Suffice it to say that the interview with Oxford was not entirely what I expected, and leave it at that. If I'm not what they want, I shall not grieve, rend my artfully diaphanous clothing, and throw myself in front of the nearest omnibus (automobile or published- I wonder if anybody's thought to combine the two? Gigantic wheeled volumes with sets of chairs along the footnotes?) I shall simply Glide Onward, with my usual grace, tact and infinite poise.
... which means I'll get two steps and fall down a flight of stairs. Onto a visiting dignitary.
Now, back to aggressively editing my portfolio [and by 'aggression', I mean 'pieces cannot reasonably expect to make it out alive, recognisable or untainted by my attempts to convert miscellaneous bits into poetry'], reading Anna Akhmatova on the beach purely to confuse myself, and discovering that I am accidentally excellent, because those scraggy dotted flowers I bought once, in a fit of rare sentimentality, for That Person Who Seems To Like Having Me Around For No Apparent Reason are actually The Lily Of the Incas. Can you think of anything which sounds even remotely more luxurious? Yes, let's combine horitcultural royalty with associations of ancient civilisations and molten gold. Jesus.
I would like to note, also, that I found these rare, Chilean and Linnaeus-named things in a bucket at a supermarket. Australia is strange.
The telephone interview with Intensely, Scarily Prestigious British University is in less than 24 hours. It will be half an hour long.
At this particular moment, despite being fortified with tea, roses and spaghetti bolognese (all supplied by my Utterly Awesome best friend of ten years, who is, what with all the unconditional love and the tea-making, essentially my wife), and in possession of six pages of crib notes, I am worried that I will:
++ Become, despite my expansive and neurotic preparation, utterly dumbstruck, and waste precious minutes of their incredibly expensive phone call in dedication to stuttering like a typewriter being hit with a baseball bat;
++ Discover a very, very well-buried confessional streak to my soul, and find myself telling reputable academics about my intense writerly insecurities, that incident with the skink when I was five, and my paralytic fear of zombies. Clearly what they want is a Shining Emerging Artist With A Healthy Attitude, and not some half-baked Antipodean loon who lies awake listening for flesh-eating people outside her window;
++ Go, at the last minute, completely and utterly insane, and answer all questions with babble about penguins;
++ Reach for the phone, slip, crack my head on a bench, and leave the ambulance men to explain to uncomprehending posh British receptionists as to why I am not available to come to the phone.
....I wonder if managing to combine several of these would get me some sort of prize.
Right!
Considering that the Original Purpose of this blog was documenting my educational rampages across the disapproving wastes of Ye Olde Lions-And-Unicorns Mother Country, perhaps the fact that I am now attempting to batter my way back in to said Mother Country for another postgraduate round indicates that I should start writing the damn thing again.
(It also indicates that I am a complete glutton for punishment and have little to no respect for the demands of my accent, which was damaged so severely by the last English jaunt that I may never be viewed as properly Strayan even again. The masochistic strain is enhanced by the fact that I will once again be exposed to people trying to make me take tea seriously. I may not cope.)
However: after essentially falling out of my university feet-first, my next move is to try and present myself as a Charming Convict Lass oozing with talent/brains/legs/je ne sais quoi to a bunch of universities offering that much-mocked degree on the post-graduate platter, the Creative Writing Masters Degree. One imagines it, runty, snuffling and slightly diabetic, stabled with all the various Economics MAs and the M.Phils in Fine Arts, trying to hide itself in a corner lest a lot of MBAs unintentionally stampede it.
The amount of flak the Creative Writing Degree gets is nicely summarised, I think, by the amount of conversations I've had where well-meaning friends, on the mere mention of the concept, go on a long rant about how 'writing can't be taught except by experience' and their belief that these MAs are a blatantly vampiric measure by those university systems trying to latch on to gullible, Zadie-Smith-reading necks. However, though there are many reasons, suffice to say that my creative approach is so in need of an environment of discipline and guidance that were a twelve-week course in a dungeon with a Literary Dominatrix offered somewhere, I would be on the application list so fast I'd break the land-speed record. (If one more person says 'Yes, but...' to me following this explanation, I shall begin sharpening my stainless steel knitting needles.)
Thus, I am currently in the process of applying to, or waiting for a response from, several UK/US universities. It's a charming process, involving a delicate mixture of failed organisation, shuffling envelopes, forgetting forms, discovering the printer is only using green ink for a week in a presumed belated celebration of St Patrick's Day, managing forgetful referees, abject panic, the attempted sorting of 14 deranged short pieces (40,000 words) spread out on a double bed into something mildly resembling a sane portfolio of 5,000, the Ancestral Visa Tango, looking at finances, covering eyes and looking at finances again in the hopes of change, waiting by telephones, more panic, more deranged short pieces, horribly lying Personal Statements about how excellent I am, Rebekah Del Rio's version of Llorando, improperly applied stamps, incompetent post offices, fits of depression in New York hotel rooms and more, calmly comforting panic.
The fruit of one of these applications- an imminent telephone interview with a UK university so scarily prestigious it probably once used Australians as basement slaves who never saw sunlight and had to donate their bodily hair for ink-blotters- has increased the panic to a nice, shrill fear.
I may soon give up, apply for an English Lit PhD on stoats in medieval literature, and huddle inside a university with very thick walls for the next four years. (The fact that I have also, for reasons I can honestly only attribute to reading too much of The Economist and Amaryta Sen, applied for a Global Politics degree at the London School Of Economics indicates that the next little while is going to be very, very odd.)
