Conorthoughts

Angry of Tunbridge Wells and Pimlico

This is Oliver Goldsmith, drawn by a certain Gilbert and engraved by a J. Linton. He looks splendidly grumpy which is how I think I sound below, browned off this evening by his college.

Dear Professor Besson,

could you please explain to me - or get a colleague to explain - what happened to the presentation under the auspices of the anthropology department of Jean Rouch's work that was scheduled for Tuesday 1st December? I had found a notice for it on the college website, and paste it at the bottom here.

The event did not take place in the location that was given. There was no sign announcing a change of venue or cancellation, not did the person holding a seminar in the room at that time have any knowledge of the event or of its whereabouts. The college porter's office knew nothing about it. One of the other half dozen people I met in search of the event went to the anthropology department to enquire but the administrative staff there knew nothing about it.

As a member of the public, I am appalled and angry that a department in a college of Goldsmith's standing could announce a public event and then apparently give no further notice about it or its cancellation. I wasted my evening as a result travelling from Pimlico and back.

If I do not receive a satisfactory response, I will make it my business to lodge a complaint with the pro-chancellor of the college - or whoever its most senior officer is – and with the body which funds the department.

I have also written to some of your colleagues and have dropped an email to someone I happen to know at the college, Nick Couldry of the Department of Media Studies, to ask him whether this kind of apparently shoddy behaviour is a regular feature of academic life at Goldsmith's.

Yours Sincerely,

Conor Joyce

Joram Ten Brink-on the African cinema of Jean Rouch
Goldsmiths Anthropology Society:
Discovering Jean Rouch work- early works in Africa and their impact on film making in Europe (including screening of extracts from Rouch's major film productions in West Africa)
Joram ten Brink is a filmmaker and a Professor of Film at the University of Westminster. He works as a writer/director of documentary and experimental films in the UK and Holland. His films have been broadcasted and theatrically released in the UK, USA, Holland, Israel, France, Germany and Spain. His work has been screened at the Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals and at MOMA in New York. Prof. ten Brink heads the practice based PhD programme in Arts and Design at the University of Westminster and is the director of Centre for Production and Research in Documentary film. In 2004 he organised a major international conference and a programme of screenings on the work of the French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. In 2007 he edited the first major book on Rouch's work in English – Building Bridges- the cinema of Jean Rouch (Wallflower Press, London). http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-1163

Event Information
Location: RHB 137 Cost: Free to attend Website: www.calamma.net/anthropologysociety Department: Anthropology Time: 1 December 2009, 17:00 - 19:00

Leaf

A leaf came through the door, well, under it, from the school opposite. I brought it up to my flat, after some days. It was all on its own. Now we're together.

Toes

A postscript to my last blog. Here are the man's toes blown up (His fingers are holding up better.):

Holding hands

I was in the Mesopotamian rooms in the Louvre the week before last. Many people were holding hands but I was on my own. Here are some hands I came across in the Sumerian section:

 
 

Here they are blown up:

The fingers look to me like they might be in need of sucking not just holding. Do you think I am right in imagining that they are anxiety-filled? They must be the hands of a nobleman or a king: they are not those of anyone who has ever done much manual work. Here is the sculpture in full (well, almost):

 

A word for John Bull

Here is my quote of the day, of the week in fact (Why not throw in the month?):

"Many people in the world say that the English are racists. I don't agree."

Ali Farka Touré the late Malian musician in conversation with the BBC music journalist Andy Kershaw in 2003 north of Timbuktu.  

Night out

I've got to get out. Anything. Maybe there is a lecture at the L.S.E.. I check in my bookmarks in the folder 'lectures & seminars'. 'Can the EU make a difference in the Middle East? Professor Jean-Pierre Filiu. 6.30-8pm, Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building'. It doesn't sound that promising but may be marginally more interesting than 'Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today', with Polly Toynbee. At least there will probably be some ranting and raving. It is 6.15. Damn it, I'll go. I'll only be 20 minutes late.   

Career update

I walked out - resigned, that is - a month ago from my latest job, as a marketing writer in the asset management division of Bank of New York Mellon in London, before the job resigned on me. My boss who was not an easy person had become unhappy with my performance, unfairly I thought, and then made it difficult for me to continue in the New Year to the end of my probationary period. I am having to repeat a mantra - simple thoughts about what happened, a string of positive thoughts overall - every time I have a new thought about the experience, for new thoughts risk opening things up in an unproductive way. I have a tendency, in difficult situations, to think negative thoughts and these are to be warded against here. Writing this is a new thought, though an oddly gentle one, and I will bring it to a close by substituting the mantra for it, and, where I would normally put a full stop at the end of this sentence, say in its place the string of words  

Career

I feel sometimes this job I'm doing is even more stupid than my first job, as the fruit and veg man in a small supermarket on the Old Brompton Road over twenty five years ago, well over. Maybe, to move things ahead, I will need to first pass through another fruit and veg stage, Eternal Return and all that. Career progression. Keep laughing.

    

Group

I started a group therapy shortly before Christmas. I've been to about six meetings, even seven. There was a meeting last night. They last an hour and a half. After it, I slept poorly and have a headache today, set off by things I said last night. It has lowered my mood. Is this progress? Probably. Something is going on.

It is quite a serious business. Lying in bed this morning, I had the urge to get up and write something humorous about it. Humour is many things, a form of defence but also a form of release and it is the latter I need.

I am up now and coffee-d but what I am writing is not humorous. Well, at least I'm writing, which makes a change, and I am out of bed, always an achievement.

Long faces.

There are six of us and the, I don't know what to call her, leader maybe. Analyst, facilitator, conductor? I've just found this last word in a book by S.H. Foulkes and E.J. Anthony Group Psychotherapy sub-titled The Psychoanalytic Approach (Penguin 1957, 1965) that I bought second-hand through Amazon the other day for £1.79 plus £2.75 'shipping' and that arrived last night. Foulkes was the main founder of group-analytic psychotherapy, at least in Britain. The place where I go, an old-fashioned, upper middle-class set-up in a large apartment - definitely an apartment not a flat - in a mansion block flat near Baker St., it could be two apartments knocked into one, I must ask, with a whiff of Harley St. not far away about it -  is the practise that Foulkes (died 1976) set up with others.

I'm having problems with what the group is, what a group is. I am resistant to it, very.  Foulkes writes in the above book (Some chapters are Foulkes, the others are Anthony.):

"To look upon any natural group as if it was the result of a confluence of isolated individuals is untenable. Paradoxically our own particular groups are really constructed of isolated strange individuals [I think he means 'stranger'. English was not his mother tongue. C.J.] meeting for the purpose of treatment. Yet behind this strangeness [same problem again, I think. The German word is Fremdheit, here in the sense of 'being strangers'] are certain pre-conditions - often silently made - of which the most general ones are as follows:

1) That the biological species is the same.
2) That the cultural background is similar, which means among other things that there is agreement as to what is desirable, normal behaviour; what is sick, good, bad and so forth.
3) That the patient and therapist speak the same language. literally as well as metaphorically - otherwise there cannot be an efficient communication between them.
4) That the patient has reasons to lay himself open to the therapeutic process (his motivation by suffering).
5) That we have a method of access to unconscious processes.

The last two points, 4 and 5, indicate why there is a premium on psychopathology; because it does appear that without disturbance, these conditions are not fulfilled."¹

Foulkes then lists two more pre-conditions.

I have 'issues' with this (I hate the use of 'issues' in this way. Do I use it because I hate it?).

I will have to come back to this later. Also, this is all terribly serious again.

The woman whom I will call 'I' - everything is strictly confidential, of course -  who sat beside me in the group last night is tall and thin with very long legs. She was wearing, as she usually does, short trousers with black leggings and designer, plimsoll type, trainers.  She usually looks at her shoes, has dyed black hair and is rich.

To be continued, but please drop me even the shortest of comments if I have made you smile, which will have made my getting out of bed worthwhile.      

Notes
1. Pp. 24-24 of the 1965 edition.            

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.