End of Year Review

Jan 20

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve spent the last two days working on PhD proposals and therefore thinking a lot about what form the next three years of my life could take, but now seems like a good time to take a brief glance back at the last twelve months.

Academia

Having elected to pursue my MA part-time I’ve only actually taken two modules in the last twelve months: Postcolonial Quest Literature, and Modernist Poetry. The former was interesting, and though I felt it leant too heavily on the Grail Quest as an organising principle (it was hardly present in some of the texts), the course as a whole remains memorable for introducing me to one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. As if to balance that out it also exposed me to one of the worst films I’ve ever sat through: Jane Campion’s The Piano!

Modernist Poetry got off to a rocky start when I got a bit of a wake-up call about my level of poetry knowledge in general. The majority of the class seemed more clued into poets, schools, terminology etc. which I obviously had a blind spot to. The module was intended to fill in a gap in my knowledge of modernism as a whole, and I came away from it very happy. It remains to be seen what grade my paper for this gets, but I was relatively content with the work I put in.

At the time of writing I’m one week into the Postmodern Fiction module which, alongside the dissertation next term, will round out my MA. As mentioned above I’m also putting together PhD proposals and thinking about what might be next academically.

Work

I’ve enjoyed the changes brought to my role at the Marlowe Theatre by the opening of the new building. It’s been interesting to be part of a team working out hoe to fit into and use a new space, and (most of the time) it’s great to see people enjoying the place for the first time.

Going back to my old job running the Box Office at Riverside was a strange experience at first, but one which went pretty smoothly and in the end seemed to fly by. It was nice doing a little encore, getting to work with some old friends again, and realising that I’d actually quite missed the place.

Arts & Culture

Movies of 2011 struggled to top my birthday trip to Curzon Soho for Black Swan. I very much enjoyed Tree of Life, 127 Hours, and Drive was pretty great – but I think I have to give it to Aronofsky for making yet another unique and compelling flick which was as tense as Pi and looked as great asThe Fountain.

Musically most questions will be answered by The List of course, but I have to make special mention for a pretty outstanding gig. The Manic Street Preachers’ birthday bash at the O2, at which they played all 38 of their singles over two 90-minute sets, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve sruggled since to think of another band that could pull that off - it was a special night. Of a completely different scale but also very good was Portico Quartet at the opening of the Turner Contemporary; I’d never sat cross-legged on an art gallery floor for a jazz set before.

In terms of books, the best I read in the last year were probably Ondaatje’s as mentioned above, Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar which I read over summer and was knocked out by, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire which I read for the course last week. I’m one book down and two to go in Murakami’s 1Q84, finding it interesting but I’m not in love with it – hope to return when I have a moment though… so, September?

2011 games. I was considering writing a post on just this, but the moment’s passed. So, in brief: Dead Space 2 and Portal 2 are tied for GOTY, LA Noire I loved to pieces, Arkham City was excellent, as was AC: Revelations; Sword and Sworcery: EP, and Bastion are right up there. Also, Spelltower.

Other Pursuits

Chess, typography, and zazen were the three I laid out in my birthday post of last year, and I’m happy to say I made a decent fist of all of them. Chess.com has been fantastic, though I need to spend more time with the tutoring side of it and get my ranking up. I got a really nice wooden board for Christmas, so non-virtual chess is also on the up.

I’ve kept a good eye on type sources on the web, and I’ve at least downloaded (if not read all too thoroughly) issues 1-3 of 8 Faces and the first issue of Codex. I quit listening to the Typeradiopodcast with any great frequency because of some of the off-topic questions they ask every time – may check back to see who the recent guests have been though.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is 100 hours of zazen: ~2 hours per week. I’m behind on that already, but I have hopes that I’ll catch up. Same with running, which I started properly in August, took a break from over Christmas, and re-started last week with an aim to notch up 300km by year’s end. I’m tired just thinking about that right now.

Last year I also grew a beard for the first time. At first I liked it, then I loved it, then it was itchy and irritating, then I shaved it off. Not sure whether or when I might repeat that experience but it was interesting whilst I could stand it.

Creativity

As is all too regularly the case my plans at the beginning of the year to write something substantial went unheeded in what turned out to be a pretty busy 2011. The sum of my creative output was a short story written in summer, and a handful of poems. I made the same promise to do more this year – it doesn’t hurt to have good intentions. I have bushels of notes for something which could be a lengthly short-story or a novella, and whilst I’m aware that my main writing projects this year will be my Postmodern Fiction essay and the MA dissertation over summer, I’m still hopeful that I can make some progress.

I could also do with posting more frequently here, and taking more photos; I think this was the best I took last year, though this has ~2000% more views.

That’ll do it, current plan is to spend my birthday seeing either J Edgar, or Haywire, or hunting out a screening of Shame. It’s unlikely any of those will beat Black Swan but still, that just means I still have my film of 2012 to look forward to!

Author Adam
Category Misc
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Essay Progress

Jan 11

The deadline for this term’s essay is Friday at noon, so essentially there’s one more full day of writing, plus a few hours of editing Friday morning, between me and submission. As always, despite my protestations otherwise, it’s come down to my usual pattern of research, research, research, then write everything in the last few days. The first couple of essays for my MA were written in two all-day sessions each – neither of which was very pleasant. Putting together a cogent 6,000 word argument from dozens of pages of notes is tricky, but for some reason I can’t get myself into the habit of writing earlier and editing / refining at leisure.

One possible reason (read: excuse) for this, is that starting the actual writing too early feels to me like missing out on valuable days of research. There’s a part of me that thinks that the research is the most important and time consuming part, and that the process of writing the essay is almost secondary: gathering as much great material as possible is the first priority; the masonry work of building something coherent out of it can be done more quickly.

So far (and I realise the extent to which I’m tempting fate by typing this right now) it’s worked out OK for me. But every time I go through one of those two or three day solid writing periods of putting notes through the juicer to make a paper, I promise myself I won’t do it the same way next time. This time around in particular I became a little obsessed with the idea that I would get sick just as the days I’d set aside for composition came up. All over the Christmas break I was almost Howard Hughes when it came to being around anyone with a head cold, or eating anything that hadn’t come, unopened directly from the fridge. Barring some overnight virus taking hold of my system in the night however, it looks like I’ve dodged that bullet this time, but it’s another reason why I know the way I go about this whole process isn’t particularly sound.

The essay this time is for my Modernist Poetry module, and I’ve chosen to write a comparative piece on work by two poets. The full, TBC title is Fragmentation and Palimpsest in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and HD’s Trilogy.

It’s been a fascinating paper to research, even if I feel I may have leant a little too heavily on Pound. Of the poets studied on the course over the last few months he was the one with whom I had the longest aquiantance already, and I felt like I got a lot out of studying The Cantos; it was pretty obvious to me when we were assigned them that Pound would be part of my essay for the term. HD, on the other hand, was a poet I didn’t know, and whose work I have to say I didn’t particularly enjoy when we read it for class.

I took the decision to write on HD for a couple of reasons:

  1. The use of palimpsest in her work is interesting on a formal level even if I didn’t like to themes in the poetry too much
  2. She had a relationship with Pound which, despite it being barely mentioned in the essay, forms a nice bond between the two of them [1]
  3. Writing on work you don’t particularly like can give you something to sink your teeth into

As it’s turned out I found a deeper appreciation for the technique in HD as I re-read Trilogy. In terms of poetic chops she’s considered among the very first tier of imagists, and it became clearer to me why that is the case. The material inTrilogy however, contains a great deal of medieval and biblical allusions which I don’t particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of.

I’m looking forward to having this essay finished up and submitted on Friday. I’ve got a haircut pencilled in the diary to celebrate, and then it’s on to reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the Postmodern Fiction course which begins on Tuesday afternoon!

[1] HD was actually one of two women Pound proposed to in the course of one year; they both turned him down.

Author Adam
Category Academia
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(Somewhat Belated) Happy New Year

Jan 08

Drink your tea slowly.

That was the best advice I received in the first week of 2012. It arrived via Google+, by way of Kevin Rose. It’s actually part of a longer quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, which goes like this:

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.

On one level it’s a simple call for mindfulness: for not taking for granted things as they’re happening, no matter how routine they might be (Headspace’s Andy Puddicombe is fond of inciting people to be mindful when brushing their teeth). I say simple, but that alone is tough enough. On top of that the tea quote is also kind of a neat encapsulation of a Buddhist idea I’ve always struggled with a little: that the past and future, in a very real sense, don’t exist; that the present moment is the entirety of one’s experience of life.

What does that mean exactly? Try explaining it to someone with a toothache who’s holding to make an appointment with the dentist: “Hey, forget getting this thing fixed tomorrow, all that matters is the pain in your mouth right now – enjoy that!”

But the more time you spend thinking about it the closer it gets to making sense. You will never know the future; you will never again know the past – the present is exactly the sum total of your experience. And no matter how many times you brush your teeth (at least twice a day, OK?) or drink a cup of tea, you’d do well to be present in that moment, to pay it the attention it deserves.

That’s a kind of resolution isn’t it?

Author Adam
Category Buddhism
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