On my way back from the shops I was practising walking with longer strides (I've noticed they’ve got shorter; once, I used to overtake everyone) and holding myself upright as I advanced my stride vigorously in front, when the image came into my mind of one of my teachers who used to walk like that, perhaps because he had been a naval lieutenant, if indeed he had. The word ‘dapper’ came into my mind and I realised that it neatly illustrated how meaning gets attached to things (like words, or, strictly word-sounds or word-marks) that thereby become signs.
I could not define dapper, nor could most people who happily use the word; any definition would just gesture at what it is, picking out one or two partial indicators. (I'll look it up, but not yet.) But it’s there all right -- dapper exists; we all recognise it when we see it. Some of the connotations are pressed creases, smart (but not military: navy, not army), trim, neat, without anything excessive; any more so and it would be uptight, anal, repressed. Rather it might go the other way: canary-yellow waistcoat and bow tie (another of my teachers, but too lanky and languid to be dapper).
So, yes, that configuration of characteristics of person and dress exists. But so, presumably, do many other configurations that haven’t attracted names. Being able to attach the name to the phenomenon may indeed make it definite and identifiable, distinct from the general blur of overlapping similarities and differences in my field of awareness. Dapper becomes an object of cognition; as far as consciousness is concerned, the phenomenon of the dapper could be said to be brought into existence by the word. Conversely, the word wouldn’t work if there were not something already in our awareness for it to latch onto. It was a word that, when it was invented, we were ready and waiting for; we latched onto it for its truth.
Now, compare a piece of music that appears from nowhere and catches on, gets taken up, becomes known, gets played among friends, becomes an object of shared appreciation. I think it’s functioning like ‘dapper’. It enters the world beyond its producers as a signifier with a limited meaning produced by the references of the lyrics, and by features of sound and structure that suggest certain associations of mood or situation and perhaps generate direct physiological and psychological effects, as certain chemicals do. Then we, the listening public, attach the music to some state that we vaguely apprehend and that’s waiting to attain definition; the music becomes the word for the state; the state becomes the meaning of the music. The music, that is, becomes a full sign; a physical entity (sounds, audio effects), meaningless in itself (just noise) acquires meaning by being associated with something other than itself, a state (of feeling, of consciousness, of circumstances). It becomes the name for the state; but the state in a sense wasn’t there, not as a clear, discrete phenomenon, before it had this signifier, the music, attached to it. The state could not have been named in advance of the music; it wasn’t sharply enough there. But now the music stands for it and evokes it, making it a reality of which we deliberately induce the full consciousness by listening to the music or letting it come into our heads.
Turn back to language: certain words, like ‘dapper’, but more interestingly whole configurations of words, such as poems, operate like music. We (especially English teachers) are easily deceived by the fact that poems are composed of words, which we take to have definite meanings. Some words don’t, like ‘dapper’, but even if other words do, the meaning of the ensemble of words, the entire poem, can’t be got at by working through the meanings of the component words and syntactical structures. The whole thing ‘stands for’ something that otherwise has no name, for a state (to call it that again) or state of affairs or state of being; the experience of the poem is like recognition--we know what it’s referring to, even though that referred to state has never been named and can’t be named. It’s still like recognition even if we haven’t had any previous awareness of the state; even if, indeed, that state has been brought into existence, as a thing in our consciousness, only by the poem. Now the state has a name or a tune or a song, the poem, and can become an object of shared experience between all the people who share the language it’s written in.
Now let’s consult the OED online: dapper, a.
[Not found in OE. or ME. App. adopted in the end of the ME. period from Flemish or other LG. dialect (with modification of sense, perh. ironical or humorous): cf. MDu. dapper powerful, strong, stout, energetic, in mod.Du., valiant, brave, bold, MLG. dapper heavy, weighty, steady, stout, persevering, undaunted, OHG. tapfar, MHG. tapfer heavy, weighty, firm, in late MHG. and mod.G., warlike, brave. The sense of ON. dapr ‘sad, downcast’ appears to be developed from that of ‘heavy’. Possibly cognate with OSlav. dobr good.]
1. Of persons: Neat, trim, smart, spruce in dress or appearance. (Formerly appreciative; now more or less depreciative, with associations of littleness or pettiness; cf. b.)
c1440 Promp. Parv. 113 Dapyr, or praty, elegans. a1529 SKELTON Image Hypocr. 95 As dapper as any crowe And perte as any pie. 1530 PALSGR. 309/1 Daper, proper, mignon, godin. 1594 NASHE Unfort. Trav. 1 The dapper Mounsier Pages of the Court. 1648 HERRICK Hesper., The Temple, Their many mumbling masse-priests here, And many a dapper chorister. 1673 R. LEIGH Transproser Reh. 9 As if the dapper Stripling were to be heir to all the Fathers features. 1749 FIELDING Tom Jones I. xi, The idle and childish liking of a girl to a boy..is often fixed on..flowing locks, downy chins, dapper shapes. 1828 SCOTT F.M. Perth viii, The spruce and dapper importance of his ordinary appearance. 1861 Sat. Rev. Dec. 605 Our dapper curates, who only open their mouths to say ‘L'Eglise, c'est moi!’ 1885 M. E. BRADDON Wyllard's Weird I. 89 A good-looking man..well set up, neat without being dapper or priggish.
Well. It seems that in medieval England a word that was imprecisely understood, being Flemish for strong or heavy, (as dapper was imprecisely understood when I first came across it), and was thus an only-partly-formed signifier, was purloined by English speakers and used to name a state, dapperness, for which a word didn’t already exist but which was ready for one.
Saturday, 19 January 2008
Saturday, 5 January 2008
One of my teachers
Like many teachers of my generation I went to a grammar school but supported comprehensives as soon as I became aware of them. I still don’t support grammar schools but in recent years have become more and more fascinated by them, and particularly by the tension between the schools’ official, middle-class ethos and the attitudes of many of their (often working-class) pupils—either instrumental (seeking exam passes but not buying into the values) or heavily into youth culture (and not buying into the values).
I'm interested in what the grammar schools achieved and what they pathetically failed to given the intelligence of their students and could never have achieved with so much downright incompetent teaching. Among the teachers, there was an intriguing contrast between the large body of hopeless cases who stayed in the schools for forty years and the brilliant ones, who were of two sorts: one lot remote, unworldly and forceful, teaching their discipline with intensity, high seriousness and exacting standards, and the other, no less serious in their mission, and typically including English teachers (but never science teachers), who were somewhat subversive (obviously despising the stuffy ‘Victorian’ order of the school), whose lessons were full of laughs and who we learned from because they were men we could identify with and were some damned interesting (not that they didn’t work us hard too).
A couple of books boosted my interest, one re-read after many years (Brian Jackson & Dennis Marsden (1962), Education and the working class : some general themes raised by a study of 88 working class children in a northern industrial city) and one old one read for the first time (Frances Stevens (1960), The living tradition: the social and educational assumptions of the grammar school). Sometime I hope to write more about grammar schools and my own schooling.
My school was Bradford Grammar School, a boys’ Direct Grant School. This was a school that had originally (17th century) had endowments, had declined and rotted and then been revived in Victorian times. From 1944 it was ‘aided’ by a grant directly from the government in return for 25% of free places being awarded to scholarship boys. (75% still paid fees and the school was in effect independent, having nothing to do with the local LEA.)
One of my teachers died recently, a good teacher of the first, high seriousness type, and I was asked to write something for an obituary in the school magazine. Here’s what I wrote.
***
H.A. Twelves
In 1958-9 there was an enlightened scheme whereby Sixth Classical took three subjects which were not to be examined and for which little or no homework was required: English literature (Dr B. Oxley), the history of science (Mr W.E. Clarkson) and French (Mr H.A. Twelves). All three were fine courses.
Before that year I knew Mr Twelves by sight and reputation, and because he supervised dinners every other day, alternating with a crude and unpleasant geography man called Downend. Whereas Downend hit a small gong to get silence and invited us to ‘say your graces, please’, Twelves simply beamed authority from his suit and, when response was not instant, uttered a cuttingly enunciated ‘I'm waiting’ (an example in linguistics of what is grammatically a sentence but performs the speech act of commanding)--after which he would say grace himself . (Rowan Atkinson would have done a good Twelves.)
I think we were not pleased when we learned that we were to have a year being taught by Mr Twelves. He appeared to us the embodiment of respectable bourgeois authoritarianness. The Sixties were stirring in their womb and the young, influenced by Sartre, the Beats, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and the ‘real life’ of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, were becoming openly rebellious against old conformity. Twelves was known to lead a strange church (the Christadelphians) of which none of us had ever met any other member. He was sometimes seen at Saltaire leading a subdued-looking family on a stately Sunday walk along the towpath. On school corridors he would advance prelate-like in a procession of one. The man clearly had contempt for innocent teenage pursuits like going out of an evening, drinking pints and listening to pop music. Of his own youth all I remember him telling us was that while waiting for a train on Sheffield station he would pace the platform reciting French poetry to himself. His self-revelations included the occasional wicked admission of some childish misdemeanour, followed by the injunction, ‘Tell it not in Gath, chaps.’ He would sometimes refer to himself smilingly in the third person as ‘Douze’, his nickname in the school. Such gestures of maty collusion did not come off; he did not do ‘getting on with the boys’. Though he did once, having learned to drive late in life, offer my friend Jim Patchett a lift along Frizinghall Road; as Douze steered the car with erratic determination Jim solicitously asked, ‘Are you getting used to the traffic now , sir?', to which the reply was, 'I have no fear of or concern for the traffic, but I have difficulty controlling the vehicle.’
Of course, we knew nothing about his life. He was not a master one got to know. He was unashamedly a scholar dedicated to the pursuit of humanist learning. It was not an easy time to be living for such ideals (not that it got any easier) and for those pupils who favoured the immediate overthrow of bourgeois society Twelves doubtless remained the sanctimonious generational enemy bent on confining the green vigour of youth in life-denying study. But most of us, I think, while never finding him entirely human or wanting to know him better, came to respect his mind, his seriousness, his knowledge and his passion. It was true that his general manner was stuffy. One did not josh with Mr Twelves on the stairs. He ran a tight ship. To a sixth former who had missed the first week and was slouching in his desk Twelves barked, ‘Mitchell, sit up!’ adding, in that precise articulation and with the smile of a villainous James Bond mastermind, ‘I can see you don’t know our ways.’
He made it clear (though perhaps only afterwards) that it was a pleasure for him to teach classics students; he told me years later that he could tell by our eyes, when we entered the third form (i.e. first year), that we were the brightest and the best (surely a delusion). In the course he devised for us he let himself go and seemed to pile into it everything he loved in French poetry and drama, including texts that he never had the opportunity to tackle in his main O- and A-Level teaching. He taught them with gusto and, for those of us prepared to give literature beyond Hemingway a chance and refrain from leaning against radiators, the year was exhilarating. Our previous experience of French had not got far beyond M. and Mme Lepine going to la gare (and, to be fair, a bit of Maupassant) and here we were being swept along by Racine’s unShakespearian alexandrines, racing through Romantics and Symbolistes and finally reading plays as contemporary and racy as the Beckett and Osborne we were doing with Dr Oxley in English: Anouilh, Giroudoux, Sartre, Cocteau. This stuff was so fresh it was being put on at the Civic (in English) as the latest in French avant-gardism.
The mode of engagement within the lessons varied between arduous mental effort in the face of translation problems, laughter at Cocteau’s jokes, intellectual fascination at Douze’s explanations of Mallarmé’s poetic theory or Sartre’s philosophy and intense, even reverent, attention as when (having first addressed vocabulary and grammar issues) he read the messenger speech in a Corneille play. I recall his barely suppressed anger once when the spell was broken by an interruption from the unfortunate Charlie Sommers [spelling?], another French teacher, who came in with a notice about cross-country. Mr Twelves held an Arnoldian belief, such as we rarely experienced in classics or English, in the high seriousness of the calling of literary study. Seriousness, but not pomposity or hypocrisy; his lessons were lively, even fun. Whatever Mr Twelves’s public demeanour, there was nothing stuffy about his curriculum. He demonstrated and induced in us a vigorous engagement with the texts, into which his insights were sharp. It was he as much as anyone who taught me to read poetry and who turned some, perhaps many of us into people who could and would continue to read French for pleasure and appreciate French culture—a legacy of which I hope he was proud and for which I am grateful.
I'm interested in what the grammar schools achieved and what they pathetically failed to given the intelligence of their students and could never have achieved with so much downright incompetent teaching. Among the teachers, there was an intriguing contrast between the large body of hopeless cases who stayed in the schools for forty years and the brilliant ones, who were of two sorts: one lot remote, unworldly and forceful, teaching their discipline with intensity, high seriousness and exacting standards, and the other, no less serious in their mission, and typically including English teachers (but never science teachers), who were somewhat subversive (obviously despising the stuffy ‘Victorian’ order of the school), whose lessons were full of laughs and who we learned from because they were men we could identify with and were some damned interesting (not that they didn’t work us hard too).
A couple of books boosted my interest, one re-read after many years (Brian Jackson & Dennis Marsden (1962), Education and the working class : some general themes raised by a study of 88 working class children in a northern industrial city) and one old one read for the first time (Frances Stevens (1960), The living tradition: the social and educational assumptions of the grammar school). Sometime I hope to write more about grammar schools and my own schooling.
My school was Bradford Grammar School, a boys’ Direct Grant School. This was a school that had originally (17th century) had endowments, had declined and rotted and then been revived in Victorian times. From 1944 it was ‘aided’ by a grant directly from the government in return for 25% of free places being awarded to scholarship boys. (75% still paid fees and the school was in effect independent, having nothing to do with the local LEA.)
One of my teachers died recently, a good teacher of the first, high seriousness type, and I was asked to write something for an obituary in the school magazine. Here’s what I wrote.
***
H.A. Twelves
In 1958-9 there was an enlightened scheme whereby Sixth Classical took three subjects which were not to be examined and for which little or no homework was required: English literature (Dr B. Oxley), the history of science (Mr W.E. Clarkson) and French (Mr H.A. Twelves). All three were fine courses.
Before that year I knew Mr Twelves by sight and reputation, and because he supervised dinners every other day, alternating with a crude and unpleasant geography man called Downend. Whereas Downend hit a small gong to get silence and invited us to ‘say your graces, please’, Twelves simply beamed authority from his suit and, when response was not instant, uttered a cuttingly enunciated ‘I'm waiting’ (an example in linguistics of what is grammatically a sentence but performs the speech act of commanding)--after which he would say grace himself . (Rowan Atkinson would have done a good Twelves.)
I think we were not pleased when we learned that we were to have a year being taught by Mr Twelves. He appeared to us the embodiment of respectable bourgeois authoritarianness. The Sixties were stirring in their womb and the young, influenced by Sartre, the Beats, Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and the ‘real life’ of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, were becoming openly rebellious against old conformity. Twelves was known to lead a strange church (the Christadelphians) of which none of us had ever met any other member. He was sometimes seen at Saltaire leading a subdued-looking family on a stately Sunday walk along the towpath. On school corridors he would advance prelate-like in a procession of one. The man clearly had contempt for innocent teenage pursuits like going out of an evening, drinking pints and listening to pop music. Of his own youth all I remember him telling us was that while waiting for a train on Sheffield station he would pace the platform reciting French poetry to himself. His self-revelations included the occasional wicked admission of some childish misdemeanour, followed by the injunction, ‘Tell it not in Gath, chaps.’ He would sometimes refer to himself smilingly in the third person as ‘Douze’, his nickname in the school. Such gestures of maty collusion did not come off; he did not do ‘getting on with the boys’. Though he did once, having learned to drive late in life, offer my friend Jim Patchett a lift along Frizinghall Road; as Douze steered the car with erratic determination Jim solicitously asked, ‘Are you getting used to the traffic now , sir?', to which the reply was, 'I have no fear of or concern for the traffic, but I have difficulty controlling the vehicle.’
Of course, we knew nothing about his life. He was not a master one got to know. He was unashamedly a scholar dedicated to the pursuit of humanist learning. It was not an easy time to be living for such ideals (not that it got any easier) and for those pupils who favoured the immediate overthrow of bourgeois society Twelves doubtless remained the sanctimonious generational enemy bent on confining the green vigour of youth in life-denying study. But most of us, I think, while never finding him entirely human or wanting to know him better, came to respect his mind, his seriousness, his knowledge and his passion. It was true that his general manner was stuffy. One did not josh with Mr Twelves on the stairs. He ran a tight ship. To a sixth former who had missed the first week and was slouching in his desk Twelves barked, ‘Mitchell, sit up!’ adding, in that precise articulation and with the smile of a villainous James Bond mastermind, ‘I can see you don’t know our ways.’
He made it clear (though perhaps only afterwards) that it was a pleasure for him to teach classics students; he told me years later that he could tell by our eyes, when we entered the third form (i.e. first year), that we were the brightest and the best (surely a delusion). In the course he devised for us he let himself go and seemed to pile into it everything he loved in French poetry and drama, including texts that he never had the opportunity to tackle in his main O- and A-Level teaching. He taught them with gusto and, for those of us prepared to give literature beyond Hemingway a chance and refrain from leaning against radiators, the year was exhilarating. Our previous experience of French had not got far beyond M. and Mme Lepine going to la gare (and, to be fair, a bit of Maupassant) and here we were being swept along by Racine’s unShakespearian alexandrines, racing through Romantics and Symbolistes and finally reading plays as contemporary and racy as the Beckett and Osborne we were doing with Dr Oxley in English: Anouilh, Giroudoux, Sartre, Cocteau. This stuff was so fresh it was being put on at the Civic (in English) as the latest in French avant-gardism.
The mode of engagement within the lessons varied between arduous mental effort in the face of translation problems, laughter at Cocteau’s jokes, intellectual fascination at Douze’s explanations of Mallarmé’s poetic theory or Sartre’s philosophy and intense, even reverent, attention as when (having first addressed vocabulary and grammar issues) he read the messenger speech in a Corneille play. I recall his barely suppressed anger once when the spell was broken by an interruption from the unfortunate Charlie Sommers [spelling?], another French teacher, who came in with a notice about cross-country. Mr Twelves held an Arnoldian belief, such as we rarely experienced in classics or English, in the high seriousness of the calling of literary study. Seriousness, but not pomposity or hypocrisy; his lessons were lively, even fun. Whatever Mr Twelves’s public demeanour, there was nothing stuffy about his curriculum. He demonstrated and induced in us a vigorous engagement with the texts, into which his insights were sharp. It was he as much as anyone who taught me to read poetry and who turned some, perhaps many of us into people who could and would continue to read French for pleasure and appreciate French culture—a legacy of which I hope he was proud and for which I am grateful.
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Where is the music?
I listened to a radio recording of a concert, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela playing Shostokovich’s Tenth Symphony in last summer’s Proms. I've heard the symphony on CD and it may be just the crudity of my musical sensibility but I found this performance especially powerful, and the players’ apparent passion infectious.
That’s not the point I want to make here, though, which concerns not that piece or that performance but something more general about music. I think it relates most particularly to classical music, though I'm open to correction on that from those better attuned to rock and pop, who came of age before they really happened.
The recording was of a live event and there were people coughing. Perhaps mainly one person, but it was bloody annoying--until I realised that if I listened properly it didn’t spoil the experience. I couldn’t block out the coughing but I could get myself to hear it on a different wavelength or on a different channel. The music belonged to another dimension and was unaffected by extraneous sound; it continued on its predetermined course regardless. The coughing belonged to a trivial sublunary world onto which this entity (Shostakovich’s) had dropped from space, its receptors deaf to worldly noise. Descended, it calmly laid out its site and in its own time and at its own pace unfolded its vast and complex construction.
It was a thing of another order come amongst us. Although manifested in sound, it was also an architecture, its reality residing as much in its abstract structure as in its audible material embodiment. It occupied time, but at another level made its own time, setting up its own measures of fast and slow, hurrying and loitering, patient attending and nervous interrupting. We were in the presence of a contingent incarnation of a timeless abstraction that had for the occasion made itself flesh. It was relentless, impersonal, beyond our reach (while apparently alluding to and actually evoking human emotion).
The effect of the coughing was to enforce awareness of the incommensurability of our world of accidents and sensual experience and the abstract structure and system that was being provisionally and partially translated into something our ears could follow. Presumably that gap is discernible at any live performance where instruments are at different distances from us and there’s some ambient noise, and even in a studio recording in which individual players and their particular instruments make sounds that are unique to them and perhaps unique to that day. At best they are alluding to something the nature of which we grasp not with our ears but with fleeting intuition.
Perhaps what intrigues us about music is its always ambiguous status. Which is real, the underlying idea or its ‘realisation’ in a performance? (A misguided way of thinking, as if the triangle I draw on a piece of paper is more real than the triangle it’s a drawing of—concepts are real but immaterial.) The same score generates many performances: are they like drawings of it? But the score is only a notation, not a likeness. A notation of what, then? The composer’s intended sound-structure? But what if a conductor, while staying faithful to the score, produces a performance that the composer hadn’t envisaged? And how do we know that the composer had anything particular in mind? Are the performances equally valid creations, as if the score is one creation, in one medium, and the performance a second, in another? (Here’s entity A, the score, and also in the world are entities B1, B2, B3, performances.) Or are the performances alternative stabs at catching the true music? This is bewildering. There is indeed something there behind the performances, and for all the physical reality of the latter (sound waves affecting our senses) we have to accord the status of reality to the composition that gives rise to them.
Or is all that just hopelessly pretentious? I'm not sure.
That’s not the point I want to make here, though, which concerns not that piece or that performance but something more general about music. I think it relates most particularly to classical music, though I'm open to correction on that from those better attuned to rock and pop, who came of age before they really happened.
The recording was of a live event and there were people coughing. Perhaps mainly one person, but it was bloody annoying--until I realised that if I listened properly it didn’t spoil the experience. I couldn’t block out the coughing but I could get myself to hear it on a different wavelength or on a different channel. The music belonged to another dimension and was unaffected by extraneous sound; it continued on its predetermined course regardless. The coughing belonged to a trivial sublunary world onto which this entity (Shostakovich’s) had dropped from space, its receptors deaf to worldly noise. Descended, it calmly laid out its site and in its own time and at its own pace unfolded its vast and complex construction.
It was a thing of another order come amongst us. Although manifested in sound, it was also an architecture, its reality residing as much in its abstract structure as in its audible material embodiment. It occupied time, but at another level made its own time, setting up its own measures of fast and slow, hurrying and loitering, patient attending and nervous interrupting. We were in the presence of a contingent incarnation of a timeless abstraction that had for the occasion made itself flesh. It was relentless, impersonal, beyond our reach (while apparently alluding to and actually evoking human emotion).
The effect of the coughing was to enforce awareness of the incommensurability of our world of accidents and sensual experience and the abstract structure and system that was being provisionally and partially translated into something our ears could follow. Presumably that gap is discernible at any live performance where instruments are at different distances from us and there’s some ambient noise, and even in a studio recording in which individual players and their particular instruments make sounds that are unique to them and perhaps unique to that day. At best they are alluding to something the nature of which we grasp not with our ears but with fleeting intuition.
Perhaps what intrigues us about music is its always ambiguous status. Which is real, the underlying idea or its ‘realisation’ in a performance? (A misguided way of thinking, as if the triangle I draw on a piece of paper is more real than the triangle it’s a drawing of—concepts are real but immaterial.) The same score generates many performances: are they like drawings of it? But the score is only a notation, not a likeness. A notation of what, then? The composer’s intended sound-structure? But what if a conductor, while staying faithful to the score, produces a performance that the composer hadn’t envisaged? And how do we know that the composer had anything particular in mind? Are the performances equally valid creations, as if the score is one creation, in one medium, and the performance a second, in another? (Here’s entity A, the score, and also in the world are entities B1, B2, B3, performances.) Or are the performances alternative stabs at catching the true music? This is bewildering. There is indeed something there behind the performances, and for all the physical reality of the latter (sound waves affecting our senses) we have to accord the status of reality to the composition that gives rise to them.
Or is all that just hopelessly pretentious? I'm not sure.
Friday, 28 December 2007
Teaching—stay or go? Or don’t even start?
A friend, 29 and in his second year as a successful teacher with good prospects for promotion, asked me the other day whether he should stay in teaching. The incentives to stay were enjoyment of the job, the early promise of a head of department post and the security of a regular salary. The disincentives were poor pay (for his age and workload), doubts about the long-term continuation of his current enjoyment (will routinisation set in and will grind outweigh excitement?), lack of time for other things after all the requirements have been met and, related to that, the impossibility of seriously pursuing his other passions—music, writing and academic study.
I could see no obvious way he could improve his income enough to clear his indebtedness--typical of his generation--and buy a house for having a family with his partner. My own story, from another era, was not much help: I left teaching at 36, disillusioned with schools for a variety of unsatisfactory occupations—which ended up as full-time supply teaching as the best paid option; then at 42 I got into full-time academic study and employment, continuing to retirement last year. For my friend in a different historical age, it's late in the day to break into the other fields he mentioned. Music and writing are financial gambles and an academic job would now require a PhD, except in education where jobs seem insecure and it’s hard to find the space to do anything like scholarship.
So moving from school would be difficult. It might also involve a real loss in that no other experience compares with teaching school students. Despite social squalor, tedium and conflict, teaching can provide a unique intensity of experience: the energy and creativity of a full class interacting in barely contained anarchy on the edge of chaos, the purposeful hum of kids engaged with their work, the attainment of a new synthesis of resources in a student’s latest piece of writing. University teaching has its rewards but is not at all the same thing.
On that theme of the satisfactions of teaching, while we were talking I failed to recall one of the main motivations that had kept me in teaching for eleven years (seven plus four, with two years out in the middle on a curriculum project). This was the excitement, intellectual and social combined, of having ideas, putting them into practice and making something new happen.
I would start with an idea--a notion, theory or hypothesis about possible modes of learning or interaction, or a sense of what was wrong with existing practice. My ‘theory’ might be about how informal, assessment-free forms of writing might aid the formulation of understanding, about the need to get aspects of academic knowledge incorporated into the kids’ ordinary conversational genres or about how ‘English' might be more effective if the boundary between it and history and sociology were removed. A new way of doing things would suggest itself; I'd work out how to make it happen, put it into action and then watch a new social reality emerge. I never got another satisfaction like that of seeing so-called non-academic kids engaging with knowledge, getting articulate, developing their thinking and interacting socially in ways they weren’t judged capable of. Possibilities for a different society seemed implicit; embryonic utopias were being born; my working-class students were becoming new sorts of people…
I started in a school in which I was allowed make my own social reality in my own classroom, but the potential for creating something with critical mass, as it were, came when, in my second school, I became head of a ‘faculty’ that contained a group of like-minded colleagues, including a couple of other heads of department; we could rewrite a third of the curriculum for our 14- and 16-year-old students and transform the pedagogy they experienced. (This was 1973-7—an age away from now.) Although we were working against the grain, and in the end the timid conformism of the head, the hostility of other colleagues and a changing political climate defeated us, it was great while it lasted.
So that’s an argument for hanging on at least to head of department stage, assuming some room for manoeuvre still remains in the system.
But what then? In my case, that was it—all over. After school there was nothing to do—nothing, that is, of equal significance. Like a Vietnam vet I was 36 and out in the world, condemned to less meaningful jobs and with no prospect of finding any equivalent excitement. I was too old, too knowing and too knackered: eleven years of trying to teach well had left me exhausted. Since then I have, of course, managed to find things to do, have amused and interested myself and have made a living, but nothing has lived up to those experiences of doing new things in schools with colleagues who were friends and kids who appreciated us. If I'd been interested in policy or management I could have maintained a pleasurable engagement with education, but for me the only point of being a teacher was always putting my own learning and intellect to use in making new things happen with students.
So where does that leave us? If the aim were to gain the maximum possible satisfaction from teaching, my advice to my friend would be to stay the course until he has been a head of department. But after a spell of that, the chances are he will have done his best work and he’ll still only be in his mid-thirties--young enough to have more than half a working life left but too old to start anything else except perhaps lecturing in education or inspecting or consulting: useful work but unlikely to give the same existential buzz. It would certainly be too late to get into the academic disciplines and compete with scholars who’ve been studying and researching continuously from their early twenties.
I wonder now whether the price I paid for those good years of teaching was too high; perhaps it was a mistake to go into teaching? To exaggerate rather, the price was the rest of my life. My initial choice of career meant that I failed to develop any specialised expertise that could keep me active, vigorous and committed for a lifetime--not just to 65 but into old age when I could die in harness like a novelist, composer, artist or architect. (The composer Michael Tippett died aged 90-something while conducting one of his own works in Finland.)
Starting again, would I go for something creative or artistic? Certainly it would need to be something that would keep me out of the clutches of institutions where work gets less and less enjoyable as ‘management’ tightens its microcontrolling grip. Best of all might be to stay outside employment altogether, working for myself.
I reflect: who do I know outside teaching who’s happy in their work? Some journalists and filmmakers, perhaps. Some who once loved their work— I'm thinking particularly of a museum conservation engineer as well as many teachers—have had their jobs ruined by ‘management’. Artists and actors impress me as successfully escaping the general ruination of work—but they don’t earn enough to buy houses to have kids in. Maybe that’s the only choice left—autonomy with poverty, or an income with alienation and a sense of your life dribbling away.
Of course, 30 years (age 35-65) of quiet classroom routine isn’t a terrible fate for everyone. If the school is not a bearpit and the management is sane and unbrutish, the work can be pleasant; there are indeed older teachersfor whom it never gets boring. Even if it does, the work and income are steady; and as one gets more practised and less conscientious the job can be managed without too huge a burden on one’s own time. Your centre of gravity can move away from the job and into family or new interests. (One of my own best teachers bought a hill farm and has run it to this day with his wife while continuing to teach.) In my day, though, and probably still today, such peaceful working conditions were available only in traditional grammar or independent schools, where I assumed I would be bored and where on principle I would refuse to teach.
Meanwhile, those who continue to work in tough classrooms after 35 tend to end up with serious health problems, physical and mental. Body, mind and spirit pay the price.
My advice is--I haven’t got any. Except acquire private means; then, after a stint as head of department, you could cut down to one class a week and teach it well, to your own satisfaction; and spend the rest of the time writing or painting or playing music.
I could see no obvious way he could improve his income enough to clear his indebtedness--typical of his generation--and buy a house for having a family with his partner. My own story, from another era, was not much help: I left teaching at 36, disillusioned with schools for a variety of unsatisfactory occupations—which ended up as full-time supply teaching as the best paid option; then at 42 I got into full-time academic study and employment, continuing to retirement last year. For my friend in a different historical age, it's late in the day to break into the other fields he mentioned. Music and writing are financial gambles and an academic job would now require a PhD, except in education where jobs seem insecure and it’s hard to find the space to do anything like scholarship.
So moving from school would be difficult. It might also involve a real loss in that no other experience compares with teaching school students. Despite social squalor, tedium and conflict, teaching can provide a unique intensity of experience: the energy and creativity of a full class interacting in barely contained anarchy on the edge of chaos, the purposeful hum of kids engaged with their work, the attainment of a new synthesis of resources in a student’s latest piece of writing. University teaching has its rewards but is not at all the same thing.
On that theme of the satisfactions of teaching, while we were talking I failed to recall one of the main motivations that had kept me in teaching for eleven years (seven plus four, with two years out in the middle on a curriculum project). This was the excitement, intellectual and social combined, of having ideas, putting them into practice and making something new happen.
I would start with an idea--a notion, theory or hypothesis about possible modes of learning or interaction, or a sense of what was wrong with existing practice. My ‘theory’ might be about how informal, assessment-free forms of writing might aid the formulation of understanding, about the need to get aspects of academic knowledge incorporated into the kids’ ordinary conversational genres or about how ‘English' might be more effective if the boundary between it and history and sociology were removed. A new way of doing things would suggest itself; I'd work out how to make it happen, put it into action and then watch a new social reality emerge. I never got another satisfaction like that of seeing so-called non-academic kids engaging with knowledge, getting articulate, developing their thinking and interacting socially in ways they weren’t judged capable of. Possibilities for a different society seemed implicit; embryonic utopias were being born; my working-class students were becoming new sorts of people…
I started in a school in which I was allowed make my own social reality in my own classroom, but the potential for creating something with critical mass, as it were, came when, in my second school, I became head of a ‘faculty’ that contained a group of like-minded colleagues, including a couple of other heads of department; we could rewrite a third of the curriculum for our 14- and 16-year-old students and transform the pedagogy they experienced. (This was 1973-7—an age away from now.) Although we were working against the grain, and in the end the timid conformism of the head, the hostility of other colleagues and a changing political climate defeated us, it was great while it lasted.
So that’s an argument for hanging on at least to head of department stage, assuming some room for manoeuvre still remains in the system.
But what then? In my case, that was it—all over. After school there was nothing to do—nothing, that is, of equal significance. Like a Vietnam vet I was 36 and out in the world, condemned to less meaningful jobs and with no prospect of finding any equivalent excitement. I was too old, too knowing and too knackered: eleven years of trying to teach well had left me exhausted. Since then I have, of course, managed to find things to do, have amused and interested myself and have made a living, but nothing has lived up to those experiences of doing new things in schools with colleagues who were friends and kids who appreciated us. If I'd been interested in policy or management I could have maintained a pleasurable engagement with education, but for me the only point of being a teacher was always putting my own learning and intellect to use in making new things happen with students.
So where does that leave us? If the aim were to gain the maximum possible satisfaction from teaching, my advice to my friend would be to stay the course until he has been a head of department. But after a spell of that, the chances are he will have done his best work and he’ll still only be in his mid-thirties--young enough to have more than half a working life left but too old to start anything else except perhaps lecturing in education or inspecting or consulting: useful work but unlikely to give the same existential buzz. It would certainly be too late to get into the academic disciplines and compete with scholars who’ve been studying and researching continuously from their early twenties.
I wonder now whether the price I paid for those good years of teaching was too high; perhaps it was a mistake to go into teaching? To exaggerate rather, the price was the rest of my life. My initial choice of career meant that I failed to develop any specialised expertise that could keep me active, vigorous and committed for a lifetime--not just to 65 but into old age when I could die in harness like a novelist, composer, artist or architect. (The composer Michael Tippett died aged 90-something while conducting one of his own works in Finland.)
Starting again, would I go for something creative or artistic? Certainly it would need to be something that would keep me out of the clutches of institutions where work gets less and less enjoyable as ‘management’ tightens its microcontrolling grip. Best of all might be to stay outside employment altogether, working for myself.
I reflect: who do I know outside teaching who’s happy in their work? Some journalists and filmmakers, perhaps. Some who once loved their work— I'm thinking particularly of a museum conservation engineer as well as many teachers—have had their jobs ruined by ‘management’. Artists and actors impress me as successfully escaping the general ruination of work—but they don’t earn enough to buy houses to have kids in. Maybe that’s the only choice left—autonomy with poverty, or an income with alienation and a sense of your life dribbling away.
Of course, 30 years (age 35-65) of quiet classroom routine isn’t a terrible fate for everyone. If the school is not a bearpit and the management is sane and unbrutish, the work can be pleasant; there are indeed older teachersfor whom it never gets boring. Even if it does, the work and income are steady; and as one gets more practised and less conscientious the job can be managed without too huge a burden on one’s own time. Your centre of gravity can move away from the job and into family or new interests. (One of my own best teachers bought a hill farm and has run it to this day with his wife while continuing to teach.) In my day, though, and probably still today, such peaceful working conditions were available only in traditional grammar or independent schools, where I assumed I would be bored and where on principle I would refuse to teach.
Meanwhile, those who continue to work in tough classrooms after 35 tend to end up with serious health problems, physical and mental. Body, mind and spirit pay the price.
My advice is--I haven’t got any. Except acquire private means; then, after a stint as head of department, you could cut down to one class a week and teach it well, to your own satisfaction; and spend the rest of the time writing or painting or playing music.
Thursday, 27 December 2007
Writing in a blog
In a recent interview Richard Ford, the American novelist, said that ‘what uncovers truth is the habit of art. It’s when you think, “I've got to make something out of this for someone else, which I will make well enough that they can make use of it.”’
Uncovering truth is putting it a bit strong for what I'm trying to do, but if the ‘habit of art’ is trying to make what will mean something to someone else, that fits. ‘When you do that, when you turn away from yourself and toward some anonymous person, then I think you have a chance of making up something that might in fact be true.’ Or at least interesting.
Uncovering truth is putting it a bit strong for what I'm trying to do, but if the ‘habit of art’ is trying to make what will mean something to someone else, that fits. ‘When you do that, when you turn away from yourself and toward some anonymous person, then I think you have a chance of making up something that might in fact be true.’ Or at least interesting.
Friday, 14 December 2007
Painting photographs
There’s a video on the gallery site where you can see some of the images, sort of:
http://www.hayward.org.uk/painting/
The photographic originals are not art photographs but are generally taken from the media or historical documents or personal collections of snaps. Sometimes the painted image we see has been through a succession of transformations in different media.
An image taken from life is already at one remove. If we come across a photograph of a torpedoed destroyer in a yellowing newspaper lining a drawer, we feel remote from the event but also aware that it happened, it was real, it caused the photograph which could not have happened otherwise. Now turn the photograph into a painting and we are more remote still – but the awareness that something, this, once happened persists.
That awareness survives everything that might contrive to drain the sense of reality out of any residue of the originating event. The image we see is and looks like a painting; we can see the paint, the work is much larger than an ordinary photograph and it’s displayed on an art gallery wall. More than that, it is (typically) beautiful, despite the horror or banality of the subject matter (car crash scene with bodies, artist’s mum standing in front of her car outside a suburban house).
How far the beauty was there from the start in the photograph is hard to tell (we aren’t shown the originals except for some tiny reproductions in the brochure); perhaps it was, if looked at with an artist’s eye, and perhaps that was partly and sometimes why the artist chose it. But I would say the painting also emphasises and enhances compositional qualities such as the relationship of tones and colours in different areas of the work, and in general makes the image feel quite different, and sometimes weirdly over-real and strange.
Sometimes the transformation happens despite what looks like an attempt to be absolutely faithful to the original; just doing it in paint and making it bigger and displaying it as art makes the difference. In other paintings the work of transformation is overt: Vija Celmin takes an official U.S. Navy photograph of civilian damage from the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor; it shows a car riddled with bullet holes, its tyres burst and the driver’s body slumped over the wheel, against a background with palms and other apparently damaged vehicles. In the painting (likewise monochrome), the background is reduced to vague swirls, the brushstrokes are broad and obvious and the body is reduced to a shape that is hardly recognisable. It unashamedly looks like a painting. As a pattern of paint on a surface with, at the same time, an allusion to an old car and some strange and unexplained holes that seem like bullet holes, it’s a beautiful thing that rewards contemplation. But still an actual shooting-up of cars at a particular moment, and a resulting state (car still there, driver dead) that lasted until it was cleared up, is there in the back of my consciousness.
Which is the lesson, that horrific reality can’t be wished away or what beauty it can be transformed into?
Perhaps the key difference between the paintings and the photographs is that in the paintings everything – every square millimetre -- has been chosen, everything has been put down by a conscious decision – even if it’s a decision to follow a specific set of rules quite mechanically – because a photograph doesn’t automatically dictate a fixed sequence of operations with a range of brushes and tubes of paint.
A camera just does its stuff mindlessly, but this mark is here and just so because that’s how the artist chosen to have it. Everything in the picture is significant or meant. So a particular spatial distribution of shapes and areas of colour and tone that happened to occur in some scene some day in front of a lens (I'm leaving out of account any manipulations with lens filters and darkroom jiggery-pokery) now, in the artist’s ‘copy’, invites or demands a quite different sort of appreciation, as a painting, a set of choices, a creation.
But, on top of that, and quite different, there’s the creepy awareness that it’s still a record of something that once really happened – and the relationship between that awareness and our aesthetic appreciation of oil on canvas, the order of composition and the luxury of the texture of paint, is complex and mysterious: I can’t say what it is but it’s there and fascinating and disturbing.
No photography by me was allowed in the gallery, but I could shoot out of the window:
Saturday, 8 December 2007
So where's the trouble?
This is the Paris public bike scheme: vélib’ (“vélo libre” or “vélo liberté”: free bicycle or bicycle freedom). The photo unfortunately is not by me but from Wikipedia who explain that the bike is free for the first half hour, and then cheap. The chap is I think returning a bike (not necessarily to the same place where he picked it up) or taking one out, using his card. The bikes aren't attractive to steal, and have built in lights that work. I saw loads of them on the street, especially on the plentiful bike lanes. ((http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Velibvelo1.jpg)That's one thing out of several that I really liked about Paris (I'm just back, never having properly visited before). Another is the free rein that's given to creative designers, e.g. of street furniture and Christmas decorations. And architects: the Pompidou Centre is awe-inspiring -- no longer need we think of buildings as being about walls. And there's the exhilarating new Musée du quai Branly, devoted to the indigenous people of other continents.
I'm sorry I didn't take my camera. I'd mistakenly assumed that I'd only end up taking tourist snaps. I'm also sorry I can no longer speak French.
My conclusion (after four days): Paris is better than London. Certainly for someone of my age it is, someone who doesn't want to be marginalised by youth.
The people are nice, the atmosphere in public places civilised, bars friendly. I felt comfortable being out at night on my own. If I didn't want a meal in a restaurant I could go in a bar and have a good home-made snack with my drink - the other night it was smoked salmon 'tartine', i.e. a sort of open sandwich on something like pitta bread.
In London pubs used to be comfortable and welcoming; and pubs, not restaurants, often had the best sites, like by the river. (So in the really nice places all you could do was drink, since Brits didn't go in for eating out.) These days many pubs do food, and it's often ok, but most are run by chains, have nothing local about them (including the staff), are noisy (hard surfaces -- a problem for us deafer ones) and are dominated by youth or sports tv or a lethal combination of both. Not an atmosphere than suits me, and I really don't like London pubs any more. There are pubs near me, but I'm not tempted to make any of them my local.
In Paris, on the other hand, I'm sure I could find myself a local bar (or bar/bistro) where I'd feel comfortable. Many unpretentious restaurants are in good locations like near the river. I spent one evening sitting by the window on a quiet and unheritaged side street (quai de Montebello) by the Seine. I couldn't see the river because an embankment was between us, but the buildings in my view were clearly the other side of it, and the few leaves on the trees this side were silvery with light reflected off Notre Dame. I couldn't think of anywhere as pleasant by the Thames in central London -- you'd have to go out to Hammersmith or Greenwich.
What I don't understand, though, is how Paris manages to be so pleasant. Don't they have teenagers? I hardly saw any, in the whole area I walked over, an hour in each direction from the Opéra. I didn't see hoodies or Croydon Facelifts or track suits in any numbers (or, come to that babies or prams). Or litter from drinks and snacks.
Come to that, I didn't see babies either.
Surely all the bad kids can't be out in the notorious banlieus?
Yet Central Paris (the part inside the Peripherique motorway) is full of apartments. As far as I can tell, people live on the four or so upper floors of most of the standard 19th century buildings. So don't families live in them? If yes, don't their teenage children go out and get together?
Perhaps families do live further out, where accommodation is more affordable. But kids from the outskirts of London nevertheless head into the centre for drinking and clubbing: why not in Paris? (It's true that plenty of teenagers also live in central London in council flats - I don't know if there's the equivalent in central Paris.) Perhaps Paris facilities just aren't geared to teenage congregation and drinking? Or perhaps the city just won't stand for kids behaving unpleasantly. Or perhaps the teenagers are doing their homework.
I don't know the answer. Next time perhaps I'll take the camera and look into this more systematically -- perhaps by walking right across central Paris, on more than one line, and then taking some excursions outside the Peripherique. Or read something about the sociology of Paris.
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