I haven’t posted on here for a wee while.  I’m probably more likely to post things on my other blog nowadays anyway.  So check it:

http://italiannotes.wordpress.com/

The Christmas/New Year TV scheduling this year was bloody woeful.  Truly atrocious. It was all bloody repeats, even on Christmas day. I mean, is nothing sacred or sacrosanct nowadays? And it seems to get worse year on year; I recall feeling similarly unenthused about last year’s festive television offerings. However even those lowered expectations didn’t stop me from being even more underwhelmed this year.

I suppose it was good for me in a way. I had next to no distractions from my work and so I got much more done. I mind when I was studying for highers or for various university exams when I really had to work at finding a way of weaving my study rota round the Christmas TV schedules. There were things that I just couldn’t miss. I loved the whole routine of getting the TV listings magazine a week or so ahead of time and then sitting on the floor with my pencil and eagerly circling the programs and films I wanted to watch. The anticipation was almost the best part.

TV was what I turned to, to relieve the stress of poring over all my notes and trying to get all of this mass of data to stick in my head.

But no, not any more. It’s not just that I’m a grown up now, since TV isn’t supposed to lose its appeal the older you get; nor is it that I have better things to do than plump myself in front of the box and switch my brain off, like parties to go to, or people to meet, an exciting swirl of a social life or anything resembling a social life — I really don’t.

Actually my age does play something of a role here: I guess, I’m much more impatient and irascible now that I’m older and my mind has narrowed ever so slightly. I’m definitely far readier to find something on TV an insult to my intelligence and much quicker to dismiss it as a waste of my time.

And maybe that’s because now that I have less time to put aside for leisure I want to use what little I do have more profitably: and being on a (perhaps misguided) self-improvement drive at the moment I’m convinced I have to spend even my time off in a way that engages my brain or my emotions in a deeper way. Something can’t just be entertaining or funny – oh no, I have to learn something from it.

Notwithstanding all that, and notwithstanding and my sentimentality and my overly nostalgic tendencies, I’m pretty sure my 15 year old self, or even my 18 year old self, to whom the idiot box was such a source of comfort and reassurance, would have felt similarly indignant at just how pedestrian Christmas TV has become. I really do believe that things have markedly changed for the worse over the years television wise in general.

I’m not asking for overtly Christmas themed films or programs here; it’s just that a little bit of escapism, and some enchantment would be nice, and it would definitely help to make amends for the mediocrity the TV channels foist on us the rest of the year. If nothing else they could have some old fashioned black and white films on or that weird arty foreign cinema they used to put on Channel 4 or BBC2. I mind they put La Reine Margot on at Christmas or Boxing Day about 10-12 years ago and I fell desperately in love with Isabelle Adjani and had a massive cinematic crush on her for the next year or two.

Of course I realise that the media landscape has undergone momentous changes over the past decade, what with the advent of digital TV and the internet, of new media and all the rest of that shite I’m barely keeping up with. Nowadays of course the main terrestrial channels are much more risk averse, unwilling to depart too far from bland populism and more than happy to shunt off more interesting fare into specialist, niche channels.

Unfortunately my mother and I, rather stubbornly, haven’t got round to buying a set top box yet – I’ve been holding out because I was scared digital TV would be too much of a distraction ironically enough — and I’ve using a broadband key since I’ve been up in Glasgow, therefore my internet access is limited due to the prohibitive cost of data – so I’ve been stuck with terrestrial TV as a means to wile away the hours when I wasn’t working.

I should definitely read more.

I’m trying to survey the last year, to figure out what it has meant for me. But it feels a bit artificial to frame the events of the past few months in terms of the calendar year since the second half of 2008 ran almost seamlessly into January 2009.

I mean there’s nothing especially significant about the last 12 months over and above its being a year. Lots of little small things occurred in 2009, which, perhaps taken together over the passage of time and after much hindsight, may prove to have been of more consequence than now seems to be the case.

Life has been a little too monotonous and grey I’m afraid. I haven’t paid much heed to the changing of the seasons, barely registering the fluctuations in temperature or in the colours of the leaves; nor do I really break the year up into semesters or terms. I exist in my secluded little world most of the time ploughing my own, lonely, little furrow.

I have my quiet routine, the quota of hours I work each day. The work is mostly similar. Even the inconvenience of moving didn’t make too much of a dent in my schedule– thanks, in no small part, to the wee lady’s hiring a car, which enabled us to make a very successful trip to Ikea in Eastwood. Mostly my routine got broken up by illness, several bouts of the cold, and various infections – I’m a magnet for viruses.

I had resolved to be more social this year but I didn’t really get round to it — my resolution to get up earlier also fell by the wayside, meaning I had to give up the pretence that I was really disciplined. I was going to join all these societies, learn a martial art, become part of the creative writing society and write poetry and share it with like minded people, really come out of my shell and finally grasp and take a hold of all those opportunities I’d let pass me by the last couple of years.

Two things got in the way of that, well three things if you count my natural shyness and my inborn reticence when it comes to having to talk to people, even folk I’ve known for years and years. One was my PhD – the fact that it leaves me very little time for anything else. It’s hotting up a bit now I’m in my third year and the end of my funding (though clearly not the end of my PhD) looms ever nearer. And what have I got to show for my — coming up to – three years of, picking up my EPSRC cheque each month, my three years of weekly meetings with Dr A, and working diligently to understand the rudiments of Modal Logic and Automata theory (most of which I ended up forgetting a short while later), for all the hours I’ve put into this enterprise? Pretty much nothing.

I have up speaking as of now got no publications to my name – at least nothing serious. It’s no joke folks. I started my PhD before anyone else in the office, but everyone, including, Mrs Nga, the wee Vietnamese lassie who started a couple of month ago, has at least one publication in some kind of journal of repute; two of the cunts in the office can boast of a list of publications that numbers 7 or 8. Woe is me, what excuse have I got.

I could claim is that what sets me aside is that what I’m working on is so much harder, or that I don’t have the luxury of collaborators, but it won’t really wash. My material is no more specialised or inherently difficult than what anyone else is doing – it might even be, gasp!, a wee bit easier — and I’ve actively chosen not to involve anyone else on my work. At the end of the day what it comes down to is a combination of my innate dullness, my lack of organisation and my wanting of initiative. I like having my lonely little furrow to plough, my quiet routine.

But this want of concrete results on my part has meant that, since I had no paper to submit I didn’t get to go to any conferences this year and envied those who did, I didn’t get to go to summer school –even though as the office idiot I would have benefitted the most from attending classes and talking to professors – and I just generally felt like I was wasting my time.

Near the middle of the year I thought I was onto something, a proof of a result that was worth proving, and that boosted my confidence up a bit. Yes, I had something semi-original to say which I could write up, even if it was bordering on the trivial, even if my proof was longwinded and inelegant. But still, it was something, a meagre trickle of water to ease the more desperate effects of the drought. I’ve been living off that little bit of assurance for the past few months even though my faith in my work, in my hideously constructed proof, has taken quite a few knocks.

The biggest problem has been that I’ve had very little feedback. Dr A was too busy teaching and too involved in her own work and her collaborations with the other students in the office to go over what I’ve sent her in too much detail. And there’s no else one in the department who’s specialist enough in my area to give my work anything but a cursory, superficial look. No one with the authority or clue enough to say, look sonny here’s where you’re going wrong, or, all this is needless, there’s a much better way of doing it.

That’s what I’m really afraid of, that this stuff that I’ve spent a year and more working on will turn out to be redundant. But I guess that’s the price of being so fond of, or rather so habituated to isolation and loneliness, you shouldn’t, indeed can’t expect much in the way of support from anyone else.

The second excuse I have for not sticking to my resolution to be more social is the Nook. The Nook is where I’ve ended up on account of my sins — or at least on account of my awful miserliness. Up till September I was living on the Queens Road in one of Mr David’s rooms. I wanted to move for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the insincere, the insufferable and the insufferably smug, Mr David himself. Another reason was the torment of the creaky floorboards of the room upstairs.

The biggest pretext to move however was my large, poorly insulated room, the cold Nottingham winters, and the necessity of bargaining with one’s bastard flatmates to turn on the heating (Mr David tried to convince me to stay by claiming last year’s cold winter was a fluke, that it wouldn’t get as cold this year. Ha!). The Nook doesn’t have that problem because all the utility bills are included in the rent – and the rent is very, very reasonable.

Of course there is a substantial downside, which is the inconvenience of living that much further from the university – it takes at least half an hour to walk there on an able day. It is also much, much further from the city centre – it takes forever to get to Market Square even on the bus it’s a ponderous journey, you’re almost living in another shire. And nor are you within drunk stumbling distance to the nearest student enclaves in Beeston.

Being outwith what is reasonable walking distance of anywhere you’d want to go really limits your social possibilities in ways you don’t initially realise. At first I thought, well, it’s just a few extra stops on the bus, or, I can add 20 more minutes to my walk to university, so what, I’m a healthy young man in the prime of life, I can easily just puff along the extra distance, innit?

But it’s funny how much that extra bit of time really starts to drag on you once the early enthusiasm has waned. As a student you demand ease and convenience, eager to keep the real world and all its attendant frustrations at bay until you graduate, at least. Going out on the lash with your mates and then having to face a 40 minute plus bus journey back – if you catch the last bus back, if you’re sober enough to do so – is almost as bad as the exorbitant cost of a taxi home, especially when you have no one to share the cab with and none of your pals live anywhere near you. That is if you have a small coterie of chums to accompany you in the first place.

I *was* planning to join some societies and enhance my social opportunities, but living so far from campus put me off to the extent that rather than the three or four I wanted to join I ended up joining only one, the Wing Chung society, where one cold November night during sparring practise I got my nose bloodied and ended up with concussion that took over week to finally ease off. Rather understandably this put me off ever going again.

My housemates in the Nook are nice, but they’re too young, they’re all a generation ahead of me, I’m starting to feel irrelevant. The oldest is 23, and I have a good 8-9 years on the youngest, that’s almost a fucking decade. It does bring back a lot of regrets, regrets for those wasted years of useless inactivity, so much worse than lost years of recklessness and druggy excess that young people usually struggle to account for. Hanging around with that fresh faced lot, I can’t help but think back to what *I* was doing when I was 23 or 25 – or rather what I wasn’t doing.

Overall though the things that made 2009 pleasant was seeing the wee lady, and being in her company. I went to Italy to see her a couple of times and that was lovely (You can read about my visit here ). Our excursions to Newcastle and Leicester were also very enjoyable. Leicester, especially I wasn’t expecting too much from, and actually I was deeply puzzled as to why the wee Italian would want to go there of all places. But actually it’s a great place to visit.

We took a day trip and spent pretty much all our time in the lively Indian or, more precisely the Guajarati, quarter. Wee lady was understandably eager to pay a visit all the clothes stores along the main road; she came to Leicester utterly determined to buy a salwar kameez suit, or two, or three. But thankfully there was also time to visit several vegetarian takeaways and restaurants — sampling many of the gorgeous daal dishes on offer and washing everything down with hot cups of masala chai.

I didn’t get to read as many books as I would have liked this year — what with my PhD, like I say, I haven’t been able to put aside too much time for anything else. But I managed to finish Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence a couple of months ago, part of an effort to get through as many of Lawrence’s books as I can while I’m living in Nottingham. Sons and Lovers actually really got to me, and it certainly made much more of an impact on me than Lady Chatterley’s Lover last year.

Over and above Lawrence’s vivid prose, the weird allusive mystical passages about fucking and the revelations earned from fucking, or the shining poetic descriptions of delicate, vibrant nature, it was Paul Morel’s relationship with his mother, the desperate intensity of that bond that affected me most strongly. I was surprised at the emotional warmth of the book, at its intensity of pitch given that it was the product of a society, a time and place, which, I assumed was cold and frigid and emotion was tightly repressed.

They held a series of special DH Lawrence celebrations in Eastwood in September, and I managed to make one of the guided walks that was being given. Accompanying me were two of my housemates who’d come along because I’d told them that Ikea was only a couple of stops before. As it was the sun made such an impressive showing that morning that my housemates decided they’d rather join me on my walk than traipse round a huge aircraft hanger laid out with reasonably priced Swedish furniture.

Eastwood high street, like most depressed small towns, is a parade of take-aways, charity shops and discount stores; there really isn’t anything more to the town over and above the fact that Lawrence was born there – and of course the massive Ikea down the road. But they aren’t at all backward about capitalising on the town’s most, indeed only, famous son. Certain streets have been permanently disfigured with a blue line running down them marking out a special DH Lawrence trail that visits Lawrentian places of significance. I’d been to Lawrence’s birthplace house the last time I visited with Fifi when we’d come out to visit Ikea. They’ve made up the house to look like a typical Victorian miner’s family dwelling, furnishing it all with authentic period decor: the tin bath hanging off a peg on the outside wall, the kitchen range, the brass bedstead and the mangle to dry the clothes, everything. Well worth a visit.

This time round my two housemates and I took the guided walk around the surrounding countryside. There were around 20 other folk accompanying us, and apart from one German exchange student who had a placement at the Lawrence heritage centre, we were by far the youngest people there, no one else looked a day under 55, one or two could even been old enough to have met Lawrence in the flesh. It was a wonderful day though. It had been billed as a tour of Eastwood mining country, but apart from one very well preserved set of headstocks, and a trail of ruts carved into the hills where there used to be a railway line, there wasn’t much sign of a mining industry — just wide open green spaces where the eye could wander and clear countryside air to fill the lungs. Walking around the beautiful green pastures of Lawrence’s youth it was easy to understand just why nature was such an obsession with him.

I also managed to finish Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I’d been wanting to read ever since I visited Lübeck last summer. What struck me most about it was just how ironic the tone of the novel was, how cruel and unsparing it could be in its portrayal of human frailty and its depictions of physical and psychological ugliness. I could detect almost no nostalgia for the Lübeck Mann grew up in and it did read at times like a bitter settling of scores against the town’s ruling caste, for what Mann perceived as their small minded pettiness, provincialism and lack of ambition. Notwithstanding its vituperative quality Buddenbrooks is still an outstanding literary achievement, especially for a 25 year old to have written.

At the moment I’m reading Dicken’s David Copperfield, on Fifi’s recommendation, and am also working my way through a C.H. Sisson’s translation of the Divine Comedy.

Last year I went to Hamburg and had a lot of fun, losing my passport, attending lots of lectures, meeting wee Italian ladies…and all the rest of it. To get there I flew out from Birmingham, accompanied by my two Vietnamese colleagues Nga and Trang. Trang was Nga’s fiancée back then and hadn’t officially started her PhD yet (they’re now married and she’s about a year into her doctorate) but she got to come along anyway for this our second ESSLLI excursion.

It was value for money for the department since she was sharing Nga’s room at the accommodation that had been organised, and because Trang hadn’t officially booked a place at the summer school which charges quite a hefty enrolment fee – she’d just be tagging along with Nga at all the lectures since we were pretty sure no one would be say anything.

She’d be there absorbing all that knowledge, which would be all to the benefit of our wee research group and all the department had paid for really was the return flights out to Hamburg.

Anyways that’s a bit of background for you. We were sitting at the airport lounge in Birmingham waiting for our gate to be called. We’d just changed some of our money at the airport currency exchange and I started making idle conversation with Nga while Trang went off to look around the duty free shops.

Nga’s a genius when it comes to anything technical or mathematical. And his English is really quite good given he’s only learned the language comparatively recently. It was just one more thing that came easily to Nga. But there were still some deficiencies, more in his pronunciation than with his grammar or anything like that.

We nattered on about his undergraduate years in Vietnam and the two years he spent in Germany doing his Masters degree. Naturally we started discussing the relative merits between studying in Germany and over here in the UK — and one of the main issues that came up was about health care provision for foreign students.

What Nga said next really, really puzzled me.

He told me the only way to get health care coverage in Germany, the only way to get to see the doctor, was if you bought insulin. Somewhat surprised at this, I asked whether he was diabetic, and if this didn’t just apply to diabetics. No, he replied, he didn’t have diabetes. That was just the system in Germany, if you wanted to see the doctor you had to buy insulin.

I was really confused now. What was this? Was it some kind of conspiracy by pharmaceutical corporations to subsidise insulin production or were there health benefits to insulin for everyone that I hadn’t heard about before: perhaps insulin in small doses is good for everyone? Shit, maybe I should be taking it. Maybe it was some kind of public health drive, they don’t mind the nanny state so much over there in Germany?

I repeated my questions to Nga in disbelief, phrasing them slightly differently just to make sure we were reading from the same page here. So even if you didn’t need insulin the state made you buy up a whole supply of it? In hindsight Nga did seem a bit perplexed at my persistent questioning …

Trang came back and I asked her about it – she’d just recently finished her Masters degree in Germany herself so maybe she’d had to buy a few boxes of Insulin as well – she discussed it with Nga in Vietnamese and came back with the explanantion that Nga had been referring to, heavily mispronouncing,  “insurance” the whole time.

How we laughed.

Monday (the 23rd) was a memorable day to say the least. Before I went to Wing Chung class — where I got my nose bloodied by a nutter who was either oblivious to or purposefully ignored the fact I was new to sparring — I was in the Trent Building trying to get some work done.

I was wandering through the faintly musty rooms upstairs in the Grad Centre, just to clear my mind a bit of what I’d been working on, when I came across a flyer for a feminist reading group:

“The reading group is a fortnightly discussion group reading a variety of theoretical and literary feminist texts. Everyone is welcome, refreshments provided. Reading is emailed out about a week in advance. Please email aexjr@nottingham.ac.uk to be put on the Reading Group mailing list. Trent Arts Graduate Centre”

The flyer had a wee cartoon at the top that made the point that feminists can be normal looking women, and that feminism is mainstream, and commonplace nowadays. I looked down the list of readings that formed the syllabus, just out of curiosity and perhaps anticipating something that might provoke my scorn, there might be something by Andrea Dworkin on there or some postmodernist shite. Scanning the flyer, my eyes stopped on the following entry for November the 26th’s reading:

“Text: Poetry about rape
(To ensure the emotional security of participants we are restricting this session to women only)”

Huh?!? I did a doubletake just to make sure I had read the bit about restricting the session right.

I had.

This kind of thing just reinforces my feeling that contemporary feminism is unwilling to shed its indiscriminate hostility towards all men, that it absolutely hasn’t been able to move beyond the pure grievance politics which have inevitably helped consign it to the cultural margins.

I mean there’s just so much that’s deeply contentious about the `women only’ proviso they add to the end, I don’t know where to start.

Firstly women and girls are not the only victims of rape, and to marginalise male victims of rape — the obvious corollary of excluding men from these sessions — whether they’re young boys or the male victims of rape in penal institutions is deeply problematic and just reinforces dominant societal prejudices about rape victims. Shouldn’t they have changed the title of the reading to “Poetry about the rape of women” just to make thing unambiguous?

However, the biggest difficulty I have with the brief justification they offer for excluding men is that they’re basically telling me that, regardless of who or what I am, my opinions, my personality, I am endangering the “emotional security” of the women present as they discuss rape purely by being a man.

OK, I would understand if this was explicitly a counselling group for female rape victims, but no, this is (for women at least) an open group discussing poetry about rape.

Digging a little deeper, the rationale seems to be based on the old feminist slogan that as a man I am a potential rapist, and therefore as the women present began to discuss these poetic accounts of forced sexual assault, my mere presence in the room, the fact I had a penis, would start tp become a major cause for alarm and disturbance. Or maybe I would begin to get visibly aroused by the graphic depictions of rape on offer.

Basically, I am immediately under suspicion just because I’m a man regardless of anything else I might be or might have done.

Not only that, but it’s also really patronising to women: it panders to this essentialist notion of women being overly fragile, sensitive creatures prone to emotional turblence at the least thing. Women are like children, they need to be protected from anything that might upset their delicate emotional equilibrium.

I mean it would clearly be absurd to hold a discussion group about racism and ban all white people from attending, and I can’t see how the two cases would be any different.

Rape is an issue which both men and women need to discuss that needs to be brought out into the open from out of the shadows to help alleviate the feelings of shame and self-disgust that victims of rape often feel; closing off discussions on the subject, for spurious reasons wedded to dated anti-male ideologies is clearly counterproductive in this sense.

In the end the problem with feminism is that to perpetuate itself as an ideology — and there are a lot of academics, writers whose careers depend on its continued relevance — it needs to constantly justify itself and its privileging of the female perspective on gender relations on the basis of the existence of sustained systematic sociocultural discrimination against women.

But as the reality of gender relationships in society becomes more and more complex and the important insights of earlier feminist thinkers are increasingly absorbed into the general cultural climate, there is much less of a call for an explicitly feminist viewpoint in favour of a more dynamic, enlightened modern worldview that incorporates previously feminist ideas.

As time goes on doctrinal feminism will struggle to deal with the subtleties of modern day life , and the more out of place it will look, and the more obsolete.

I went to see White Ribbon with Fifi last weekend. It came across as a bit self important I must say. From the start the crystal clear black and white cinematography boldly proclaimed the film’s aspirations to profundity, and implored a proper level of respectful hush from the audience.

The director wanted to create an atmosphere of course, to so entrance the audience with bewitching visuals, and its the weird luminosity, and then so captivate them with moments pregnant with uncanny early 20th century weirdness, that the vagueness and elusiveness of the plot wouldn’t matter. Indeed this open ended lack of resolution in addition to being a challenge to the expectations of the audience and being rather ironically in striking contrast to the clarity of the visuals is I think integral to the films treatment of its central themes.

OK, granted the film is supposed to be an enigmatic riddle, the problem is that I didn’t feel the other aspects of it were strong enough to compensate for the plot’s open-endedness.

Like lot of European Arthouse cinema, White Ribbon works more as a series of memorable scenes or vignettes all held together by a single plot or by a tangle of interweaving plots or by a common underlying set of themes visual or symbolic, and each of these scenes will have its own internal logic and cohesion — whereas with mainstream commercial fare everything tends to be in service of the plot: details arise only if they have a direct relevance to a central storyline. It’s the contrast between a non-linear versus a linear view of plot.

Often the overall effect of this diffusion of attention on tangential details is that the director is able to create the impression of a self-contained world – and off course since real life doesn’t run in terms of singular plots these films have a certain realism and depth, an “organic” feel that can make for a profound cinematic experience.

However the problem is that with the white ribbon the characters were rather flat and underdeveloped, especially the baron and his wife, there was no unity of effect in the sets or locations, no particular sense of eeriness or gloominess, no real atmosphere.

But then I’m not even sure how much that judgement was coloured by my preconceptions regarding the director’s motivations. This was I think the result of seeing `Funny Games’, after which I had trouble viewing Hanake as anything but an arch ironist, a conceptual artist playing at being a film director. Consequently that I was primed to see WR as some kind of joke at the expense of an audience drawn into seeing some deeper meaning or making connections that aren’t there.

After finishing Dorian Gray I decided that the next book I was going to read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I haven’t read as many novels as I would have liked this year, so I thought I’d finish off 2009 with something substantial – and Mann’s debut is certainly that. Plus I’ve been wanting to read Buddenbrooks in particular for a while now.

Actually I can trace back the origin of that desire to an exact time and place: to last year’s day trip to Lübeck during my two week stay in Germany – and more specifically to that point in our guided tour itinerary when we passed the Mann family house on Mengstraße and our guide stopped and talked a little about the book and the momentous impact it had.

Lübeck had begun to work its olde-world charms on me as soon as we arrived, and I was already completely taken in with the place by the time we made it to Mengstraße. The old part of town is one of the most quaint and charming places I’ve ever been to: a maze of narrow sloping streets filled with neat little old fashioned gabled houses so tightly clustered together that it felt claustrophobic to walk among them — and so much of it looking like it came straight off the front of an ornamental biscuit tin or an old book of Grimm’s fairytales. Teutonic eccentricity at its best.

Outside the Mann family house our German tour guide, whose English didn’t extend much beyond her well rehearsed tour commentary, asked how many of us had heard of Thomas Mann – which of course I had, though I hadn’t known, hadn’t cared that he was from Lübeck. Then she asked how many of us were familiar with his magnum opus Buddenbrooks, which was set in Lübeck and was all about its ruling merchant class — I kept quiet to show that, philistine that I am, I had never heard of it. A few of the Italian students in our party returned happy smiles and nods of recognition – bastards they’d probably read it in the original German.

The guide, an average looking middle aged woman with short blonde hair, mentioned with a proud self-satisfied smile, that Buddenbrooks written in 1900, was generally reckoned to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. At the time of its publication the patrician families of Lübeck hadn’t been best pleased at their portrayal in the book, but I guess Mann was forgiven now what with all the money and prestige he was bringing in. They’d done up his old house and turned it into a heritage museum.

After all this, the impact of visiting Lübeck and hearing about Mann, I was dying to read the book. Prior to this little trip Mann hadn’t really made it to my long to-read list, now he was near the top. However it did take me a full year and a half to actually get hold of a copy of Buddenbrooks, which tells you something about how pressing my `to read’ list is.

I had managed to read Death in Venice in the meantime, and in the introduction to the edition I had the translator had a bit of a go at H. Lowe Porter, Mann’s first translator, whose translations had been, up till recently, the sole means through which Mann’s written work was accessible in the English speaking world. Anyway he pointed out all the mistakes Porter had made, basic errors really, and this made me determined to seek out the more recent translation by John Woods. Being a cheap bastard, and being unable to find Wood’s version in the library or in any second hand bookshops (though I found quite a few copies of Porter’s translation in the process) it took me a while before I was finally able to convince myself to throw some caution to the wind and buy a brand new copy off Amazon.

I’m really excited about reading it now that I have it. Indeed recently I’ve began to develop a strong fascination for fin de siècle Europe, that transition period from the 19th century to the 20th, right up to the First World War, Mann’s milieu when he was writing Buddenbrooks – and this is reflected in my reading preferences: the last two books I read were Lawrence’s `Sons and Lovers’, and of course `Dorian Gray’.

For me the chief allure of that period lies in the extent to which two wildly opposing social-cultural forces were able to coexist together and maintain an uneasy balance – a balance which lasted up till the first world war after which the old order was finally swept away. So that on the one hand you had massive stagnation arising from the cultural sediment accumulated from centuries of settled tradition and orthodoxy, in addition to the reactionary grip that Europe’s antiquated monarchies still wielded over vast swathes of the population — granted that at this point the princes were vainly striving to maintain the final vestiges of their power and privilege in the face of their bourgeois usurpers.

And opposing this static conservatism was a massive forward surge generated by a myriad emerging modern ideologies, movements, nihilisms and cults, fuelled by the bewildering discoveries that were being made in physics, biology, and chemistry, and the advances in technology that would so drastically reshape our perception of the world and our intuitions about reality. The contrast between the recognisably modern and an antique world with its roots in some dim dank medieval past which would soon vanish for ever is deeply striking.

The German speaking world was at the forefront of all this, it set the pace in almost everything bar the visual arts. In science and mathematics the centre of gravity (pardon the pun) undoubtedly resided there with the teutons. And it wasn’t just Einstein, so many of the big hitters during this period were German or Austrian: Cantor, Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Hilbert, Born, Dedekind, and Gödel to name but a few. In philosophy you had thinkers like Wittgenstein, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger, who were decisive in setting the philosophical agenda for the rest of the 20th century. And of course it’s hard to overestimate the contribution to the nascent field of psychology that Freud’s work had – indeed hard to overestimate his contribution to the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. In music, the “German art”, the towering influence that figures like Mahler, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern exerted would determine avant garde composition for at least the next half century.

So for me the reason Thomas Mann’s work is potentially so exciting and alluring is because he was part of this world, he breathed in its dazzling heady atmosphere, and through his own art he played an important role in making it so special.

Just finished reading Oscar Wilde’s `The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ and like any other great piece of literature it’s going to take me a while to digest the bulk of the ideas contained within– but I’ll give a few initial impressions anyway.

For a start, I think Wilde succeeds superlatively well in giving sophisticated voice to the aesthetic and moral sentiments underpinning a certain `aristocratic’ worldview, at least in the guise under which it held sway over much of late Victorian English nobility.

This was a worldview held together by a clear notion of the limits of the role of the nobility in instilling moral purpose: namely by the idea that although the gentry had an important duty to maintain a facade of conventional moral propriety as an example to the rest of society, it needn’t go beyond the surface appearance of such. For in this view morality was nothing more than a means of imposing order and stability on a savage and chaotic mass and therefore need not detain those whose role it was to oversee this rabble.

So that while the `proper’ conventions should be (must be) adhered to on all the `appropriate’ occasions, the preservation of an outward appearance of rectitude was in itself sufficient to maintain overall moral order and to fulfil the exemplary role assumed by the upper classes. Indeed, the whole elaborate, ritualistic, system of etiquette, in which these conventions were embodied, served to distinguish class and good breeding and had grand aesthetic value in itself (much like the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church with which Wilde along with so many other late 19th century decadents were enamoured).

In place of any simplistic, bourgeois, sense of obligation to commonly understood notions of ethics or moral obligation was a commitment to the perfectibility of experience through the arts and through bodily pleasure. Correspondingly debauchery and excess was to be tolerated, and even implicitly encouraged, as a sign of worldliness and refinement – as long as it were done discreetly so that there was never any open lapse in proceedings such as would breech decorum and cause scandal.

To inhabit this dual world of masks and shifting roles where the real thrill lay in committing outrages by night and cosily resuming one’s lofty public office by day meant taking part in a very cynical game. But this is the world so utterly embraced by Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat who thanks to the mysterious workings of some occult mechanism (perhaps something as simple as Noel Edmond’s cosmic ordering) takes on the ability to inhabit a further dual role: both as a beguiling object of desire, an idol and muse, and as a predatory libertine, hungry for pleasure and experience and resolutely callous to the consequences. For Dorian Gray discovers that he has become immune from the ravages of sin and time, and can pursue his depravities free from any outward physical blemish — indefinitely.

The only catch is that while his own beauty remains undiminished, the ruinous effects of his lifestyle start to work themselves on to the lifelike portrait of Gray caught at the peak of his youthful grace – the very portrait which incites him into make his fervent prayer that the effects of the passage of time on his dazzling looks might be stayed.

But this seems no catch at all. Once he has hidden the portrait away beyond the reach of prying eyes, fate itself seems to take a hand in protecting Gray from the terrible consequences of his actions: at one point his youthful visage itself stays the hand of his would be murderer, a young sailor hell bent on avenging Gray’s mistreatment of his sister – for the man who wronged his sister all those years would not be this young.

The wonder of the book, in my opinion, lies in the irresistible brilliance of Lord Henry’s epigrams, dispensed as effortlessly as from the lips of some wizened Eastern sage. And with their utter contempt for the artless, sincere and ugly, set in opposition to the pursuit of beauty and pleasure for their own sake free from any self-imposed ethical inhibitions and society’s dreary pieties, Wilde perfectly distils the essence of the aristocratic ethic mentioned above. Lord Henry’s teasing paradoxes are – along with an unnamed book which Lord Henry gives him to read – enough to seduce Dorian from his initial youthful earnestness on to the path of amorality and physical excess.

Gray takes greedy advantage of the license offered both by his agelessness and by his prominent social standing, and rather understandably his arrogance begins to snowball quite quickly. He thinks he can get away with anything – and he does, leaving behind him a trail of broken lives, and at least one corpse. He pays no mind to the necessity for discretion and reputation so that his name becomes blacker and blacker — he’s still invited to some of the best parties though. Finally, it is his arrogance, which has now attained to gargantuan proportions, that leads him onto his final act of destruction, the one that proves fatal. So that the book seems to be saying that Gray is not up to the demands conferred upon him by his kind of immortality, that perhaps no mere human being is – and that in the end our ideals should always be unobtainable.

I’ll always love the Cribs because of that one line: “A year’s a long time/you’re doing nothing with your life”. I’m not sure what that means in the context of the song. But since the rest of it is a withering put down of the vast rump of their peers, insincere, generic indie band fodder and loser scensters, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t quite meant as the self-directed lament for lost time I originally took it as; seems to be more of an attack on insincerity and vapidity. But I like isolating that one line when I listen to the song, there’s just something about the way that Ryan Jarman spits it out with a mixture disgust and pity.

You always cherish songs or lyrics that seem to speak directly to you, and that for one reason or another attach themselves to some emotionally raw period of time– even if you’ve picked up on something that isn’t really there. I really wasted a lot of time when I was younger, spent more than a year, indeed more than two years, when I really was “doing nothing with my life”, bound up in myself and shut off from everything — when I should have been at the peak of my strength, both mentally and physically — when I should have been going out with my friends and being young and care free. Everything went to waste, all of it. That whole episode was a sad stasis for me during which I effectively accomplished nothing, a big messy blot on my chronology which I find especially galling now that I’m almost up to my third decade and am just beginning to appreciate what a precious commodity youth is.

The first time I saw Ryan Jarman on TV on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (and this was before I’d heard a single note of theirs) I thought he was a total poseur, one of those hipster wankers that the Cribs are always harping on about in their songs. My immediate reaction was to assume his whiney, effete Northern accent was a put on. In fact his whole awkward, foppish manner, the bored adolescent slouch, the slurred `couldn’t care less’ delivery, came across as just so much posturing. So, I reasoned, there’s probably not much more to their music either. Just another group I can dismiss without doing them the courtesy of actually listening to their frantic, gormless attempts at ripping off the Libertines or whoever.

How wrong I was. All it took was one viewing of their `naked lady prancing around mischeviously as the band plays on impervious’ video for `Men’s Needs’, during which I noticed that, you know while the girl is clearly the main attraction here the music’s pretty damn good too, in fact it’s really good.

And that wasn’t a fluke. Mirror Kissers, the next video of theirs I came across, a kind of ADHD indie take on A-ha’s Take on Me, had no nudity whatsoever. But the song was brilliant, even listening to it now there’s a wonder in it for me; it still gives me the same gut level twist I always get when I hear something that makes me realise why I fell in love with this kind of music in the first place, that makes it thrilling again. It’s not just that the Cribs had taken a sound that by this point has been done almost to death, and made it sound so fresh and invigorating, it was the electric potential they had that you could hear and that you could see as they performed in the video, the promise of so much more to come.

Their album `Mens Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever’ I played over and over again, something I rarely do anymore. I find it hard to just listen to albums as albums anymore, and can usually only stand to play a few songs from most records at any one time so little patience do I now have for the studied superficiality of too much that’s out there now. But `Mens Needs…’ drew me in, their songs were fiery and honest, and I never felt short changed just listening to the whole thing through. I wish I’d gone to see them when they had toured this album though: they played a few gigs @ Rock City back when I lived within walking distance of it.

I haven’t yet bought their newest one the one with Johnny Marr on it. I haven’t even downloaded it like I would have done till recently just to hear if it was worth buying a physical copy. I did what has rapidly started to become a habit for me and streamed it off Spotify. I love Spotify just because it lets you to listen to music without having to make the comittment of money or disc/physical space, without having to subject yourself to the tyranny of the radio playlist to hear something; it makes music even more disposable than it was before. Oh yeah and on top of that it’s really fucking convenient too. Plus yeah with downloading much as I tried to avoid or ignore it there was always that residual guilt over the fact that you were short changing the people who made the music.

Anyway back to the new one, the hooks aren’t as immediate as before, the pace and tempo have been slowed down, I think it needs a few more listens.

I have an awful confession to make: I think I may be falling out of love with music. It’s been quite a gradual process over the last few years, becoming more obvious since I moved to Nottingham in 2007. But try as I might I can no longer deny it. Maybe it’s just that I’m older now and I’ve grown out of my prior infatuation with music or I’m getting jaded about everything.

The worst thing now is to compare my current mood of spent passion with a few years ago when I had a desperate almost pathological dependency on certain records. Records which I absolutely relied upon to lift me out of my despondency or gloom, out of myself when being myself wasn’t too much fun. All the time I was infatuated with a song I would treat it like it held some kind of essential truth about whatever was going on with me at the time, to which I had to keep referring back incessantly; I was always conscious of just how music was a mood altering substance for me.

I had phases when I latched onto different records or bands or musicians, leeching off as much emotional sustenance as I could from them and then dropping them. My nervous reliance would eventually wear itself out fading from its initial intensity, through different stages till it reached a kind of bored indifference – most of the music I was obsessed with about 10 years ago I can take or leave now. There is a roll call of names: the Beatles, the Black Dog, the Aphex Twin, Suede, the Pixies, John Fahey, Neko Case, Coil, Current 93, the Smiths, Van Dyke Parks, Love, Built to Spill, the Go Betweens, Josef K, Shack, Elliott Smith, the Wildhearts, Richard Thompson, the Afghan Whigs Galaxie 500…It was an unhealthy lecherous relationship that I had with music. But I would always discover some new artist or album to rekindle the previous excitement once I had grown weary of a current favourite or even a whole genre of music. There would always be a replacement, even the Replacements.

Right from the off, from when I started seriously getting into music, it was never a communal thing for me. Listening to music was almost exclusively a solitary pleasure, like onanism it was something I got most out of alone and secluded in my room. The few times I ventured out from my sanctuary to a live gig I felt awkward and uncomfortable. I would go alone, because I had no friends, and just stand self-conscious near the front feeling my bladder filling up, and unwilling to pass all the way through the crowd to go to the toilet.

As a kid I followed the NME (this was in the mid 90s just before it became completely unreadable) and kept an eye out for whichever bands were being hyped up as the brightest and best. A little later I started to consciously make more of an effort to seek out music I thought might impress my peers; but I soon enough discovered they didn’t care what obscure unlistenable rubbish I pestered them with, and that my musical tastes did nothing to endear me to them (precious little did actually – I was too far gone into my personal weirdness at that point).

See, I’d been labouring under the belief that the music you listened to spoke profoundly for who you were, just as much a matter of identity as the clothes you wore or the company you kept — and for a lot of folk, music became the entry into a whole new cultural, tribal affiliation. So since it was such an important constituent of your public persona, maybe even the key to a whole lifestyle, you had to really work at your taste in music, cultivate it and filter out all the shite that stood out from the rest, so that it was all seamless and fitted in neatly with the rest of your posturing.

But that didn’t work out for me – I couldn’t use my musical acumen to compensate for my many asocial defects – so I abandoned most of my prior extra-musical criteria when it came to choosing what I listened to. Instead I decided that I would just follow my gut and seek out whatever gave me the most pleasure. So that the realisation that I impressed nobody became a liberating one and I resolved to spurn the shallow dictates of musical trends and fashions. Actually this turned out to be problematic for me. As the music became a more and more intimate thing for me, more of an indulgence, it increasingly served to reinforce my already strong inclinations towards introversion and solitude.

Overall it seemed to work out alright, I could listen to Coldplay, Limp Bizkit, Orson and other fun insincere throwaway shite all day – though there was plenty of piles of steaming insincere shit that I stayed away from because it was no fun at all – and I didn’t need to pretend that I was doing it ironically since I’d given up evangelising about my music tastes: so if no one cared about the cool stuff I listened to why the fuck should I be self conscious about my “guilty pleasures”. No one cared about my music tastes full stop so fuck ‘em all.

Of course I couldn’t totally escape the influence of trend makers and hype merchants when it came to seeking out music to listen to, but I thought I was doing alright. Actually turns out I wasn’t too far off prevailing trends: the clamour to reappraise each and every musician who’d made anything halfway listenable any time during the last 50 years without regard to the intervening layers of critical orthodoxy coincided, perhaps not coincidently with my own such attempts.

But at the same time — and I’d kind of realised this before but hadn’t properly taken it to heart — a lot of what makes rock music so compelling is bound to its essential newness, to the ephemeral, disposability of it all. That’s the nature of the beast. It’s the statement that’s being made in the here and now, which will always be tied to some particular here and now as it spins away into a hazy past, that gives or that gave ferocious life to so much of popular music. As joyous and wonderful as it is to listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ it can’t ever capture the thrill of hearing it when it first came out, and that impact of knowing how much of an almighty sneer Dylan was cocking at his audience’s expectations; similarly you can’t distil the wonder of the Velvets first LP into a pure aural experience separate from its seedy black and white New York milieu.

This music is *about* a certain time and place, it derived from a joy and recklessness of feeling that came from tramping down prior generations’ staid conventions and obsolete thought patterns, in a word it is disrespectful. Rock would be nothing, a heartless and soulless shell, without the sneering postures and attitudes of rebellion, the guttural promises of dissolution spat out in the face of an uptight establishment. I mean, it just isn’t Mozart or Mahler — whatever its pretentions it can never have the same depth and it will never evoke the same breadth and range of emotions that “classical” music does, so it doesn’t have that going for it. But then modern popular music rarely ever really attains or even attempts to attain to the timelessness of folk music: precisely because at its core it is antagonistic towards its antecedents. The more it moves away from that spirit of nihilism the more tedious and artificial it becomes. The more it becomes a part of the same establishment it once strove to scorn and provoke — and ultimately the less it means anything. It *should* be music for outsiders by outsiders.

Because in the end, the clothes and the haircuts these fuckers wear, their music videos, the legions of girls/boys they like to fuck and the drugs they gorge themselves on — all the debaucheries and the subsequent mock penitence or the getting religion — each aspect of the now clichéd rock mythos is an essential part of the whole performance, each is integral to understanding the art, to understanding why this music is so compelling and so awesome. This is why Bowie was such a genius; he understood all of this and then consciously, artfully, encompassed it in his art. But in the midst of all the pandemonium and the trips to rehab and the coke and the groupies you can’t neglect the music for too long – unless of course you’re a genius and have already delivered some scant bare proof of your genius to the world, but despite the widespread empty bandying around of the term in praise geniuses are seldom to be found in nature.

And that’s why Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are such cunts, they got one little taste of the adulation and the worship and the attendant lifestyle, all the shit that came from heading up the zeitgeist, and ended up just dive bombing into their own personal horror movies—and FORGOT ABOUT MAKING ANY KILLER TUNES. You can only indulge these idiots for so long, sooner or later we get tired of the cheap voyeuristic vomit laden thrills they keep offering up and then they need to start coming up with the musical goods.

OK maybe it’s a lot more nuanced than what I’ve just spouted in the last few paragraphs, there’s jazz, soul, R&B, various hybrids of different musics that aren’t necessarily focused on iconoclasm, but I still think that in the end the spirit of defiance should be and once was the engine of popular music post the second world war—and yes that rebelliousness was manipulated from the start but there was still some substance to it. So anyway I guess my mission to extract as much joy as I could from the annals of recorded popular music, to listen to records on their own merits divorced from the immediate circumstances of their creation or inspiration, missed the point by a pretty large margin and I was doomed to failure from the start.

And then the more music I bought, downloaded, streamed, the more I gorged myself on just on the process of just gathering stuff that I could listen to later, the more I just got bored of the actual music. A lot of stuff I listened to and if it didn’t have that immediate visceral impact the first time, I would just discard it and never bother listening to it again. Of course there were records that absolutely shone through amongst all the tiresomeness and that gave me much succour. But these were few and far between, and I was demanding more and more from those I did manage to find. And then there is no contemporary music that I could really get excited over, lose myself in again – I keep hoping there will be and I’ll get reeled back into being a proper fan. Of course I love bands like the Cribs, the Fleet Foxes, and the Twilight Sad and I’ve really started trying to keep up with new music again. But I can never escape the feeling with these newer groups that they’re all retreading old ground that’s already been retread at least once before already. Take the two CDs from my collection that I’m currently most enamoured with: Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, and the Inner City compilation “Good Life: The Best of Inner City”. This music was created around 20 years old, it is part of the sound track of 1989, and yet it could have been released last week because sonically it hasn’t dated at all. And yet in 1988 or 1989 pretty much everything released 20 years prior with a few exceptions sounded *old* and of its time to those ears.

In fact what have been the main musical innovations of the 00’s apart from everything getting more shite?

Essentially the big revolution that has taken place has had nothing to do with how music actually sounds or which new genres have sprang into being and everything to do with how music is formatted and distributed, and the CD fighting a pathetic last stand for the physical formats against MP3s and downloading – and consequently everything to do with how easy it is for folk to take a hold of music (thieve it) and share it amongst themselves and thereby elude the grasp of the bloated and complacent music industry. And this has changed how we listen to recorded music, but more especially how we value it, first of all financially and then spiritually.

It’s a bland truism that for most things (aside from perhaps crack cocaine) the easier they are to come by the less you value them. For music certainly scarcity lent whole albums and bands and even genres (e.g., Krautrock) a whole other aura of seductiveness, being elusive and mysterious upped their cache no end amongst those with even the barest aspirations to being trendy. But then I can also relate too many occasions when I bought an album or a compilation for the sole purpose of hearing just one song as against the fact that I’d read in the NME or something that rest of the record wasn’t up to much; and my shelves are now cluttered with this kind of stuff. Nowadays I don’t bother listening and making my own mind up on the whole album. I can avoid opening myself up to chance, I just find that one song I want to hear on pirate bay or spotify and play the fuck out of it. There was sheer joy to be had picking through racks and stacks of dusty CDs in charity shops or scouring badly lit indie record shops (I never got into vinyl so I was never cool enough to rifle through boxes of LPs or singles) in anticipation of finding something rare by a band or a musician you saw namedropped a few times in some old interview, that might potentially open up a whole new genre of music for you, or finding a song you’d caught the tail end of on the radio and which was never played again, the thrill of the find often eclipsed the actual pleasure to be got from listening to the music itself. Usually you found fuck all, but you were sustained by the memories of glorious past finds. Now compare that with the scenario where the name of a song pops up in your head and a few minutes later you’re streaming it on spotify, like I just did just now with the song Encyclopedi-ite by Sammy.

And talking of abundance now music from every corner of the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia, has become readily accessible and most probably has some kind of market outside of its previously limited geographical confines. Also too the archives are continually being turned out in the quest for more reissue fodder, and we’re all hungry to discover neglected masterpieces, to what had been dismissed before when it felt like there was a surplus of good music around – and all this on top of a music scene which, although it may not be thriving, is still producing enough intriguing music that you shouldn’t really dismiss it out of hand. In the end this all leads to a surfeit of choice, which can be kind of wearying – for me at least.

And of course, the other thing that has really fucked music up has been the total triumph of corporate cynicism, the co-option of everything, giving us the apparent paradox that the more money flows into an art form via corporate sponsorship the less everything is worth artistically. Obviously the men in suits have always had a major hand in things. It would be foolish to suggest there was ever a time when they weren’t standing somewhere off to the side pulling the strings and gleefully manipulating what was supposedly a spontaneous expression of youthful spirit and clamour sacrificing art to the profit motive. Equally it’s impossible to deny that the marriage of business and creativity was ultimately responsible for some of the most wondrous, life affirming, superlative music ever recorded.

But the fact is that, whereas before there was some kind of struggle going on between the dictates of the bottom line in opposition to the imperatives of art, that battle is now truly over and was decided quite some time back squarely in favour of mammon. There were times when the corporations hadn’t totally consolidated their grip on music when musicians had money thrown at them and were still allowed a lot of leeway, with the understanding that sooner or later the record labels would recoup their money – without marketing everything to fuck and without the demand for instant monetary gratification. The Beatles, Bowie, the Stones all were products of this kind of latitude. Turns out that all that time the corporations were busy working away, figuring out the optimal ways to manipulate youth culture to suit their own nefarious ends.

For example corporate sponsorship today is in effect a parasite leeching off of the credibility and the spirit of a youth culture, that once seemed to stand for more than the latest make of mobile phone, or clothes line or alcoholic beverage but which no longer can claim to. A subculture that once flowered precisely because it offered up an alternative to a over commercialised mainstream is now fatally compromised.