Two New Poems

My poetry writing has dropped off over the last couple of years. Partly, this is because I am no longer immersed in it, as I was as an undergraduate. Without the training in slow-paced appreciation poetry reading brings, and without the subconscious cues of rhythm working in the back of my mind through the day, I seem not to have the same impulse to spend a patient hour, two hours writing. I can't remember precisely when I wrote the last poem published on this site, "The Spaceman," but it must be over a year ago now.

So I am happy that today, suffering from a bout of endoftermitis, and not feeling inspired to do my conventional work, I decided to revisit a couple of poems I had half-written in the last twelve months. And after sitting down to them properly, I think I have them in a state where they can go online, for your comments and advice. As I have said, I don't necessarily like discussing the origins for my poems, except where this discussion forces me to interrogate and understand my motivations and execution of ideas, so I do not want to say anything more about the two here. Instead, in classic exam style, please read and discuss "Pass Over" and "Radio Ga Ga" now!

Postgraduate Diary: Humour Me

Having at long last rounded off my chapter on A Whistling Woman, I am moving on to look at A.S. Byatt's Possession (although with only a week before I go home for Christmas, I am trying productively to procrastinate and to re-edit existing chapters, rather than starting a new one now). Among its many other subjects, this Booker-winning novel provides a parody of postmodern literary criticism. At one gloriously anarchistic moment in the novel, Maud (the heroine) stands in the shower and thinks about Fergus, an arrogant, academic anti-hero with whom she had a brief fling at a conference. Maud is a feminist, psychoanalytic critic, a form of analysis Byatt mockingly plays up to here:

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on 'The Potent Castrato: the phallogocentricstructuration ofBalzac'shermaphroditehero/ines'. The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed.

The passage reminds that we are addicted to jargon and conjunctions as evidence of our own cleverness. But, as Maud rubs her legs, naked in the shower, it lays bare through the puns that our vocabulary provides a screen of language which conceal s the fact that, behind it all, we are, simply, obsessed about sex. (See Acephalous for some unfortunate, hilarious proof).

Byatt is herself a former institutionalised literary critic (as opposed to the public intellectual she is now). However critical, her writing also indicates that we do have a sense of humour, able to mock ourselves even whilst taking and presenting ourselves seriously and (perhaps incongruently) sexily as well. Given the passage above, Byatt would probably have approved of The Amazing and Incredible, Only-slightly-Laughable Politically Unassailable, PoMo English Title Generator. Here, you type in an author and a novel and let the generator produce a clever sounding title, for use by the undergraduate in his dissertation topic, or by the professor "trying to obtain department funding to go to that high-flying, hard-drinking conference." Try Balzac, and what emerges is not unlike the title Byatt invents for her fictional characters. From "Collusive Relic and the Dis-ease of Masculist Dualism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine" to "Merging Seduction: Testicular Capitalism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine," the generator produces titles which, worrying, would be quite feasible in some of the postmodern literary journals and conferences of the sort the two fictional academics attend. For myself, I am not sure that I dare write on "Complicity and Feminism in Possession: A.S. Byatt Visioning Orgasmic Discourse," though it remains a possibility if the current theme of my chapter proves unproductive.

We are driven by sex, and as part of that impulse we show off our learning with the pretentious peacock feathers of language (an ostentatious piece of alliteration and metaphor if ever there was one). Literary criticism has thus become something of a cult, with its own morals and codes of discourse. Perhaps, therefore, not every reader of this blog will appreciate the humour derived from intense anthropological observation of our group that goes into Jorge Cham's comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). If you are lucky enough to have escaped academia for the real world, the subtleties of some of these may pass you by. If you are yourself a postgraduate, however, you may be able to comment on whether, since I dare not use a randomly generated title in my PhD, I dare at least show this or this to my supervisor, as I fail to get my writing on Possession off the ground?

Postgraduate Diary: Plagiarism

I was obviously quite amused by the discovery that my work was being used by students at an American university as part of their course. But this finding, in conjunction with the fact that, over the last couple of months, hits to this site have shot up to about 200 a day, reminds me of a more serious problem of publishing online. As I said, I have just finished marking my first batch of essays; it is not, in my opinion, particularly challenging to mark a university essay, because the categories are so broad: almost by the end of the first paragraph I am generally sure whether it is going to be a 2.1 or a First. And of far more importance than the grade itself is the discursive individual handback session with each student. However, as a postgraduate tutor I do lack one key skill that a more experienced tutor has, which is to be attuned to recognise where work has recruited specific ideas or phrases from an existing critic.

Sometimes I can spot plagiarism. Last year, for example, by the time I had read five essays all talking about the "fetishistic pistols" in Hedda Gabler, I had twigged that there must be some source from which this nice quote was drawn, and it wasn't too difficult to trace it to an essay by Elaine Showalter. But more difficult to spot are those paraphrases of less well-known critical texts. Whereas a lecturer on the course will probably have read most of the works on the subject, I do not have the time or need to do this. Hence it is quite possible that in some of the essays given to me a phrase has slipped passed my red pen radar. Neither am I in the position to experience something one of the tutors who ran our teaching induction had: an essay which blatantly plagiarises a book which the tutor herself had written.

Having said that, there is the possibility that this might happen through this website. As a fellow postgraduate blogger has recently experienced, with online sources increasingly used by tech-savvy students, the chances of work drawn from the internet being applied in essays increases as well. Clearly, in a digital age, it ought to be correspondingly easier to trace plagiarism of online sources immediately through tools such as Turnitin. But these are not perfect, and not all tutors have access to it - I don't, or I would have checked to see whether it registered the essays available on The Pequod, which with my increased hits and with me now being a scholar of international reputation, may increasingly be a source for plagiarism. I would be horrified to learn that this is the case; so at the weekend I put a piece of warning text at the top of every essay:

Plagiarism is theft! If using this essay in your own work, please ensure you use the correct citation.

Not that this will prevent a plagiarist, but it at least salves my conscience to know that I have publicly denounced and drawn attention to it, and take no pleasure from students using my work unless, as with those lucky students who studied it as part of their course, they acknowledge it.

Willa Cather

I must admit, I hadn't realised that Willa Cather's fiction had been ignored and not given the recognition it deserves, as A.S. Byatt asserts in today's Guardian Review. Cather was the first author to feature on my undergraduate American Fiction module, and I thoroughly enjoyed both set texts, My Antonia and O Pioneers!. Cather deposited her manuscripts at the University of Nebraska, and their Willa Cather Archive ranks, in my opinion, as one of the best examples of digital research tools, up there with the beautiful William Blake archive. Perhaps the ready availability of online material on Cather accounts for her popularity on university courses: writing in the early twentieth century, she is just distant enough for scholarship to be historical, whilst just modern enough to ensure that there remains a great deal of manuscript and audio-visual material on her. Further evidence of Cather's popularity comes from my own online resource: my essay on Cather and Faulkner is the ninth most popular page on the site.

Postgraduate Diary: Making and Taking Criticism

One of my favourite tasks of the academic year took place last week, when I handed back my first-year students' first essays. At my university, we are lucky enough still to have a system whereby each student has an individual fifteen minute slot with their tutor, in which the tutor returns the marked essay and explains and discusses its positive and negative points. Obviously, this is a massively intensive use of teaching resources, compared to tutorials (one teacher to eight students) or lectures (one tutor to several hundred). It is also massively useful, both for the tutors and for the students.

In the case of the latter, who are coming to our university with straight A-grades, it can often be shocking suddenly to find that they have gone from getting many ticks on their work from a school teacher who thinks the world of them, to having scrawls of red corrective pen applied condemnatorily by a tutor who has known them for a couple of hours. Shockingly, it is possible for an A-level English Literature student to get 100%; and to have met our standard entry criteria, all our students will have achieved higher than 80%. So to get their first essays back with a mark of 60% (a mere 60%!) can be quite a shock to the system. I know it was to me. With the handback sessions, however, we get to alleviate these concerns, to assure them that a 2.1 is perfectly normal for their stage of work: after all they are three years from becoming graduates, and three months from being school pupils. When put in context in the handback session, that corrective red pen is less a condemnation of where they are at, than a prompt to look at areas in which they need to improve, if they are to realise their potential and achieve a First.

For my part, the handbacks are beneficial because I get to have an individual meeting with my students, in which I can find out how work really is going (cutting through the mumbled happiness that comes across in a tutorial group at 9.00 on a Monday morning), I learn a little bit about their background and other interests, and I get to talk to them as individuals. It is after the first round of essay handbacks that I finally start to remember student's names, and put names to faces, which has a beneficial effect on tutorials, preventing me from seeming like some anonymous voice of divine wisdom. And, without wanting to sound too arrogant, when a student comes in feeling nervous about how they have performed, and goes out knowing precisely what they did well and what they need to work on to do better in their second essays, I feel like I am making a real difference to them, intellectually and emotionally.

But if this is the high point of my postgraduate life, one of the lows must be getting negative feedback on one's own work. It is one thing for an A-Level student let down by a weak exam system to come to university unable to write grammatical sentences; it is another for a PhD student to suffer the same humiliating corrections to their style. Luckily, grammar is not one of my weak points, and although I occasionally write an over-long sentence with too many embedded clauses, this is a mark more of failed ambition than of limited capability. However, my supervisor is a fast reader, but a close marker, and any misspellings or errors will not escape her red pen, just as I hope none of my students escape mine (there is something faintly hubristic about the experience of marking).

But, in case the reader thinks I am getting a little vain, I must cut myself down to size. Although happily now I am able to write to a technically high standard, it was not always the case. Although most of the essays on The Pequod were written in the last couple of years, a few of the essays were written as undergraduate assignments (the bottom seven on the Essays page). That there are so few is partly because my computer crashed in my second year, so I lost quite a lot of work, and partly because I only put on those essays which were actually any good, both in my opinion and in the eyes of those who marked them. The exception is my essay on "The Representation of Memory in Time's Arrow and Shame." Written in my second year, I got a low 2.1 for this essay, and I was pretty upset, because I had thought I was writing in a very advanced way. Contrary to my principles, I decided to put this one online to spite my tutor, rather than for grander principles of public education.

But my vindictiveness has come back to haunt me. Through my Statcounter, I discovered that an English Instructor at the University of West Georgia has given her students a link to my essay in their reading assignments, and asked them to critique it in class. Through Google I discovered some of their presentations and responses were also published online. In the same response my tutor might conceivably have had, one of these complained that:

the author [sic] thoughts were confusing. He made random points that were not valuable to his argument. We believe the intended reaction was to inform the reader of the importance of time and narration in the story. Yes because we were too confused to understand the point author was trying to get across.

How dearly I would love a handback session with these students! Although, actually, on re-reading the essay, their points are valid. Whilst some of the other responses were more complimentary, I have to admit that the argument does appear highly convoluted, with structural weaknesses both at the level of sentences (winding and long-winded) and of the essay as a whole. Finding my original essay plan, at 6000 words I expect I probably had too much information, and a too-passionate desire to disseminate all my knowledge, rather than succinctly presenting a briefer but more coherent argument (a comment that could have been lifted from one of several of the handback forms I distributed to my own students last week).

Whereas when I received my mark at the time I was a little horrified (and clearly still am, given my drive to publish it online when I launched The Pequod in 2004), I can now look back laconically. I can appreciate the flaws in the essay, safe in the knowledge that, in my second year of a PhD, I would not write in such a way today. And I can laugh at the irony that, a week after I return work to my students, here is an English postgraduate in the United States, probably the same age as myself, giving her undergraduate students my old undergraduate essay to read, and then publishing their comments on my work online. Oh, what incestuous circles we English literature students weave and wander in.

Google Exists!

On occasions such as Halloween or Christmas, when you visit the Google home page you will see that famous logo modified slightly, in reflection of the events in the calendar. It is a nice touch, because it reminds that behind this simple interface, through which so much of the world's information comes pouring into your experience, are real human beings.

In the digital age, "to Google" something has become a verb, replacing those traditional words that imply an embodied act of discovery: to search, to find, to explore. Though I find it wonderful, it is also slightly strange that now my knowledge appears, instantaneously, through no more physical an act than the tap of a key, and the flick of an eye. So I was quite happy today when, in the post, I received my Google Adwords security pin. Here was a letter, stamped from America, a tangible piece of proof that Google is more than an algorithm, a method and a name, but is a real company in a real building, at which physical people work, even if only folding envelopes. Today, at least, my interactions with Google were sensual, not simulated: the flutter of paper onto the doormat, the satisfying rip of a finger against glue, the unfolding of the creased pages.