when i grow up

There's this relentless drumming voice inside my head. It goes a little something like this: PhD thesis submission in eight months. Over and over. You know how often men supposedly think about sex? That's how much I think about my PhD. It's frightful, really. The funniest thing though is that everyone seems completely astonished that I would rather stab HB pencils in my eyes than stay at King's for another year. I finished a four-year high school degree in three years and I finished a four-year University degree in three years. There is no way in hell that I'm finishing a three-year PhD programme in four years. I love my research - I love research in general - but I don't want to still be doing it this time next year. I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia anymore and now that I've realised there's this whole, huge unexplored world out there - I can't wait to figure out what I want to do next. To think that I'd have to wait another year before being able to get out there and make some noise doesn't really appeal to me. And besides, I don't have any reason to stay another year - apart from the fact that I changed my topic after the first year and had to throw a year's worth of work away - but let's not speak of such things. When I was first starting, a friend of mine said that the most important part of doing a PhD was the research - not the teaching, not the paper giving - just the research. I took his advice quite literally and hardly did any teaching or conference-going, and now that I've finally, pretty much, mostly decided that I don't want to stay in academia (I adore the research element, but find most of the rest of it fairly restrictive) I'm so glad that my PhD primarily comprised three years of solid research.

I suppose my biggest problem with the academic world is that it encourages an extremely limited field of interest. I don't understand when or why research came to mean restriction. This is certainly not true for all of my colleagues, but I'm regularly astonished by the lack of interest academics show for any field or even subject outside their immediate research interest. As the kind of person who wants to know everything about everything, I don't understand why anyone would purposefully choose to cut themselves off from so many other areas of interesting information. The other thing that drives me crazy is a distinct lack of collaboration. Again, this is generalising to some extent, and if you work in a lab I'm sure the experience is quite different, but the closest most academics get to creative collaboration is jointly organising a conference or putting together an edited volume of papers. There's something profoundly clichéd about this, but working on a weekly magazine has introduced me to the joys of interacting with a team of incredibly bright, creative and dynamic people. It's such a nice thing to sit down together with people who have ideas and are knowledgeable about a variety of subjects and can bring all that knowledge to the table in order to enhance the quality of their professional work. An awful lot of academics don't have this breadth of knowledge - hardly surprising given that they've been working on the same, focused subject area for the last 15 years.

It's important that my work lets me to be creative, work with a group of inspiring people, and gives me free rein to pursue a wide range of interests. What that will be, I have no idea. But once I finish this damn PhD, I'll have plenty of time to figure it out. Having said that, suggestions on a postcard are most welcome...

tastes like bitter lemons and judgement day

Taste is such a strange thing. Why is it that we’re so defensive about our individual tastes in music, literature, and members of the opposite sex when, even in one lifetime, these tastes will change many times. Okay, so taste in whatever is a great tool. We make snap judgements about people we might not know so well by nosily browsing their bookshelves or iTunes library because it’s easy, fast, and occasionally useful. It’s rather odd, but most people feel a bit hesitant about sharing these things with others. Fine art seems to be the one area where we get away with making grandiose judgements: “that Turner exhibition was ABSOLUTELY awful,” you sigh to your friend who promises not to see it. Nobody really seems to get that offended – we don’t align ourselves to artists the way we do poets or singer-songwriters who ‘understand what we’re going through’. Blah blah blah.

Compare the first time you listen to music at your boyfriend’s house. He puts on some art-house indy-rock band music that you can’t stand. No way are you going to tell him how much you hate it, for fear you might crush the fledgling buds of romance. No matter that you might find, in a few months time, no doubt after many listens, that you’ve become a skinny-jean wearing, indy-rock devotee. No more Tori Amos for you.

This is what I mean: why are we so defensive of our own tastes when they so often change depending on what we’re exposed to. Humans are the most forward-thinking, constantly evolving, creatures of habit in the world. How remarkable that we, in so many ways, stay the same, and yet alter our appearance, our tastes, our partners, our jobs, all the time.

What brought these ramblings on? A break up and a poet. I thought my partner was a decent chap. It turns out I was mistaken. I thought I didn’t like the poet Auden. Also mistaken.

Regular readers will know that I am a devoted fan of the Josephine Hart poetry nights put on at the British Library. It must have been about six months ago now that I went to the Auden evening, which as I wrote here, was very enjoyable. Hart also produces CDs of the British Library readings. I recently purchased the first collection called Catching Life by the Throat which features Ralph Finnes reading a selection of Auden poems. Unfortunately the sound quality of the recordings leaves much to be desired but Finnes is an excellent reader and Auden suits him particularly well.

Auden is cheeky, witty, snappy and incredibly poignant – don’t know how I missed that the first few times around. There’s a whiff of melancholia that I’m particularly drawn to, an almost elegiac quality in some poems, particularly: Lullaby; September 1, 1939; and O Tell Me the Truth About Love.

My favourite poem though has to be Song of the Devil. It’s laugh out loud hilarious and brilliantly clever. I can’t find it anywhere online so I’ve transcribed a very messy version below from the recording. I haven’t a copy of the poem in print, so I have no idea where the line breaks or even punctuation should go, but it’s a really funny, fantastic poem, read superbly by Finnes on the recording.

So it turns out, some things really are worth a second chance. Worth an adjustment of taste. Then again, some definitely aren’t.

Song of the Devil

Ever since observation taught me temptation
As a matter of timing, I’ve tried to clothe my fiction
In up to date diction. The contemporary jargon of
pride. I can recall when, to win the more obstinate
round, the best bet was to say to them:
sin the more that grace may abound.

Since social psychology replaces theology
The process goes twice as quick. If a conscience
Is tender and loathe to surrender, I had only
To whisper: you’re sick.
Puritanical morality is madly non-U.
Enhance your personality with a romance, with two.
If you pass up a dame, you’ve yourself to blame,
For shame is neurotic, so snatch.

All rules are too formal. In fact, they’re abnormal,
For any desire is natch. So take your proper share,
Man of dope and drink, aren’t you the chairman of
Ego Inc? Free will is a mystical myth as statistical
Methods have objectively shown: a fad of the churches.
Since the latest researches into motivation, it’s known
That honour is hypocrisy, honesty a joke. You live in
A democracy: lie like other folk.

Since men are like goods, what are shouldn’ts
or shoulds when you are the leading brand.
Let them all drop dead, you’re way ahead.
Beat them up if they dare to demand what may
Your intention be or what might ensue. There’s a
Difference of dimension between me and you.
If in the scrimmage of business your image should
Ever tarnish or stale, public relations can take it and
Make it shine like a knight of the grail.

You can mark up the price that you sell at
If you are packaged as glamour and show.
Values are relative, dough is dough. So,
Let each while he may think you’re more okay,
More yourself than anyone else. Till you find that
You’re hooked, your goose is cooked and you’re
Only a cipher of hells. Believe while you can that
I’m proud of you. Enjoy your dream. I’m so bored
With the whole fucking crowd of you I could scream.

song of the day

If my life (at the moment) was a song, it would be this one:

Ray Lamontagne is one of those artists who sounds great live and a bit meh on his inevitably overproduced albums. He has this amazing voice: half mountain man, half Tom Waits, with a little bit of an old school blues man thrown in for good measure. I guess I'm just a sucker for the whole tortured artist thing.

So song of the day/week/moment is Ray Lamontagne's cover of Garls Barkley's 'Crazy'. I love it.

In other randomness, my flatmate sent me this picture this morning. It took a second for me to figure out what the hell I was looking at - Eve and Wall-E. Hilarious! I seriously loved that film. I saw it on the plane coming back from America and thought it was absolutely sublime. I think kids have it so much better. We have to watch serious, depressing, grown-up art-house cinema and the kids get to watch Wall-E and Ratatouille. I'm being semi facetious, of course, for I do love my melancholic foreign films and other intellectual indy gems, but sometimes you just want to have a laugh. And I love how, especially Disney (Cf. Fantasia, i.e. one of the best films ever!), much as they went slightly off the deep end with Disney Stores and HSM 1, 2, and 3, can make films that work on an adult and child level. If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, you absolutely should. It's a gem.