday reading books. It's a tradition in my household that we each buy a novel or two for holiday reading, and this year I asked for Owen Jones 'Chavs: The Demonization of the working classes' (non-fiction), Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, also by Rilke. I'll start with the book of letters. Written to aspiring poet Franz Kappus in the early half of this century, this selection of ten letters from Rilke to Kappus is inspiring, uplifting, encouraging, and life affirming. I felt, as I'm sure most readers do, that Rilke was talking directly to me. For a manual on how to write, on God and on life, they are essential reading, and I can this book becoming part of my 'Desert Island Discs' kit - the book, after Shakespeare and the Bible, that I'd want beside me when I feel lonely or lost. 
This brings me on to the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. I haven't finished the Sonnets yet, so I can't really comment on them. I don't feel qualified to comment on anything Rilke created, so all I can say is this: read them. Read them slowly. Read them on buses, and then listen to the conversation the people behind you are having about them, having seen you reading them. (You have to turn the pages every now and then so they don't realise you're eavesdropping.) If you can, read a bilingual translation so you can appreciate the rhythms and rhyme scheme which are totally destroyed in translation. Go away and learn German then read them properly.* Love them. Do not worry too much about understanding them. 

I bought the wrong translation of the Elegies and I am contemplating going and buying another translation because I think the phrasing is slightly better. This is how obsessive and lit-geeky I feel about them. (If you're interested: I have the Stephen Mitchell translation, which is good, but I'd prefer the Martyn Crucefix translation. So. Sad.) 

I haven't finished Owen Jones Chavs yet. It merits slow reading. Discussing attitudes to the working class in Britain, it is a truly challenging book, taking on many common misconceptions, from social to statistical. It suggests links between cause and effect, prejudice and reason, and argues strongly for the case that that social ills are a symptom of, rather than the cause, of Cameron's 'Broken Britain'. As you might have guessed, it's an angry left-wing work, with plenty of reasoned criticism of the Conservative governments of the last few decades, especially Margaret Thatchers' government. Jones also levies a fair amount of criticism of the labour party under Tony Blair, and is careful to present a reasoned and valid case for all his arguments. It is the sort of book that could be questioned, but it's a useful springboard for a groundwork of understanding the problem of class in Britain today. I feel it could do with - or at least, I'd appreciate - some more political theory to support the statements it draws from case studies and statistics, but the point is that the book is popular politics, designed to be accessible to everyone, so the absence of theory is justified in its premise. A highly qualified political commentator, Jones presumably has argued through the more academic side of his arguments and is confident that he could, and I think often has, support them when required to. It is, in any case, a useful and informative book, and the authority of Jones' arguments has for me been confirmed by the instances where he speculates about the future and his speculations have been confirmed by events since the book was published around two years ago. He's another person I'd love to meet, as our views seem very similar. The only other thing I'd nitpick about the book is the poor organisation of his arguments. It's a little hypocritical of me to complain, given the rambling nature of most of my blog posts, but I feel the book could have done with a plan setting out a miniature argument and conclusion for each chapter and then sticking rigidly to it, like an academic essay. Perhaps the book was planned like this, but if so, it's been hidden cleverly so as to create a general impression with each chapter rather than a logical, joined-up-the-dots argument. If there's one thing Critical Thinking AS Level did for, it was to make me pedantic about being able to trace argument structures, and it's often quite hard to follow the thread in Chavs. 
Nevertheless, it's definitely worth reading. It might not leave be more informed, or better at social arguments, but it will leave me with a genuine desire to challenge class perceptions and my own inherent prejudices. I have to read it in small chunks because it makes me want to hit people who vote Conservative,** but underwritten in the text is a genuine desire to make the lives of others better, and educate the uneducated - the degree-holding classes...

Soonish I will (hopefully) have a reading list for University, so that'll probably take up most of my time. I'm going to have to learn to think again! :D 

Until then, I have two main things on the go. I'm going to read Julius Caesar, because I saw the RSC production on TV and really liked it, and I'm going to read Les Miserables. Today, on the 7th or 8th book of the first principle book of the story, one of the main characters was finally introduced...more on that when I get there.

Until then, keep reading :D I always like book suggestions so please send me some!
J.R. 


*This one is still a work in progress. 
**Which isn't nice. Please don't stop reading if you vote Conservative. I love you really. 

Backdated book review: I, Claudius

May 2012

I have just finished Robert Graves' 'I,Claudius'. Written in 1934, this is a fictionalised autobiography of the fourth Roman Emperor, Claudius, whose superior mind and physical disabilities allow hs survival in what must be the most murderous, perverted and despotic family in all history. Claudius is a fascinating character and an excellent narrator - so good that before I did my research, I mistakenly thought this was a translation of a genuine Roman autobiography (oops!). An austere-looking hardback, I was convinced that I would find it boring, and only picked it up to confirm that it was as boring as I thought it would be, although I admit aerily mentioning obscure books I have read was also a motivational factor... The book was far more readable that I ever imagined, and also far more famous - it was made into a very successful television series with Derek Jacobi as Claudius in the 70's - so neither of my preconceptions came true. I'm really glad I did pick it up though; it's been a long time since I've read anything quite as engaging and fascinating as Graves' masterpeice. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading something beyond their A-Level set texts - it's not hard work, but it is very rewarding reading :)

Cassette Appeal: Please Help!

In September, I leave home for university. The idea with leaving home, albeit briefly, is that you're a legitimate adult. Not necessarily grown up, but old enough to look after yourself. For most, including myself, it's a time to put childish things behind us and discover ourselves as adults. I'll pack up all the bits of me and my life I want to take on, all the adult bits, and leave my childhood tidied away at home. All my old toys, my teddies, my old clothes. Well, brown bear may come with me. I've had him since before I was born and I don't want to leave him, although on the other hand, I'd hate it if he got damaged. 

But there's one thing I'd like to find, before I try and pack away all the relics of my childhood. I'm looking for an audio cassette tape of Philippa Pearce's 1958 novel, Tom's Midnight Garden. It was probably made during the 1990's, when I would have been listening to it, as it was a high quality cassette - possibly even as late as 2001. We owned it until recently, but somewhere along the line one tape was misplaced and so the other - it was a two tape set - was thrown away. Ironically, the second tape later turned up, and so followed its sibling into the dustbin. Being a child, I had no reason to remember who read the story, so I'm having a hard time tracking down these cassettes. Many adaptations of Tom's Midnight Garden have been made over the years. YouTube has thrown up no hints, and it isn't possible to hear a sample of the tape on ebay to verify whether it's the right one. I'm only after one particular adaptation. It had particularly beautiful and entrancing music. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood are listening to these tapes in the car with my family or falling asleep, and this was my absolute favourite.

I'm also interested in any tapes of Diana Wynne Jones books - they always made me smile :) Thankfully we still have our dramatisation of the Hobbit and the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which were equally wonderful tapes. 

If anyone reading this - which I know is very unlikely - owns any of these tapes and doesn't want them, or knows of an inexpensive way to copy them, or would even let me borrow them, I would be immensely grateful. The Tom's Midnight Garden tape, for some inexplicable reason, is very important to me and I would love to hear it again. Equally, if anyone knows of a better way to find old tapes on the internet than google searches, which have proved pretty useless so far, I would love to hear about it.

Please forgive me for writing such a sentimental post. I'll try and write something more serious next time! When I first started this blog I intended it to be more personal, looking at the tiny adventures of my everyday life, and as I've gone on I've realised that I want to talk about bigger things than myself, even if I have no right to. I worry that, despite having an opinion on everything, I'm not a very interesting person. Now, I am a not-very-interesting-person with a strange interest in old children's tapes. Well, it's a development... 

Until next time, go find your old cassette players, wind up the spools of tape with the end of a pencil and let the memories flood back - 

                                                      - for in a few years those tapes will just be plastic rectangles that unravel when you try to use them... 

God bless,

J.R.

Update: Within a few hours of posting, not only have I received an offer to turn the tape into a CD - thankyou! - but my lovely mother managed to locate it on amazon, so I have purchased the CD version. I am now a happy almost adult. Thankyou :) 

Let's talk about Twitter

I've had a few topics running around in my head for potential blog posts this week, but this morning I woke up thinking about Twitter (never a good sign), so I'll start with that. 


Short Twitter summary for the uninitiated who do not have Twitter (sad. sad. sad.) 
Twitter is a 'microblogging' website, of beautiful simplicity, where the user posts short comments of up to 140 characters. The user is able to follow others and be followed, send direct messages, post pictures through links, and follow trends - particular phrases which are cropping up frequently within a geographical area, e.g. the UK. #Hashtagging is used to highlight the topic or key words of a 'tweet', making it instantly searchable. And that's basically it. 


For want of a better start, some shameless self promotion! If you have enjoyed my blog, please follow my Twitter - @corybantically - where you can find obscure opinions, random rants, perplexing politics, wonderful words, and other alliterative things that pleased me less when writing this sentence. In the world of Twitter, I am a small fish (or should that be a chick?). At the time of writing, I have 103 followers and 2217 tweets. There doesn't seem to be an upper limit to how many tweets you can send, and many people pass the 10,000 mark. Archetypal 'tweeter' Stephen Fry has sent 12356 tweets and has 4,612,268 followers, as of 11.10am today. Well, I would have more followers, but I block the spambots and pornstars.*


Rapidly gaining users, Twitter has been expanding at an explosive speed. It's useful, fast, and easier to remain anonymous than on Facebook. The ease of communication has made it a key tool on 'the street'; faster than the news websites, more open than Facebook, and more diverse than any other network, it's a brilliant tool to start a revolution. Sitting in my bedroom in the free(ish) world, I have to nod respectfully at Twitter for its part in the revolutions in the middle east. It would be an exaggeration to say that Twitter caused the revolutions, but it certainly enabled them. Twitter is a great place for meeting new people, although you have to be careful. It's, quite simply, the best place to stay abreast of current affairs. Also Justin Bieber and One Direction, but you learn to filter them out. 

Yet the thing that is really making Twitter famous is the moral and legal dilemmas it throws up. We all know that the internet is rewriting the rules of privacy, but Twitter has created more scandals than any other. We've all heard about the problems enforcing injunctions as secrets are leaked over Twitter. Some people use the anonymity of Twitter to spread this information successfully, and notorious groups like hackers Anonymous have twitter accounts, yet the police are also using twitter and it has become not uncommon to hear of arrests made as a result of people posting on social networking, such as during the London Riots last year. 


More controversial are the cases where the arrest is due to action on social networking. At what point does an action cease to become a right, through freedom of speech, and become an offence? The jury are still out - quite literally. The #TwitterJokeTrial, concerning a joke tweet about blowing up a local airport has only just cleared in favour of the defendant. It's clear to anyone rational that it was a joke, but in the end, it could be construed as a serious threat. A visit from the police could have solved the issue, but instead time and money has been wasted and one poor man's life has suffered because of a flippant comment he made on Twitter. The ease with which the kind of silly comments we make to each other every day of the street can become newspaper headlines is astounding. 
Only today another Twitter scandal resulted in an arrest. One user, a young guy, sent a series of abusive tweets to GB diver Tom Daley, accusing him of letting his recently deceased father down and making death threats. It's easy enough to see that this is just an idiot with too much publicity, speaking without thinking, but his words were abusive and inappropriate. The question is whether they were serious enough to precipitate an arrest. For me, the line is whether it would have had the same outcome if he'd said it in real life, passing Daley on the street; thing is, I don't think he would have. People perceive the internet as a great big shield they can use to say or do anything (the term is trolling), but they're wrong. And so we have to create a new code of behaviour and new laws about rights specific to the online community, and they're far from ready. The internet is moving on faster than the judicial system at least can handle it. 


The other, more mild gripe, I have with Twitter is that there are vast amounts of irritating people with nothing interesting to say who amass thousands of followers by bargaining for followers with each other. The less subtle of these style actually including the hashtag #TeamFollowback or similar on their profiles, and they have very 'hipster' bio's - naming bands they like, declaring their love for tea, posing semi-naked with a caption like 'i'm so ugly. yeah'. I think you have to be a teenager to appreciate fully how this works. I'm sure their lovely people in reality, but in the world of Twitter - designed with a vague hope people will use their 140 characters to make insightful comments - these people are particularly frustrating. The ways it works is this: They ask their followers to RT (retweet) them to get to a particular number of followers, e.g. "I'm 10 off 150! RT!". They exchange 'shoutouts' with each other. So Mary tells all her followers to follow @Emma "because she's a lovely person so all follow her. RT" and in return Emma tells all her followers to follow "@Mary because she's wonderful and you'll all like her." In reality, neither of them have ever met - they just follow each other on twitter and neither is particularly interested in what the other has to say.(Then they unfollow you so that their follow count is higher than their 'following') Actually, I'm not convinced any of these people ever read their timelines - they follow hundreds, if not thousands of people, and the majority of those millions of tweets are frankly, banal nonsense. Such is the world of the internet, it's just that Twitter emphasises the sheer volume of this nonsense. 


But surely you don't have to follow these people? Of course not. And you can block anyone on Twitter who is sending you spam or giving you unwanted attention. More effectively, you can protect your tweets so only certain people can see them. I'm not a protected tweet-er - for the moment, at least - so I do occasionally encounter unwanted attention on Twitter. Recently I decided to enter a conversation with a stranger on Twitter via email. It was a lovely conversation, but after 7 years of having 'do not talk to strangers on the internet' drummed into me at school, I realised what I was doing was deeply unsafe, so I stopped replying. I've probably hurt the feelings of a lovely and ordinary person out there, but in the end, you just can't be too careful. That was hard, but the internet isn't a playground. It horrifies me to think of the way I used the internet when I was younger. My parents, quite rightly, wouldn't allow me to join a social network, so I joined Piczo, Bebo and Myspace (twice!) behind their back, and happily posted all sorts of information about myself and pictures without security controls. I have now been able to delete most of that - the Piczo and Bebo accounts are gone, and the information has been removed from Myspace. Strangely enough, the 'deactivate account' button on Myspace doesn't work, and the customer service line never answered my messages... When I've finished this blog, I'm going to go and play with my Google+ account. I love most of the Google services, like this one, but I can't figure Google+ out - and I'd like it to be displaying a little less information about myself! 


Forgive me for rambling. Having started this blog to discuss Twitter, rather than follow a line of argument, I've allowed myself to digress and procrastinate. It's now Wednesday the first of August, 13.39, and Stephen Fry still has 12,356 tweets, but has gone up to 4,617,463 followers. His Twitter is hilarious - satire and wisdom combined. For all the nonsense, Twitter is a great window into the lives of many fabulous people, ordinary and famous alike, and useful organisations - I started following Team GB yesterday! If only, like Mr Fry, my followers would increase by over 5000 whilst on a 4 week Twitter hiatus in Uganda... 
Time to send another tweet.




Do you have an opinion on this? Or even better, a twitter account? ;)
Leave a comment or send me a tweet :)


J.R. x 





* Don't let me put you off Twitter. Hey, I'm sure those spambots and pornstars aren't all bad. 

On the High Street

Warning: May contain over-dramatic metaphors


I am now firmly convinced I live in the best town ever. Four years ago we moved to a medium-sized market town on the verge of being swallowed up by a fast growing city. Having moved from the city itself, this isn't something I particularly resent, but the longer I live here the more I fall in love with little town life. Out of some appeal to originality, I'm trying to avoid the word 'vibrant', but I can't think of any other way to sum up the atmosphere in this town. It's so full of history and culture and life. Like many towns, it's experienced it's losses, such as the closure of the branch line (now a lovely, shady walkway) but it hasn't become a dead, commuter town. Old families stay. People move here and never move away. The churches and the clubs and societies and the multitude of coffee shops and the scout groups and the festivals teem with happy locals. I love it, and when I move away in September, I'll miss it more than anywhere else I've lived. 


The high street is only five minutes away from my doorstep, so this morning I went up into town to raid the charity shops. As you may or may not have guessed, I am a book fiend, and as it happens we have a particularly excellent selection of book-selling charity shops here. After visiting Oxfam (my favourite, but smelt weird this morning), Willen Hospice (always excellent for books) and Age Concern (spotted useful book on Hitler in window display) I was meandering towards the co-op to pick up 4pints of milk (thrilling) when I remembered that I'd heard about a new book shop opened down one of the side-streets, so I thought I'd take a look.


And then I was transported to book lovers heaven. 


Maggie and Josie's Bookshop is an independent shop, selling a wide selection of second hand books. Walking around, it was obvious that they'd been selected with love and taste: everything was in good quality and the selection was fantastic, from sports biographies to 50p Danielle Steels to Dr Faustus and English A-Level textbooks. The shop itself felt quiet and homely, with a few beautifully kitsch touches like the front of the desk, papered in book-leaves. Clutching my armful of books, I had a lovely chat with the lady who runs the shop about books, and unashamedly dragged my long suffering mum back later in the afternoon so she could buy some too. In the end I purchased 5 myself, plus 1 mum bought for me, at only £12.50 in total, which was fantastic! Having also bought three books in charity shops earlier, I now have nine new books. It's too good for words, so here's a picture instead: 

Courtesy of Maggie and Josie's bookshop: 
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. 
The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
Peter Pan and other Plays by James Barrie 
Save me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
A glossary of literary terms &
a palgrave book of 20th century literary theory.


I am so happy to have been able to get the original play version of Peter Pan, which I have been looking for for ages. I was also tempted by Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Vladimir Nobokov's Lolita but I had to stop buying at some point. Also Lady Chatterley's lover, but somehow it does not feel quite decent to own it. I had to get it out of the library by the self-service checkout. 


I also bought Animal Farm by George Orwell from Willen Hospice and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and Burning your boats: collected stories by Angela Carter from Oxfam. We already have the Moonstone, but I am a Wilkie Collins fanatic and require my own copy to attend university with me! 

The other high street shop I want to talk about is Queen of Threads, a relatively new vintage clothing shop at the other end of the high street. This used to be my opticians and I was gutted when they closed down as they were really lovely, but all that changed when Queen of Threads opened. At present, it is the only clothing shop on the high street. Quirky and colourful, it sells the most amazing range of jewellery, bags, shoes, dresses, skirts, tops and trousers to be found in the county, all at affordable prices. Being reasonably conventional in my tastes, I haven't been brave enough to buy any of the more exciting pieces yet, but I love going in to browse. Although my 'sleeping mouse' ring broke, I still have a gorgeous dress with a woolly dog on it and this wonderful, hand-knit jumper photographed right. It's the perfect jumper for snuggling up in on a winter's evening, but it also looks great and makes me feel confident. What more can you ask for? Love it! 


So that's my materialistic outpourings for the month. I hasten to assure you that I am a deep, fulfilled, spiritual person and did not jump up and down with joy at the prospect of double-stacking my bookshelf...




Till next time, God bless & stay groovy!


J.R. 

Look - No glasses!

I've moved fractionally up the seriousness scale since my last post, to 'I'm taking myself seriously, but it's not really important'. 

This morning I did something I've been meaning to do for a while - try and draw my room without my glasses on. I knew this wouldn't be a great idea, as I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but the idea was to try and give you an impression of what it's like to open your eyes every morning and see the world as a giant fuzz. For those of you acquainted with the linguistics of optometry, my eyes score -4.5 and -5.5 respectively. 0 means perfect sight, -20 is no sight on the short-sighted scale, and +20 is (I presume) no sight on the long sighted scale. Basically, my eyes can't focus on objects further away from my face. It's a very common problem: I reckon, although I have no statistics, that more of us wear glasses than not. Thinking about it, I suppose in numerical terms, this means I've lost a quarter of my sight... Being short-sighted though, without any other medical conditions, isn't necessarily permanent. As the shape of your skull changes, your sight fluctuates; apparently it can improve in middle age. It can also be cured by laser eye surgery, although I believe you have to have -8.0 in each eye to have this done on the NHS. (Don't quote me - I'm speculating here!)

Since I started wearing specs just after my ninth birthday, I've become rather fond of them. I have a particularly lovely pair at the moment with green stripy sides, although the glass is beginning to look depressingly thick. People often ask me to remove my glasses and then exclaim that I look different, and stare at my face as if my nose has suddenly turned green or something equally disturbing; most of my friends have only ever known me with glasses these days. I think I look smarter in glasses, personally, although I wouldn't mind trying contacts. There are, of course, disadvantages to glasses. I have to take them off to go on rollercoasters, so I can never see the big dips coming.They fall off and break at the worst moments. They slide down your nose when you're sweaty (ew!) and you can see the rim of the glasses constantly, although after a while you become blind to this. Glasses don't cover your peripheral vision and nice frames are really expensive. All this aside, I think they're fantastic. If I'd been born in the days before glasses I wouldn't have been able to read or sew or enjoy the theatre or any of the hobbies I suppose they had in those days... It's a scary thought! Yet glasses are just one of those tiny alterations you make to your life these days, imperceptible changes for the majority of us. In all seriousness, thank God for opticians!

As promised, the picture of my bedroom without glasses:

I think it looks a little bit like impressionism. Naturally, this is because of my gift for drawing, not because the impressionist were short sighted. 

The blue blob on the wall should have been a calender. On top of my wardrobe there are two framed paintings, a Van Gogh and a Salvador Dali, a photo frame, several souvenir glass bottles of sand from the Isle of Wight, a Venetian carnival mask (Not even drawn - it's white so I couldn't see it), a glass coke bottle wearing an innocent smoothies hat, and a red table decoration from my 18th with little multicoloured 18's spilling out of it. The piles of oddments on my desk are completely obscured, the jacket on my chair vanished into it, and the pattern on my bedspread is gone. Drawing with the paper on my lap, I couldn't even see properly what I was drawing, doubling the inaccuracy of my sketch. Even so, this is in as much detail as I could see. For perspective, my room is about 4m long, and my focal point is about 15cm away from my nose... 

Drawing this was an interesting experiment, although I'm not sure it's one I'll repeat, if for nothing else than for fear of boring you all to death. 

Prizes for anyone who can guess what the other unidentifiable blobs in the picture are!

God bless 

JR x  

Magic me there?

I've been writing a lot of serious posts recently, so today I have decided to write you a short summary of my favourite fictional ways to travel, which I'll probably update as I think of more. Please leave me your suggestions to be added to this list in the comments!

1. FLOO POWDER

From: The Harry Potter Series

Advantages: Quick, Magical folk only, looks amazing

Disadvantages: Dirty, No muggles (awh!), may deposit you one grate too early, not very environmentally friendly.

Why? I like the idea of being able to step into your fireplace and go wherever you like. There's something wonderfully quaint and mystical about this aspect of floo powder. It's cute without being gimmicky, and as far as I can tell, it's pretty original. 

2. BABYLON CANDLE

From: Stardust 

Advantages: It's really valuable, it can travel long distances ridiculously fast, it can follow imprecise commands like 'take me home' 

Disadvantages: It gets confused and takes you to places you'd really rather not be, it's hard to get hold of, and each candle only has one or two journeys in it. 

Why? The candle is black and for something supposedly good, looks wonderfully evil. Also, the phrase 'travel by candlelight' has a wonderful ring to it. 

3. HEART OF GOLD

From: The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

Advantages: Beautifully random and eccentric, doesn't have to go through hyperspace, flickers through every point in the Galaxy at once, looks pretty, is filled with wonderfully strange rooms/people/fish. 

Disadvantages: Often appears in very dangerous places, easy to loose when you've misplaced it, vulnerable to the attacks of cricket-robots, not as fast as the bistromath, can't fly and make tea at the same time

Why? This is without doubt the coolest space ship in the universe. It works on the principle of improbability. The whole series refuses to take itself seriously, and as such, is the most hilarious and yet beautiful science-fiction series of all time - and certainly it's only trilogy in five parts. 

4. ASLAN'S BREATH

From: The Silver Chair (6th book of the Narnia Series, C.S. Lewis)

Advantages: Fast, very good view, warm and comfortable, very safe

Disadvantages: Only Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole get to try it out, and even then only once. Also, involves falling off cliffs. 

Why? Although it sounds initially VERY WEIRD, in context, it makes a lot of sense. Aslan is a lion/God, he's sending them on a mission, they're all at the top of a cliff looking over the entire world, so he lets them float to their destination over Narnia on a sort of cloud made of his breath. C.S. Lewis' writing, as usual, is extraordinarily beautiful. Don't start the Narnia series with this book though - the best introduction is the 2nd chronologically, but principle book, the ever famous The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. 

5. DRAGON

From: Everywhere, but I'd like to pick the time Dr Faustus gets to write a dragon with Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe's play Dr Faustus.

Advantages: Seriously cool, quite fast, and if you tame them it wouldn't be a bad ride. 

Disadvantages: The scales might make it quite uncomfortably, people run away from you, the dragon may decide to eat you, and it's very hard to steer a dragon. Apparently. 

Why? Again, the cool factor triumphs. Also, Dr Faustus is enjoying the benefits of being seriously evil at this point, which is quite a welcome rescue from wizards in pointy hats jumping on their cute pet dragons etc. I saw a production of Dr Faustus at the Globe where the dragons were these wonderful blackened skeletons, terrifying looking things, the perfect complement to the Jacobean dress and all... It was beautiful, comic, and haunting. Also, the fire-breathing could be quite handy.  

6. NAZGUL

From: Lord of the Rings

Advantages: Fast, powerful shriek, quite hard to kill (a sword through the neck usually does the trick)

Disadvantages: Large size makes it hard to balance on buildings, ugly.

Why? Most of the characters travel by foot, horse or pony in LOTR, which emphasises the human aspect of the epic, but frankly, isn't very exciting. As ever, the baddies, who have no need for the valour of a slog across Middle Earth, get the coolest transport, although the goodies get the best costumes. The Nazgul are horrible, but with all the SFX, they are  also quite spectacular. 

7. T-65 X WING STARFIGHTER
From: Star Wars 

Advantages: Fast, cool navigation & targeting equipment, precise, fits one droid & one human/humanoid, good weapons if you like blowing things up

Disadvantages: Blows up ridiculously easily, no good if you land it in a swamp

Why? Luke Skywalker has one. Also, it's possible to blow up the Death Star with one of these, as they're very fast and can make quite precise moves. Also, it kind of means unlimited access to any planet in the galaxy. 

8. HAGRID'S MOTORBIKE & THE FORD ANGLIA, also THURSDAY NEXT'S SPORT'S CAR
From: Harry Potter Series & Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair 

Advantages: Technology at its utmost, augmented by magic! Fast, potent, and eccentric.

Disadvantages: Occasionally unreliable, all of them stand out, two of them are dependant on magic

Why? It's a bit retro and  and very effective, and a great way of announcing that you're a trustworthy character.

My inner geek is satisfied.