Jim Granter

It’s a new month and so I feel it’s also time for a few blogged thoughts. Have received news that Keele University have chosen to close all their Continuing Education classes ( at least the ones I have been attending for the last 2 years – see blog of 10 February, 2010 ). They don’t call it that of course. Couched in some vague euphemisms about retirements in the Department, reduced and devolved budgets and such.  However, now the good news. Have also heard that some of the old stalwarts of one of the classes and the tutor have combined their not inconsiderable wills, intellects and regard for their fellow human beings to arrange with our local pub for our new classes to use the pub’s function room and the tutor has already put together our new syllabus on the theme of  Twentieth Century Liberation movements. To be studied through eight sessions on literature, with a further session devoted to related movements in art and one more on a play yet to be chosen. Wonderful. (If this is what the latest pathetic slogan of  our government means by the Big Society, then I like it. But it isn’t really, is it). How we pay the tutor is nobody else’s business. I already have Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, used to have Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City but had to buy it again along with Meridian (Alice Walker), Disgrace (J M Coetzee) and The Help ( Kathryn Stockett ). How good is that, to have a real reason to buy some new books. The accompanying links are there for me to see some background and also because sometimes such links means you follow one and don’t get back to where you came from for hours, if at all.

Been to Leek today to meet up with someone doing their family tree and who has discovered she is related to my wife. Leek is not like any other town round here and since we spent most of our 2 hours today in a cafe talking, we plan to return soon for a prolonged mooch around the streets, back streets and shops.

Looking after next door’s stick insects – am told there are 8 in the two containers but have only spotted 6 so far amongst the foliage. Hope they are all apparent when I hand them back in 10 days time…… What odd pets.

General election campaigning is all over today so been to vote at the Civic Centre for one of the candidates who promises to sort out the economy; watched the indoor bowls for a while. How civilised, one activity in the world where all that is solid has melted into air and then one where it all looks pretty solid to me.

Started (obviously) reading the Communist Manifesto again while waiting at two NHS hospitals for B’s drug test monitoring, consultation on a proposed new treatment and finally a breast cancer screening.  All free at the point of need.

Beth rings us up to check out funeral protocol as she is going to one and it’s the first for her on her own.

Have dug out two Be Good Tanyas CDs to put on this computer. Excellent listening when you’re in the mood, a very Southern sound it seems to me, though they’re from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Just spent a satisfyingly idle hour on Flickr looking at a slideshow of one photographer’s work. He clearly loves America – classic cars, people and buildings; lots of sheds! To the question “How do they get those cars so clean?” the only answer must be time and effort. Which is probably what lies behind everything worthwhile really. Yes, those cars are worthwhile in my book. Whole slideshow takes me back to my trips in April ’88 and June ’02. Nostalgia is what it used to be. Thanks Marty.

Gave a first donation of platelets yesterday in Stoke-on-Trent. Oil level warning light in the car on the way with the accompanying message “Switch off engine immediately” was worrying but probably explainable after several days of snow and temperatures below zero and not using the car . Not the sort of thing one expects in a Nissan either. After checking levels and a quick burst of acceleration needed to enter fast moving traffic it went off and I still arrived in time, though slightly flustered and a little apprehensive anyway. Seventy five minutes, a big drink of water, staff who know how to smile and a bag of yellow stuff later I was ready to make the next appointment. The machines cost £50 000 each. Taxes and time well spent.

Whilst watching the machine’s display racking up the numbers and beeping occasionally, I managed to read a bit more of Manhattan Transfer by John dos Passos in anticipation of our focus on him this Thursday. Tomorrow though it’s McTeague by Frank Norris which I have enjoyed and look forward to seeing what the rest of the group think, as I suspect that none of them are as keen on Am Lit as I am, though they are always outspoken and often generous in response to any writing they enjoy. Last year one thought that Sherwood Anderson‘s Winesburg Ohio was the worst book she had ever read! Some stills from the film Greed, (with its extraordinary production history and based on McTeague) remind me of scenes from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, also based on a book, this time by the wonderfully mysterious B Traven.

Through Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham) and Housman ( A Shropshire Lad) in a sort of fin de siecle way on Wednesday this week and then Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and e e cummings on Thursday. Religion and sex, especially sex, dominated the responses to all these works. Differences and similarities in attitudes to promiscuity and homosexuality, between the period of these writers’ work, 1890- 1940 and our own times made a happy balance in the lectures and ensuing discussion with the attention we paid to traditional lit crit.  The latter revealed again the wide variety of ways of reading there are, even among 20 or so people.   We don’t really have formal lectures because all three tutors allow and sometimes invite interruptions. They get them uninvited too, such is the enthusiasm and confidence of we students – most of us are clearly over 60 after all. Perhaps this also explains the ease and considerable delight just about everyone shows in talking about sex….

After the morning with the poets I had lunch in Reubens in Newcastle-under-Lyme with a friend who assists at a catholic church. Afterwards she gave me a guided tour of the church, the sort of thing that is always a treat even given my atheist convictions. They have a relic in this church – a piece of a martyr’s arm, kept in box hidden away in a wall unfortunately! Two sculptures by Eric Gill too (interesting hyperlink there) . So loads to think and reflect on that day, to say the least.