Warning: I Am Upset

Well, college has done it again. I went in on Wednesday, thinking to have a look at my room and to figure out how best to pack it up, only to be met by one of the heads of Housekeeping, very embarrassed and apologetic on my behalf. They’d been given the order to clear my room, and all my stuff was now boxed up in the storage rooms. If they wanted the room for someone else (as a stiff little note informed me later on that same day) then why on earth didn’t they just ask me? I’d have cleared it out, and been able to send a mountain of documents for shredding and another to be thrown away, all of which would have been easier than having to do it at home (I have twenty boxes arriving in the college van this afternoon!). And it would have been a chance to say goodbye at some level. I feel like there’s a dignified way of doing this, but college is determined to be as clumsily punitive as possible.

I realise that I need to back up a bit here and fill you in on what’s happened so far this year. Early in January, I cracked and wrote to the Master, as I still hadn’t heard a word from college, no letter, no email, I’d even received a pay slip for the princely sum of £7 (what for, I have no idea). Mr Litlove and I had consulted a lawyer, but she wasn’t much help. She was very unwilling to deal with college, as the university is a law unto itself pretty much, and usually gets its way in the end. I would have walked out after two minutes, but Mr Litlove is made of much sterner stuff, and he kept insisting there must be some way we could signal our displeasure and sense of injustice. In the end, she remembered that we could instigate a grievance procedure. So when I wrote to the Master, I said that this was something I could do, although of course I would prefer not to. After about five weeks, he replied with a very conciliatory letter. This was nothing to do with my work, indeed the college would be very happy for me to continue to provide study support – only it had to be at the level of a College Teaching Associate, not as a Fellow. He was trying to big up the CTA position, saying some other Fellow had chosen it as a route. But the point, I guess, is that he chose it. By having the Fellowship taken away I had lost my research grant (£2,000 over two years), my book grant (£400 a year) and my medical insurance. I wouldn’t even have a pigeonhole in college any more. Not to mention the drop in status. The positions are not at all comparable, although the law doesn’t recognise the loss of a Fellowship, alas, so in providing some sort of alternative, no matter how shabby, the college had more or less covered itself.

Well, I admit I sat on this for a bit. Mr Litlove was all for me making a fuss, asking them to put together a proper proposal for a job that would show me how I’d make up the lost money and so on. But I knew I wasn’t going back. And eventually I wrote the Master a brief note, saying that I did not want the CTA role, and explaining why, and then wishing the college the best for the future and generally being my polite-beyond-all-reason self. A few weeks before I wrote this, I actually received a plaintive email from a student I’d seen last year, asking if she could come again. It cost me to turn her down, as I hate knowing that someone is suffering whom I could help. But yet again it proved that no one knows about this; there’s been no announcement, nothing in the council minutes. I suppose they didn’t really tell the students in the first place that I existed, so it’s no surprise if they don’t inform them I’m no longer there. They just want me to disappear, and transparency doesn’t come into it; they couldn’t come out of this looking good, after all. Then this morning, I heard back from the Master (it’s about a fortnight after I wrote), just three lines thanking me for the work I’ve done and wishing me the best for the future. Is it wrong to feel this is too little too late?

I’m considering writing an article about what’s happened for the THES, I suppose – I’ve never written for a newspaper before and don’t know how best to approach the subject. But is this unreasonable of me? I feel I’ve lost my ethical bearings, and I know my general sense when wounded is to feel that I’m probably at fault. Although I’m not. And I don’t want to go back. All I wanted was for there to be some sort of nice, mutually respectful severing of ties, which it seems I am not to get.

Anyway, on a different note entirely, let me draw your attention to the way in which I’m moving forward from all this, with an article of mine that’s just come out in Open Letters Monthly about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a woman who had a great deal more to complain of than I have. In fact I became interested in her after reading her gorgeous book, Gift from the Sea, a gently feminist philosophical exploration of women’s lives and how they might be lived better, which is as relevant today as it was when it was written 60 years ago. Once I’d realised the author of the book was the same Anne Morrow Lindbergh who had had her son kidnapped and murdered, I became very curious to know how she had managed to produce such a beautiful, reparative, reconciliatory work after all she had suffered. And then that took me to the Lindbergh marriage, which proved to be a fascinating piece of biographical history. Well, please do pop over to OLM and read some of the other wonderful articles available there, too.

Thursday Musings

I was going to write this post much earlier in the day, but I sat down after lunch and fell asleep. That’s how it’s been lately; I’m still a little convalescent and as usual, experiencing most things through my body. But my general state of mind is, hmm, hard to find a word for it… is resistant, I suppose. I don’t want to be fussed or stressed or bothered, I don’t want anything around me or inside my head that makes too much noise or poses too many demands. I want things very peaceful and spacious right now and am fairly unrepentant about being slow and lazy. This strikes me as inevitable. What kind of a robot would I be if, leaving behind a 25-year-old chunk of my life, I could simply brush the dust off and skip away in a new direction? Perhaps there are people who are good at that sort of thing; me, I have to do the work.

I feel a great deal better about the job itself, to the point of being almost quite relieved that I don’t have to tend to the walking wounded. I made a promise to myself many years back that I would not spend so much time fixing others, and this job was not exactly in line with it. I’m even feeling better about leaving the university, since it was kind enough to make it easy for me by behaving so badly. I couldn’t help but notice that one of my well-wishers on facebook is an ex-colleague who was convicted of paedophilia, but kept his job. There’s a waitress in my college who had a short spell in prison but her job was held open. I’m really wondering whether the university has its priorities right, you know? Having written that I do feel it’s unfair, as I’m sure those people have suffered enough in other ways. But do I want to work for a place that won’t keep me because I don’t fit a box, but will readily keep others who don’t publish, can’t teach, have criminal records, or are generally unpleasant? I always believed completely that the university was a meritocracy and it’s been quite a revelation to realise that it isn’t. I don’t think I will ever understand exactly what happened, and why. The other study support tutor, a retired gentleman who works with the mathematicians and the scientists is still doing his job. I’m glad about that – he is kind and experienced and the students need him. But I can’t help but feel that my (relative) youth and femininity and my conflict-avoidant nature went against me. I can’t tell you how much it has helped to receive so many messages of support and surprise from former students and colleagues. One of the best responses I’ve had came from the porter on Sunday duty, who stood there in complete shock with his head on one side saying ‘It just don’t seem right.’

Anyway, enough, I can close the door on all that and be thankful. I don’t need to understand. But I do feel overcome by this strange lethargy and I was wondering why. Happily I saw my reiki practitioner today and thank you again to those of you who suggested reiki and brought this wonderful woman into my life. I thought maybe it was the loss of a sense of belonging, as the university is very much like a big family. But when Jodie asked me if I was troubled by the thought of standing alone, I knew that I wasn’t in the least. I’ve always preferred to be on my own, and the group mentality never sits well with me. Did I mind about my career? Well, no, not really. My proper university career ended when I gave up teaching French literature and this has just been a long epilogue. Perhaps, Jodie suggested, it was just the effect of no longer being constrained to keep up a certain role. And that, I knew at once, was exactly it. For me, being in academia came with a lot of standards I had to keep up, a huge philosophy of careful attentiveness, pedantry, precision, loyalty, engagement. I chose to do this because it seemed right. But it turns out to be a burden I can now lay down. It’s much like having had your hands tied behind your back for a long time. Once the ropes are undone you are at first numb. But when feeling returns it’s painful. The very release itself turns out to hurt.

So, as I reassemble myself into my new shape, I have to say the self-medication with books and films has been going well. I can thoroughly recommend Roman Holiday to everyone. Audrey Hepburn won the Oscar for it, and no wonder. She is utterly adorable. And Gregory Peck is completely gorgeous. A few nights later I decided to follow up with a Doris Day film and chose Pillow Talk. When Mister Litlove came in to see what I was watching, I told him that it was an odd thing, but Gregory Peck turned out to be more handsome in black and white than he was in colour. Mister Litlove looked at the screen. ‘That’s Rock Hudson,’ he said. Well, he was right, and that did explain a few things. I’m not sure what to watch next. I have the first season of Downton Abbey that’s a strong contender, or I might work my way through my Hitchcock and Woody Allen collection again. Whatever it is, it won’t be anything too demanding.

This Business of Reviewing

Scarcely a day seems to go by without some new attack or challenge to the notion of the review in the blogworld, and for the most part, I don’t find them helpful. But I’ll make an exception for two interesting posts, one from Book Riot and one from The Millions, more interesting than others of their ilk because of the serious attempts made to think about what good review might do. Both are suggesting a move away from the stranglehold of summary-plus-personal-opinion that dominates the orthodox review structure, and I’m all for experimenting with new approaches.

My own feeling, which I’ve mentioned many times here, is that personal-opinion based reviews tend to say a great deal about the person reading, but less about the book. When you read them, you have to measure yourself against the taste of the author of the post, rather than the nominal subject of it. And you come away with an idea of whether you should read the book or not, rather than anything more durable and useful concerning literature, reading, and their place in the world. Sometimes that’s all a person wants, and that’s fine. But books are so rich, so full, so fascinating – don’t they occasionally deserve a little more of our mental energy?

The Millions post provides a good account of the latest round in the review wars and makes some suggestions about what is reliably useful to read in a review. My only objection to this post, and it is a strenuous one, is the idea that negative reviews are ‘better’. To be fair, the justification put forward for this is that readers tend to be fuzzily warm over books they’ve enjoyed, but dislike or dissatisfaction requires a sharper more focused approach, and I can see the logic in that.

However, I simply cannot abide this idea that picking out what is ‘wrong’ (highly subjective in itself) is the highest emblem of quality. Whilst I am no more in favour of always writing positive reviews (prescriptions of all kind distress me), I think negativity has to be handled delicately and in great self-awareness. It can so easily be about the critic claiming intellectual superiority over the stuff that feeds him, or throwing a hissy fit because a book has proved to be a disappointment. We read books from such a deep, private, sensitive place that they can affect us disproportionately, and we don’t acknowledge this enough.

I think it also risks conflating the experience of reading a book with a judgment of it. The experience of a book is unique, powerful and set in stone. We cannot be persuaded that our experience was other than it was. But an experience is based on so many factors that have nothing to do with what we are reading – which is why we can return to a book twenty years later and have an entirely different experience of it. So pure experience is not to be trusted to communicate the very essence of a book. It provides a springboard into the story, a starting point, not an end in itself.

Over at Book Riot, the blogger formerly known as the Reading Ape (is there a symbol for that?) discusses his frustration with reading and writing reviews and posts an excellent list of ideas about what a good review should do. His point here is that we rarely say; this is a great review and you should read it. So what would a great review look like? My initial response is that whilst this is an impressive list of ideal review qualities they pose a substantial and often abstract demand. How to set about achieving any of them? Among the comments there are a number of responses that argue that incorporating such qualities into a review would turn it into literary criticism instead. To which I am obliged to say: what would be wrong with that? A little literary criticism is like a little spice in cooking. The right amount enhances the flavour, even if too much is indigestible. Now whilst I cannot tell anyone what a good review ought to look like, I can offer the basic principles of literary criticism, which are simplicity itself.

The basic building block of interpretation is critical commentary, or taking a chunk of text and seeing what’s going on in it. You can take as much or as little as you like, a paragraph or the whole book. Then – and this is what I used to teach my first years – you consider it from a series of perspectives. I’ve created a list of possible questions that readers can ask themselves but it is by no means definitive, simply an initial suggestion that can be altered and built on as wished:

Narrative voice.

Who is speaking here and what impact does this have on the story?

Are we dealing with a first or third person account? The first person tends to be intimate, partial and particular, the third to be distant, even invisible, but authoritative. Or is the text polyvocal, with lots of different voices undermining the idea of a coherent argument or approach informing the story?

How to describe the register (colloquial or formal, poetic or lyric) and tone (so many possibilities – confiding, ironic, subversive, playful, cold, etc)?

What does the narrator want us to know about themselves and what is being hidden?

Form and Structure

What are we dealing with here – a conventional story with a beginning, a middle and an end, or something more fragmented? A text studded with letters or newspaper reports, or a stream of consciousness?

Does genre play a part, and if so, does the book follow the conventions of the genre?

Then we need to dig down into the words – even to think about whether we’re dealing with long or short sentences, and their rhythm, their musicality or lack of it.

What sort of lexicon or discourse are we presented with? For instance, are there lots of analytical words (creates an argument) or abstract words (philosophical or spiritual leanings) or fantastic ones (appeals to the world of private imagination), etc.?

Are there particular devices at work – metaphor and simile?

In all these instances, we need to ask ourselves what the effect is. Each word has been chosen for a reason, busting its little guts to affect the reader, so what are they actually doing?

Themes and Characters

It’s interesting to look at questions of energy and balance when considering themes and characters.

Do the different personalities in the narrative balance each other out, or do they tip the scales one way or another?

Where’s the energy going in the book – towards what purpose, or what end?

How do the characters play out the themes of the novel?

Is there a clear moral universe being constructed (who wins, who loses) and what does this say about the culture the book is set in?

What systems of values dominate the story – are the values clear cut, or is the book confused and contradictory? Sometimes the best books are confused and contradictory; it can actually make for a very powerful effect on the reader when the answers do not come at the end, and of course it’s very comforting when they do.

Change and Transition

So what is actually different by the end of the book, or even the end of a scene? All sorts of issues come into the aspect of change concerning the version of time and space the story functions in.

Are we looking at characters who develop in linear fashion, or are we all about the circularity?

Repetition is a very powerful device in literature, and when you come across it, it’s worth a moment’s thought, as it can suggest quite contradictory possibilities: depressing and even cynical entrapment, nostalgic, conservative desires for stability and a cosmic view of a natural order that inevitably reasserts itself.

Change, by contrast, tends to indicate lessons learned, characters developed and the scary unpredictability of consequences, both good and bad.

There is a fundamental message here about whether we can change and alter the world – both our personal one and the external world we live in – which is the basis for all political readings of novels.

The Role of the Reader

It’s interesting to take a step back from reading to see how and why we are responding to a novel.

Are we being manipulated and if so, how, and to what purpose?

Are we kept in line with the narrative development, up to date with everything the characters themselves learn, or are we kept in the dark, mystified, held in suspense? What knowledge do we need to bring to the text to understand it?

What knowledge are we readily given, and what is withheld?

How hard do we have to work to extract the meaning of the story?

What are we asked to bring our sympathy to, or are we instructed instead to mistrust, to disapprove, to disagree?

And lastly but fundamentally, what were our expectations? Have they been met or not, and if not, is this because in actual fact, the novel is challenging conventions and asking us to be more broad-minded?

Ok, so having gone through all these sorts of questions, we have a lot of information at our disposal. Of course not all the questions will have yielded fruit, and that’s fine. The way forward now is just to pick out the information that seems most interesting to us as basis for a discussion. The whole reading thing is about being playful and open-minded, asking lots of questions, and avoiding those deadening assumptions that prevent us from getting the most out of what we read.

On Not Being Thanked

Mister Litlove and I have decided that we must have come down with a bug this weekend, as we are both feeling under par. But in my heart of hearts I recognise that cataclysmically wiped out sensation as a remnant of the old chronic fatigue, rearing its ugly head. For me, that means an external cause, something out in the world has had a disproportionate effect on my inner world, and it wasn’t hard to track at least one cause back to an unsatisfactory meeting in college earlier in the week.

You all know that I do this part-time study support job, helping out the students who are struggling with their work. Well apparently the three-year trial period I had no idea we were having is up, and it is time to re-elect me to my post. Only the Senior Tutor (and I should point out right away that I like him very much, we are friends and he was very patient and supportive of me when I was ill) needs to ‘regularise’ my job as it is unlike any other. This will essentially mean more work – when doesn’t it? – which doesn’t exactly thrill me.

‘Do you think college council will be willing to re-elect me?’ I asked, bearing in mind that when I began this job, there was much hostility and resistence to it.

‘Council has indicated it would be happy to see greater provision of study support,’ replied the Senior Tutor, which I took to be a yes. But the u-turn in council feeling was not attributed to the time I have taken over the years to talk to the other fellows, and engage in long email exchanges, explaining what I would do and how I would do it, and the huge campaign of diplomacy I have undertaken not to tread on their delicate toes. And then of course, all the hours I have spent actually with their students. But perhaps it had nothing to do with that at all?

It feels wrong to want recognition. It feels sort of demanding and unreasonable. When we were discussing the students and in particular one whom I worked with a great deal at the end of last year, a student who had been predicted to fail and who ended up with a surprisingly good 2:1, I could have thumped the Senior Tutor when he said smugly ‘I always knew X could do it.’ I did not point out that for two and a half years, X had not done it, and it was only after a massive input of my time and energy that the miracle occurred. Because that felt grasping and arrogant and wrong. But surely I counted for something in the process, didn’t I?

It’s not like I want trumpets and balloons and champagne. I would be embarrassed in the face of effusiveness. I couldn’t bear to be fawned over. I’d just like someone to say thank you, and to reassure me that I’ve done a decent job. We got through a whole meeting without coming anywhere close.

I really feel I ought not to want it, but I do. I know without a doubt that part of the reason I burned out as a lecturer was exactly this lack of recognition. Don’t get me wrong, the students are great, and a solid proportion do say thank you to me every year and that’s lovely. But I sort of feel they shouldn’t have to thank me, really, while the people who employ me jolly well ought to. Is that wrong? I have this genius at being invisible, which Mister Litlove attributes to my façade of self-containment. I don’t look or act needy, which is of course a lie; I’m as needy as anyone else, particularly for reassurance. And this new job turns out to be quite difficult and demanding and almost 95% of the time I never get any feedback from my colleagues as to whether their students are working and coping better. I certainly don’t go begging for gratitude because that sort of strategy would completely undermine its results, wouldn’t it? I’m only interested in what people are willing to give freely.

So at the moment the thought of more years of more hard work with the same old lack of recognition is making me feel  tired. But there is a large part of me still deeply attached to college; I like being a fellow and the perks that come with it, like my room and my book grant. I even appreciate students still, despite spending all my time with the most hapless ones. It’s ironic, really, as so much of what I do with those poor, hapless students is reassure them that I see how hard they are trying, and how much effort they are putting in. Their supervisors only look at the results and when they are not good enough, the first assumption is that the students are slacking off. When it is so much more likely the case that they are twisting themselves up in knots trying too hard. Cambridge is such a harsh system, the opposite of nurturing. And of course I’m a product of this system so I try very hard, too. There is probably a lesson to be learned here for both the students and myself, we should all just put in a lot less effort and watch the paradox of increasing returns unfold. But when Monday morning rolls around, and finds you in your workplace again, take a moment to express your gratitude to someone, say it out loud and generously. There’s just not enough recognition around and it has such an energising and clarifying effect. It’s such a small thing that can really make a difference to another person’s day.