The narrative of this week has been dominated by health.  I threw my lower back out at the start of the month, and I’ve been off work most of this week with what my GP worried was appendicitis, but which turned out to be some sort of infection.  I’m fine now, but there were a few days of intense, searing abdominal pain that crushed most of the life out of the week.  I also had to spend the week unmedicated due to a series of delays to my Vyvanse prescription, meaning it was doubly hard to get any real writing or thinking done.

The week wasn’t a write-off, though — they never are, really.  This week has made me reflect on my physical health. Fortunately, my pills showed up the other day, so I’ve been able to think clearly again.  I’ve noticed — and this is mid-thirties for you — that my body doesn’t bounce back so easily.  It’s slower, creakier.  My spine sounds like a bag of marbles being dropped. It boots up like an old Windows laptop, with a whirr and a whine and a shrug.  Since my daughter was born, I’ve neglected my physical systems, relative to how I used to be.  I used to be able to run at marathon level; now, a jog around the (hilly) park makes my lungs ache — and that’s just while I’m lacing up and stretching.  I’m not a glutton, but I seem now to be mostly carbohydrate.

I’ve used the Apple Fitness+ app for a while, mostly for yoga, which is a form of exercise I’ve managed to stick at in some form for about a year, though I’m not as consistent as I’d like.  There’s a new feature: it will make you a fitness plan.  Just tell it what exercise you want, on what days, and for how long, and it’ll make you a plan.  I’ve opted for 30 mins three times a week.  My phone pinged this morning to remind me that I’ve got 10 mins of core and 20 of yoga later.  I’m quite looking forward to it.

I want to move more because I want my body to feel good.  There is no substitute for it.  This closer attention to my body and health is part of a wider recent trend in my thinking.  I am more aware of what I’m paying attention to, and more readily ask myself whether I want to be paying attention to that thing.  (I discuss this more here.)  I’ve noticed that I get frustrated with my creative pursuits, such as playing the guitar and drawing — I think it’s because I’m not really getting better.  And I’m not getting better because I’m not really paying attention, which means I’m not spending my time intentionally.  Next week, I’m going to try to deliberately get better at one guitar skill.  In fact, I’ve started making myself a small menu of things I might like to do.  Here’s this week’s:

I haven’t even touched some of this — blame abdo-agony and ADHD, perhaps — but now I look back at it, I did do some of it.  It’s about finding the sweet spot between freedom and constraint.  I’m probably going to keep it the same for next week.

Such thinking has influenced my teaching, too.  The opening lesson for each of my classes this academic year saw three words displayed as the class entered:

1. RESPECT

2. ATTENTION

3. CURIOSITY

They feed into each other.  A baseline level of respect for what’s in front of you requires you to give it your attention — your full attention.  And only then can you be properly curious about it.  And your curiosity feeds your respect — the more you are curious, the more receptive you become to the experiences of others.  It means that my lessons have become simpler: most of my lessons involve students doing two things.

1. Noticing things.

2. Asking good questions about the things they’ve noticed.

There’s a cycle here: the questions yield more things to notice, which are in turn questioned.  Some lessons, I just ask the students to write down questions that they don’t answer.  I want them to be curious, but curiosity is a skill, which means it has to be practiced.  If students can ask their own questions, they are on the path to independence and self-determination.

The more I ask my students to notice things, the more I find that I do.  I realised that when I was struggling to write earlier this week that there were other things far more worthy of my attention anyway.  While I’ve got writing projects I’m working on, and I aim to be more intentional with what I create, I’m also (ostensibly paradoxically) care far less. I’m going to have fun.  And I’m going to reserve my fullest time and attention for those I love.  My daughter is four next month, and I want to hold her in my gaze as often as I can, while I can.

Song of the week

Before we start, though, I want to establish the ways in which I’ll be thinking about history and time. The first is based on ideas from Venkatesh Rao’s 2018 post, The Age of Early Divinity.

Time is hard to make sense of.  Rao, in keeping with his theme of divinity, uses the metaphor (we have to use metaphor to describe time, but the metaphors we use reveal who we are, which means that the way we talk about time is both influenced by our metaphors and reflective of our zeitgeist).   

Chronological perceptions of time

First comes our chronological perception of time: time measured by watches, graphs, charts, calendars.  It’s time as data, recordable and recorded macro and micro, and extended via forecast and modelling into the future.

Narrativist perspectives of time

Second comes a narrativist perspective of time. This view frames time, and human lives, as accumulations of significant events — it’s the tendency to turn time into something digestible, something with a plot.  History is descended from the Latin historia, and wasn’t defined as discrete from ‘story’ until the 1500s. I’ll explore the potential significances of this in a later post, but for now consider how during this period people are starting to think more humanistically, and are less willing to accept dogmatic religion. In any case, the story in historia lives on.  It’s what’s led to grand narratives and golden ages, such as the Belle Epoque or Elizabethan era.  Narrative must eschew completionism, which is a double-edged sword: what’s left out is rendered invisible, silenced and erased. The old maxim of history is written by the victors here is proven true, though it’s perhaps more accurately phrased as history is written by those with the power to write it.  Because this narrative form of history is the story of power: of empire, war and monarchs.  It is a story of taking and losing, of killing and attempted immortality, of fear, and of love.  If this all sounds like Romanticism, it’s because it is: it speaks to a post-Romantic tendency to centre the human (see Romantic notions of genius), but there’s a catch here: who gets to be ‘human’? Scholars of race and its interplay with other disciplines, such as literature, history and linguistics, are still unpicking the complex network of assumptions that many take for granted when we discuss humanity — this will also be fleshed out in more detail another time, but see these posts for some related thoughts:

Aionic time

Thirdly, we can see time from beyond it, or out of it.  By this, we are zoomed out and think about the ‘canvas’ on which a period / era is ‘painted’.  Rao coins ‘aionic time’ for this conception of time.  It’s distinct from the narrative sense above in that it isn’t about the individual stories, but more the way we tell the stories.  What narrative tropes does the period lean on?  How does it cycle?  What maps does it trust?  I repeat for clarity: if narrativist perspectives of time are the painting, aionic time is the canvas.  

Gods made and remade

Each of these periods are assigned a metaphorical ‘god’1: Chronos, Kairos, Aeon.  Rao is most interested in the third conception, because his speculative theory of how history works (which is rooted in the maxim ‘we make our tools and then our tools make us’) fits quite neatly to them: 

1. First we make our tools: the things we make that define an age.  For example, the printing press and the early modern period.

2. Once we have these tools, they shape who we are.  Rao alludes to Woolf’s (1924) Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, which he says is basically about how we made clocks and now clocks control us, which makes sense: capitalism relies on the standardisation and colonisation of time.  This gives us the character of an age, about which we can concoct narratives.

3. After this, it’s a case of remaking gods — or, to be more specific, re-conceiving what a god is, and what our relationship to it needs to be, given our current technological advances but, crucially, our current limitations. This view leads towards the materialism and physicalism of scientific rationalism, because it sees gods as gods of the gaps — this is the idea that we only have gods to account for our current shortcomings in terms of science and technology. There are two logical extensions of this: we’ll either eventually close all the gaps, and therefore need no more gods (or, as Rao argues, admit that we’re already gods, and that ‘we might as well get on with it’2); alternatively, we’ll never close the gaps.  This binary possibility is analogous to the current state of consciousness discourse: consciousness as illusion, after Dennett vs panpsychism, after Goff.  The remaking of gods happens in such a way to help human beings make sense of our overall place in the world, and our relationship with it and the 'material universe'.

A quick NB, though.  This is painting with quite a universalising brush, and I have learned to beware the universality of the ‘we’ because it encourages conceptions of history that erase minoritised peoples.  Perhaps Rao’s theory is useful in this regard, if we use it to shape our current sense of humanity to be inclusive. The paradigm has to shift.  Perhaps, then, posthumanism is where we need to go: we need to remake ourselves not as gods, but as humans (as Rao writes), but with the added stipulation that our remaking must be one of humility, in which we re-voice the voiceless, and undo years of harmful erasure.

Some highlights from Rao’s essay

The first dimension is chronological, objective time, presided over by Chronos, he of the hood, scythe and bony finger. That gives us a history of notable calendar dates, a present of calendar appointments, and a future of election forecasts. A grim accumulation of all-the-data-so-far, statistically extended into the near future by Nate Silver, Philip Tetlock, and Nassim Taleb.

The second dimension is subjective, narrative time, a sense of the history as an coherently event-full container presided over by Kairos, our carpe diem! friend with the pair of scales and questioning eyebrows, constantly challenging us to seek luck and challenge fate with every moment. This dimension is a story of risk and reward, daring and timidity, seizing the day, or failing to. A story with a discernible plot that passes through the bottleneck of present situation awareness and diverges into a multiverse of possible scenarios in the future.

The third dimension is a sort of out-of-time eternalist sense of the texture of a period. Its warp and woof, its patterns and cycles. Aionic time, which I wrote about in my last post. It is less a kind of time per se,and more a collection of atemporal narrative tropes; the tactical gestalt of a storytelling style.  It is the canvas rather than painting.

I picked it up again a few years ago, but fell out of the habit again. The problem was, I wasn’t really getting better. I had the same problem with playing the electric guitar

In Peak, Ericsson and Pool write about how people tend to practice a skill:

We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic.

It’s at this level we plateau, unless we engage in deliberate practice. It is different to the standard model of practice outlined above in that it involves:

• Giving a task one’s full attention

• Having small, specific steps towards achieving one’s goals

• Getting meaningful (i.e. timely and specific) feedback on one’s progress towards both small and overarching goals

• Pushing beyond one’s comfort zone and current ability level, one increment at a time.

This last, Ericsson and Pool write, is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice:

If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. The amateur pianist who took half a dozen years of lessons when he was a teenager but who for the past thirty years has been playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may have accumulated ten thousand hours of “practice” during that time, but he is no better at playing the piano than he was thirty years ago. Indeed, he’s probably gotten worse.

The reference to ‘ten thousand hours’ relates to a common misconception about expertise which I believe stems from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers1: that is, that one needs to put in ten thousand hours of practice into a skill if one wishes to master it. However, this ignores the fact that the type of practice matters far more. Deliberate practice is what leads to expertise.

Deliberate practice is hard. It can be gruelling. Central to it is the maxim that there’s no such thing as talent. Many would like to believe in talent, because it’s an easy excuse as to why you aren’t able to do something. And I don’t wish to be reductive and do away with talent completely. But I do believe that a so-called ‘natural aptitude’ or predeliction will only take one so far. It’s often the case that those who are ‘talented’ seem like they’re just good at something, but what many do not see are the sheer hours and effort that goes into truly getting good.

Therefore, I am trying to get better at drawing and painting via the principles of deliberate practice. I share below a baseline — where I am right now. I can pick out my weaknesses: proportions are off, shading is smudgy, I struggle with faces. My plan, therefore, is to get better systematically, sharing my progress along the way. I’m going to start with heads, following Loomis’ method.

Here’s some art. If you watch the time-lapse videos, you’ll see my process. I’d love some feedback, so please feel free to get in touch here or via Instagram.

The Angel

Figure Study

The Jaguar was a relic, but well-preserved, and racing green in that soft vibrancy of old photographs. The man who climbed out of it was its antithesis. The Jaguar was a slim, rattly thing, seeming to vibrate even when he engine was switched off, but the man was broad, thick, all heft, and the car creaked and bucked as he got out of it. He wore a lurid Hawaiian shirt covered in pineapples, cargo shorts and flip flops over which huge knuckly toes protruded. He took a few goes to close the door of the jag, which was creaky and — it seemed — finicky — then stood leaning against the car, grinning. Again, Ian felt the flicker of old photographs: young men grinning by their cars, the car that marked out the passage to true manhood, the manhood of freedom that unraveled with the graunch of the tyres on tarmac.

“Alright?” the man said.

Ian said hello, at little more tersely than he’d meant. Truth told, he had been fretful all morning, cleaning in a frenzy, his fingers now stinging and chemical-dry. The man standing by the ancient Jaguar was the curate he’d known Bishop Frank was going to send, though he had held it off as long as he could, taking advantage of Frank’s penchant for distraction the moment anybody turned the conversation to Frank’s achievements. Frank was, like all true egotists, utterly convinced of his own humility. But ultimately too many reports reached Frank of ‘strain’, ‘workload’ and ‘well-being’ from — Ian assumed — his parishioners, though he’d done his level best to convince them otherwise. You need a little help, lad, Frank had said, just a little.

And so, Frank had sent the curate, who was now grinning at him from beside this ridiculous car.

Ian must have been looking at the car more intently than he’d realised, because the curate said, “This is Lesley.”

“What?”

“Lesley. The car.” The curate patted the bonnet. “I called her Lesley.”

Ian felt his throat tighten. “Why?”

The curate chuckled. “You know, you’re not the first person to ask me that. And I don’t know. It just came to me. I saw her and I thought, You’re Lesley. And she’s done me right so far, as old as she is.” He nudged the front tyre affectionately.

“Lesley was my mother’s name.”

“Oh, aye? Well, then.”

The two men looked at each other a moment. Ian took in his square head, the big blue eyes, the cropped shock of fashionable hair, short back and sides. Everything about the man seemed to say Rugby. His hands in particular were huge; Ian imagined them, momentarily, clutching his entire head before crushing it like a watermelon.

The curate stuck out his hand, breaking the silence. “I’m Neil,” he said. His accent was unmistakably Yorkshire, warm and friendly, and so disarming that Ian felt even more on his guard than before he’d met the man.

Ian took Neil’s hand. It was warm and made his feel small and effeminate.

“What’s the plan, then?” Neil said, walking around to the boot and wrenching it open. Like the rest of the car, it responded with creaks and groans.

“The plan?”

“Aye. Getting my stuff in, getting acquainted, acclimated. All that jazz.”

“I’ve a room ready for you.”

“Grand.” Neil now had closed the boot and was standing next to Ian, holding a big old grey suitcase.

“You have more, I assume?” Ian said, motioning towards the suitcase.

“Ha. No, not me. Travel light. Always have done, you see.”

Ian led the curate into the Presbytery hallway and straight up the stairs. He stopped at the entrance to the smallest bedroom — a box room, really. It was furnished in spartan fashion, which is to say that it wasn’t really furnished at all, save for a cot-like bed and small chest of drawers that gave the room the feel of a monk’s cell or a barracks.

“This me, is it?”

“Yes. This is your room. The bathroom is just over there,” Ian said, pointing down the landing. “It’s next to my room.” Ian noticed then that he had left his own bedroom door open, and recoiled slightly. The curate could see into the room, which was the master bedroom, and its plush, silken bedspread and wide windows. The contrast between the two rooms upset him in a way he wasn’t quite sure how to parse; he also hated the idea of anyone seeing inside the privacy of his bedroom. If the curate thought anything of any of this, he didn’t say: he was already unpacking, lifting a few huge pairs of boxer shorts out of the suitcase and chucking them into the top drawer.

“I’m sure you’ll be right at home soon,” Ian said.

“Oh aye,” not breaking from his unpacking.

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Grand. Oh — any chance of a brew? Gasping.”

The big blue eyes rested on Ian, seemed to take him in. Ian pulled his own away from them, noticing for the first time the bottom end of a tattoo on the curate’s upper right arm. The bottom of a crucifix.

“Brew? Tea, you mean?”

“Ha, yup. No rush, though. I’ll be down in no time.”

Ian made the tea, deciding to leave it on the kitchen counter. The curate had said he’d come to get it; sure enough, after a few minutes, he could hear the huge feet rumbling down the stairs. Ian by this point was drinking his own tea in the living room, flipping absently through a book on Salvador Dali, one of several art-related books he kept on the coffee table. Light blared through the windows, though Ian felt strangely cold.

The big man appeared in the doorway, almost filling the space like an action figure in its box. “Brew?”

“It’s in the kitchen.”

The curate bustled past.

He called from the kitchen: “Where abouts?”

“On the side?”

More stomping. Then: “Nope, can’t see it.”

“By the kettle.”

“Right, right.”

Stomping.

“God, you know what, I just can’t see it.”

Ian waited, listening to the ways in which the big man seemed to be reshaping the very fabric of this whole house already. He clutched his mug.

Then: a clatter and smash from the kitchen.”

“Bollocks! Ah, Neil, you clumsy, you clumsy bastard!” This last was delivered with a roaring chuckle. “Oh, you’ve done it again, haven’t you. Crash bang wallop. What are you like. What. Are. You. Like!”

Ian stared at the silence, and the silence stared back. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “Everything all right in there?”

“Oh, aye. This cup’s a big worse for wear, though. And … have you got a mop. God, this bloody brew’s good everywhere!”

The man was howling with laughter. Ian couldn’t reconcile the situation with the reaction, frozen to his seat in a state of pure cognitive dissonance. Then, it clicked and he jumped up.

“How did you … I mean, how did you even …?”

The kettle had been upended, somehow; the shattered mug lay in pieces; the floor and walls were coloured in Pollock-like spatters of tea. In the midst of it all, a huge man was on his knees, scooping tiny fragments of mug into his huge hands, shaking with laughter. The kitchen seemed to laugh with him, and Ian felt betrayed by it, furious with it, in fact.

Later, once all had been cleaned up and the laughter had subsided, Ian and the curate sat in the living room. Neil noticed the open Dali book and pointed to the blue painting.

“What’s that?”

Ian looked. It was Room of Chaos.

He looked at the curate and allowed himself the privilege of a dramatic pause. “Chaos,” he said.

Here follows a quick sketch of the character of Ian, a Catholic priest, one of the central characters of The Falcon, a novel I’m working on. A precis of it is coming soon!

Unedited, largely stream-of-consciousness, written as part of 25 min daily writing practice.

He’s the kind of man you might ignore, not out of spite, you see, but because he wants to be ignored. If he could, he’d be invisible for the rest of his life. Perhaps, he thinks sometimes, that’s why the priesthood suits him: he’s a conduit for something greater than himself, something he is under no obligation to understand. And yet, they all think he does understand it — all the God stuff, that is, the ineffable mysteries of the universe — and they are angry with him when he cannot explain them, because he does not know. He tells them that that’s the beauty of it — the mystery — but they live in a world that cannot accept such things. They live in a world where things makes sense. Capitalist sense. We do x because of y. Everything has an order.

When he thinks about this, he realises that he loves order, too, and when he doesn’t have it, panic rises noxiously in his chest. His love of order comes out in a monkish fastidiousness, a need to scrub things clean, down to the raw wood, as though any act of cleaning is an act of penance. This makes all-black clerical dress problematic — he cannot find a way to stop the cotton-polyester blend attracting all manner of lint and squiggly hairs; they insult him from his trouserlegs; they mock him as he removes his jumpers from the washing machine.

He has priest’s hands. He was not aware that this was a phenomenon, but he has been told it enough times — usually by pious old ladies — that he has. Priest’s hands, he is given to understand, are pure and white, with slim fingers, not unlike those one might find on the statues of saints or the Virgin. He dislikes their pallor, a dislike that extends to his overall pallor. His colouring is Celtic, by way of his Irish mother. His father is darker, but that passed to Bernadette, and he felt shortchanged in his milky whiteness, blaming it for his avoidance of the outside, and by the transit of property his scrawniness: the underdeveloped pigeon-chest, the sticklike wrists (he is rather obsessed with wrists, seeing them as the number one determiner of masculine strength and therefore of raw masculinity of itself; his watch on the tightest setting reminds him of his failings in this regard; the logic going that, if you have a well-developed wrist, you must be developed in other areas). He refuses to entertain the idea that this is a logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, because he cannot countenance the perception of himself as a lazy man. In fact, he is known amongst the parishioners of St Dymphna’s Catholic Church, which sits in what might as well be any one of the smaller east Northamptonshire towns as a hard-working priest, who is told often of the rings around his eyes, the yawns his stifles, and his near-constant availability to his parishioners, which, though some take full advantage, they are always quick to tell him that he shouldn’t be letting them. Such is, of course, he thinks, the nature of the human beast.

All of this, one might argue, is a way to avoid thinking about what really matters. He has a daughter. While he attended seminary, he had sexual thoughts that troubled him greatly. He didn’t remember a time in which he didn’t have them, but it was as though the impending permanence of a vow of celibacy had precipitated an extinction burst, and the thoughts are relentless. He is — though he would never use the term to describe himself, not even within the privacy of his own thoughts — homosexual. He sleeps with a woman to prove to himself — somehow, though later he cannot quite follow his past-self’s logic — that he does not need to believe what he knows to be true about himself.

When this liaison produces a daughter, he cannot stop himself thinking of her as a punishment. Now he has a new thought to hide away.

Neurodiversity lead

I’ve been a secondary school Lead Practitioner for a few years now. In my setting, that means responsibilities within faculty — CPD, support, curriculum — alongside a whole-school responsibility. In the past, this has seen me run the house system and the student council, but I’m most excited about a new focus for September: I’m going to be Neurodiversity Lead. This role will have two broad strands:

1. Supporting our neurodivergent students in all aspects of school life

2. Giving staff the knowledge they need to effectively work with neurodivergent students.

In order to do both of these well, I need to know what I’m talking about. This post is a brief overview of a slice of the research I’ve done so far. It’s not exhaustive; if you’d like to read more for yourself, check the reference list at the end. It’s also not going to go into the particulars of the two strands of my new role — I’ll likely write more about that once the role is properly underway.

Neurodiversity and neurodivergence

In order to speak about things, we need to know the language. The terms neurodiversity and neurodivergence are frequently misused and confused. An excellent article from Walker (2014) sets this straight. In short, neurodiversity is the diversity of human minds. This is different from the neurodiversity paradigm, which is a specific perspective on neurodiversity, rooted in the disability rights movement. Essentially, its position is that:

• Neurodiversity is natural and valuable

• The idea of one ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ mind is a ‘culturally constructed fiction’ no more valid than there being a ‘normal’ or ‘right’ gender or ethnicity, for example.

• ‘The social dynamics that manifest in regard to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics that manifest in regard to other forms of human diversity’. Neurodivergence is ‘having a mind that functions in ways which diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of “normal.”’ (Walker, 2014)

It’s not possible to be ‘neurodiverse’, because it takes more than one thing to be present before there can be any diversity between things. A neurodiverse group of people would include both so-called neurotypical and neurodivergent people.

We’re still finding our way around some very new language. Oppressive hegemonies are built of and around language, and, as Audre Lorde wrote, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ A new paradigm requires new language, and this takes time to figure out. We don’t just use language; language makes things happen. Such performative utterances mean that we have to get the language right if we want to create more equitable classrooms, and a more equitable world.

Naturally, neurodiversity etc. has had a fair share of backlash. For an article that argues that the neurodiversity ‘movement’ (i.e. paradigm) has become ‘harmful’, see Costandi, 2019. For evaluations of the claims and critiques of the neurodiversity ‘movement’, see Jaarsma and Welin, 2012 and Russell, 2020.

If you’d like to go back a bit further, the term ‘neurodiversity’ was first used, as far as I can see, in Judy Singer’s thesis Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the "Autistic Spectrum" from 1980.

Autism

When we’re talking about neurodiversity and its associated topics, we’re often talking about autism. I won’t therefore repeat any of the above, but I would like to sketch out a few core ideas about autism as it is currently understood.

The first thing to note is that contemporary autism research is increasingly following the disability rights movement. That is, it tends to spurn objective medicalisation in favour of subjectivity and social constructionism. This means that recent research has shifted from neurotypical researchers studying autistic people from the outside, to a more interactionist bent to the literature, in which autistic people themselves are the driving forces behind research and activism. The rallying cry of the social constructionist view of disability, as spearheaded by Mike Oliver, among others (see Oliver, 2013) for his reflections thirty years on from the birth of the movement) was and is ‘nothing about us without us’. (Chown et al., 2017) proposed a framework for inclusive autism research which centres the autistic voice and perspective based about this same mantra.

Theory of mind

Perhaps the most important paradigm shift within autism research saw the rejection of the ‘theory of mind’ hypothesis in favour of the double empathy problem. Theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own. To have one is ‘…to be able to attribute independent mental states to self and others in order to explain and predict behaviour.” (Frith and Happé, 1994, p. 2) It is called a ‘theory’ because the ‘theory’ is one person’s theory about another’s mind; theory does not refer to the idea itself.

The origins of theory of mind can be traced back to Premack and Woodruff (1978). This study asked ‘Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind?’ This was picked up in autism research by way of Leslie’s 1994) research into pretence in childhood play. Leslie was curious as how very young children could play pretend, and yet this pretending did not seem to trouble the cognitive frameworks they were building to help them understand the world as it was. Leslie’s conclusion was that “pretense (is) an early manifestation of the ability to understand mental states” (Leslie, 1987, p. 412) — that is, to have a theory of mind.

But autistic children struggled to pretend. In 1985, Leslie, with Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith, posited that autistic people do not have a theory of mind; that is, they lack the

ability to make inferences about what other people believe to be the case in a given situation allows one to predict what they will do (… which) is clearly a crucial component of social skills. (p.39)

Such a hypothesis is rooted in the ‘triad of impairments’ — the ‘cognitive deficits’ of the autistic mind.

However, in 1994, Utah Frith, who co-authored the original 1985 hypothesis that autistic people could not have a theory of mind, worked with her doctoral student Francesca Happé to look ‘beyond theory of mind’. While the theory held up when autism was considered solely in terms of its triadic features , the authors found that theory of mind couldn’t account for the many non-triad features of autism. For example, the 1985 study didn’t address the common ‘spiky IQ profile’ that’s a common feature of autism — essentially, an all-or-nothing cognitive profile that sees the person incredibly gifted in some areas and struggling greatly in others — and it didn’t look at social interactions, either:

social approach need not be built upon an understanding of others’ thoughts-indeed Hermelin and O’Connor (1970) demonstrated to many people’s initial surprise that autistic children prefer to be with other people, just like non-autistic children of the same mental age.” (Frith and Happé, 1994, p.3)

This changing line of thought, that ‘social approach need not be built upon an understanding of others’ thoughts’, marks the start of what becomes a paradigm shift: Damian Milton’s Double empathy problem.

The double empathy problem

According to Milton (2012), cognitive neuroscience and other psychological paradigms don’t acknowledge the divergence and difference in social reality between autistic people and the ‘neurotypical’. Noticing the double empathy problem allows for exploration of this contested space, arguing that autistic people are framed, assimilated and judged on its terms. Such unilateral judgement, without the input of autistic people, takes us beyond the idea that it is simply autistic people who struggle to understand the world, read its social cues, and correspond to its interactions.

It is not, therefore, that autistic people are deficient and at fault for issues that arise between them and the neurotypical, but rather ‘a breakdown in reciprocity and mutual understanding that can happen between people with very differing ways of experiencing the world’ (Milton, 2018). Judgement of autism from the outside positions the autistic person as a curiosity, a subaltern, to use Spivak’s coinage,

Therefore, if one is to properly understand autism and the people who identity on the autism spectrum, we must:

1. Allow autistic people to play an active part in the codification of what autism is, and what defines its daily experience.

2. Create inclusive spaces for autistic people within society.

3. Stop thinking of and discussing autism using a deficit narrative and deficit thinking; it should never be a case of ‘modifying the autistic person “as best one can” to fit in with the mainstream culture of society’ (Milton 2012).

As the discourse shifts, so must the research methods. Since the adoption of constructivist and interactionist models within research, research has had to change its methodologies. Phenomenology appears to be enjoying a renaissance in this regard, due to its intense focus on subjectivity and the things themselves. Ideas of embodiment and performativity closely related to the work of theorists such as Judith Butler have become the norm, displacing the medicalisation and the pathologisation of autistic people. Phenonmenological analysis has been used in a paper from this year (O’Neill and Kenny, 2023) to explore the experiences of autistic teachers in Ireland, finding, among other things, monotropism to be a core feature of autism for both staff and students.

Autistic teachers

Such a shift has meant that autistic people are speaking for themselves, and it turns out that autistic people are everywhere, though they have often hidden in plain sight. I’ve been especially interested in accounts of autistic teachers, of which there are few, though the field is growing. Francesca Happé has worked a great deal in this field, publishing a book with others such as Laura Crane and Rebecca Wood which draws together many strands of research and testimony from a range of authors connected to neurodiversity and education. Happé and Wood this year also published her findings from a questionnaire aimed at autistic teachers to better understand the diversity of lived experience of these teachers’ daily lives. They found that autistic teachers enjoyed their jobs: they liked the timetabled and ritualistic nature of the school day, and spoke very positively about their relationships with students. Many teachers felt proud that they could be role models for their students. However, there were many negative responses. Many teachers experienced stigma and discrimination, struggling to get promoted (there seems a lack of autistic teachers in management roles) due to an inability (or lack of awareness) of the subtle politics involved in such matters. Many found it very hard to disclose their diagnosis, or have it understood when they did. As a consequence, many autistic teachers mask their autism.

Research into autistic masking, or ‘camouflaging’ is also a relatively novel strand of research, worthy of a post on its own, so I won’t delve too much here. However, the body of research has revealed it to be a widespread phenomenon which, while it can yield some net positives for the masker, can have truly debilitating consequences. Please see the references below if you’re interested in reading more about it.

ADHD

This is another area I’m going to discuss pretty quickly. It’s controversial: a BMJ Head-to-Head not long ago debated the validity of adult ADHD diagnoses, and there are many who don’t believe in ADHD at all. Like autism, ADHD shares differences with focus, executive function, emotional regulation and behaviour. I have found the conditions so similar I wonder if they’re the same; they are certainly highly co-morbid. More and more adults are being diagnosed with ADHD, including a number of public figures. It was recently featured in the New Scientist and seems to be, like ‘trauma’, a rather fashionable concept. However, as someone with ADHD, I find it to be very real. It is inseparable from who I am. I take medication to help calm the cognitive chaos and it has made so much difference. I hope that those who have struggled as I have will get the help they need.

One very recent study bears mentioning quickly. Ornella et al.(2023) has found that high-frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), alongside cognitive training, “yielded significant clinical improvements (reduced parent-reported ADHD rating-scale scores) following treatment, compared to the control intervention.” TRNS is a specific form of non-invasive brain stimulation, which sees the brain gently stimulated by electrodes (not to be confused with Electro-Convulsive Therapy!) Early results are promising; see the references below if you’d like to know more.

Teachers with ADHD

Sadly, I’ve been unable to find any literature about teachers — like me — who have ADHD. There seems to be an upward trend of adult diagnosis; perhaps it will take some time for this to filter through. Perhaps many people with ADHD struggle to make it into teaching at all? I know from experience that struggling with executive function can make the job feel impossible at times.

Next steps?

Therefore, I’d like to see much greater representation for neurodivergent teachers. Our students have to see our diversity if they are to feel comfortable with their own. I’m increasingly open about my neurodivergence with my students. So far, it has been very positive. I am lucky to work in a supportive school, too. Perhaps neurodivergent teachers need to meet and spearhead their own brand of research? I love the idea of each school having a member of staff who is a neurodivergent voice within the school for students, to ward off the dangers of the double empathy problem.

There is so much I haven’t touched on, such as BIMS and monotropism. For now, I shall keep reading, thinking and writing. Get in touch if you’ve read this and would like to talk about it: @curtaindsleep on Twitter. DMs open!

References

Asherson, P. et al. (2010) ‘Is ADHD a valid diagnosis in adults? Yes’, BMJ, 340(mar26 1), pp. c549–c549. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c549.

Baird, A. (2020) ‘Teaching While Autistic: Constructions of Disability, Performativity, and Identity’, Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, 2(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.9707/2833-1508.1040.

Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A.M. and Frith, U. (1985) ‘Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind” ?’, Cognition, 21(1), pp. 37–46. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8.

Boonstra, A.M. et al. (2005) ‘Executive functioning in adult ADHD: a meta-analytic review’, Psychological Medicine, 35(8), pp. 1097–1108. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s003329170500499x.

Callahan, B.L. and Plamondon, A. (2019) ‘Examining the validity of the ADHD concept in adults and older adults’, CNS Spectrums, 24(5), pp. 518–525. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1092852918001190.

Chown, N. et al. (2017) ‘Improving research about us, with us: a draft framework for inclusive autism research’, Disability & Society, 32(5), pp. 720–734. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1320273.

Cook, J. et al. (2020) ‘Camouflaging Behaviours Used by Autistic Adults During Everyday Social Interactions’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-96362/v1.

Cook, J. et al. (2021) ‘Self-reported camouflaging behaviours used by autistic adults during everyday social interactions’:, Autism, pp. 13623613211026754–13623613211026754. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613211026754.

Frith, U. and Happé, F. (1994) ‘Autism: beyond “theory of mind”’, Cognition, 50(1–3), pp. 115–132. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90024-8.

Geffen, J. and Forster, K. (2018) ‘Treatment of adult ADHD: a clinical perspective.’, Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, 8(1), pp. 25–32. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/2045125317734977.

Hupfeld, K.E. et al. (2022) ‘Hyperfocus: The ADHD Superpower’, Frontiers for Young Minds, 9, p. 625433. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2021.625433.

Hupfeld, K.E., Abagis, T.R. and Shah, P. (2019) ‘Living “in the zone”: hyperfocus in adult ADHD’, ADHD Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders, 11(2), pp. 191–208. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12402-018-0272-y.

J. Moncrieff and S. Timimi (no date) ‘Is ADHD a valid diagnosis in adults? No’, BMJ Preprint. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c547.

Jaarsma, P. and Welin, S. (2012) ‘Autism as a Natural Human Variation: Reflections on the Claims of the Neurodiversity Movement’, Health Care Analysis, 20(1), pp. 20–30. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-011-0169-9.

Kosaka, H., Fujioka, T. and Jung, M. (2019) ‘Symptoms in individuals with adult-onset ADHD are masked during childhood’, European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 269(6), pp. 753–755. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-018-0893-3.

Lawrence, C. (2019) ‘“I can be a role model for autistic pupils”: investigating the voice of the autistic teacher.’, Teacher Education Advancement Network Journal, 11(2), pp. 50–58. Available at: https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4658/1/LawrenceICanBeA.pdf (Accessed: 6 May 2023).

Lawrence, C. et al. (2021) ‘“Howling at the scrabble-board”: exploring classroom literature from an autistic viewpoint’, English in Education, 55(2), pp. 164–176. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2020.1801345.

Leslie, A.M. (1987) ‘Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.”’, Psychological Review, 94(4), pp. 412–426. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.4.412.

Lorde, A. (2018) The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. London: Penguin Books (Penguin modern, 23).

Milioni, A. et al. (2014) ‘High IQ May “Mask” the Diagnosis of ADHD by Compensating for Deficits in Executive Functions in Treatment-Naive Adults With ADHD’, Journal of attention disorders, 21. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054714554933.

Milton, D. (2012) ‘On the ontological status of autism: the “double empathy problem”’, Disability & Society, 27(6), pp. 883–887. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008 (Accessed: 6 April 2022).

Moheb Costandi (2017) Why the neurodiversity movement has become harmful, Aeon. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-neurodiversity-movement-has-become-harmful (Accessed: 5 April 2022).

Oliver, M. (2013) ‘The social model of disability: thirty years on’, Disability & Society, 28(7), pp. 1024–1026. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.818773.

O’Neill, C. and Kenny, N. (2023) ‘“I saw things through a different lens…” : An Interpretative Phenomenological Study of the Experiences of Autistic Teachers in the Irish Education System’. Available at: https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/9vr2u.

Ornella, D.-K. et al. (2023) ‘Transcranial random noise stimulation combined with cognitive training for treating ADHD: a randomized, sham-controlled clinical trial’, Translational Psychiatry, 13(1), pp. 1–11. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-023-02547-7.

Pearson, A. and Rose, K. (2021) ‘A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and the Illusion of Choice’, 3(1), pp. 52–60. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0043.

Perry, E. et al. (2022) ‘Understanding Camouflaging as a Response to Autism-Related Stigma: A Social Identity Theory Approach’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52(2), pp. 800–810. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-04987-w.

Russell, G. (2020) ‘Critiques of the Neurodiversity Movement’, in S.K. Kapp (ed.) Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline. Singapore: Springer, pp. 287–303. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8437-021.

Salehinejad, M.A. et al. (2020) ‘Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in ADHD: A Systematic Review of Efficacy, Safety, and Protocol-induced Electrical Field Modeling Results’, Neuroscience Bulletin, 36(10), pp. 1191–1212. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-020-00501-x.

Silberman, S. and Sacks, O.W. (2016) Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity.

Singer, J. (1998) Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the ‘Autistic Spectrum’. University of Technology, Sydney.

Tamm, L. et al. (2021) ‘The Association of Executive Functioning With Academic, Behavior, and Social Performance Ratings in Children With ADHD’, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 54(2), pp. 124–138. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420961338.

Walker, N. (2014) ‘Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms & Definitions’, Neuroqueer. Available at: https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/ (Accessed: 20 August 2023).

Wood, R., Happé, F., et al. (2022) Learning from autistic teachers: how to be a neurodiversity-inclusive school. London ; Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Wood, R., Crane, L., et al. (2022) ‘Learning from autistic teachers: lessons about change in an era of COVID-19’, Educational Review, pp. 1–23. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2103521.

Wood, R. and Happé, F. (2023) ‘What are the views and experiences of autistic teachers? Findings from an online survey in the UK’, Disability & Society, 38(1), pp. 47–72. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2021.1916888.

Intention is everything. I have done most things in my life rather mindlessly. But recently I have started to ask myself what I want to get out of a given situation — what is my intention? The more I’ve thought about it, the more this simple question has proven rather transformative for me.

I did not want to write any of this. I hate productivity culture. I’m convinced that most of the content said culture produces is either lazily and sloppily recycled / remixed, or clickbait. This post feels like that sort of thing, but I think it’s worth sharing. In fact, it was supposed to be a single post, but I found I have too many ideas for one post. I’ve therefore sketched out an outline for this to be a series of posts, so make sure to subscribe to the mailing list for free to get the next instalment in your email inbox.

Creativity thrives in conditions of routine and order

This seems like a nightmare on paper for someone who struggles with executive function. Goodness knows I have tried countless methodologies, hacks, tools. The sole takeaway really has been to learn what hasn’t worked. But I realised I hadn’t really thought about when I’d do things — it was always about what or how. There are some brutal accounts of creatives who have unflinching daily routine, from which one cannot deviate even a hair. Anthony Trollope, for example, is know for his prolific output. He put this down to his routine. He would sit down every morning at 5:30am, requiring that he wrote 250 more words of his current work. If he finished a work before his allotted time was up, he would immediately start the next. I was surprised when I read Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by just how routine-based most of the accounts were. Indeed, this was the scope of the book: Daily Rituals , so there’s an inherent selection bias, but Currey features a real range of creatives, from across the centuries and across disciplines. The composer John Adams said in an interview that his ‘experience (was) that most really serious creative people’ he knew ‘have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits’. The late painter Chuck Close concurred: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” And William James warned himself in his diary that ‘only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action’.

Related to this is another common factors in artists’ rituals: Successful work is closely related to the time at which it is attempted. In fact, the most important factor I’d say in terms of getting meaningful work done is time. There is, he added

no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.”

I quote this last because it reminded me of myself. Having been diagnosed with ADHD last year , and having since been through an intense and protracted period of titration to get the medication right, I realised why I so often felt paralysed by indecision. I would work in manic, last-minute bursts, time-blind, to get things done. I lived a boom-and-bust life. I would be unable to do things (if indeed I was aware of them and their time horizon at all); suddenly, they would rear their head like Wordsworth’s ‘black and huge’ peak  and I’d either tackle them (if they were for my job, because the consequences of not doing would terrify me) or, more likely, just quit. This latter behaviour was most common with any sort of creative project; beyond the initial spark of inspiration, I couldn’t hold it all in my head. I’d write it down, but then I’d forget where I’d put it. The rushing ‘boom’ stages would exhaust me. ‘Bust’ would see me do very little, my senses overloaded to the point that it was hard to even open my eyes. Eventually, I would have to catch up with everything I didn’t do, so a ‘boom’ cycle would begin.

My current medication — the second I tried — has cleared things up tremendously. I’m going to write more about how later in this series when I take a closer look at ADHD perceptions of time, but it has helped me get to a position from which I can build a simple routine. A routine, I realised, was not so much a case of going full Trollope and measuring things exactly — there are too many variables for me to even attempt this. Instead, I realised that a good routine needed to account for the fact that I find certain things much easier to attempt and complete at different times of day. So that’s where I started: I looked at what I wanted to do and when in the day I should do it. I realised that my energy levels varied in great peaks and troughs throughout the day. I used this to build a simple daily routine:

Morning

• Academic writing. I have an overarching goal to write a book about what it’s like to be a neurodivergent educator, taking in my perspectives, the perspectives of other neurodivergent people, and a significant body of research and scholarship. I noticed in Currey’s book that virtually none of the featured creatives worked in the afternoon; they would do their creative work either early in the morning or late at night — first or last thing. Moreover, they tended to spend only about three hours of the day working, but those hours were purposeful, focussed and intense. I tried working at night — I’ve been a night owl a lot of my life — but it clashed with having to get up early for my job as a teacher. As I’ve got older, I’ve found myself waking up earlier anyway, so now I do work that requires creative intensity in the morning. I’ve gradually built a morning writing routine that I’ll elaborate on it subsequent posts.

Afternoon

• Exercise. I have tried and failed to exercise in the mornings, which means that though I enjoy it, it doesn’t stick. However, I hit a major slump in energy in the mid-afternoon, and I have found exercising around then perks me back up. During the holidays I can be quite flexible and do it when I want; during term time I try to get home as close to four as I can so I can head straight out.

• Family time. I make sure to spend time with my daughter. I’ve started to bring her into my exercise; she likes yoga!

Evening

• Reading. I used to write a lot in the evening, but most sessions were fuzzy and abortive. I did get some good stuff written, but it was hard to predict when this would be.

• Practicing the guitar

• Fiction writing

Here, it’s clear how central time is for my creativity. But I restrict time further by making sure, if I’m doing something important, to set a timer that has an intention attached. More about this soon — it’s a natural progression from my post on beautiful limitations.

I do want to stress that I’m only now able to manage these things because I’m finally on the right medication. If you have ADHD and you’re reading this, please don’t let it make you feel guilty. I cannot stress enough just how much of a positive impact the right medication has had.

Later in this series, I’ll be looking at some of the following ideas:

• Planning and flexibility

• Starting small

• Procrastination

• Accepting personal idiosyncrasies

• The importance of rest

• Forming habits is hard

• How do neurodivergent people respond to traditional habit-forming methodologies?

• States of creativity: messy thought and neat thought

• Reading in the secondary English classroom: intention and attention

Until then, be well — and make beautiful things.

I’ve started some new ADHD medication. I’ve been taking Xaggitin (methylphenidate) for a little while, but while I’ve had some net positive experiences with it, I’ve felt the need to try another medication: Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine dimesylate). Both are stimulants, which might seem strange — surely the last thing someone with ADHD needs is a stimulant! — which increase levels of neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. These neurotransmitters play important roles in your ability to pay attention, think and stay motivated.

Tonight’s post is a quick rundown of the medication I’ve been taking and how it’s affected me. It is not intended as medical advice but as personal reflection.

Xaggitin: 18mg

This was the first ADHD medication I tried at the start of titration. Initially it was a blessed relief. It didn’t seem to be doing anything, but I noticed after a few days a loosening of the muscles, a relaxing of the senses, a diminishing of photosensitivity. I take Sertraline for depression, too, so maybe that had something to do with it, but I felt better. Clearer. However, the old executive function issues persisted (albeit not as potently) and I was titrated up to 32mg.

Xaggitin: 32mg

I was experiencing a flattening of the benefits of 18mg, but 32mg increased the clarity. Essentially, I experienced the same as with 18mg, but I found the same longer-term — the deficits were still present.

Xaggitin: 64mg

This was probably the sweet spot. This dosage cut a lot of the deficits, but also introduced a tightening of the chest, albeit mildly. It’s the dose at which I felt most comfortable on Xaggitin.

Xaggitin: 72mg

This was the greatest dose, and enabled better focus. However, by this point, the ghosts of anxiety I’d re-experienced on 64mg reappeared fleshed out. Tight chest, tight mind. It was okay for a few days, but the anxiety (of which I have a significant history) lurched up from its swamp in all its claggy, dripping glory.

Overall, I found that the best dose of Xaggitin (64mg) wasn’t helping with depressive and anxious spiralling. My autism, shall we say, did not appreciate such emotional lurches. I knew I needed to try something else.

Vyvanse: 30mg

At time of writing, I have been taking Vyvanse (30mg) for three days. It is of course too early to tell what longterm impact it will have, but I do feel optimistic. My chest is open; I can exhale the world inside me.

Addendum: neurodiversity and neurodivergence — language matters

I have been alerted thanks to @neuroteachers to issues surrounding the language we use to discuss neurodiversity etc. Nick Walker explains it better than I can summarise: check out her post here.

Wendell Jr.’s first appearance in Princess and the Hustler sent me down a rabbithole. I’m supposed to creating resources for it, but his the camera around his neck got me thinking. Mavis, his mother, is furious with him, because he’s been out for ages with his friends:

WENDELL JUNIOR. Mummy. I am really sorry.
We’re doing nothing bad. We just hang by Queen Square with our cameras…
MAVIS. So let me get this right. You sneak out of my house at whatever time on this particular day to choose to go posing in the street /
WENDELL JUNIOR. Not posing Mummy.
Leon and some other guys wanted to take photographs by the docks. And you know I’m trying to learn everything I can…
I’ll be an apprentice one day in one of them photography studios …

Wendell’s a smooth talker; he’s able to talk his mother down by appealing to her vanity:

WENDELL JUNIOR. I split from those guys so I could come back and do portraits of you…
Mummy…
Gon’ use some of my savings to get them developed in that place Leon goes. Over by Fishponds…
Going to take real pretty pictures of you.
_MAVIS puts down the belt – _
You gon’ shine like a queen!
MAVIS pats her hair –
MAVIS. Pictures you say?
WENDELL JUNIOR lifts the camera to his face, and circles his mother, pretending to be taking photos –
MAVIS. You think so Junior?
Maybe…
You know when I iron out this wig and add a little colour on my face, you wouldn’t even recognise your own mother. MAVIS preens herself –

Cameras decide what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. They present these things as fixed, immutable, but photographs, as John Berger points out, are ‘appearances’. ‘Every image embodies a way of seeing … Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.’^[1] Who takes the photograph controls the narrative invisibly. The dominant narrative is always the narrative of normativity. In the 1960s, in which Princess and the Hustler is set, the photographer is becoming a celebrity. It is the era of David Bailey, Brian Duffy and Terence Donovan, the so-called ‘black trinity’, whose ways of seeing become the ways of seeing. London, through this lens, becomes ’Swinging London’.

But there is always a counter-text. Wendell’s photography mirrors a real movement of Black photographers who documented the real lives of Black people in the towns and cities. Photographers such as Neil Kenlock, Charlie Phillips, James Barnor and Armet Francis captured it all: the sorrows and the joys, the climactic and the mundane, the candid and the posed.

The photographer that came most to mind, though, was Raphael Albert, a photographer who established the Miss Black and Beautiful contest, followed by Miss West Indies in Great Britain, Miss Teenager of the West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada. Albert ran and photographed the pageants himself. His camera became a way to create a new narrative of Black beauty.^[2] In Princess, Wendell’s younger sister, the eponymous Princess, is desperate to enter (and win) a Weston-Super-Mare beauty pageant; the play brings together a new generation of who are ready to celebrate Black beauty and Black excellence. This is reinforced by the contextual framing of the Bristol Bus Boycott, whose success precipitated the passing of the 1965 Race Relations Acts, which made “racial discrimination unlawful in public places”, extended to housing and employment in 1968.

Beauty matters. Referencing Naomi Wolf^[3]’s idea of beauty as ‘a currency system like the gold standard’, Kim F Hall argues that if whiteness’ normativity is tied inextricably to notions of female beauty. White = beautiful, therefore beautiful must = white. Such associations run deep; Hall explores how images of Elizabeth I drew upon white normative ideals of beauty and simultaneously created them:

(My students were) looking at representations of Elizabeth I and discussing how her whiteness becomes both a spiritual and racialized virtue specifically associated with England. If, as art historian Roy Strong notes, later paintings of Elizabeth reflect a "messianic imperialist cult" that presented her as an almost magical and divine icon of England, then the fairness so reveled in also became part of that imperialist fervor.’^[4]

Black photographers undo these narratives and celebrate Black beauty not just for its own sake, but because to do so is a political act. For me — though I still have a lot to think about — that’s what I think Princess and the Hustler is doing, too.

1. Berger, John. (1972) Ways of Seeing ↩︎

2. Read more about him and his work here. ↩︎

3. In The Beauty Myth. ↩︎

4. Hall, Kim F. (1996) Things of Darkness ↩︎

As I tweeted yesterday, I'm walking a lot more. The walks help me think and write; some of this very post was sketched out on this morning's walk:

I was listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer, a First Nations scholar and a botanist, writes sentences that do what plants do — bind, wind, climb, effloresce, bud, bloom, wither, flicker — about what plants do. She opens with the Potawatomi origin story of Skywoman, who falls from the Skyworld and co-creates the Earth with the animals:

Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude.

Kimmerer compares this Indigenous origin story with that of Western Christianity; in binary opposition to the shared incandescent joy of Skywoman is Eve, whose story is one of banishment leading to a need to subugate the land to human will. It's the origin story of the Western hierarchy, with man as mightiest of all creation, and animals and plants below his feet. Skywoman gives us an alternative way of seeing, an analogue for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). It is the Skywoman to Western science's Eve; it is a cumulative body of knowedge that has been shaped by oral tradition and collectivity:

It is, Kimmerer writes, a 'grave error to separate the individual from the whole. When one tree fruits, they all fruit. Communication rings out beneath the soil, as I've previously written about in terms of mushrooms.

Science is bending this way. It's possible that spiders think with their webs. Reading A Mind Made Out of Silk, I encountered 'a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.' The skull, perhaps, does not mark the separation between 'us' and 'the world out there'; rather, there is a case that cognition extends beyond us 'out there'. There's a lot more to read about here, so I end this discussion here out of fear of writing something stupid.

It makes me think about the land, and how it has been claimed and reclaimed, with lines demarcated, erased and redrawn. Africa, I learned recently, was sliced up in all sorts of horrid and nonsensical colonial ways. In 'Description of Manchester' in Alexis de Tocqueville's Journeys to England and Ireland, 1835, he writes of the land:

An undulating plain, or rather a collection of little hills...On this watery land, which nature and art have contributed to keep damp, are scattered palaces and hovels. . . .Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills I have just described. Their six stories tower up; their huge enclosures give notice from afar of the centralisation of industry. The wretched dwellings of the poor are scattered haphazard around them. Round them stretches land uncultivated but without the charm of rustic nature, and still without the amenities of a town. The soil has been taken away, scratched and torn up in a thousand places, but it is not yet covered with the habitations of men. The land is given over to industry's use. . . .Heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools are found here and there among the houses and over the bumby, pitted surfaces of the public places. . . .

In There Is No Such Thing As Countries, Thomas Wells notes that countries are fictional. That doesn't mean 'that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.' Perhaps what we're seeing now — and amidst conflicts and so-called culture wars it's hard to be optimistic — is a new cynicism towards the grand narratives that led to hierarchies, taxonomies and cartographic mythmaking, but one that's tempered with a real effusive love and connectivity, both within the natural world and fizzing through our global digital networks. Perhaps this is kama muta, the 'sudden devotion emotion' that creates deep connections within communities. It's those connections — and getting outside — that get me through the toughest days.

Hello.

I'm still, like I think the majority of teachers in England, teaching An Inspector Calls as a modern text. It's getting harder, though, to seriously call it a 'modern' text. As I type this, though, I realise that 'modern' is exactly what it is — a text that's set on dismantling the grand narratives of modernism, while still not quite managing to throw off its own modernism. It's not contemporary, it's fair to say, which is what I think we're looking for when we're looking for a modern text to teach. It's a play that's set in 1912 and concerns some uppity white archetypes. It's as alien as Dickens to the teenagers in front of me.

It's no wonder, then, that AQA have made more diverse texts available for first teaching with the next cohort of Y10s. We've decided to swap out AIC for Princess and the Hustler; one of my gained time tasks is to put together resources for it. There's not a lot out there at the moment, so if you're going to teach it, get in touch on Twitter. I'm hoping to have more to share about this soon.

Despite all this, AIC is still giving me things to think about. My students found a recent mock on it difficult due to the lack of extract, so I told them that there's always an extract — it's the opening. The staging notes, character notes and first page of so of action are always the extract. No matter what, it all starts there. So we spent some time looking at how we could craft an essay about Gerald using the opening as a springboard. During this, I noticed that AIC — despite my having taught it for ten years now (and having studied it for my own Lit GCSE) — still gives me new things to think about. I think that's true of any text — you've got to be willing to have conversations with it, which is not always worth the effort. However, here are a few things we noticed about Gerald today:

1. The very first line and action from Birling is riddled with faux pas. He should be ordering the servant, not asking her ('Giving us the port, Edna?), and he should not be boasting about the port's provenance — how unseemly! This is before we consider that he distributes the port himself by (uncouth!) sliding it across the table; again, this is not a man used to servants but the 'provincial' life. His wife lets this one slide, but is less patient when he asks her to speak to the cook on his behalf. It terms of Gerald, he's pretty quiet. This is a 'well-bred' man, one who lives and breathes etiquette. He's able to steer Birling's boast into less embarrassing terrain via euphemism ('then it'll be all right') while saying that unlike his father, he 'doesn't pretend to know much about it.' That 'pretend' might be innocuous, but in a play that's pretty damned exacting in its attention to period language, one might read it as Gerald's coded warning to Birling to avoid bringing up his father. Gerald's family's status is a boon for Birling and Co. — Arthur makes no secret of this when his engagement toast becomes an excuse to bang the capitalism drum of 'lower costs, higher prices' — but the absence of the elder Crofts (and therefore their approval) will not be directly addressed by Gerald. Gerald refers to his father as 'The Governor', affectionate Edwardian upper-class slang for 'father', which is both a reminder of Gerald's close relationship with his father and the gap in status. Birling needs Gerald more than Gerald needs him — perhaps.

2. On this last point: Gerald is shrewd. He is not one of those landed people who will isolate themselves from the prosperous bourgeoisie and face their own ruin — he, like his father, has industrialised (and quite early on; we learn that Crofts Limited is older and bigger than Birling and Co.) meaning that he knows that the gentry need to rub shoulders with more common stock if they were to survive. Sybil seems the unhappy pawn in such a union across class lines. But in Gerald's case, it is the man who is marrying 'beneath himself'. It might seem odd, but what better way to absorb the competition without making a fuss? It's clear from the opening that maximum impact from minimum fuss is Gerald's m.o.

3. He's 'too manly to be a dandy' but is nevertheless a 'well-bred young man about town'. I want to touch on 'dandy' first: there must be no sense of effeminacy or modern ostentatiousness about Gerald. His is a rather Victorian masculinity, one that is shrewd, robust and sensible. Despite his age, he is a man much in thrall to the past. 'Well-bred' gives me pause in the context of the early 20th century, a period in which eugenicist thinkers were celebrated in the mainstream. Breeding was tied up in how human one was 'allowed' to be, codified by Enlightenment standards of human perfection; it would, of course, reach its nadir via the events of WWII, Nazism and the Holocaust. In 1945, as the war ends, Priestley adds a reference to breeding, which might have rung rather more dangerously in the postwar period — if there's anything one doesn't want to go back to, it's that. For more on this line of thinking, read this: On the dark history of intelligence as domination

This post is an experiment. Usually I procrastinate; what you don't see are the hundreds of posts I haven't published (or indeed finished) due to perfectionism, akrasia, shame, and other nonsense. I've had a difficult time recently (it's nothing I haven't written about before), during which writing — which I love — became work, not fun, so this approach of slapping some daily thoughts straight into a blog post is a way of making it fun again. It's part of a wider effort to pay attention more and worry less — my posts are going to be more spontaeneous and — hopefully — more frequent. I was inspir by Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter, who wrote:

I'm going to see if it's true.

Thank you for reading.

Alex

“My manager tells me I need to smile more.”
—Kurt Cobain

I thought a voice had to be about what you could do. It wasn’t until I heard Billie Holiday that I realized a voice could be a collection of compensations for things you couldn’t do. The great singers were also the great interpreters. She had just a single octave, and she made it her lifelong subject.  I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
—Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

Months before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Nirvana played an MTV Unplugged performance, closing with a cover of Lead Belly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’  If you haven’t seen it before, you can watch it here.  Rehearsal’s leading up to the performance were tense; Cobain was jittery and snappy with drug withdrawal and at one point refused to play.  He asked for the stage to be decked out with lilies and candles, ‘like a funeral’.  The performance as a whole, especially the closing track, would be Kurt’s requiem, released posthumously in the wake of his suicide.

Listen.  It is the sound of pain.  Cobain is not a gifted singer in the technical sense; he is not a showman nor a virtuoso.  Hunched like a cardiganed vulture over his acoustic guitar, his eyes — when he looks at you, which he seldom does — are ice.  In the final chorus he jumps up an octave, his voice a chainsaw made of cigarettes, and he hits the word ‘shiver’ so hard that Grohl stops drumming, his voice breaking, blood-lunged.

This is the sound of limitations.  Beautiful limitations.

I showed this video to my Y13s to make a point: creating something incredible does not involve access to every resource.  On the contrary, the best creative work is born from some sort of limitation.  My Y13s were spending too much time with their texts, trying to find the ‘perfect’ quotation; once they had it, they were trying to write the perfect 'essay'.  To combat this, I gave them an essay question and then told them to open their texts at random — I believe we were studying A Streetcar Named Desire at the time — and they were only allowed to use those pages as the basis of their essays.  They had to make the best of what they had.  The essays they turned in were better: sharper, less fussy, clearer, and a few of them said that they’d read the text in new ways because they were forced to look at parts they’d glossed over before in favour of the more familiar.

There are a few other ways in which this approach might be useful in an English setting.  In terms of creative writing, one of my favourite techniques is what DBC Pierre in Release the Bats calls ‘the pressure cooker’.  The idea is that the best stories are the product of tension, which means that the writer should restrict things as much as possible.  Limit the amount of time a character has to figure something out, the amount of physical space they have, how much they know, how much they can see.  The more you do this, the more tense and lean the story becomes — the action is taut, tense, hair-trigger.  It’s a great way to get students away from baggy plotting.

This is similar to Jacob Ross, who prizes the idea of the ‘singularity’ when crafting a short story: “a single dominant character is confronted with a singular dominant problem or challenge for which there is  a single dominant outcome” (from Webb, Teach Like A Writer).

Lastly, it’s worth considering what Lockwood said about Billie Holiday.  Holiday helped her realise that the best and most beautiful voices were ‘collections of compensations for things you couldn’t do. She had thought that ‘a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits.’  This is why I use Cobain as my example, but it’s also because of Lockwood’s final comment: the imperfect voices have ‘an additional dimension, which is pain’.   Pain is easy to forget and hard to listen to, but — somehow — it seems to me that it’s where a lot of beauty lives.

Further reading:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/nirvanas-tense-brilliant-em-unplugged-in-new-york-em-20-years-later/282040/

The Classical liberalism that was the dominant mode of thought in Enlightenment and Romanticism have a fair bit in common, though they are ostensibly in opposition.  Both rejected the rigid social hierarchies of the old order and emphasized the importance of individual freedom and creativity.  And both are rooted in ideas of intellectual superiority, whether it was an Enlightenment sense of logical and technical Scientific rationalism or a more Romantic sense of 'poetry' — to use the old sense of poetry, 'to make or create'.  Shelley saw poets as 'institutors of laws ... founders of civil society'.  For aesthetes like Shelley, poetry was the way to get society to behave itself; for those of a more rationalist bent, this was better achieved by more logical means.  In the latter case, it was reason — taut, sensible, and stress-tested right from its Grecian origins via the Renaissance — that was the safeguard against ignorance.

This is where we come to the first point of divergence.  We might see history —albeit with broad brushstrokes — as a push-pull between emotional and rational modes of thinking, as though the two were mutually exclusive.  While I maintain that they are not, one only has to look at British education nowadays to see the fault lines between the structured domains of Mathematics and Science and the Humanities (whose name references the desire to civilise savages that characterised the early formulations of the discipline). Perhaps we could see Romanticism and Enlightenment thought as the beginning of what would eventually calcify into a schism.  The ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Man, or polymath made no such distinctions; one only needs consider the role of the  Fibonacci Sequence in the golden ratio to find evidence of this.  However, Enlightenment liberalism's insistence that reason will liberate and civilise is what seems to set off Romanticism as opposition to it.  Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern, follows this thread. Codified at the heart of modern thinking, he writes, is the belief that Culture / Politics and Science are fundamentally separate entities that should be kept apart, but this distinction should never have been made.  Certainly we can trace a lineage from the Enlightenment thought to our current proclivities.

Perhaps another point of divergence could be drawn along class lines. Romanticism’s core values are ‘youth, vibrancy, immediacy, ephemerality’, according to Sutherland, John. (2014) in A Little History of Literature: life fast: die young, in simpler terms.  Lord Byron was considered 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know'; as an aristocrat, he rather conformed to the Rake (archetype), or perhaps the Libertine (archetype).  The point is that this kind of character is going to have enough social cachet to be able to burn brightly for a brief time; it is no coincidence that the Romantic poets who died young were from privileged backgrounds.  Reason, then, was the preserve of the bourgeoisie, because it was reason that led to wealth being made for oneself.  No need for this when one inherits one's wealth, but there is every need to be po-facedly sensible when one's own capital is at risk.

What happens, though, is that both schools of thought converge around ideas of individualism — indeed, enshrined within the rhetoric of the French Revolution are the core values of both: liberty, equality, fraternity.  But this is also the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: how can such things coexist?  Slavery was an inevitable product of the Enlightenment, in fact, Orlando Patterson writes.  Though it seems at first surprising that slavery should have occurred during the Enlightenment, wherein individual human beings’ have inalienable rights and freedoms, it isn’t, because how else does one measure freedom if not in contrast to its opposite, slavery?  One simply has to codify what ‘human’ means. Ostensibly universal, ‘human’ is actually a strictly-defined set of white, patriarchal hegemonic values.  To be ‘human’ is to be ‘civilised’, and both Romanticism and Enlightenment thought believed its ways of thinking held the key to this, whether by artistic transcendence or by scientific rationalism.  Either way, though, both reify the very values they ostensibly seem to reject: power concentrated in the hands of the few, resulting in as strict a hierachy as any that had gone before.  The difference now was that the middle classes were in the ascendancy and, driven by a new-found sense of individual importance as sanctioned by both rationalism and Romanticism, there was no stopping their ability to make their own myths.

All this is to say (and, I disclaim, that if this post seems rambling it’s because it is; I’m using this as a way to share ideas in a rather raw state, so please do not take this as authoritative but as a vital part of the learning process3) that I’m having to change things. A lot. 

I’m referring to several different changes that I’m either trying to bring about or that are happening to me anyway, sometimes on the very hinterland of my awareness. The first is that my attitude towards and awareness of my own language is changing. It’s a slow and strange process, but it is one, I remind myself, that I have the (white) privilege of choosing to enact, and so if I want to try to work past that privilege I must engage, lest I perpetuate that privilege. Second, the certainty and authority and ease with which I usually write has gone: at least, when I am exploring matters of decolonisation, race, raciolinguistics &c. I cannot write about these subjects from any sort of authority (the opposite, in fact: I feel like a child, which is not a bad thing by any means) which kneecaps my speed, fluency, and confidence. I’m used to getting the words out there fast. Writing doesn’t come that hard. Don’t mistake the rapid blurting of this post for ease, though. I am writing it in a weird state of tension: trying to just let the words get out there while trying to be mindful of what the words are doing. 

And therein lies the tension. I want to take care, but in order to do so I have to change the way I write. My writing cannot be how I used to write. It has to be exploratory. This is not the finished product. This is externalised thinking. 

All that said, I am going to slow down and work through an idea that (I think) is helping me engage with new ways of thinking, being and seeing:

Stop trying to ‘get it’

This might seem a ridiculous statement given everything I’ve written above, but I am referring to an ingrained white way of seeing I’m trying to unpick. I’ll illustrate by way of anecdote.

Year 9’s class reader was The Art of Being Normal, a YA novel narrated by two transgender teenagers. While we were reading students were receptive, but I could sense some discomfort. Eventually one student gave in:

‘I just don’t get it, sir. Transgender. The whole thing. It just doesn’t make sense to me.’

I asked the students whether it was important if they ‘got it’ or not. I asked the students about a few different things, to see whether they ‘got’ them or not, such as quantum gravity, money, or how their fridge works. Naturally they did not. I asked them whether or not ‘getting it’ was a barrier to belief, to acceptance. It was not. It’s not important to have to ‘get’ everything, because nobody ever does. And this is especially true of human beings. I have found that my (white) way of thinking, calcified by years of British education4 assumes that I have to understand things. I have come to realise that ‘understand’ doesn’t mean what I have told myself it means. It has come to mean make this fit with your current ways of thinking. What if it simply doesn’t? Discard. Sometimes this is a useful heuristic: it works pretty well with conspiracy theories. It’s the structure of my thinking, the whole architecture. The edifice needs razing to the ground. Therefore, I’m trying less to ‘get it’, which also means:

Stop!

I don’t stop. I talk all the time. And it means I’m not really listening. And it means that I hurtle from one bias to the next. If I want to change my thinking, I’ve got to stop. I foreclose and erase so much otherwise. Don’t mistake this post for me not stopping, but rather the result of having stopped.

Closing thoughts

If you’ve got this far, you might be thinking that there’s not a lot of specific critical substance here. This is not an essay, at least not in that sense. This is just part of a conversation; it’s an update on how I’m thinking right now. Specifics will come; I am thinking a great deal about how language can be a force for immense good within the secondary classroom, but I am aware it can be (and often is) the precise opposite. To get better at understanding this, I’m currently exploring:

• Hall, Kim F. ‘Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender’. Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 4, 1996, p. 461. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/2870958.

• hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

• Flores, Nelson, and Jonathan Rosa. ‘Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education’. Harvard Educational Review, vol. 85, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 149–71, https://doi.org/10.17763/0017–8055.85.2.149.

It’s very easy to get hung up on what one hates (though hate is a strong word, it is a worthy one for our hyperbolic times).  In antithesis to this, then, is this post, which might (my caprices notwithstanding), become a series.  

This is a love letter.  It is short missive of tenderness and unabashed affection.  There are things I like, sure, but rarely do I find something I love.  I think we’re all like that.  This goes beyond things I got obsessed with (and there are plenty of those); this is about things that resonate like a bell caught briefly on the hem of a coat.  These are the things that are hard to write about and hard to speak about, because when you love something, you resort to cliché.  It’s not surprising, really — what else is there to do, but let language fail?  The originality of the love — let’s comfort ourselves — is in complete opposition to the unoriginality of our expression of it.  I apologise, then, in both the original sense and modern sense of the word ‘apology’ — I both justify my clichés and ask forgiveness for them.  

In any case: my first love letter is to Jimmy Eat World, a rock band from Mesa, Arizona.  I write it having just got my first tattoo — a Jimmy Eat World tattoo, so the timing feels right:

Surviving

Never had anything to prove

But never was anyone like you

All you fought through

All you had to face

Made you stronger, unafraid

(From ‘555’, Surviving, 2019)

16 October 2019, and my newborn baby can’t breathe.  She’s rushed to a specialist unit in Luton because her needs are beyond the capabilities of the hospital in which she was born. The next day, drunk from sleeplessness, I smash my wing mirror in an attempt to get out of the hospital car park.  I get someone at Halfords to tape it back on.  My baby lies still in a glass box, nested in wires.  Rhythmic bleeps let me know that she lives.  

18 October, and I hold her for the first time.  I tell her that she cannot die.  I demand it, a father’s first ultimatum.  

On 18 October, Jimmy Eat World release Surviving, their first album since 2016’s Integrity Blues.  It’s a return to rockier, simpler times, go the previews and reviews.  Perhaps.  But I am in pain and I am afraid and that is not what I hear.  I hear Jim Adkins tell me that I’m ‘Never alone in pain’ on opener ’Surviving’; to not ‘worry where we end up / This ending up's not real’ on ‘Delivery’ and, most crucially, ‘555’, whose lyrics become a kind of anthem of our need for her to survive. 

‘Time, such clumsy time …’

Looking back, a lot of the band’s work is preoccupied with time, with each album having something to say about it, some crisis it brings about, some reflections it precipitates.  I think this is why they’ve stuck with me; there’s a Jimmy Eat World for every age, like an emo version of Jacques ‘Seven Ages of Man’ from As You Like It.  So here’s a rundown of their discography through the lens of time: how it seems to move, what it does to things, and how, sometimes, you’d swear you could touch it. 

Static Prevails (1996)

Unsettled, severing

Always severing old ties

One last good-bye may last the rest of your life

(from ‘Claire’)

Youth.  Energy.  Nothing is figured out, but you act like everything is.  You’re never going to die, and you are pure yearning.  This album is pure ambition: the vocals are scratchy, catching at the heights like feathers on barbed wire.  Guitars interlock in a kind of crystalline hesitance that must surge, must break — and break it does, into waves of dissonance that reach towards the next melodic thread.  Static is what Prevails when you’re young: you’re still tuning into those frequencies that’ll define you.  For now, though, you bathe in the noise until you become static yourself. 

Clarity (1999)

”If I don't let myself be happy now, then when?

If not now, when?"

(from ‘For Me This Is Heaven’)

Next comes Clarity.  You hit your twenties and decide you see things as they really are.  You’ve shaken off youth’s gauche efforts, settling into comfort, but it’s ‘mindless comfort’1.  You start to yearn for things you weren’t brave enough to grasp when you were dumb enough to dream.  On opener ‘Table for Glasses’, Jim Adkins sings that ‘it happens too fast / To make sense of it / Or make it last’; from this point, an album that’s resolutely lush and midtempo aside from a few distorted spikes asks if things will ever slow down enough to make sense.  By the closer, ‘Goodbye Sky Harbour’, which draws on Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, music and lyric meet in paradox.  The lyrics play with time and distance: ‘Do you remember that?’ and ‘So here I am above palm trees so straight and tall / You are smaller, getting smaller / But I still see you’, as the song falls into a loop lasting about 12 mins of the song’s 15 min runtime.  As things fade, they remain.  In-between all of this are songs about wishing for better things (‘Lucky Denver Mint’, ‘Believe In What You Want’), living with regret and fear (‘A Sunday’) and the overwhelming desire to stay within a moment that you’re missing because you don’t want it to end (‘Just Watch The Fireworks’).  

Bleed American (2001)

On sleepless roads the sleepless go

May angels lead you in

(‘Hear You Me’)

So shape up, shake off.  You swing between impatience (‘cheating gets it faster’), self-help (‘don’t write yourself off yet’) and a need to feel something real and urgent, just like you used to (‘I want to always feel like part of this was mine / I want to fall in love tonight’).  Any which way, you’re now, pure now.

This album wasn’t supposed to be the hit it was.  It is still Jimmy Eat World’s most successful album, containing by far the band’s most famous single, the Taylor Swift lip-synched ‘The Middle’.  Dropped by their label, Capitol, the band had to resort to working day jobs.  It was a bleak time, but they put songs together, kept going, and ended up signing to Dreamworks.   The album is a labour of love, a shout in the dark, a proof that love and effort combined might just get you somewhere.  

Bleed American opens with a title track that fairly crashes with their old youth, but it’s tauter, older, wiser.  But such an offensive can’t last; much of the album is wistful: The Promise Ring’s Davey von Bohlen’s croon locks in with Jim’s on ‘A Praise Chorus’ as they reference all the songs that made them feel alive as they were growing up; ‘Our House’ realises too late that ‘Sometimes, I wish I could lose you again’.  For an album that’s best remembered for the optimism of ‘The Middle’, it’s a surprisingly mournful work: ‘The sweetness will not be concerned with me’, Adkins repeats as ‘Sweetness’ barrels to a peppy conclusion that belies its pessimism.  Perhaps the saddest moments are from ‘Cautioners’, whose tempo is as cautious as its lyrics are hopeless:

You'll change your mind come Monday and turn your back on me

You'll take your steps away with hesitance

You'll take your steps away from me

or from closer ‘My Sundown’:

 With one hand high, you'll show them your progress

You'll take your time, but no one cares

Futures (2004)

I won't always love what I'll never have

I won't always live in my regrets

(‘23’)

But you are so fearful of the future.  The past gave you no assurances, so why should the future be any better?  As title track and opener ‘Futures’ notes, it’s ’so hard to find a balance / Between living decent / And the cold and real’.  Things darken; the musicality of Futures now matches the lyrical content so its rawness has nowhere to hide.  Much of the album is about not knowing what to say or what to do, feeling stuck in places and within oneself.  ‘I can’t help it baby, this is who I am’, Adkins sings on ‘Kill’; one track earlier, on ‘Work’, he’s revealed that he is someone who is struck dumb by fears of who he’s supposed to be: ‘All I can say / I shouldn’t say’.  The mid-album highlight is ‘Pain’, an explicit stab of agony with blood under its nails and bandages around its wrists: 

Anyone can make what I have built and better now

Anyone can find the same white pills

It takes my pain away

It's a lie, a kiss with open eyes

And she's not breathing back

Anything but bother me

Never mind, these are horrid times

I can't let it bother me

The guitars slosh and stab, the bass jitters, the drums nail gun you into submission.  But things seem to get better: once the narcotised haze of Drugs or Me’ clears, things largely settle down.  But ‘Night Drive’ sees that things are better only superficially, and ’23’ brings us further from the future than ever: it brings us back to the last time we were hopeful, before the regrets, a life rewound and started again:

Amazing still it seems

I'll be 23

I won't always love what I'll never have

I won't always live in my regrets

It’s a gorgeous song.  It soars in a way that epic but not arrogant, hopeful but not naïve.  And the album closes in on itself, the past and the future one.  

Chase This Light (2007)

Play my little part in something big

(‘Big Casino’)

The world doesn’t get smaller, but you feel more at ease in it.  Some of the old optimism comes back.  This album came out just as I was recovering from a horrid time, so it feels almost impossible to write about it.  Taken without that context, it’s an average album, and not really a patch on the three-album run that came before it.  But that’s what experience, time and love do to things (I’m convinced, for example, that I’d find Star Wars distinctly average if it hadn’t played such a formative role in my childhood).  But it did, so I don’t, and its the same for this album.  Listening to it now, I’m taken back to a certain point in time, but the edges are sanded off now.  

Invented (2010)

 My best theory

It’s already in me

(‘My Best Theory’)

This is the album that didn’t really click for me.  I drifted away from the band for a few years, and it was partly because of this album.  Lyrically, it was an experiment, with Jim writing lyrics based on photographs.  His lyrics have always worked for me because of how personal they seem (that’s emo for you), but there was something about how he used them to inhabit characters on this album that left me estranged, compared to their other efforts.  However, I can look at it more favourably now, because it’s about making oneself — for oneself, or for others.  Perhaps a better title might have been ‘reinvented’.  However, the title track reminds us that we’re always a different self to everyone we meet, and this is true vice-versa:

 You’re always in my head

You’re just what I wanted

I live in constant debt

To feel you, invented.

Damage (2013)

 If I don’t lean on you I fall

(‘Lean’)

The breakup album for when you’re too old or busy to have the time to deal with it properly.  Damage is about how and why lovers become strangers, about how people leave shards of themselves embedded in your long after they’ve gone, about how love maybe is a ‘fiction, written by the loneliest’ (‘Book of Love’).  It’s about codependency, too (‘Lean’), and how a relationship can make you both blind to and confront versions of yourself that are pretty awful.  This is an album of weary wounds, uncertain of its ability to heal, its lo-fi production an abrasive whisper in your ears at night.  

Integrity Blues (2016)

It’s all what you do when no-one’s there

It’s all what you do when no one cares

(‘Integrity Blues’)

This album is a whisper, too.  You’re getting older still, and you’re taking stock.  So you experiment. That’s what this album is, a bit like Invented was, but this is more successful. This time, the guitars sparkle, synths purr, drums patter.  It’s an album of neon night, an album of nocturnal softness.  It is the most comforting thing the band have ever put out; it’s sparklers and fire-crackle, it’s stars on a cloudless night.  It wraps itself around you. 

Surviving (2019)

 That’s how a diamond grows

Give yourself the right chance over time

Don’t believe them if they try to sell you something quicker

(‘Diamond’)

Like Chase This Light, this album takes me back to a difficult time, as I outlined at the top of this post.  But it’s easier to listen to, partly because it’s an album about making peace, not with ‘distance’ (see ‘Cautioners’ as mentioned earlier), but with closeness.  This is an album about patience, acceptance.  It is an album about stopping and letting time be time.  Not rushing, not slowing down: just being.  Survival.

I love this band.  I’ve written over 2,000 words now, and I think I still haven’t explained why.  It doesn’t matter: ‘Naming  is the love act and its pledge’, Kavanagh wrote; through love, we ‘snatch out of time the passionate transitory.’

She was almost disappointed in herself. The inevitability of the killing was such that it felt more like a looming deadline, something she just had to get to, then past. She wanted to smirk at ‘deadline’ as it flashed past, but thoughts of how dull inevitability made the whole affair dulled even her usual weakness for weak puns.

He crossed his legs in front of her, adjusting his trouser-seam on his knee. He interlaced his fingers. His nails were a little too long. Somehow, that was part of it.

He placed a thin sheaf of bulldog-clipped papers onto the desk, next to the tea. Everything was already written, she thought, looking at them. Everything in there always was, and this was always going to be. The bitterness, she realised, as she forced herself to drink the tea, wasn’t limited to the beverage; the true bitterness was that by killing him, she’d be making him the tragic hero, and she the villain.

It always was his narrative, though.

He cleared his throat. Somehow, that was part of it. ‘Paradise Industries thanks you for your service, Lucy. But we’re concerned about some of the things you’ve been saying. We’ve got to let you go. We’re hoping this can be quick and clean.’

It would be, she thought. So quick, so clean. She forced herself to look into his eyes. Of course they were blue. Placid, benevolent, omniscient. His smile, salesman-white, had something different about it. Something at the corners of it. Something, she realised now, that was a little like hers.

She looked down at the tea.

Oh, God.

Oh. God.

If I’m honest, I think I’ve been putting off a) working on this and b) sharing it because of my ignorance; I’m desperate to get things ‘right’, trying to be aware of my biases and privileges. But I think allowing that (in itself privilged, I think) self-doubt to stop me sharing anything also limits any discussion, any discourse. Far better, I think, to be wrong in public and learn.

And if I’m really honest, this might be one of the reasons I’ve kept away from. Twitter. There are so many people who (I think) know better that me, who might ridicule me, might call me out, might make me feel I shouldn’t write anything, but I know this is a narrative I have wrought for myself. The best place for this kind of discussion is Twitter. So I am also going to post this in thread format there, too, if only to playact some bravery.

Pauses to share to Twitter.

Okay: done.

Back to writing.

1. How does Protestantism influence and shape the modern world?

2. How was race constructed in Early modern literature?

3. How do we create a world that embraces difference?

4. ls capitalism a religion?

5. How should we read Shakespeare in the 21st century?

6. How useful are English literary studies in the 21st century?

7. How does secular society find meaning?

8. What is the 'self’?

9. How do societies work?

10. Is religion now outmoded; does it have any place in the modern world?

11. What comes after postmodernism?

12. What's the moral status of capitalism?

It both did and did not surprise me. I waited for one to grab me.

One did.

I’ll tell you which very soon. I’m back to working on it. Having a questions demands the centering of enquiry; it demands an answer. There are no easy answers to these questions, but I think that’s good — turns out that’s the only kind of question I’m interested in.

Some students say, ‘hands’ or ‘fist’, but most don’t — most say things like ‘aggression’, ‘tension’, ‘generosity’, ‘openness’, ‘begging’. When I looked at these images with Year 11, one student (without any prompting), said that they represented Scrooge’s Stave 1 and Stave 6 selves respectively, drawing on ‘tight-fisted hand at the grindstone’ and comparing it to his open-handed generosity. 

The point is: we think analytically. We look at things, material things, and we use them to talk about other things. Most human metaphors are so commonplace they pass by unnoticed:

• I’m on board with this.

• That broke me.

• I couldn’t see it from her perspective.

Analysis stems from this fact of human interaction: language used in perfectly literal form seldom does the job. The trick is to get students to notice. 

I was looking extracts from near the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale with Year 9, and I started with images that related to the extract. I wanted them to understand that the way they spoke about the images was the way they should think and write about the text. This was the first image:

The first student said, ‘This is an image of sacrifice.’ I asked him how he knew this. He said that it was also an image of pain, but it was a pain on behalf of others. 

I asked if it wasn’t just a crucifix. 

‘Yeah,’ another said, but to most people it’s so much more than that. 

‘Most people?’

‘Yeah. It depends on who you are. Different things mean different things to different people.’

Exactly. And this is what I think we’re asking students to do when we’re asking them to analyse. We’re getting them to realise that language means different things to different people in different contexts, and that probing this is an interesting to do, because it’s how we make meaning. It’s how we learn. And, also, it’s fun. 

We came up with a formula for how we might read analytically. Normally, I hate this way of doing things, but this seemed to work quite nicely:

Thing + how it’s used = idea

The key is that things in the physical world only really mean anything of any significance in the abstract. I asked the students to think about what our school actually was. We discussed whether or not it was the building, and we agreed that it couldn’t be, because we could knock the school down, build a new one, give it the same name and it would be the same school. The same? Well, they answered, the important bits would be the same. The school’s ethos, rules, reputation — they’d still be the same. And what do all those important things have in common? They’re all abstract: they’re things we believe in, things that exist in the realm of the mind but not materially. Does that mean that the material doesn’t matter? No: without the material, the concrete, there is nothing to anchor ideas to. There’s no common frame of reference. Nobody learns anything in a wholly abstract school. 

Slowly but surely, I realised I was teaching my students about semiotics in order to get them to grasp what I mean when I ask them to analyse. 

To analyse, then, is to probe the ways in which the concrete relates to the abstract. When noticing that the Commander’s Wife uses a ‘cane’, students were then able to quickly grasp that this has ideas attached to it which made sense when they thought about the thing and how it’s used:

• She’s vulnerable

• She might feel fragile

• Her movement will be limited, therefore she might feel limited in other ways

• She’s trapped in ways that go beyond the trapping of a body in physical space

• She might feel clumsy and awkward

And so on. All they did was realise that things relate to ideas: the concrete and the abstract team up to make meaning. Analysis, then, is one of the most natural things to do. I feel that framing it like this helped my students get past a lot of the dread, confusion and apathy that the word ‘analysis’ dredges up. It’s not the whole picture — there is much more to reading, thinking and living — but it’s a start.

A rather polarising performance; several publications took issue with the big blank set and the bizarre costuming; at least one (as memory serves, The Guardian) took issue with the rather prosaic delivery of the lines.

Notable for its rather hysterical Antonio as played (I think quite interestingly and well) by Jamie Ballard, who starts the play sobbing and looks about to do the same at the end. It's almost enough to forget the scene in which he literally spits, twice, in Shylock's face at point-blank range. Khoury's Shylock was received polarisingly, too, with some seeing his performance as moving and quietly menancing, while others saw it as rather pathetic — an old downtrodden man in a cardigan.

It's also notable for really playing up the romantic nature of Bassanio's relationship with Antonio. Interestingly, Antonio's love seems consistent, if jittery and hysterical. When he's first alone with Bassanio he can barely get his words out and instead starts gurning and pantomiming a bizarre American accent. But, as Merchant, 1.1 moves forward, the two move closer together in meet with the magnetic inevitability of a kiss, one that happens so quickly that the audience can't quite tell who instigated it. It's Antonio's voice, though, that gives away just how it has affected him, quavering and modulating all over the place post-kiss. Bassanio's stays level; tellingly, he moves closer towards Antonio when he thinks he might be about to borrow (more!) money from Antonio, but becomes aloof when learning that Antonio's ships are all at see. The two men are in each other's arms again only when Antonio says he'll 'try what my credit can in Venice do.' However, Bassanio mirrors Antonio's early hysteria in the infamous court scene later, realising too late what happens when you equate money with love (see 'To you, Antonio, I owe the most in money and in love' (Merchant, 1.1.121-138)), screaming, emptying a bag of banknotes all over the stage, before finally kissing Antonio — this time in full view of his friends and wife, in public and not private — tenderly and passionately, making Portia's line, 'Your wife would not thank you for that,' ring with menace and jilted sadness. I'd argue that this production really does try to make this work, making much of the strange awkwardness and gender-friction in the denouement in the argument over the rings and compounded by Lorenzo and Jessica's melancholy night-time discussion of doomed lovers and Jessica's inability to be cheered by music.

The play ends, then, with a stage full of candles, which have gradually been brought on (with some excellent physical comedy) by Lancelot Gobbo. Antonio is eventually left alone on the stage, just as he began, his love paradoxically requited and unrequited — the candles make it clear who bears the torch.

It's a troublesome play, and it's hard for me to really know what I made of this. It did feel as though it was yearning for symbolism it didn't quite understand itself; the big empty stage made all the more so by all the mirrors worked in some cases but often worked in counterpoint to the intimacy needed for certain scenes, such as the courtroom, in which too much open space made some of the actors look rather lost. It succeeds, though, in capturing the melancholy nature of a play that never really feels to a modern audience particularly comic. Perhaps that's the best we can expect of Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice: unevenness, mirrors, and, ultimately, a bit of dissatisfaction.4

Details here.