Fascinating stuff from Germaine Greer - perhaps the best public speaker I have ever had the pleasure of being in an audience for - on the disparities between male and female humour, and the old lie that men are funnier than women. I can't really add much to this, because I'm knackered, other than to say that I agree that the majority of men I know who really, really enjoy making other people laugh (ie, me) look for a kind of acceptance in it. I'm not sure that this is a bad thing, though...

Petrolhead Propaganda

The Hungarians all laughed at me when I told them that I can't drive. It seemed wise not to get into an ethical debate about the subject.

On that note, here's the ever-reliable Evening News doing its part for the Norfolk drivers' lobby...

That link will stop working in a week or so, by the way: for future reference, the story is about a man with a phobia about speed cameras...

Monday morning - a shot in the arm

I'm starting to like Monday mornings quite a lot. The last few weeks have made me realise just how much I enjoy teaching, especially when its results can be as immediately clear as they are in language classes. I like to think that I'll bring what I've learned in this field back into academic teaching: although I believe that the ideal humanities seminar is characterised by a certain formlessness and natural fluency, the pedagogic realities in the UK at the moment make this more or less impossible. Literature seminars too often collapse into a situation in which the teacher is having to explain (what is inevitably their own take on) a text that the class have not been able/ bothered to read, and setting lesson objectives in such circumstances is basically pointless. It is pretty dispiriting to have a group of twenty, three of whom are bursting at the seams to discuss the narratological difficulties of The Turn of the Screw, whilst the other seventeen are making excuses for not having got beyond the first page.

Language teaching has been a different kettle of fish, and has certainly offered pointers for how university seminars might be better run. Firstly, the school I'm teaching at insists that groups should contain no more than seven. Secondly, you can't do this work without a lesson objective. Thirdly, the students all (seem to) want to work.

This isn't to say that I'd prefer to be a language teacher, only that the literature seminars in the redbrick and Brutalist universities are predicated on utterly unrealistic conditions, and that far too much of the work the tutor is asked to undertake there involves making simplifications for students who, I'm sad to say, probably shouldn't be there in the first place. Tutors, predictably, become unmotivated, and a degree of cynicism creeps into a process that should not accomodate such an attitude. We're being asked to encourage independent thought amongst a generation for whom critical thinking has been reified as a banal 'well, it can mean anything you want it to mean, can't it: that's just your opinion'. The great license of poststructuralism has been turned back upon itself, or even been ventriloquised, by the Fukuyamas and Fukuyama-lites who would have us believe that our democracy has been perfected because we can propose the deferral of any opinion.

Anyway, that is for another post. What I meant to say is that I particularly enjoy my Monday morning class, because it's exclusively male, and nearly all my other students are women. Predictably, Monday is the silliest, most unruly class, meaning that I really have to come out of myself to have any authority. This morning, I think I cracked them, although this did involve a long argument about whether or not an Audi can do 280 km per hour, and whether one should do this or not. I think I'll avoid getting into cars driven by Hungarians for this reason...apparently, it's 'normal' to rag your motor to the top of its capacity.

And we were supposed to be talking about film reviews...

Hard Fact Time

I feel lucky to be in a different country while this situation worsens. Having a new job, meeting new people who speak a language I know next to nothing of every day, tends to take the edge off situations like the precarious health of one's local football team's finances. Last night, though, after an exchange of texts with my brother, I sat down for twenty minutes with a glass of cheap red wine to try and figure out exactly what I think about it all.

My brother and I are both in our mid-to-late twenties and we could both reasonably be said to be beyond the age of no responsibility. He's a full-time journalist with a few years worth of experience, I'm a PhD in English supposed to be transforming my thesis into a fully-fledged book proposal. Last time our football team achieved any real success, I was nearly nine and he had just turned seven, so we were understandably not going to celebrate that by going out on the town and getting drunk and sentimental. Last night, I realised that the window of opportunity for that kind of abandon has just about gone. It will probably be a few years before the club is in a position to challenge for anything again, and I just can't see either of us being a position to suddenly drop everything and travel across the UK for a vital end-of-season away game
by the time that situation comes about.

I've seen Man Utd, Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea fans who have never set foot inside a football ground wildly celebrating winning various competitions. I've seen them argue with each other about the relative merits of their clubs as if they had any real connection with the place. I've seen them moved almost to tears by adverse results while sitting in the pub on a Saturday afternoon. All Thom and I have got from Darlo in the period of time when we can afford to actually follow a club with the 'passion' all of these plastic fans proclaim they feel is disappointment upon disappointment upon disappointment. The chances are that next time - if there is indeed to be a next time - Darlo get promoted, I'll be sitting in a conference room somewhere, or something equally adult.

Another point in all of this is that, for all the complaining fans do when their clubs go into administration, there are people who (understandably) have no interest in football whose livelihoods are damaged when '1p in the pound'-type settlements are imposed by preferential creditors. It's all well and good the 'club being saved for future generations', but when its debt management agenda can involve other, smaller, companies taking a serious hit in the pocket, there's something pretty grubby going on. Football fans need to be less blinkered about what 'administration' actually means: it isn't just a problem for the club which results in a ten point deduction, it has a real and palpable effect in the community. Clubs must learn to live within their means soon, even if that means a number of them going part-time. I'd rather see Darlo fielding semi-professional players than think that their mismanagement had cost anyone a job or their livelihood.

'I'm forty, and I've done nothing I'm proud of.'

Talking of plotting, we went to see Gus Van Sant's biopic of Harvey Milk last night. I enjoyed it, although the ending was pretty heartbreaking, and thought Sean Penn was outstanding in the title role. He may even have undone some of the damage done by his pompous, dick-waving directorial turn Into the Wild, but it's a little too early to say.

One note about Milk, though. It's very interesting how many films recently have dealt, in one way or another, with crises in the ego of the successful male. Here's the list that immediately springs to mind:

Goodnight and Good Luck (2005) - David Strathairn's fantastic portrayal of Ed Murrowgoes beyond the manifest politics to attempt a psychologisation of the newsman during his contretemps with Joe McCarthy.

Michael Clayton (2007) - George Clooney's high-powered fixer confronts himself at the same time as taking on the ethical shortcomings of corporate America.

Frost/ Nixon (2008) - Pretty much the same: Michael Sheen's David Frost isn't just taking Nixon to task, he's - with the aid of Sam Rockwell's left-leaning academic - interrogating his own lack of political responsibility.

The Damned United (2009) - Well, it's not out yet, but it's safe to say from the trailers (and the source novel) that the film will be at least as much about what took place in Brian Clough's head as what happened on the pitch.

Milk did open up avenues for psychological explorations, but it tended to close these down in ways that the above films didn't (or won't). Each time, we were returned to the dynamics of interpersonality, to engagement, to what one might do to alter their immediate political circumstances. There was less hand-wringing here than in a film like Michael Clayton, although it was, indisputably, a film which took an acute interest in how men perceive themselves and their achievements. Van Sant's decision to suggest psychologisations without following them up in their entirety gave the film a rather unusual texture, but it was probably the right directorial choice. In a way this was the anti-Dark Knight, in as much as Christopher Nolan's second Batman film repeatedly offers us glimpses of political engagement at the end of a long, incredibly dark tunnel of angst without ever quite letting us reach them. Good stuff, anyway.

'Sometimes I get an idea for cinema...'

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel ... You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there's a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn't finished till it's finished. And one day, it's finished.

A reticent David Lynch is interviewed about his creative processes in the Observer. This is exactly how I like to think of Lynch working. 'How a character talks' seems to be just as valuable as a work's point of origin as the McKee-esque dynamic of a protagonist and their antagonism: of course, Dale Cooper's almost absurdly earnest delivery in Twin Peaks might be said to set the tone for the whole series. Lynch's remarks here make me think of M. John Harrison's novel Climbers, which, to me, is almost about the writer's attempt to establish narrative connections between particularly powerful images or Wordsworthian 'spots of time'. As in much of Henry Green's writing, 'plot' gets subordinated and reduced to the status of a defile which allows the reader to move between outcrops of particular poetic intensity.

Green, I think, worked from the same kind of premises as Lynch. Also reticent, or elliptical, when asked to provide statements about creative process, he memorably said that his novel Loving, set in an Irish country house during WWII, grew from a remark made to him by a man who had once been a butler. Upon being asked what the best feeling in the world was, the butler replied:

Lying in a bed on a Sunday morning with the church bells ringing in the distance, eating hot buttered toast with cunty fingers.

My friend Lorcan has a joke about Creative Writing students. He was a manager in the postgraduate bar at UEA for some time, so he became pretty familiar with the odd human traffic of that place. He'd meet Creative Writing PhDs and ask what their novel was about. In the first year, they say 'It's about Vincent van Gogh, but from the perspective of his mistress.' In the second, they say 'It's about Rembrandt, but from the perspective of his mistress.' In the third year, they say 'It's about Paul Gauguin, but from the perspective of his mistress.' Because the degree is never finished, you can substitute as many artists as there are years. The point is, though, that the inflexible plot device, whilst perhaps having some kind of hard, Aristotelian, attractiveness, is no substitute for that salacious phrase, or that nagging sound of a voice awaiting embodiment, or the misleading simplicity of a certain quality of light. In Twin Peaks, the death of Laura Palmer was a giant MacGuffin which legitimated the earlier inventions of Audrey's come-ons, Cooper's voice, and the light through, and the smell of, the Douglas Firs.

Michael O'Leary, I'm beginning to think, is the world's greatest satirist...

He's like some character in a Bill Hicks routine magnified by, well, a large number.