Sons of Loki

One exam down! Two more to go! This morning I had Civil War and Restoration Literature, my English module for last semester. I actually stayed up until 2am last night cramming, which is quite late for me. I never generally make a big fuss about revision, because I figure you either know it or you don’t (and I usually don’t, hence bad grades), but this time I knew I had to compete with proper English students. Being joint honours means I’ve done all of two English modules in my three years here, while single honours have done at least six, so they’re far, far ahead of me on practical exam skills. (Joint honours really is half a degree. Let this be a warning to you.)

So I sort of picked up that what proper students do is study a few topics in depth and then apply that knowledge to the exam. A cursory glance at past papers revealed that a) sex and b) authority were likely to come up, and I find those two subjects far more interesting than ‘time’ or ‘pastoral’ or ‘nature’ and the other themes on the course. So I flicked through a few books and made notes and went into the exam really having no idea what I was going to do.

Always three hours seems like an impossibly long time, and the blank white pages stretch on forever, and you have no idea how to answer any of the questions. But the time and pressure and stress sort of squeeze something out of your brain and you start writing and before you know it, time’s up and you’ve done a half-decent job.

the face of a dirty, dirty man

My first question was:

9. Be judge yourself, I’ll bring it to the test:
Which is the basest creature, man or beast?
Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey
But savage man alone does man betray. (Rochester)

Does the literature of the period make us feel uncomfortable about being human?

To which I was like, you know Paradise Lost is all “humans are beautiful things but then it all went a bit wrong, look at the poor wretched things.” Then I threw Pepys in there, perhaps a bit too vigorously (it’s all too obvious that I just crammed Pepys because it’s full of extraneous detail about him, like his gallstones and what he does in church). Pepys is a fascinating character: a kind of lecherous prude, a man enamoured by the pleasures of the flesh but deeply ashamed by them; a man genuinely upset when his wife catches him fondling the maid but then who does it again the next day; a man who reads filthy French books and is all like “this is a disgusting book, but a learned man must remind himself of the sin of the world so I’ll take it don’t tell my wife yes a brown paper bag please”. He’s attracted to sex like a moth towards a flame, but when he gets there he burns up in shame. Finally I threw in Rochester to make the same point – humans are disgusting and we feel uncomfortable reading about it, but at the same time there’s a certain joie de vie, a kind of we’re-damned-anyway-so-let’s-party. And then something from Locke, which unfortunately I could barely remember.

Kind of the worst king there ever was, Charles II.

Then I twiddled my thumbs for a bit before embarking on my second question:

‘There were kings long before there were any laws. For a long time the word of a king was the only law’ (Sir Robert Filmer)

Write an essay on the relationship between law and Royal authority in the literature of this period.

Jackpot! Except I screwed it up by confusing Waller’s “St. James’s Park” and Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”, but they are practically the same poem (except Denham can write poetry and Waller can’t). Still, I think I got across nicely that Charles is a king ruled only by himself and his own whims, with God his only authority,who allows himself to be fettered by law only for the good of all concerned. His temper is barely restrained, and if the commoners tried to restrain him further he would burst like an angry river and flood the country with destruction, as Denham put it. I could – should – have been harsher and pointed out that Charles II barely gave a damn about anything beyond where his next mistress was coming from, but I’m not sure where that would have fit into the essay.
So then I was went on to Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” and explained how Dryden, rather sneakily, turns Charles’s promiscuity into a virtue, making out that having ten children by five different women is the sign of a powerful and deeply masculine man – ahahaha check out his tights there – and therefore how he don’t need no ‘law’ to have authority, but Dryden backtracks and adds ‘but he is also lawful because if not he could be a tyrant and Charles could never be a tyrant, except for that time his goons hunted down a guy who said something bad about him and cut off his nose, and all those times he pardoned his buddies for murder and rape.
And then some more John Locke, and the exam was done. That’s that for another year!

All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
(Rochester, “A Satyr on Charles II”)

Found a job! Yes, I’m sort of working freelance for Demand Media, an online publisher who run eHow and LiveStrong, among other things. Of all the “work from home” schemes I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot) it’s really the only one that works. It’s absolutely perfect for me. You pick a title from the database – I’m doing how-to guides, like how to write a personal statement or how to fix Guitar Hero drums – write the guide, which takes me anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour, and submit it. Either it gets approved straight away, or a copy editor has you make a few changes before it’s (hopefully) re-accepted. And boom, $15 (£9.50) for an hour’s work sent via PayPal. Any time of day, any day of the week. One a day, and that’s my rent and utilities for the week covered.

I mean to write a post on here about my experiences from my first few articles and tips for newbies like myself, so keep eyes peeled.

It’s 2011, the first year of the 10s if you don’t believe 2010 is in the 10s (which it is, as any sensible non-pedantic person agrees). Resolution time!

• Write a radio script! I realised that while writing a play requires you to get a director and a stage and actors, you can write a radio script and submit it to the Beeb and you might get feedback, if they like it enough, and if they really like it they’ll buy it from you for megabucks and make it into a radio play. How ace would that be?
• Join the theatre society! I wouldn’t really say I’ve always wanted to be an actor, but I do kinda feel like I need to do acting at some point in my life, when I think about it. I didn’t go to no fancy acting schools and I have only seen about three plays and my only experience with Drama is a term of Drama enrichment in sixth form, but someone’s got to be the extras.
• Have a shower! No, wait, that’s my plan for today.
• Start jogging (again)! I’ve been running on-and-off for three years now? I used to use the treadmills at TUFS, which was really convenient, but there’s no sense paying silly money to use the gym at Leeds when I have the beautiful wood near my house to run through.

I discovered an amazing app called RunKeeper (currently free for the pro version) which – get this – you set up a route, like run 0.5 miles then walk 0.25 miles and repeat three times, and then you pop in your headphones and listen to some banging tunes and a synthesised voice tells you when to start running and when to stop running and how far you’ve run and your pace and speed and stuff all in your ears automatically. And it tracks you by GPS so you can see exactly how far you ran, how high you climbed, and then overlays it on Google Maps.

It’s so weird. You know your forefather William Gibson told us how technology would revolutionise the world. And while we don’t have nanomachines in our bloodstream or skull-guns or brain-cyberspace interfaces yet, I honestly think the age of better living through technology is here. My phone tells me when to run for optimum fitness. My PC makes the screen warmer in the evening so I can sleep better. Then my phone monitors me while I sleep so it can wake me up at the right time. I know it seems like iPhones and smartphones and app ecosystems are overhyped, but it really is a revolution in the way we use technology. The future is now, people!!

Things have been pretty quiet lately. Everyone’s gone home for Christmas; I have been hanging around working on my dissertation, which is moving along at a fair old clip. It’s changed quite a lot from my original intention, which was a big unfocused grab-bag of topics about the future of Japan.

Instead I narrowed it down to the future of youth in Japan – the big question being whether freeterism (flitting from temporary job to temporary job in your 20s and 30s, not settling into a career path) and NEETism (basically giving up on life and living in your parents’ house) has a viable future. But then I kinda got lost on that, so it changed again to the causes of this crisis in Youth Employment. This is important, because it’s what’s gonna happen here in a year when all the jobs are gone and I can’t get on the career ladder, although thankfully the UK is a little different to Japan.

Anyway, stick a conclusion on that, get it ring-bound, and that’s that done. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a few articles on HubPages to get my writing out there and hopefully earn a few bob from advertising. It would probably make more sense to write on this blog more, but I’ll try this in the meantime and linking here helps with the old SEO:

Best of Seoul: top places to go in the heart of Korea
Top places to go in sunny Seville
Hangover from hell: Climbing Mt Fuji
Malaga: Where to go in the Andalusian City of Culture
Top European spas: three of the best
Buying a title: can anyone become a Baron or Lady?
Tokyo on a Budget: Top tips to survive in Tokyo on the cheap

Anyway, Christmas is coming and I’m back at home. I’m writing my first play, although I don’t know anything about drama beyond a couple of Alan Bennett plays I’ve been reading. My plan is to join the theatre soc in the new year, become an accomplished AC-TOR! and then move on to playwright. Also, to keep on with this Beatles tribute band I’m in. And get a job. And pass third year.

Been thinking about my future lately. I’ve still got 17 months until I graduate, but it’s been weighing on my mind since I attended this careers expo on Wednesday where they had two very good guest panels on Creative Writing and Publishing careers and the increasingly crisitunity world of Media and Journalism. The Creative Writing panel confirmed my fears that writing a novel does not make you a megastar overnight and that there are no parties and no million-dollar film deals, at least until you crank out more books, the foreign deals come in, and you can begin to make a modest living out of it. The average writer makes £8,000 a year – yer man Steve Mosby said he got £12,000 for his first two-book deal, then another £12,000 for the next two books, before getting a modest success with his third book and raking in £30,000 from international sales. So the other piece of advice was: stick to your day job, at least for a while.

Carter. I can't wait for the day he's throwing me out of a thirtieth-story window.

So what’s my day job gonna be? It’s slightly embarrassing because I know nothing is like the movies, but I think I can trace my interests in magazine journalism back to How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Vanity Fair) and The Devil Wears Prada (Vogue). And I read an interview with Graydon Carter where he came across as … an interesting guy, and then I bought two issues of GQ and decided that I was definitely going to write for them some day, falling in love with the exciting cardigan-wearing jet-setting New York restaurant-dining world of the moderately wealthy. (“I always keep an overnight bag with me at all times in case I have to leave for New York unexpectedly” kind of people.) Unfortunately I have no fashion sense and no money, but I guess I can work a keyboard, and surely that’s good enough?

The Media panel was mostly about news and TV journalism, from which I brought away that in this madass age it’s important to be multiskilled – a writer one minute, a cameraman the next, then a presenter and an editor. I guess I could be good at that. My other dream is to work for the BBC in Japan or something, or Kyodo News, so it might be important to get involved with the student TV network here at Leeds if I can.

Excitedly, I asked John Sutton from the Liverpool Echo how I should get into magazine journalism, and there was an embarrassing silence when he asked me what sort of magazines I wanted to write for, and I realised I had no idea. But then he suggested lifestyle, and I decided yes, that was what I wanted to do, and he said just find out names, find a specialism, shadow editors and writers and relentlessly badger people until you get an internship and an ‘in’. Ins are important, I gathered. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, which is a shame because I’m shit at networking. But who knows? I might just email every single magazine in the UK next spring and see if I can do an internship over the summer. Top goal would be something like Wired UK – if nothing else, I guess I know about tech, and there’s always room for ‘weird shit from Japan’ in geek mags, right?

Meanwhile, life continues unabated. I’ve started research for my dissertation, and I’m starting to think I might actually write it after all. I’ve got not one but two language partners and I can feel my Japanese speaking confidence slowly building. Everything in my life feels just barely under control, like a clown juggling chainsaws on a tightrope, but for the time being he’s catching the chainsaws the right way up. Which I guess is all he can ask for, right?

We land on a cloud and I hop off his back, realising in mid-air that I’m jumping onto something entirely insubstantial, and yet I land on a soft, solid surface. I run through it, and it’s like running through fallen autumn leaves, a sense of wonderful, childish joy. He sits catching his breath, watching me run. I feel a little silly, but it’s absolutely incredible. I run and scream my head off, jumping without fear into the soft white fluff, spinning around with abandon in sheer awe at the unscaleable dome of blue sky that hangs in every direction. I run back to him, grab his hand, and we stand on top of the world, on a white meadow, in a perfectly silent world.

NaNoWriMo is back! I’ve come to look forward to November – first my birthday, then NaNoWriMo (3rd time this year), and finally my first Movember (feel free to donate to my ‘tache here).

Back at home for the weekend. Regular readers of my blog will know I very seriously considered giving up Japanese last spring, but somehow I pulled through the exams and started back at Leeds for the third year of this degree. But it feels like a Pyrrhic victory; sure, I passed, but I didn’t pass very well, and it may have been better to just bite the bullet back then and come to terms with the fact that I’m not really that into Japanese.

It occurred to me, the week before last, when I had to write this English essay. It was pretty complex and I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing, but I happily hunkered down in the library for ten hours with a stack of books and crafted a deeply imperfect, but ultimately finished essay. I realised I really enjoy that kind of work – essay writing and such – because it’s creative work. I find creating something – a story, an essay, something in a computer game, a piece of art, a blog post – to be a wonderfully rewarding experience.

The thing is, I get none of that buzz from learning Japanese because it’s mainly passive learning. I know you create conversations and write compositions, but it’s really not the same thing at all, for me.

Anyway, my real point is, I really don’t think I necessarily need to be doing Japanese any more. The big problem is that I can’t drop it. I investigated, and was a little taken aback on Thursday to be told that I’m two weeks too late to drop the necessary credits to have room to take up English modules for next semester.

So I’m stuck. But! There is a plan C: abort this year entirely, get a job until August 2011, then start again at Level 2 next academic year doing Single Honours English. This would mean I graduate in 2013, not 2012. The job would earn me a nice bit of extra cash (and I certainly need all I can get) and I believe that since I’d still be registered as a student, I wouldn’t have to pay council tax.

This is kind of scary and exciting all at the same time. But then, it might be just what I need to do. There’s that great Talking Heads song, “Found a Job”¹, with the line “if work isn’t what you love / Then something isn’t right” and I’ve always thought I’ll never be one of those people trapped in a boring job they hate just because they’re too scared of things changing. But, to shamelessly quote another song, for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same². So I guess I should perhaps go for this. It certainly beats being bored and miserable in Japanese class all day.

¹: Byrne, David. “Found a Job” in More Songs About Buildings and Food. Talking Heads, CD, Sire Records (1978).
²: Cave, Nick, et al, “Jesus of the Moon” in Dig Lazarus Dig. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, CD, Mute Records (2009).

Anamorphotical portrait of Charles II of England. Oil on canvas

My arch-nemesis Miles, over at Memoirs of a Gaijin, has had no less than three people recognise him from his blog in real life, which I think is enough people to get a little first-tier ‘internet celebrity’ badge. I’m pretty sure all my readers stick to the shadows and, upon seeing me, flee in terror and respect. Or I don’t have any readers. Anyway.

Classes started! Civil War literature hasn’t been quite as dull as I imagined. I mean, you got hacks like Edward Waller who just drone on about how radiant and majestic Charleses I & II were (chinless autocratic amoral bastards, the lot of ‘em) but there’s some interesting things hidden away, and there’s the whole turmoil of the period when England stood on a precipice between being playing second fiddle to Spain and the Heiliges Römisches Reich and becoming the most powerful nation in the world – kind of like England’s difficult teenage years? Mandarin is pretty easy – everything’s monosyllabic and I find it really easy to think in Chinese characters. Being used to Japanese means I have no problem with a language without proper plurals or gender or articles, which I imagine must be quite a shock if you’ve only done French or Spanish.

Anamorphotical portrait of Charles I of England. Oil on canvas

Japanese is … kinda weird. Everyone’s pretty much better than me, as I expected, but so far the grammar and such is stuff I did last year, so … the classes are kind of easy at the moment? But it’s still hair-raising to have to speak in front of people, and make conversation, and stuff. I just hide in the library and lurk on 2-channel, which is fun.

Today I had a meeting about my Short Research Dissertation. It’s 4,000 words, and it doesn’t seem like an enormous undertaking, but it will certainly be enjoyable, I think. Well, I say that now. I’ve narrowed it down to being about the phenomenon of NEETs and freeters and the Japanese youth counter-culture – where it comes from, and whether it exists as a short-term phenomenon or whether it will have wider implications for society. Will the monolithic kaisha culture fall or will it remain depressingly intact? These, and other important questions, I hope to answer.