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.

A long time ago in a town far away (well 80 miles) I came 28th out of 29 in Woodwork at my grammar school. This didn’t bother anybody too much, as my Dad’s life experience up to that time told him that working with your hands was to be avoided if at all possible, since it meant low wages and being treated badly altogether. This he was keen to tell me, so as to encourage me in more “academic” pursuits which he hoped would lead to a world he knew very little about, but he knew was desirable – anything where brain work was involved, something called “the professions” and it looked like I might make it there if I kept working at the school work that wasn’t Woodwork or Metalwork. His observations were based on a career which started at 14 in the workhouse, (still operating in 1926), through french polishing furniture and spraying cars, coupled with the odd encounter with a solicitor he had to visit to put a deposit down on our house and a dentist for whom he did some french polishing. Such programming against manual work was supported by the school, with its public school pretensions, so what years later came to be called Design and Technology was dropped from the curriculum for clever pupils. Fifty years later I can knock a nail straight in a piece of wood fairly successfully, say 9 times out of 10 and saw a pretty straight line if I concentrate really hard. The shelves I build don’t wobble. The quiet thrill such achievements now create equates in a funny sort of way to the non-manual work high points or “achievements” I sometimes reached working with rebellious adolescent school pupils for many years (after a disastrous stop-off for 2 years in accountancy training).

I have so far read the first 40 pages of  The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford and am liking what he is saying very much indeed. I loved my non-manual, “professional” job most of the time and I don’t think Crawford is so much arguing against such jobs as campaigning for a shift in middle class attitudes towards manual workers that is a bit more respectful than the commonplace “We’ve found a marvellous, plumber and he’s so cheap…!”. I may return to this theme after completing the book.

Sounds like a firm of solicitors or a band. Today we talked about The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, set on the coast of Maine, USA.  Most people liked it, some a lot, some a little but a fairly vocal minority not at all. Soporific and unrealistic, thought some.  I loved it and was pleased to borrow a different edition with some other Jewett work included, as this one story Morag had introduced us to in our Wednesday class made me want more, even in the light of some comments that this was her best writing, putting the rest into it’s shadow. We’ll see. One viewpoint off the internet suggests that Sarah was influenced by the Trancendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. Once I’d found out what that was I could see the reasoning behind that observation and understood more clearly one of the aspects of The Country of the Pointed Firs that made it so agreeable to me. I must be a Transcendentalist, (maybe). Off to Leek next week for a tour of the Arts and Craft Movement in the town.

Lovely few moments listening to Jim Dwyer talk about his childhood and subsequent career in journalism, all in Manhattan. His mention of Charles Snyder and the story behind his memorial took me back to our recent studies in the Thursday class of some American architecture and somehow or other I got round to reading of the conflicts between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs in New York in particular but in urban design theory and practice in general.   Out shopping earlier and picked up the ( charity shop £2 ) DVD of Mean Streets which had to be watched so I took the Big Apple in my head to bed. And then there’s Chinatown,  Jack. Will I get to Chicago this year, I keep asking myself, as the exchange rate – sterling to the US dollar – gets worse and worse?

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.