Covering a class

(Written several weeks ago but I forgot to publish it)

Someone is away so I'm covering his class. This is about the third time I've done it so they're getting used to me by now. They're a strange bunch; different to my sociology class at college. We were all quite nerdy. If I remember rightly the majority were Asian girls, then me and my mates Sophie, Emma and Laura squished at the back, and this guy I thought was gay but apparently wasn't.



My life has quite a routine these days. I wake up around 8, go to work, come home and play computer games for a while and then watch soaps and catch up on movies until Katie comes home. Sometimes I break the monotony by reading a book. Recently I've been working my way through Satantango, a seven hour Hungarian film about the collapse of a collective farming community. A few weeks ago some friends came round and we ended up discussing how miserable my film collection is. I showed them my most recent acquisitions- mostly European/Russian movies about people being mopey in different settings.



I'm finding something appealing about this movie- probably the fact that it's Hungarian and miserable, so for me it has ticked both boxes. The thing that Tarr has managed to do, that I don't think I've ever seen any film maker do before, is make the audience feel like the body is a weight that they have to carry. I haven't even seen Bergman do that. Bergman can show the body as a cage or a tether- that same feeling that you get from Keirkegaard through to Bacon- but no one has managed to make the body actually feel like a lead weight, like clothes filled with water. There are extended scenes of people trudging through rain and/or wind, being beaten and battered by the elements, and yet that doesn't seem to be the thing that slows them down. The movement of the characters, their lumbering gait (especially the fat guy in the third chapter who is off searching for a bottle of brandy) seem to be slowed down by the sheer weight of their bodies. I think that's the true inescapability of the situation- the thing that Camus managed to grasp better than most. It isn't that the soul is trapped inside the body and cannot flee, but that the soul and the body are identical and so sickness, fatigue and ordinary wear-and-tear are conditions of the self and not something distinct.



The only reason that ability of Tarr's grips me these days is because I can't help but feel it. There's something about repetition and continuity that wears one out, body and soul. Movement becomes a weight; it can be judged by volume and not by speed. It's not an uncommon feeling. Anyone who has found it hard to leave bed, not out of lack of sleep but out of sheer despondency will know the feeling. The feeling that you would crash through the floor if you stepped out onto the carpet.



Of course, one can break the tension- snap the tether with something outside of the norm. A little change of habit here, a little difference to go with your repetition and so on. The adolescent reply comes back with "That's easy for you to say" and for once I agree without the urge to slap the oik. It is easier said than done. Difference and change require effort. At 5pm I can't raise a smile let alone a pen or a guitar. My outlets have dried up a little. I am too tired to play or to write- the two things that were actually going to help me escape from monotony.



Writing is the more difficult. It's harder to improvise (for me anyway). Plus there is always a self-awareness (my blessing and my curse) that writing involves conviction and skill. You need to be able to write- to capture in the way that other writers have- and the conviction that you're doing so. I spend too much time looking back over my work and thinking "You're quite eloquent- but not author eloquent".



I had a friend who used to write short stories. He'd post them on the internet in his blog and post links on chat forums. People would always tell him how superb they were, but when you really read them you couldn't help but think that they belonged in a short story competition in Bella. Tired and obvious metaphors; a "message" being delivered but so one dimensional that it seemed corny; no character, no depth, no seizing of the moment. It was bad writing. And since then I have been fully aware of how (and I think it was Ruskin that said this) every man's shit smells sweet in his own nose.



Poetry is the worst for that. I fucking hate poetry because it's always bad (with exceptions, obviously). As an art form it screams of pretension. The cart has permenantly been stuck before the horse; simply because some poets became able to express powerful emotions through poetry, it has been decided that poetry is the best medium for catharsis. Now we have endless streams of girls who've read The Bell Jar and mopey goth/emo boys who can't play guitar well enough to get into a band, writing in notebooks and shoving them under the bed. This is the difference between a diary and a poem. A diary is meant to be read, even in a hypothetical sense. This is why blogs are so popular- it's a diary without the pretension of the thoughts being hidden, but with the safety of distance. Diaries work the same; the writer imagines an audience, writes to them, and puts the book away. The result is pure Lacan; the greatest horror is for the diary to be read only because it's precisely the desire of the writer that it should be read. Poems are hidden away. Is it because they are the true vent for the soul? No. It is because they are fucking embarrassing. It stinks of inauthenticity. Some kid either shoehorns his infantile emotions into words or spews onto the page without any real direction or meaning. And the adult poet is no different. Carol Ann Fucking Duffy. If I wrote poetry about women in the same way that she wrote about men, I'd be sent to prison. Feminism at its worst (and by that I mean the worst sort of feminism, and not the best sort of feminism- the constructive and intelligent de Beauvoir, Fricker, Butler).



Interestingly, someone wrote an article in one of the papers the other day about how men are being made into the weaker sex. I feel that myself. For example, I was watching Big Brother the other day and Tina (a "strong" woman- for "strong" read "fat and obnoxious") said to Coolio "No man will ever tell me to shut up". To most this was a fair point; to me it was a little offensive. Let's turn it around; Coolio says to Tina "No woman will ever tell me to shut up". Sounds sexist, doesn't it? Sounds like someone doesn't feel that an oppressive patriarch should be allowed to exert his power over a female in any sort of chauvanist manner. But isn't she doing the same? The assumption here is that men are automatically chavanist- that any attempt to criticise a female comes from an inherent sexism. This isn't distinct from misandry- it's the form that it takes. The reason a misogynist won't take criticism from a woman is because she isn't capable of doing it; the reason a misandrist won't be criticised by a man is because he is just an oppressive brute.



Let's turn it around again. Imagine Tina had said "No black will ever tell me to shut up". We'd have a world war on our hands. Obviously she didn't- nor would I suggest that it was what she was actually thinking. My point is rather that if you draw attention to something then you do it for a reason. (I had a similar discussion with an ex of mine who would call bad Asian drivers "paki" when she shouted at them. I said this was racist and she said it wasn't because she doesn't mind Asians- she just used what she could to offend them. My point was that by drawing attention to the fact that the person is Asian, you are saying that this is a bad thing, just as I could say "stupid woman" and it would be sexist). So Tina shouting that no man would ever tell her to shut up is an expression of her sexism (notice how there was no male/female divide until she pointed it out in a chat behind the backs of the men? And how this led the females to split themselves off from everyone? The maths says that women were voted out by votes from both males and females- yet she painted it as if the men were voting the women out. Reminds me of the old Zizek quote- even if the Jews were running an international conspiracy, the Nazis were still neurotic for believing it).



I think the way I feel comes from the fact that it isn't an isolated incident. You can slate men on TV and get away with it- no one complains of the misandry in Loose Women, yet Rodney Marsh created a storm for making sexist comments on I'm a Celebrity... Men in adverts are increasingly becoming the stooge for the smarter woman- some guy who buffoonishly gets the task wrong or who only does it well so he can get his treat of watching the football (remember those 50s adverts where the housework gets done so she can relax and do her nails?) Intellectual works will be damned for their chavanism, yet only where it relates to males (e.g. Freud and Lacan are pushed to one side for their apparent phallocentrism yet the part of psychoanalysis that suggests that men over-sexualise things is widely accepted. It is accepted that women are not the lesser of the sexes intellectually, yet it is widely accepted that men can't multi-task and cannot express their emotions- despite thousands of years of evidence that suggests otherwise. For example, do you see any self-sufficient workmen back in the middle ages lacking the ability to multi-task?)



Anyway, what do I know. I'm a man.