{"id":5152,"date":"2019-08-12T18:28:11","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T17:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/?p=5152"},"modified":"2019-08-12T20:07:41","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T19:07:41","slug":"mr-edwards-mans-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/mr-edwards-mans-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr Edwards Mans Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Monday\n24 June <\/em>2019. Working slowly on the third chapter of the\nthesis. It is currently like walking in mud. To stretch the analogy further,\none fears either becoming stuck for good or that one&#8217;s shoes will come off,\nleaving our hero looking foolish. Well, why stop now? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This evening I go to\nthe Birkbeck arts department in Gordon Square and attend my Graduate Monitoring\nInterview for the second year of the PhD. This is an annual check-up with a\ntutor who is not your supervisor. You can discuss any problems that may have\nemerged over the past school year, which includes any difficulties with one&#8217;s supervisors.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Supervisors often get a\nbad press, the stereotype often being that they have flings with their students.\nEven the hip Netflix series <em>Russian Doll <\/em>continues\nthis rather tired tradition. I&#8217;ve never heard of any such goings-on at Birkbeck,\nthough perhaps the less traditional set-up of evening classes and mature\nstudents makes that possibility less likely. In real life, the student&#8217;s concern\nis not so much that a supervisor might be too hands-on, but that they&#8217;re not\nhands-on enough. One hears horror stories of supervisors failing to reply to\nemails for months on end, or of them being too busy for even the briefest\nmeeting, or of them forgetting that their students even exist. In this respect,\nI have been lucky, as so far mine have been perfectly responsive. The problems I\nhave had are entirely my own fault: wobbles of doubt, worries over my\nabilities, bouts of procrastination.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that&#8217;s what we\ndiscuss tonight. The tutor I have for this meeting, Dr Owen, suggests a useful\nmotto: &#8216;write ugly words first&#8217;. Don&#8217;t worry about the quality of the first\ndraft. Just hit the word count. Only afterwards, during the editing stage, are you\nallowed to turn it into <em>The Great Gatsby<\/em>.\nThis may be an obvious lesson, but I still have problems learning it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n27 June 2019<\/em>. I give a tour of Birkbeck for my\nfriend Sonja T and her daughter Daisy. Daisy is about 18, and is keen to do a\ndegree. She&#8217;s apprehensive of the competitive side of being among her own\ngeneration, so the mixed-age aspect of Birkbeck appeals. Indeed, the class\ndiscussions are much more interesting as a result: glimpses of different domestic\nsituations, of people with different daytime jobs, of people who&#8217;ve already had\nlong lives and are now topping up their intellect, and of younger people who can\nbe surprising with their choices of favourite texts. <em>Brideshead Revisited <\/em>was one such book on my BA course: despite its\nsnobbishness and sentimentality, the younger students, including girls of\nethnic and religious minorities, could not get enough of it. It was the\ncharacter of Sebastian Flyte they liked: for all his wealth and privilege he is\nstill a troubled young person, struggling with sexuality, family and faith. No\nshortage of that in the world, whatever the background.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also remain a fan of the 1980s TV adaptation, the influence of which could be seen in an episode of <em>Killing Eve <\/em>recently. When Villanelle turns up in Oxford, she dresses in what she imagines is an Oxford boy look: light shirt, brown slacks and a cream tie, with a cricket jumper knotted over her shoulders. According to the costume designer, this was a deliberate nod to Anthony Andrews as Sebastian in the TV <em>Brideshead. <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday 28 June 2019<\/em>: I have a rule on not going to any festivals unless I am invited to appear. It rubs in my own sense of failure otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday 29 June 2019<\/em>. I read Bret Easton Ellis&#8217;s <em>White<\/em>, his new collection of essays. I&#8217;d been enjoying his podcasts, with his soft-spoken monologues railing against the world. So I was interested to see how he would render them into prose. Sadly the result on the page is a shapeless rant lacking any sense of cohesion. It doesn&#8217;t help when he admits a tendency to go on Twitter in the middle of the night fuelled by &#8216;a mixture of insomnia and tequila&#8217;. That says it all. To update Capote, that&#8217;s not writing, that&#8217;s tweeting.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, there&#8217;s something in his theory that the hyper 1980s world of his novel <em>American Psycho <\/em>has come to pass on today&#8217;s social media, with the valorising of &#8216;likes&#8217; and dislikes&#8217; and the posting of photographs of one&#8217;s restaurant meals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Women&#8217;s Football World Cup has becoming immensely popular this year. I don&#8217;t know much about football, but I like Megan Rapinoe&#8217;s hair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday 6 July 2019<\/em>. I see <em>Yesterday <\/em>at the Everyman cinema in King&#8217;s Cross. This turns out to be in the rather soulless new buildings to the north of the Granary Square development. The film has a bizarre premise about a struggling singer-songwriter waking up in a world where the Beatles never existed, except in his memory. So he goes about becoming a pop star by passing off their songs as his own. Unlike <em>Groundhog Day<\/em>, the magical conceit isn&#8217;t properly connected to the love story, so the latter feels added to pad out the film. However, the lead actor Himesh Patel&#8217;s rendition of &#8216;In My Life&#8217; \u2013 simple and sincere &#8211; quite takes me by surprise, and I&#8217;m in floods of tears when he does it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Sunday 7 July 2019<\/em>. The day after Pride, Holborn tube platform is covered in little silver gas canisters, as well as the discarded box they came in. This reveals that the objects are manufactured as &#8216;cream chargers&#8217;, intended to go in dispensers of whipped cream. Not here, though. The gas, nitrous oxide, can be sniffed (once decanted into a balloon) to produce a legal high. But not a harmless one: there&#8217;s reports of the things causing permanent nerve damage, breathing problems, and even death from asphyxiation. I&#8217;m more grumpy about the litter aspect. Knock yourself out, just be tidy when you do it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nitrous oxide is better known as laughing gas. With the clown-like Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, the idea of his Britain being one where the drug of choice is laughing gas might read as a corny political metaphor. That&#8217;s the trouble with reality. It&#8217;s so badly written. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday 8 July 2019<\/em>. Going in through the barriers at Dalston Junction tube station, a woman going the other way calls out my name. This turns out to be Suzy Woods, with whom I was at Great Cornard Upper School, Suffolk in 1989, last seen briefly at a Spearmint gig in Brighton circa 1999. Suzy has two hulking teenage boys in tow. &#8216;These are my sons&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n9 July 2019<\/em>. The strangest catcall in my life &#8211; which\nfor me is saying something. An grey-haired, red-faced man passing me in Covent\nGarden today: &#8216;You&#8217;re not in France, you&#8217;re in Britain!&#8217;. I am wearing my usual\ncream linen suit and tie. Still, <em>\u00c3\u00a0 chacun\nson go\u00c3\u00bbt<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s since occurred to\nme that he might be one of the slightly crazed pro-Brexit protestors that are\ncurrently a common sight in central London, often walking to or from the\nprotests at Downing Street and Parliament. The Pro-Brexit lot are usually found\ninstalled next to an equally passionate group of anti-Brexit protestors, kept\napart by a few bored-looking police officers. I think of Quentin Crisp&#8217;s quote from\nthe late 1970s: &#8216;protest has become a game any number can play&#8217;. I also keep\nthinking of that phrase in <em>Decline and\nFall<\/em>, used for the Bullingdon Club: &#8216;confused roaring&#8217;. &nbsp;That rather sums up what&#8217;s going on in Britain\nnow: a huge amount of confused roaring. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Weds\n10 July 2019<\/em>. Last week of summer term, and my last\nsupervisory meeting of the academic year. I&#8217;ve agreed to crank out at least 1000\nwords a week from July 22 onwards, after a proper break. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n12 July<\/em>. To the Rio for <em>The\nDead Don&#8217;t Die<\/em>, Jim Jarmusch&#8217;s zombie comedy. It&#8217;s entertaining at first,\nbut when the characters start making comments about being in a film, my\npatience evaporates. <em>Blazing Saddles <\/em>or\n<em>Airplane <\/em>might be able to do such a\nthing, but this film isn&#8217;t in the same league. It&#8217;s one big indulgent shrug.\nNot awful, just inert (there&#8217;s a comment for the poster). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday 13 July <\/em>2019. Another auteur horror film at the Rio: <em>Midsommar<\/em>. Unlike <em>The Dead Don&#8217;t Die<\/em>, the aesthetic in this case cares about its viewers. It slowly pulls one into a hyper-sunny world, about a sinister pagan community in rural Sweden. As the film goes on, the flowers pulsate with CGI irises, and the film&#8217;s own colours become as bleached as the linen frocks. There&#8217;s an upsetting moment of two of violence, which has a couple of people at the Rio walking out (I&#8217;ve heard some have even fainted), and which is arguably unnecessary. A further criticism is that the debt to <em>The Wicker Man<\/em> prevents the film from being entirely original. But <em>Midsommar&#8217;s <\/em>confidence in its own vision is spellbinding. After it&#8217;s over I have to take time to adjust to the normal world, as I did with <em>The Neon Demon<\/em>. This is the highest compliment one can pay: a film that can shift reality. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Sunday\n14 July 2019<\/em>. I read <em>Fabulosa! b<\/em>y Paul Baker, a new book on Polari, the historical gay slang.\nBaker&#8217;s other two books on the subject came out a while ago; I&#8217;ve read those\ntoo. One is an academic linguistic study, the other a straightforward\ndictionary, beefed up with more general gay slang. I was once going to write a\nbook on the subject myself. One of the reasons I didn&#8217;t is that, as Baker\nproved, there&#8217;s not quite enough on the topic to fill a whole book on its own.\nPolari makes for a good magazine article, or a few pages in a book on gay history,\nbut that&#8217;s about it. Where it does come in handy is when it&#8217;s used as a way in\nto the wider story of homosexual social life during times of criminalisation. This\nis what Baker focuses on with this new book, adding his own life story into the\nmix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m especially\nfascinated by a section on a late 1990s debate in the pages of <em>Boyz<\/em>, the free magazine in gay bars (in\nwhich I once appeared, though not as one of the nude pin-ups). In this debate,\nthe magazine polled its readers for their views on reviving Polari, and by\nextension on camp in general. There&#8217;s evidence for an anti-camp attitude among\ngay men from at least as early as the 1930s; it&#8217;s also in Angus Wilson&#8217;s novels\nof the 1950s, with the rise of straight-acting &#8216;golden spivs&#8217;, not unlike the Kray\ntwins. In the 1990s the surge in interest in indie rock gave rise to gay indie\nnights in London like Popstarz and Club V. One consequence was letters to <em>Boyz<\/em> like those in Baker&#8217;s book, which railed\nagainst gay men for listening to Kylie Minogue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why does camp persist now? Why are there TV programmes about drag queens in 2019? My answer would be because there&#8217;s still a sense of rules about what &#8216;normal&#8217; looks like. A rainbow flag on a town hall may say &#8216;we are fine with LGBT people&#8217;, but by implication it also says &#8216;LGBT people are not the &#8216;we&#8221;. Camp responds to the idea that there&#8217;s still a &#8216;normal&#8217;, and has fun in the process. As Judith Butler puts it, camp is &#8216;working the trap&#8217;. The only thing that would really make camp die out would be a world in which everyone was exactly the same. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday\n15 July<\/em>. To the Rio for a third horror film with an arty\naesthetic. This time, <em>In Fabric<\/em>. I\nfind Peter Strickland&#8217;s faux-1970s stylings impressive, but am not convinced\nthey sustain a whole film. As with <em>The\nDead Don&#8217;t Die<\/em>,there&#8217;s a\ndetached indifference that tests one&#8217;s patience. I&#8217;m glad these films exist and\nget made \u2013 they are, after all, art rather than commerce &#8211; but I prefer <em>Midsommar<\/em>&#8216;s more immersive approach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Weds\n17 July 2019.<\/em> Trying to calm myself with the thought of Boris PM with the phrase\n&#8216;interesting times&#8217;. Either that or the end of <em>Planet of the Apes<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday 18 July 2019<\/em>. <em>Vita &amp; Virginia <\/em>at the Empire Haymarket. Mrs Woolf is played by the towering Elizabeth Debicki. I&#8217;m reminded of the line in Alan Bennett&#8217;s play <em>Forty Years On <\/em>about Woolf being proud of winning the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, &#8216;an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also today: the <em>Kiss My Genders <\/em>exhibition at the\nHayward. Lots of portraits of gender-bending figures, some of which, like\nLuciano Castelli&#8217;s androgyne in sparkling gold, seem very up-to-date, but turn\nout to be from the 1970s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday 19 July 2019<\/em>. To Knole mansion on a whim, inspired by seeing the house in <em>Vita &amp; Virginia <\/em>the day before. This takes a mere 23 mins on the train from London Bridge to Sevenoaks, in Kent. Then one has to walk (or get a taxi) from the north of Sevenoaks, through the town, to get to Knole on the southern side. The rooftop views are startling: straight out of <em>Orlando<\/em>, with the deer in the grounds and the countryside going back for miles all around. The gatehouse has been converted into a sub-museum of its own, recreating the 1920s rooms of Eddy Sackville-West, the gay cousin who inherited Knole in place of Vita, even though she grew up as a child there. As <em>Orlando <\/em>satirises, she was disinherited purely by being female. A letter from Vita is quoted on a panel, on what she thought Eddy had done to Knole: &#8216;It made me cross; it was all so decadent, theatrical, and cheap. And Eddy himself mincing in black velvet. I don&#8217;t object to homosexuality, but I do hate decadence.&#8217; It takes me a minute to realise that Vita, no stranger to same-sex love herself, used the word &#8216;homosexuality&#8217; to mean men only. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are signs in the grounds at Knole asking visitors people not to pet the fawns, &#8216;as this confuses their mothers&#8217;. I&#8217;d have thought mothers being confused by their offspring was an occupational hazard. Particularly in the case of the sort of people who lived at Knole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The caf\u00e9 at the house\nis so busy that I walk back into Sevenoaks to get something to eat (fish and\nchips at the Chequers pub, the staff kind and charming). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I read <em>Normal People<\/em>\nby Sally Rooney, the biggest-selling literary novel of the moment. There&#8217;s a\nstory in the news that the most played song on UK radio since 2000 is &#8216;Chasing\nCars&#8217; by Snow Patrol.&nbsp; <em>Normal People\n<\/em>is the literary equivalent. It&#8217;s tasteful, competent, well-crafted, and\nable to appeal to a huge amount of people. It seems designed not to put anyone\noff. And that rather puts <em>me<\/em> off. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The main idea of this novel &#8211; checking in with an\neveryman-ish couple over a period of years &#8211; rather recalls <em>One Day<\/em> by David Nicholls, another\nmassive-seller, except with the quotation marks taken out. There&#8217;s no spikiness\nor oddness. For me, it&#8217;s too&#8230; normal.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tuesday\n23 July 2019. <\/em>Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. Reality\nhas officially eaten itself. It seems that there is no amount of gaffes,\nineptitude and misconduct that can stop him. In giving up his journalism to be\nPM, Mr J has had to take a substantial pay cut. That says it all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Perhaps Brexit really is the last gasp of the old ways. The photos of Boris meeting the Queen show him absolutely in his element \u2013 though according to the <em>Sunday Times <\/em>even the Queen has apparently voiced her concerns. Still, in a culture of &#8216;confused roaring&#8217;, of laughing gas canisters, of a babyish obsession with colourful characters, who else is there? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday\n25 July 2019<\/em>. A ludicrously hot day in London: 37\ndegrees. I decide against braving the tube, and instead work at home, followed\nby seeing <em>Varda By Agnes <\/em>in the\nair-conditioned Rio basement. Still feel so lucky to have a cinema on my\ndoorstep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday\n27 July 2019<\/em>. <em>Only\nYou <\/em>at the Rio. A low budget British drama about a couple&#8217;s relationship, and\nhow they try for a baby against the odds. Despite the gritty realism, I can\nonly see the couple as a couple of actors. Still, the IVF injections seem real\nenough \u2013 and very unpleasant. I really had no idea that women put themselves\nthrough such ordeals. In the educational respect, at least, the film is a\nsuccess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Wednesdays 31 July 2019<\/em>. I finally get around to reading Djuna Barnes&#8217;s <em>Nightwood <\/em>(1936). Quite a wry introduction by Jeanette Winterson, saying that the book is now mainly read by students. What really interests me is the story of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas and others championing the book while trying to play down its camper, gayer aspects. This was not so much out of homophobia as the desire to get <em>Nightwood<\/em> taken as seriously as <em>The Waste Land<\/em>. Which is where my research comes in: campness as thought to be incompatible with serious art, because of the element of humour. Or rather, queer humour, and so the wrong kind.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday 1 August 2019<\/em>. A book event at Burley Fisher Books: Savannah Knoop, Lee Relvas, Linda Stupart and Isabel Waidner. There&#8217;s a volatile, disruptive, older woman in the audience with a loud voice and wild, staring eyes, whom I&#8217;d seen shouting at passers-by on the Kingsland Road earlier. I assume she hasn&#8217;t come for a free literary event so much as just wandered into the bookshop off the street. But perhaps I am wrong. At the event she&#8217;s given the benefit of the doubt by the staff, and is provided with a seat, albeit with much &#8216;shush!&#8217;-ing when she occasionally shouts over a speaker. Linda S sits down to talk with the woman afterwards, which makes me feel guilty for tending to avoid such people pre-emptively, fearing as I do sudden violence. I suppose I also think, &#8216;one of us has to be mentally stable here, and it sure as hell isn&#8217;t going to be me&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Roz K, Jonathan N, Laura B also here. Savannah Knoop reads a piece on their experiences in a gym. With their non-binary pronouns and self-designed clothes, a mixture of Dickensian rags, <em>Alice<\/em> skirts, and lycra, Knoop is a good example of a gender-neutral dandy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Saturday 3 August 2019<\/em>. To the Rio for a screening of <em>JT Leroy<\/em>, the dramatization of <em>Girl Boy Girl<\/em>, Savannah Knoop&#8217;s memoir. There&#8217;s a nice parallel here with <em>Vita &amp; Virginia<\/em>. Both films have scenes in which a woman writer gets a camera and takes photos of a (rather wary) androgynous friend, in order to represent a fictional character. Just as Virginia Woolf used Vita Sackville-West as Orlando, Laura Albert used Savannah Knoop as JT LeRoy. In <em>JT LeRoy<\/em>, though, Savannah hints at the more exploitative aspects of the arrangement, yet still tries to be sympathetic to Ms Albert&#8217;s need for artistic ventriloquism. &nbsp;&nbsp;<em>&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By way of balance, I also watch <em>The Cult of JT Leroy <\/em>on Amazon Video, a more investigative documentary in which Laura Albert is called everything from &#8216;predatory&#8217; to &#8216;ill&#8217; to &#8216;evil&#8217; to &#8216;genius&#8217;. What with <em>Author<\/em>, the documentary that presents Albert&#8217;s own take, it&#8217;s fascinating that there&#8217;s now at least three films telling exactly the same story from different sides. One can imagine a Borges-like situation in which every possible real life narrative, however mundane, is turned into an infinite number of documentaries and dramatisations, each one edited to represent every possible take. There is no such thing as the truth, only a forking path.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Monday 5 August 2019<\/em>. I read an interview in the <em>Guardian <\/em>with Noel Gallagher. Typically the focus is less on music as it is on celebrity gossip, as in his broken relationship with his brother Liam. He calls Liam&#8217;s solo music &#8216;unsophisticated music for unsophisticated people&#8217;. This is probably fair, but in the same interview he admits to never having heard of gender fluidity: &#8216;What&#8217;s that? I know what gender I am \u2013 Mancunian&#8217;. It&#8217;s probably too much to expect Noel Gallagher to be <em>au courant <\/em>with the theories of Judith Butler, but if he thinks himself to be more &#8216;sophisticated&#8217; than his brother, a little more curiosity about the world is surely in order.\u00c2\u00a0 Maggie Nelson&#8217;s <em>The Argonauts <\/em>is a good (and short) introduction to the subject of gender fluidity, and one which other rock stars have manage to endorse, namely Kim Gordon and Carrie Brownstein. So there&#8217;s no excuse. I used to enjoy Mr Gallagher&#8217;s music, and indeed his interviews, but now I worry when I see intelligent people making jokes about being ignorant. If the legacy of Britpop means laddish incuriosity as something to aspire to, then speed its death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Still, this all says rather more about me than Noel G. I&#8217;m less curious these days about rock music and more curious about books, so that&#8217;s a kind of ignorance on my part. I feel I have to be epicene to be believed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Thursday 8 August 2019<\/em>. Today I find myself delving into the Terry Pratchett archive at Senate House Library, by way of a diversion from my own research. I&#8217;m working in the library anyway, and stumble upon the Pratchett items as part of the integrated catalogue. One item intrigues me, so I call it up to take a look. It&#8217;s a printed manual for a 1991 computer training course, &#8216;Introduction to Word For Windows 3.1&#8217;.\u00c2\u00a0 The manual uses licensed extracts from <em>Good Omens<\/em>, the 1990 fantasy novel written by Pratchett with Neil Gaiman (and lately adapted for TV).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the manual, the extracts are presented as raw text with which to teach the correction of typos, play with fonts and paragraph breaks, and so on. Quite why the manual used a copyrighted novel rather than one from the public domain (like Dickens), I don&#8217;t know. But the screenshots of pre-Web computer programs fascinates me: so inelegant in their two-colour blockiness. And those floppy disks and diskettes to save the files upon: cutting-edge materials then, now obsolete and difficult to access. This 1991 manual, however, printed on paper, has long outlived the software it was designed to serve. Such manuals are maps of lost worlds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Friday\n9 August 2019<\/em>. A cat-call from three crisp-munching\nteen boys as I turn a corner in Bloomsbury: &#8216;Look at THIS c&#8212;.&#8217; It could have\nbeen worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once again, I think to\nmyself: &#8216;Still got it!&#8217; (to be sung to the tune of Louis Armstrong&#8217;s &#8216;What A\nWonderful World&#8217;).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At Birkbeck&#8217;s main building in Torrington Square, one of the men&#8217;s toilets has been refurbished and renamed on the door as &#8216;gender neutral&#8217;. Inside, the urinals have gone. The four stalls now have walls and doors running from ceiling to floor. Inside each stall is a bin for sanitary towels, plus an advert for Birkbeck&#8217;s counselling service aimed specifically at men. According to the advert, some men might feel that they cannot easily talk about their mental health problems, because they might be told to &#8216;man up&#8217; and &#8216;grow a pair&#8217;, in the parlance of today. Recently, someone got out a marker pen and scrawled over one of these adverts with the words &#8216;MAN THE F&#8212; UP&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wonder if this commentator realises that the phrase they used already appears on the advert underneath, thus justifying its existence in the first place. And what course is this graffiti writer doing, anyway? An MA in self-defeating irony? I wish I could meet this person, if only to tell them that if being unkind and unintelligent is their idea of manliness, then they need to man the f&#8212; down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>**<br \/><em>This online diary was begun in 1997. It is thought to be the longest running of its kind. The archive contains over twenty years of exclusive knowledge, all searchable and free to read without adverts or algorithms or clickbait. It depends entirely on donations by readers to keep it going. Thank you!<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_button_id=Q5V5C7CAZWF6Y\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/btn\/btn_donateCC_LG.gif\" alt=\"Donate Button with Credit Cards\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&amp;hosted_button_id=Q5V5C7CAZWF6Y\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/btn\/btn_donateCC_LG.gif\" alt=\"Donate Button with Credit Cards\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monday 24 June 2019. Working slowly on the third chapter of the thesis. It is currently like walking in mud. To stretch the analogy further, one fears either becoming stuck for good or that one&#8217;s shoes will come off, leaving our hero looking foolish. Well, why stop now? This evening I go to the Birkbeck [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1539,350,479,1535,793,1519,837,190,802,1534,1526,1531,1529,1307,1485,1537,1530,759,1525,1523,1533,1532,1347,37,1527,1524,1097,1536,1538],"class_list":["post-5152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-beatles","tag-birkbeck","tag-boris-johnson","tag-boyz","tag-brideshead-revisited","tag-burley-fisher","tag-dalston-rio","tag-decline-and-fall","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-fabulosa","tag-good-omens","tag-in-fabric","tag-jim-jarmusch","tag-jt-leroy","tag-killing-eve","tag-knole","tag-midsommar","tag-neil-gaiman","tag-nightwood","tag-noel-gallagher","tag-paul-baker","tag-peter-strickland","tag-phd","tag-polari","tag-russian-doll","tag-senate-house-library","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-vita-and-virginia","tag-yesterday-the-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5152"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5196,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5152\/revisions\/5196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}