Jim Granter

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.

Finding out about podcasts, how to use them, what equipment (I would say “kit” but somehow that makes me smile and squirm a bit) do I need and do I just want a player ? So far have managed to download 3 programmes, including one about the architecture of the New York Subway System, another called Americana with Matt Frei from the BBC talking to Americans in his Washington studio about a wide range of subjects. I look forward to having access to such stuff when and where I like which doesn’t mean being near the computer, as well as sometimes using the computer to “Listen Again” on the BBC  to their matchless output. BBCi is already a favourite source of entertainment.

Spent 2 hours on Thursday with F Scott Fitzgerald in our course – Into the Jazz Age: American Art and Literature 1900 – 1930 – run by Keele University at Silverdale Library. Introduced by our great tutor John Toft, the man was depicted, dissected, discussed, delighted in, debated and distributed in the form of extracts from Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. Clive James includes eloquent praise for Fitzgerald in his Cultural Amnesia, putting into words whatever it was I thought or felt about him without knowing it and then some. Someone mentioned the shirts scene in Gatsby and away we went for a humorous minute led by John on the subject of his own shirt collection! Then I missed most of the next 20 minutes as he asked if anyone knew the name of the actor who played Tom Buchanan in the 1974 movie and I knew but couldn’t get the name off the tip of my brain. By the break, we had gathered the phrase “American Dream” to find out the origin of, too. Get Bruce Dern from memory, but this one’s going to be a search engine job.

As our group all brought their reading of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula to the Century’s End literature session today, wife Barbara was at the local hospital undergoing the ordeal of multiple medical staff trying for 3 hours to find a vein into which blood could be transfused. You couldn’t make it up, as they say. This  was the preliminary procedure to a predicted 6 hour transfusion session. Eventually a vein was located by a cancer ward expert and half the planned dose of A+ was administered. That happens to be my group too so perhaps we have shared blood now as I have donated plenty to date over the years. We await a further bloody appointment. As for the lecture and discussion, many of the usual topics for this work were covered – homoeroticism, fear of invasion, racism, feminism, the Oscar Wilde connection, earlier and later gothic fiction, Freud, hysteria and the wonderful wolves. Along with a fairly unanimous appreciation of the quality of the writing apart from a few minor glitches.

Thought the start back Wednesday literature class The Century’s End didn’t happen today on account of treacherous roads and pavements under snow and ice but it may just have been a week early.  Borrowed a copy of York Notes on one of our set texts – Dracula – from the only other local resident / student who made it to the library just in case today was correct. We agreed that at our stage of studying we could cope with the dilemma of having York Notes available before getting on with the actual reading of the text. Even worse for me though as she has annotated the Notes! Well, I guess I’d just better get on and read the actual book if I hope to both enjoy it and have anything to say about it myself. Must visit Whitby again, hopefully this summer; it’s ‘on the list’, just after Chicago…..

Watched this great film on TV and with the wonders of BBCi Player played the soundtrack near the end –  A la Claire Fontaine – which made Barbara my wife cry as she learned it at school; within minutes it was found on You Tube and transmitted to her schoolfriend in Australia and on to Facebook.  Edward Norton is outstanding.