Post Job

What a job I am making of posting here. It's been so long since I've written here - it's not that I haven't been trying on and off - that I received this email recently from a friend:

"Conor - how are you? It seems a long time . . . And a long time too since you posted on your blog. People disappear for a while generally because they're distracted by happiness, or by wretchedness or something awful has happened, or sometimes just inadvertently. Reassure me - Jenny"

Jenny is not his real name though he has published a novel under it recently, receiving a very positive review (of the 'go-out-and-buy-it' type) just before Christmas in one of the broadsheets. What, by the way, are these newspapers called now that they have almost all shrunk towards tabloid scale?   

Colin Burrows ended a review in a recent Saturday Guardian of a book by John Mullan Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, on the business of publishing under a pseudonym or under no name at all, with the following lament:   

"Anonymous authorship was more or less killed off by the literary marketplace, and Mullan's book makes one feel more than a little nostalgia for its teasing concealments."

I'm not so sure about the killing off. I only know a small number of writers in London - I could count them on the fingers of one hand if a couple of my fingers were amputated - and they have published, taken together, two books anonymously within the last two months. Now if I knew twenty writers ... 

Where am I? Having made a hard job of posting, I am now sewing together, or trying to, what I have just written with a piece that was to be called 'Job' of all of eight months ago. It is a rough bit of sewing.

The

thread

is

'job'.

                                                         Job

 

Not the Old Testament Job.

I don't know whether it was just in my family or whether it was a middle-class Dublin thing or an Irish thing generally – I'm pretty sure that the word is not used in this sense by English people – but, when I was little, 'job' was, em, what you did on the toilet by using the muscles in your bottom to press hard when you had a pain there. You did a job. The job was the result of the push. It bobbed around in the water or there might be two of them or even three, with nicely curved ends. Jobs. Each time you did one or more, it or they were an impressively different brown to the time before. They were a different size and texture, the most interesting ones having a rougher, granulated, surface, irregularly encrusted with tiny pebble-like structures, often a different brown or a different colour, such as a shade of cream.

Was I proud of them? I cannot remember but as I write, pride comes to me, so I suppose I must have been. They were fine jobs, jobs well done. Sometimes they were big jobs, darker and even more solid than usual.

I had a dream last night of three jobs. The toilet was a German rather than an Irish one, that is to say, it had a water-less plateau where you can inspect your faeces before flushing them down. To talk of an Irish toilet is not correct. Like Irish law and public administration and indeed our language, the Irish toilet is English. The Slovenian philosopher Žižek has a rich passage in one of his books - I cannot remember in which, it is on my shelves but they are far away as I am in the back of beyond in Umbria and I cannot do a quick search on the internet since I have not yet asked Santi, the owner of the retreat house where I am staying, whether I can use his computer, I know that there is an internet connection (Could it be broadband?) but now is not the time to ask him, he is cooking -  yes, there is a passage in Žižek where he gives a comparative analysis of English, French and German toilets¹. He delves into the toilets'  cultural meanings and what their different forms tell us about the differences between the cultures.

There were two huge, quite dark, adult jobs in the German toilet in my dream. I knew that they were not mine. The third job I produced. It was just as impressive and adult as the two that were there already.

When I was three, my father got a big job. He hadn't had a job until then. We moved from Dublin to the town where the job was. My father was a doctor and the job was in Mallow County Hospital. It was a very difficult job. My father would come home after work - he worked long hours - and talk at length to our mother in our presence of the difficulties he was having at work.

                                                        (To be continued)

Notes
1. I am now back in London, so can give the reference:  Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 4-5.

Comments

[thouseecort]

Hello, http://www.realtybyelizabeth.com/ - buy xanax online It is possible for there to be a physical dependency on the medication that can cause withdrawal and rebound symptoms of anxiety, panic, or depression if the medication is stopped too quickly. http://www.realtybyelizabeth.com/ - alprazolam price

[flapajege]

flapajege, http://hollywoodshoptilyoudrop.com/ - cheapest effexor It was a medication that was approved by the FDA and introduced to the market by Wyeth in 1993. http://hollywoodshoptilyoudrop.com/ - order effexor

[Unlormseree]

— Не знаю, ключ ли это, — сказал Джабба. — Мне кажется маловероятным, что Танкадо использовал непроизвольный набор знаков.Четвертая попытка тоже не дала результата. Интим знакомства в бишкеке
Дом 2 официальный сайт секс
Знакомства секс мурманск
Крик медсестры гнал его прочь.
Беккер задумался: «Я бы хотел, чтобы ты как следует вымыл голову, научился говорить по-человечески и нашел себе работу». Но решил, что хочет от этого парня слишком многого. Интим знакомства в архангельскеЗнакомства в саратове сексЗнакомства секс воркутаЗнакомства секс улан удэВеликие луки секс знакомства
Знакомства в ростове для сексаЗнакомства для секса в бийске
Знакомства для вич сексаЗнакомства в сергиевом посаде
Интим знакомства в балашихеКострома знакомства секс
Интим досуг услугиЗнакомства трансексуалов

Знакомства секс таганрог
Новокузнецк интим услуги

Иркутск секс знакомстваЗнакомства секс лобняЗнакомства в печоре для секса

— Кто? — требовательно сказала она.Беккер пересек зал аэропорта и подошел к туалету, с грустью обнаружив, что дверь с надписью CABALLEROS перегорожена оранжевым мусорным баком и тележкой уборщицы, уставленной моющими средствами и щетками. Он перевел взгляд на соседнюю дверь, с табличкой DAMAS, подошел и громко постучал. Знакомства для секса парыИнтим знакомства майл ру
Он потер виски, подвинулся ближе к камере и притянул гибкий шланг микрофона ко рту.— Может быть, хочешь воды? Знакомства секс николаевЗнакомства для секса нижний новгород