Things I promise to do to this blog...

...just as soon as I've finished writing my lesson plan for A Passage to India. Said novel was something of a nadir as regards my Literature in History classes in 06/07, especially when a group turned up with literally no-one having read it. I'm not a huge fan of Forster- for some reason I always imagine him as being a bit like Richard Curtis, if Richard Curtis was partial to quoting Wittgenstein- but I felt the need to leap to his defence during today's lecture when long-term bane 'Virginia' was mentioned as castigating him for not feeling the need to clog his work with the 'spiritual', which I increasingly come to think is interchangeable with one of my least favourite literary phenomenons, vague spookiness. I once met an American academic at a conference who told me she frequently met women (yes, it was always women) at Woolf conferences who claimed to have been the subject of nocturnal visitations from 'Virginia' herself. If I woke up to find her sat on the end of my bed I'd pass her a David Peace novel and go back to sleep. This is not to say that I've turned into a mangy historicist this year, BTW.

Anyway, what was I going to do?

- Write something about vague spookiness, pet hate extraordinaire.
- Post one or two poems up here, irrespective of the fact that people might actually read them.
- Do something more boorish about football, because I like it.
- Make clear my opinions about certain magazine columnists in a certain Manchester-born newspaper.
- Say something about music. I'm listening to it like I actually care again.
- Update the links.
- Pictures, in all of their mishandled glory (off-modernism, baby...)
- Angst-ridden quotations from Archive Fever, or from blogs about Archive Fever, or from blogs about blogs about Archive Fever
- Articles brimming with all of my barely-repressed insecurities/neuroses regarding the intellectual acumen of my peers/friends.

I'd love to be able to engage in a relaxed and competent manner with elements of critical theory on here, like all of those self-proclaimedly 'Deleuzian' or 'Lacanian' bloggers who fight their amusing little fights on the internet, but I'm really quite inept at articulating myself in that manner. Furthermore, I'm slightly suspicious that the internet Lacanians are actually, pre-dominantly, a troupe of performing neologists who feel the need to ex-hibit themselves under a (putatively) Lacanian rubric in a form of Symbolic compensation for the Real grades of Masters essays in which they argue that the Real is reducible to that which is beyond the Signifier exhausted by relationality.

See what I did there?

Joe