5 posts tagged “rant”
Despite the glamorous elements which come with writing a novel- creative freedom, indulging a passion at great self-indulgent length, getting all the girls at the coffee shop hot under the collar with your turtleneck-beret combination- there is one major downside. (This is not including writer's block, which is less a 'downside' than 'like being stuck in the middle of childbirth, without the fun, or the mercies of epidurals'.)
The major downside is this incredibly frequent double-header:
a) "So what's your opus about, hey?"
b) "How's the novel going? Finished yet?"
If anybody asks me either of these, ever again, I am quite likely to decapitate them, pickle the head, and carry it around attached to my satchel by its hair to warn off anybody else. The additional problem of being unpublished, blue-haired, and generally in possession of an air of artistic eagerness means that both a) and b) are asked rather indulgently. 'Oh, you want to be a writer, dear? How adorable! Do tell us more- quickly, while this adorable delusion of yours lasts.'
In the absence of decent, modernised laws about enlightened uses of decapitation, however, I will do the next best thing- develop a cheat sheet. Print it out! Give it to your friends! Stay the hell away from my scythe!
What My New Novel Is About, The Cliff Notes
Themes: Fate, ambition, lies, drunkenness, shame, academia, jealousy, things lost on trains, nationalism, mid-life crises, ethics, violinists falling into rivers, art, faith, family, guilt, and other things, including shepherd's pie. (It's said to be the sign of a terrible writer to work from the themes rather than the story, but one good thing about writing theory is that nobody agrees on anything.)
Plot (Basic): Set in three different countries- a man lies on the spur of the moment, and, surprisingly, there are consequences.
Plot (Detailed): Unless you're my editor, wait a while, and buy the damn thing.
Characters: Currently include an elderly lesbian having a mental breakdown, an emotionally disconnected immigrant, a man who may or may not be named Klaus, and an academic who compares postmodernism to haggis. Others.
Tone: Sarcastic, surreal, sweeping, sensuous, self-important, stark, and any other 's' words I can bring to mind without necessarily admitting that I haven't really hit on one yet.
How My New Novel Is Going
Fine, thanks.
No, really, that's all you're getting out of me. You want hysterics, ask me how my THESIS is going. Then again, you might get a garbled answer about the application of American exceptionalist thinking to Schroeder in 'Peanuts', so maybe you don't really want to do that either. Um.
Want to know a way in which to take ten years off my life? Fix my online university results so that, beside the Very Important Subject I Need To Ace So As To Get Into Honours And Have An Academic Future, it reads Incomplete- Mark: 0.
I have come close to having a heart attack a handful of times in my life. Reading those results was one of them.
Now, I'm a veteran when it comes to the incredible fatuity of Arts departments. I've handled being declared persona non grata by a foreign university two weeks before I arrived to study there, and being told that I don't actually attend university at all, despite all appearances to the contrary. I've coordinated an assault involving three different offices, a passport, a nonexistent university subject, and four people occupying the same job in an eighteen-month period (Head of English Honours seems to have a high turnover). I'm an expert in midnight phone calls to academic advisors in other countries, juggling eighteen different forms at once (in triplicate), demanding to see superiors in a Very Cold Commanding Tone, and various other types of armed and unarmed combat against bureaucratic nonsense. Forget the University Medal, I deserve a Purple Heart.
However, if there were a cake, this would take it. We had only submitted one 100% assessment for the Very Important Subject, so there were no other marks to comfortingly suggest that perhaps a mistake had been made. Across the country and the world, a select group of USYD English students read their results, imagined that their meticulous essays had been lost/shredded/set alight, and entered into a state commonly known as 'panic'.
Senior Arts students are, as a rule, rather highly strung (it's a medically proven result of over-achieving, looking pompously superior to Engineers and perpetually insisting that you won't be working at a fast food joint in five years). You would think that the Arts Office would be careful not to upset us, or make sudden movements. We can turn feral and footnote you into an early grave. Quite aside from that, making a large group of us believe, for at least half a day (before word got out that it was a mistake), that we'd failed was more than a stuff-up: it was frankly rather cruel.
One good thing came of this debacle- the 2008 Honours candidates drew ever closer together in our dismay. Phones rang across the country, crying 'Did you get Incomplete too? Oh, good, then we can freak out together.' Evidence is definitely mounting to support my theory that the English Department has embarked on a Darwinian quest to cull the weak from our cohort, and bind the survivors together in a mass united by terror, hatred and confused references to Derrida. We're being bred to be either prisoners of war or Übermenschen.
Either way, 2008 is going to be a very interesting year.
EDIT: So, I suddenly got my mark back. I am now, in the words of a friend, a sports car, because I went from 0 to 93 in 60 seconds. Yep. 93. The English Department is not forgiven, but if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here, doing an incredibly silly victory dance.
On the list of Things You Really Shouldn't Do To Me, above 'pulling my streaks to see if they're real' and 'asking me if I'm ever going to finish my book', is 'be condescending', particularly about the whole being female issue. Luckily, the few people who've ever tried that have generally been such poor specimens of humanity that they've deserved my pity rather than my incendiary wrath. (Hence why they all remain alive and retain their limbs.)
Today, however, I got a letter.
More specifically, my mother and myself both received letters, from the wife of the politician seeking re-election in our constituency. (Draw me not upon the inanities of Australian elections. Politics here is 99% blather and 1% small children asking about cactuses.) My brother and father, also sometime residents of this address, were left wholly unmolested by said wife, whose letterhead includes a photograph of herself looking Glamorous But Relatable. If you're noting a gender pattern here, congratulations, five points to you; but it gets better.
Said letter runs to two pages, and contains absolutely no reference to her husband's politics AT ALL. (I scoured it.) What it does contain is a thorough, wifely, hearts-and-flowers account of her husband's character: his father's death, his unprivileged upbringing, his 'commitment to family life' through their 25 years of marriage. 'I thought it was important', says Wife, 'for you to have the opportunity to hear about the Malcolm I know and love.'
I, being approximately as sentimental as a particularly craggy boulder (I found My Girl mawkish and am often found being sarcastic to small children), find this disgusting. I also, however, find it insulting, and this is why:
One, obviously women are complete political ignoramuses, and need to be provided with special letters all of their very own (oh! how charming! a note from the Mayoress!) outside the normal political commentary of newspapers, television and the general media to make them participate in a big ol' election. No, it takes a woman-to-woman talk to get us interested in that boring rubbish.
Two, because I am a woman voter, defined by my soft heart and good feelings towards my fellow members of breast-kind, I will of course respond with avid sisterhood to a woman's touch in any political material, rather than that scary rough-ridin' tobacco-chewin' yippie-ki-yay masculine discourse they have in them scary newspapers. I mean, EVIDENTLY. I need something I can read whilst fanning myself gently upon the verandah, which won't stain my petticoats.
Three, the central thing to think about when going after my vote is that I am a WOMAN, a woman whose chief concerns are making babies, beds and buns. The letter contains the assurance that 'Malcolm understands that it is vital for women to have a good work-life balance', because it is of course completely self-evident that for a woman, 'life' and 'work' are two diametrically opposed things which require balancing. (Probably many career women without children would find it slightly surprising that they don't actually have a life; we should be glad of the Mayoress's touching generosity in letting them know. Unless, of course, they are lesbians, which in Australia apparently equates to 'single woman with minimalist taste in interior design'.)
Of course, being as I'm a tender-hearted woman and all, it seems obvious that my sympathies with regard to voting are located in my personal feelings about the politician's life (oh, he has children, that's nice, oh, his father died, how tragic) rather than in my opinions about, you know, ACTUAL POLITICAL STUFF. Women? Opinions? What a farcical idea; the stress of it makes me swoon! My stars, where are the smelling salts, Ellie-May?
The Wife may be slightly shocked to know that I find her husband's stance on the Kyoto protocol intriguing, and wonder how he reconciles his Catholic beliefs with his stance on abortion. She would probably be surprised by the fact that I read the Economist rather than knitting booties for my future children. What may startle her the most, though, is the idea that being treated like a woman is pretty much the opposite of what I want from my electorate.
Edit: This silly woman's emotivoting plea made the front page of the city's biggest newspaper, so uproarious was the response. No mention, though, of how it was only sent to women, which makes me hope desperately, for the fate of my electorate, that said gender discrimination was a mistake. Unfortunately, I still have my doubts.
I'm out. I throw in the towel. English weather has defeated me.
In the past eight hours alone, we've had beautiful sunshine, gale-force winds, and snow (yes, snow)- rearrange order, repeat. I left my apartment for twenty minutes in the blazing sun, came back inside, looked out the window and actually said, aloud, 'What? Why is it snowing?'. I had a disoriented moment- perhaps I'd somehow entered a time warp and been drawn back into winter. Instead, and somewhat disappointingly, I just seem to be caught within some kind of spring schizophrenia, or a Battle Of The Meteorological Bands.
This spontaneous-snowing lark, in particular, is grossly impolite. Snow never happens unexpectedly in those parts of Australia which are sufficiently mountainous to get a cold winter. We predict it weeks ahead, bunker down, watch the thermometers, and examine the sky intently for the first flakes. We create suspense, damn it. To be snowed upon without notice is unfair- it feels like a royal visitor has merrily dropped by unannounced, and then sailed off after a few cups of coffee, leaving shell-shocked disarray behind. I'm not ready! I haven't had the chance to prepare!
Herein lies the difference: Australian weather is a complex mix of intense drama and sadism- five years of drought! Heat-wave from the central desert! Gale-force winds from Antarctica! Tropical storm!- whereas British weather simply seems easily distracted and keen to display as much of itself as possible. A case in point: the sky is now sporadically spitting showers of hail every twenty minutes. In the eastern antipodes, 'hail' happens rarely, and when it does is directly synonymous with 'punishment for everybody's sins'. Roofs are pummelled in, cars utterly destroyed, pets who happen to have been left outside concussed. You go out afterwards and pick up pieces of ice the size of cricket balls and fists, and then either chuck them at your siblings or keep them in the freezer for summer, when you can chuck them at your siblings in 40-degree heat.
The sleety, slushy, tinier-than-a-marble specimens I've been watching fall daintily from the sky (which is at the moment, of course, pristinely clear and filled with sunshine) seem completely half-hearted by comparison. I hereby lay down the gauntlet: British weather lacks guts. Come on, heavens, where are the blizzards? Scorch something! Thump me on the head with a snow drift! Commit! I refuse to accept any weather system which doesn't operate on the tenet 'Scare The Bejesus Out Of Everybody'!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is war.
The University of East Anglia has just let me know that I can’t study any of the three subjects I signed up for in September, because they are full. This is a problem for two reasons.
a) I only have permission from the University of Sydney to study those three subjects. Without them, I’m effectively in British limbo. That, however, isn’t the biggest problem (although it’s still fairly whopper-sized), since I can conceivably do some electronic acrobatics and wrangle permission from Sydney Uni for other subjects. It would possibly involve bribery and threats of violence to family members, but it could be done. The BIG problem is:
b) I’m currently going into third year. I want to study English Honours in 2008, my fourth year. To do that, I need to do two specific English subjects in 2007, one in first semester and one in second. (Following? Good.) Obviously, being in England and all, I can’t do the first semester one in Sydney. So, with the alternate aid of eyelash batting and aggressive pestering, I obtained a precious piece of paper saying ‘If you study Course A or Course B while in England, we’ll count that as the same thing as studying that Honours prerequisite course thingie. Have fun!’
Problem (if you don’t quite understand yet)- Course A and Course B are ‘full’. Consequence- I can’t study Honours in 2008, as I haven’t fulfilled the criteria.
‘But Jenny,’ you say, cowering behind something sturdy, ‘surely you can just do the Honours prerequisite course thingie another time?’
Good point, I say, only I can’t. I have a piece of paper asking me very politely but firmly not to attempt to study any more English beyond what I’ve signed up for in 2007, because I’ve already exceeded the limit. And I mean ‘exceeded’ in the sense that if academia were a highway, my speeding ticket would be the equivalent of a small African country’s GDP. If I attempt to study any more English, I will receive more polite refusal letters, and possibly a baseball to the kneecaps.
Let’s play ‘What Annoys Jenny About This Situation.’
- The fact that the notification comes, oh, about a month before I’m due to arrive on the university’s doorstep, and four months (FOUR) after I first submitted my enrolment preferences. (Note that my enrolment preferences contained a big ‘REQUIRED’ symbol on top of Courses A and B.)
- The knowledge, even if unspoken, that the courses have been ‘filled’ by British students who picked it because it ‘sounded good’.
- The fact that this is the second time their enrolment people have screwed me around. First time, they supplied me with an outdated course catalogue, so I effectively signed up for courses that didn’t exist. I had 24 hours to get new permission forms, for Honours and my other two courses, and only made it because Australian academics appear to find desperate wails persuasive.
The stress of this kept me up for most of my first night in Paris, which continues to be aggravatingly Parisian (gardens on top of garret apartments, arrogant pigeons, Smartcars locked in desperate battles around statues of angels) despite my problems.
