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Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue, 2011

Dedicated to the few who messaged on New Year’s Eve.

2011 was a story I don’t know how to tell. It’s a year that had so many structural positives, countered by surface negatives. Perhaps it’s best defined by what others have said.

Shadows

In the early summer, I was ‘strange’, ‘sick’ and ‘damaged goods’. Thanks. In the mid-summer, I was an expletive abomination. Consequently, in the late summer, I was branded a defeatist.

Victimisation does arise sometimes. Not because it is wanted – if there’s a brand of people who don’t want to be happy, this author is not one of them – but because it’s a way of dealing with the various angles of attack and the after-effects that cannot be disguised.

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New Horizons

Published November 12, 2011 Geneva , Leicester , Literature 1 Comment
Tags: Aegis Quest, Andrew Marvell, Blogging, Geneva, Poetry, Psychology, Self-Discipline

Inspired by, and dedicated to, those who didn’t write me off. (And welcome to any students who are looking for information on Marvell and arriving here. Please do contact me if you want any help).

This could be a maelstrom: of sentiments; of changes; of minds and mysteries. Much has changed in recent weeks, with positive challenges and valued rewards. It has been difficult to document it all, and the positivity comes with understandable nervousness and a touch of trepidation.

“The only way is onwards…”

Ideally, we want our lives to lead upwards trajectories. When somebody hits particular heights for themselves, they struggle to contemplate living within or below that potential. That’s the intricate psychology of accomplishment.

My life took such a monumental leap four years ago that when the subsequent falls struck with intent, no amount of trying, support, or soul-searching could arrest the slide, nor console its gravity. And this beautiful little portal came to life, with its artistry, its cadence, and its candour, as sadness drove and inspired my best writing.

I’ve told stories through feelings, and feelings through stories. I’ve read poetry through loneliness, and loneliness through poetry. I’ve discovered Marvell through myself, and myself through Marvell.

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A Long Winter’s Tale

Published April 17, 2011 Leicester , Literature , Politics , research 1 Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Cultural Revolution, Early Modern, English Civil War, English Revolution, Geneva, humour, John Milton, Leicester, Literature, Nigel Smith, Politics, Print Culture, Public Sphere, Reformation, Religion, Seventeenth Century, Teaching

A summary of research activity from January-March 2011. This features a lecture by Nigel Smith at the Andrew Marvell Centre in Hull; a teaching event at the University of York; and the biannual British Milton Seminar at Birmingham Central Library.

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Private Education: Universities, Fees, and Futures

Published December 29, 2010 Culture , Geneva , Politics , research 1 Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Censorship, Cultural Revolution, Education, Geneva, Hypocrisy, Politics, Public Sphere, Switzerland, Teaching, Tuition Fees, Universities

This post has escaped me for some time, so fraught has the political sentiment been. Student protests, planned anarchy, university sit-ins, the attack on the Royal cavalcade, and we have attempted revolution on our streets once again.

Speaking of ‘revolution’, it seems ironic that my recent attention has been on the precarious ‘Horatian Ode’. Marvell’s first political statement on the regicide was written 18 months after the event. Even writing in private, sometimes there is inhibition and concern about finding your own voice, documenting your own thoughts, and realising your own future, not least when everyone around you is bubbling with opinion.

I’ve found this year less difficult in terms of my own personal views than in the way politics has become aggressively popularised in the new digital public sphere. I remember voicing concern during the election that friendship had adopted political colour in a way that had never happened before. I suspect the same to be true of this adversarial issue of tuition fees: you’re with us or against us.

There are legitimate arguments on both sides here. It is necessary to divide the issues from the vitriolic protests that were carried out in response. Charlie Brooker, as ever, does a neat line on those happenings (c. 54 mins onwards). But perhaps I can offer a snippet of my own.

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The Fifth Element: Leicester

Published October 9, 2010 Edinburgh , Geneva , research 1 Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Edinburgh, Geneva, Leicester, research

University of Leicester: David Wilson Library

University of Leicester: the impressive David Wilson Library

This week marked the start of university number five: Leicester.

Two years ago in Geneva, I was marketing the Erasmus scheme by conducting interviews with second-year students to inform them about the possibilities. In doing so, we attracted the attention of Leicester and negotiated what became a prestigious link. Producing a supplementary article for the department magazine, Noted, to aid the promotion effort [2008-2009 Spring, 12-15], only then did I understand the magnitude of Leicester’s ascent. One of my best students, Noémie, chose to spend a year in Leicester, and did magnificently. For all the upheaval, admin, and readjustment that comes with yet another switch, to practise what I promoted (if not preached) proves a most worthy cause.

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Exposure and Control

Published July 29, 2010 Edinburgh , Geneva , Knightmare , research , Writing 2 Comments
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Dissertation, Edinburgh, Facebook, Gareth Malone, Geneva, James Loxley, Knightmare, Print Culture, Privacy, Public Sphere, research, Self-Discipline, Writing

As the Wheel of Fortune spins again, I am attempting to shake off private blues to regain control. Privacy proves baffling in that respect: control. Privacy appears to offer control, but in today’s climate it takes plenty away too. After a grilling yesterday in the use of ‘motive’ and ‘intention’, here lies a drop in the ocean on ‘exposure’ and ‘control’.

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Presenting Privacy: Marvell and London

Published July 11, 2010 Geneva , Literature , research 3 Comments
Tags: Andrew Marvell, English Revolution, Geneva, Nigel Smith, Poetry, Privacy, Revisionism, Secrecy, Steven Zwicker

Thank you for visiting, and for reading. It is nice to receive a few glances every so often. I hope you will come back again.

Presenting Privacy

Both professionally and personally, privacy has been a daunting and fascinating topic over the past two weeks. A paper entitled ‘Denying Authorship: Marvell, Maniban and the Quest for Privacy’ was given in Geneva, which was followed by ‘Marvell in Manuscript and Print: Public and Private Experiences, 1649-1660′ at the Andrew Marvell Centre, University of Hull. The Geneva presentation was by far the stronger of the two. The latter was, coincidentally, almost a private affair. Finally, I ended up in Oxford for a ‘Marvell and London’ conference this weekend.

A universal positive in my favour is that people remember the subject. Unlike topographies and typographies, episcopacies and liturgies, privacy is something that everyone can, and in a way, wants to, identify with. We are instantly drawn to exchange and adapt our own sense of privacy with the picture we have of the early-modern world in which our protagonists lived.

And our protagonists are real people. Tapping into somebody else’s psyche and trying to understand the creation of the puzzles rather than the answers is surely to create and define a more colourful literary history. We want to know what there was to hide. We probably won’t find out, but we can be as inquisitive as we like under the guise of ‘history’.

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The Quest for Privacy

Published June 29, 2010 Geneva Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Geneva, Literature, Privacy

[Written in a 7 min limit]

I have arrived in Geneva to present ‘Marvell, Maniban, and the Quest for Privacy’ at the Authorship Conference [listed under Sites]. This experience continues to be a mixture of anticipation and dread, for a number of private reasons.

One thing that has arisen, though, is how to present yourself to people you haven’t seen in a long time. Old primary school friends, almost all of whom I have not seen since the age of 11 [and definitely all of whom will remember me as a facetious little shit], have suggested a social event in July, which I would love to attend. But I’ve no idea how to fashion myself at all; the thought itself might just persuade me out of it.

And then there is the academic crowd I encounter again tomorrow: the fair and wonderful professionals who stand strong where I was weak, and who represent everything I want to represent and yet cannot. How do I reply to the old question ‘how’s it going’? To tell the truth, I fear, would just humiliate me beyond any further measure of respectability. And yet, where’s the hiding place? Help me, Mr Marvell.

“A Mirror Up To Nature”: Hamlet (2009)

Published December 28, 2009 Culture , Geneva , Television 5 Comments
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Culture, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Geneva, Hamlet, Joseph Fiennes, King Lear, Kingship, Mirrors, Patrick Stewart, Print Culture, T.S. Eliot, Theatre, Thomas Jordan, Tragedy, William Shakespeare

"A Mirror Up To Nature": David Tennant in the RSC's Hamlet (2009)

Although not wanting to abscond from Roxette’s ‘air of silence’ previously, I am inspired to move from Sweden to Denmark, and from Lear to another fine play, Hamlet. Despite largely avoiding Shakespeare at undergraduate level, I taught this play, new to me then, to first-year undergraduates in a very nervous first term in Geneva. This production, that I watched on the strength of the main actor above any other specific merits, alerted me not only to the skills I have picked up since, but also a new sense of seeing theatre. Between theatre and film, between traditional and contemporary, between stolid culture and celebrity impasse, this version struck an excellent compromise for 2009. I felt like I was watching something unique – that kept me attached.

This Hamlet of 2009 is to tragedy what Shakespeare in Love of 1998 was to comedy (despite the latter, ironically, portraying a tragedy itself). A play is a play, a king is a thing; a stage (all the world) is a stage, and has its stage limitations. For all the intricacies not necessarily visible to the average human eye, stage productions can just be too alike. For classics of Shakespeare’s corpus, played endlessly at the finest theatres by the finest players, it has been time to bring the imagination alive again.

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Way Out

Published January 23, 2009 Geneva 2 Comments
Tags: Geneva

[Amended from Original]

It is nights like this where I am glad for another space to turn to. The academic climbs of the past few months, even the past two weeks, have been outstanding. I have spoken with people, who, before this period, I would only have dreamt of meeting; Professors contacting me through various channels discovered on the internet and offering all sorts of help – unimaginable.

Yet this seems permanently overshadowed by neverending problems in Switzerland, not least as time here nears its end. As much as the people in the English Department are wonderful, this place is a recurrent and desperate nightmare. There are four separate forms to be filled in to leave the country, all of which need delivering to different places. A charge is levied for a leaving certificate: freedom from prison.

I had to go to the admin building, Uni Dufour, last week to try and sort out the extremely messy business of matriculation, 12 months after I was reprimanded about my French there. There had been a misunderstanding, and the stern headmistress was even less impressed this morning. Why had I not appeared at her summons last year? Because my registration file should have been complete. But no, she is not satisfied that she has seen original documents, even though I went through the painstaking process of getting them here, taking them last year, and she herself offering to copy them. At that, everything stalled, indefinitely. As a member of staff at the university, I should not have let myself be intimidated to the bone like that, but could do no more than utter ‘Je les ai apporté’ without assertiveness. I was left to shiver through coat and scarf through the various shakings of the head from the other side of the desk. The positive upshot of this – and there is one – is that I should be guaranteed student status at Geneva in absentia with Lukas’ supervision.

Uni Dufour / Prison / Mental Asylum

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Writing Privacy

Posts Tagged 'Geneva'