To teach or not to teach

Working in a university affords some bonuses, one of which is finding out about things before everyone else.

Accordingly, I got an email this morning which said the following ' Philip Pullman has agreed to be one of the new Fellows for the forthcoming MA in Creative Writing, and will be launching the course in September ... Teaching on the course will be novelist James Hawes and poet Jane Yeh, as well as other Creative Writing Fellows who will be announced shortly.'

What most people here probably don't know is that I recently completed my Masters at the University of East Anglia in Life Writing - or in layman's terms I studied the ways in which biography and autobiography are written. This course is sort of a side dish to the bigger, and more prestigious, Creative Writing course, set up by Malcom Bradbury which turned out such distinguished alumni as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Whilst the CW course is geared to teaching people how to write, the LW course, it seemed to me, was more focused on looking at how the genre is written, rather than getting you to do it yourself.

This was fine for me - who had come straight from an undergrad degree in English and American Literature, where my favourite thing was to find how an author's life reflected on their work, but to the five other people on the course, the writing seemed to be the key, and they were most upset to find that we seemed to be the poor, ignored, younger cousin to the CW Masters.

The point, however, that started me thinking about writing the post was not to have a rant about the unlevel nature of UEA degrees, but to ask a more general question:

Can the art of writing ever be truly taught? I know there are courses people can go on to help them write decent reports etc, and they seem to work fairly well, because they need to conform to a formulae, but what about the art of writing in it's most creative and imaginative form? You may have some prestigious writers at the helm, encouraging those on the Masters, and helping them to define their work, but in the end, won't the general outcome be the same as those report writing courses? Won't everything turn out formulaic in the end? (And if it doesn't, will it go the other way and be so outrageous that it is simply unpublishable?

I know that there are a couple of published authors who read this. Do you have a strong view about these courses? What does everyone else feel? Has anyone been on a course to help their writing techniques?

Also, in conversation with one of the creative writers in the grad bar one evening, I mentioned I had a blog. This, apparently, proved that I wasn't a real writer at all - because if I were, I'd want to go back and alter it all the time, which would defeat the purpose of the blog, and hence I wasn't a writer.

To which I say balderdash and piffle! But what does everyone else think?

Painter Extraordinaire

On this day in 1898, the pre-raphelite painter Edward Burne-Jones died. In memory of him, here are some of his works.

I just can't help myself

Only two days back from hoilday and I've already purchased four books.

- The Constant Gardner - John le Carre
- Notes from an Exhibition - Patrick Gale
- The Seven Sisters - Margaret Drabble
- Speaking of Love - Angela Young (didn't take it on holiday Angela, there simply wasn't room!)

I'm looking forward to all of them, in different ways.

Back from sea

Well, I'm back!

I shall post lots once I stop moving back and forth as if the house were rocking. I'm hoping no one on the street thinks I'm drunk as I weave between them!

It was completely fantastic. I loved every minute, and I shall tell you all about it once I get my rather spaced out thoughts together!

In the meantime - go read this blog Ifyougottago - he was onboard, and was doing around the world in 80 days. What a way to do a part of it!

Global reading

I've decided what to read whilst on this trip (thank you all for your suggestions), but before I disclose my final list, I'd like to share some pictures of my reading activities whilst in some rather beautiful places.

In Mykanos at the age of six, I read a book on the Island. I scare fishes with the size of my glasses!

At the age of nine, my reading material had evidently matured, as on another Greek Island, I try my hand at Schindler's List. I appear to be using Dilly the Dinosaur as a pillow.

A year later, I am in Egypt, where I take A Little Princess, because obviously the view isn't up to much.

Here I am in 98 (roughly) in the Uffizi, clutching a copy of 'Anne of the Island'. I distinctly remember sitting in front of Venus rising from the sea reading this. I was such a heathen!

And bringing the catalogue roughly up to date, here I am in Italy in 2005, proving that no matter what age I am, I will always find a place to read!

And the books that made the final cut are: (I feel like I'm announcing a very mixed Orange award!)

'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont'
'Hons and Rebels'
'A Fool's Alphabet'
'The Turn of the Screw'
'The Parasites'
'My Mother's Wedding Dress'

Of course, if 'Letters from Menabilly' turns up in the post tomorrow morning, I will bump 'The Parasites'.

I need to stop making inappropriate metaphors about packing. Saying I have enough to sink a ship does not bode well for anybody!

Poem of the week

I'm ahead of myself, I know, but I decided to do next weeks' poem today, for obvious sailing acros the Atlantic reasons.

I decided yesterday that I wanted to put up both Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath's versions of 'Wuthering Heights' which they wrote at the same time, but are so very different, then I discovered that Gondal-Girl had had the same thoughts - strange how ideas weave over the world.

Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,

Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

Touched by a match, they might warm me,

And their fine lines singe

The air too orange

Before the distances they pin evaporate,

Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.

But they only dissolve and dissolve

Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

I can feel it trying

To funnel my heat away.

If I pay the roots of the heather

Too close attention, they will invite me

To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Gray as the weather.

The black slots of their pupils take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

All wig curls and yellow teeth

And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water

Limpid as the solitudes

That flee through my fingers.

Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

Of people and the air only

Remembers a few odd syllables.

It rehearses them moaningly:

Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

Darkness terrifies it.

Now, in valleys narrow

And black as purses, the house lights

Gleam like small change.

Sylvia Plath

Wuthering Heights

Walter was guide. His mother's cousin

Inherited some Bronte soup dishes.
He felt sorry for them. Writers
Were pathetic people. Hiding from it
And making it up. But your transatlantic elation
Elated him. He effervesced
Like his rhubarb wine kept a bit too long:
A vintage of legends and gossip
About those poor lasses. Then,
After the Rectory, after the chaise longue
Where Emily died, and the midget hand-made books,
The elvish lacework, the dwarfish fairy-work shoes,
It was the track for Stanbury. That climb
A mile beyondexpectation, into
Emily's private Eden. The moor
Lifted and opened its dark flower
For you too. That was satisfactory.
Wilder, maybe, than ever Emily knew it.
With wet feet and nothing on her head
She truged that climbing side towards friends
Porbably. Dark redoubt
On the skyline above. It was all
Novel and exhilarating to you.
The book becoming a map. Wuthering Heights
Withering into perspective. We got there
And it was all gaze. The open moor,
Gamma rays and decompsing starlight
Had repossessed it
With a kind of blackening smoulder. The centuries
Of door-bolted comfort finally amounted
To a forsaken quarry. The roofs'
Deadfall slabs were flaking, but mostly in place,
Beam and purlins softening. So hard
To imagine the life that had lit
Such a sodden, raw-stone cramp of refuge.
The floors were a rubble of stone and sheep droppings.
Doorframes, windowframes -
Gone to make picnickers' fires or evaporated.
Only the stonework - black. The sky - blue.
And the moor-wind flickering.

The incomings.
The outgoings - how would you take up now
The clench of that struggle? The leakage
Of earnings off a few sickly bullocks
And a scatter of crazed sheep. Being cornered
Kept folk here. Was that crumble of wall
Remembering a try at a garden? Two trees
Planted for company, for a child to play under.
And to have something to stare at. Sycamores -
The girth and spread of valley twenty-year-olds.
They were probably ninety.

You breathed it all in
With jealous, emulous sniffings. Weren't you
Twice as ambitious as Emily? Odd
To watch you, such a brisk pendant
Of your globe-circling aspirations.
Among those burned-out, worn-out remains
of failed efforts, failed hopes -
Iron beliefs, iron necessities,
Iron bondage, already
Crumbling back to the wild stone.

You perched
In one of the two trees
Just where the snapshot shows you.
Doing as Emily never did. You
Had all the liberties, having life.
The future had invested in you -
As you might say of a jewel
So brilliantly faceted, refracting
Every tint, where Emily had stared
Like a dying prisoner.
And a poem unfurled from you
Like a loose frond of hair from your nape
To be clipped and kept in a book. What would stern
Dour Emily have made of your frisky glances
And your huge hope? Your huge
Mortgage of hope. The moor-wind
Came with its empty eyes to look at you.
And the clouds gazed sidelong, going elsewhere,
The heath-grass, fidgeting in its fever,
Took idiot notice of you. And the stone,
Reaching to touch your hand, found you real
And warm, and lucent, like that earlier one.
And maybe a ghost, trying to hear your words,
Peered from the broken mullions
And was stilled. Or was suddenly aflame
With the scorch of doubled envy. Only
Gradually quenched in understanding.

Ted Hughes

How different; but how beautiful in their difference

Decision time

Ok, I have pulled books from shelves, sat on the floor with them, dispaired and turned to you for help. I know not what to take.

These are the ones I am sure on:

'My Mother's Wedding Dress' by Justine Picardie
'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont' by Elizabeth Taylor
'Wide Sargasso Sea' by Jean Rhys
'The Parasites' by Daphne du Maurier
'A Fool's Alphabet' by Sebastian Faulks


These are the ones on which I need help:

'Northanger Abbey' - Jane Austen
'Love and Friendship' - Jane Austen
'Evening' - Susan Minot
'The Turn of the Screw' - Henry James
'A Long Long Way' - Sebastian Barry
'The Rendezvous and Other Stories' - Daphne du Maurier
'A Murder is Announced' - Agathe Christie
'Hons and Rebels' - Jessica Mitford
'84 Charing Cross Road' - Helene Hanff
'Carry On, Jeeves' - P.G. Wodehouse

Cast your votes now. I'm going to start packing clothes. Sorry to be all mad as a wet hen on you all - I've never known a packing session to be so stressful!

Weather report

It's been raining cats and dogs here in Oxford (and most of the country, I shouldn't wonder) but I don't care, because on checking BBC weather earlier, I discovered it was going to be 37 degrees C in New York on Friday. Anyone want me to fry an egg?