On Tuition Fees

Before I begin - I haven't posted anything in some time. I can't entirely account for this curious fact, but I expect a sense of overwhelming apathy has been somewhat conducive to its precipitation. This said, I don't think I have been writing less, in fact I know I have written more than I usually might, but I have been either unwilling to post pieces or unwilling to finish them - but I suppose this can be considered the same thing. The previous five 'posts' on my 'dashboard' (blogging being so similar to driving) are all drafts, supporting the growing case for the argument that my soul is an indolent one. But I will also explain, in a bit, that it's also a besieged one.

I have returned - reluctantly - for my second year at university. I have written innumerable scathing pieces of my 'experience' (because it is an experience, isn't it? This is what everyone terms it), but have chosen not to publish them both for fear of offending others and for fear of the effort the pieces' completion would require. Let's be honest though, spending £27,000 and losing three years in order to complete academic work - free of charge - in something close to penury is hardly the best backdrop for fun. Indeed, I would have to experience some excessive joy following this acknowledgment in order for the thing to be even neutral on the fun scale. It's strange really - there is a kind of oppressive, profoundly deleterious insistence afoot that one must have great fun at university, and this necessarily jinxes the whole thing. There is nothing more inimical to the experiencing of fun than the forceful exhortation that one must have fun. No thanks, I'll be miserable and annoy you instead.

When I write 'you' in that last sentence, whom do I refer to? The students? The universities? The government? Well - all of them really. It is in all of these parties' interests to promote the idea of university as almost paralysingly enjoyable, and they do it fairly well. But do people really enjoy the whole ordeal? I've asked a lot of people and none has explicitly told me that they are having the time of their life. I'm aware this may be to shield me from the cold truth - that I am desperately alone in my disaffection, but I happen to believe my sources.

Part of the reason for this disaffection, I am certain, is the tripling of tuition fees - indeed, the very idea of tuition fees is terrifying enough. There is something incredibly retarding in the presence of this abstract, intangible debt, hanging like black spaghetti in the rafters of the soul. It is a constant reminder that one must be serious, because people want this money back. To someone who believes solemnity may be the last stage in the death of the human spirit, this is more worrying than all other emotional pangs. The idea that the personality can be curtailed and truncated in such a way as to produce a money-making machine is to me diabolical. There is, furthermore, the humiliation of irony to aid the misery; it is counterintuitive that something as earthly and temporal as money can seize and bring palsy to the soul, but it is extremely effective in doing so. This is partly by design - debt appeals to the sense of justice in humans, a sense which corrodes the conscience until remuneration is complete. This is how capitalism purges the individualism of its subjects, in the aid of unhalted production. But to me there is something perverse, unfair, and frankly sadistic in imposing this on teenagers who haven't a blind shit of an idea how this money is going to be found. The government would immediately retort with, 'But you needn't repay anything until you earn more than £21,000 per year!' - a gross statement which assumes guilt is bred entirely by a sense of personal economic burden, rather than a sense of the injustice in failing to repay a creditor. This assumes the presence of absolute avarice in all students. Whether they come to be in a stable financial position or not, the fact that most people will not be able to repay their university loans is a fact that will haunt the conscience. Every coin my indolence fails to collect is a coin that could have been spent in some other, more pressing need. This is the true horror of the tuition fee. Do not give credence to politicians' assertions that this is merely a matter of economics - the whole concept of the tuition fee relies on emotional blackmail, and this is far more insidious. It is underpinned by guilt, and guilt does not die. To heap debt on the student population is to heap distress and an unthinking acceptance of toil.

On TV Adverts

Arseholes.

Adverts on television have become an accepted misery in our lives. We see them as a kind of Satanic trade - give me documentaries and I will gladly surrender my soul to offers of biscuits. Capitalism has become a thing designed to piss people off as extensively as possible. And it does its job. Every one of the senses is now exploited in the aid of flogging some terrible product which needs all the help it can get. There are even such things as smelly adverts now, little packages of chemicals in beauty magazines and such. Yet these are sadly not yet televised, so I am working outside of my remit. What I find interesting, though, is the assumed distance of the genre; televisual adverts are equal in effect to ushering a cavalcade of salesmen through one's house, steps punctuated by cries such as, 'Do you need faster broadband?' and responses of mine such as, 'No.' For some unknown reason, we are not quite so offended by adverts on television. I think this is a great crime. Remember, there are legions of trained professionals whose lives are animated by the sole aim of exploiting each habit of your sensory faculties in order to sell you some turd.

I just saw an advertisement for Robinsons squash (pictured above), in which two typical boys guzzle litres of this luminous fluid (I believe it's diluted so as to prevent the transference of too much flavour). This all seems great, and the unthinking viewer might (paradoxically) think: 'How charming, this fluid must be delicious!' But no. This advert says nothing of the product whose consumption it advocates. I could pay two pensioners £5000 to ingurgitate vast quantities of camel urine, with broad and delirious grins seared into their aspects, piss foaming around their terrified dentures, speckling their blouses with perfect, golden globules. Any outward inspection would support the hypothesis that these two people were having a fantastic time of it all, but they are of course dead inside, shackled to the economic facts which sanctify their prostitution as necessity. Let it not be forgotten that you can pay anyone to do anything, however abhorrent (trust me). This is why we treat advice from friends more seriously than advice from companies. So in a strange way, the economic coldness of these companies completely undermines their probity - and yet advertising works. Pay some enchanting beauty to pretend to give a cock about your product and it will sell. It's faintly depressing.

This leads me to the Aldi adverts, or perhaps the Lidl ones, for the two chains have agglomerated into one grand, Teutonic purveyor of strange foodstuffs in my mind, and whenever I watch a Lidl advert I immediately think of Aldi, and vice-versa. I have always wondered whether each party has considered that it is advertising in equal measure for the other. Perhaps this is intentional - my immediate thoughts towards a Lidl advert are: 'Fuck off, Aldi, I'm trying to watch TV here.'

The specific Aldi/Lidl advert I am thinking of is some kind of consumer testimonial piece - asking people what they think of the products. It is always, 'I like this one,' gesturing towards the expensive, nice food, and, 'I also like this one,' complete with gestures towards the boxed manure from Aldi. Adverts such as these must be effective, for they are increasing wildly in their frequency. However, to me they seem gaudy, arrogant, annoying and transparent. Here we have testimonials from the company who is selling the inferior product. I scarcely think Lidl is going to pay someone to review their products, receive the crappy feedback, then proceed to spend millions of pounds to tell me how crap consumers thought the product was. Let's not kid ourselves - these testimonials are direct from the company, if only by omission. They may interview 100 people before they find some nationalistic German fruitloop who thinks Lidl's Fizzy Alien Balls are better than Rice Krispies, but in reality they probably needn't go that far - they pay somebody to read a script out loud. So this is a nuanced way for Lidl to tell me how good their own products are, without it seeming grotesque and pompous. When we realise this, it becomes obvious how shallow and vain the whole enterprise is - it is equivalent to having someone tell you, 'Look, I know other people write good poems, but mine are the best.' I would instantly be seized by the urge to maim such an individual, and you should feel a similar contempt for Lidl. Or Aldi.

This said, I must say I find it worse when adverts pretend they're not adverts. I speak of the horrors which last for a minimum of three minutes and usually involve an intolerable interloper who has decided he will populate your field of vision against your will and best interests. 'I'm going to show you how to cook the most wonderful lamb koftas - great for birthdays, weddings, normal days, abnormal days, different dimensions, whatever.' Meanwhile I am usually screaming imprecations at the television, with a volume such that my words will be carried back in time and to the place of the advert's production. These adverts are the unwanted friends of the televisual sphere, the people who assume a large position in your life without your accession. 'I'm not an advert, I'm a nice guy!' they seem to cry. Well, you're not on the TV listings, and anything not on the TV listings will gain no place in my life.

Advertising, quite simply, is the ultimate in the construction of pretext. Companies quite rightly realise they cannot invade our homes without at least some specious bullshit behind it. 'We asked Sally what her sleep pattern was like.' Nobody gives a flying toss about Sally! This is demonstrable by the fact you had to raise the subject of Sally in the first place. If I cared about Sally's sleep pattern, I'd have asked her myself. Just tell me to buy your ear plugs and be done with it. It is the same as if a salesmen were to ask you: 'do you have a mobile phone at all?' - the immediate response is, 'What do you want me to buy?' Sadly, all this artifice is so often ingested as quite alright. There's something entirely 1984 about having such lurid offers hurled at you in your own home. To me this is a kind of totalitarianism - capitalism previously took place only in public life, but now it has been subsumed by the private life. The balefulness of this is hard to appreciate - with branding there is a kind of ownership, and of domination at the very least. It is the idea that there should be no escape from capitalism, and toil, and materialism. We have constructed these tunnels of convenience, bored through the air between producer and consumer, and we can now buy everything at home which, whilst convenient, begs the question - is what travels towards us in these tunnels wholly benign?

Fairy-Land by Edgar Allan Poe

A depiction of the poem by Edmund Dulac

Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can't discover
For the tears that drip all over!
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces
About twelve by the moon-dial
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain's eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O'er the strange woods—o'er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how deep!—O, deep!
Is the passion of their sleep.
In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like——almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before—
Videlicet a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies,
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.

This poem was, quite gashingly, published by the time Poe was 20 years old. Wikipedia claims that the first person to whom Poe offered the poem for publication 'threw the submission into the fire and joyfully watched it burn,' in what is probably one of the most idiotic responses to such a poem. Others dismissed the poem as nonsensical, which to me would seem almost excessively complimentary. It's a strange human insistence that almost everything must have a secret meaning, and nothing can simply be. I do not suppose many would dismiss a wonderfully tended garden as nonsensical - it fulfils its purpose simply through its presence, its beauty, its redolence. Of course one may organise flowers in such a way as to create 'meaning', but this is an artifice, a dead accretion. In many ways it is a truer representation of the world to present the world in the way this poem does - lacking meaning, lacking premeditation or divine sentience. This is what Wilde tried to show, and many of his poems are almost devoid of 'deeper meaning' as a result, resembling sketches more than contrived visions. Read his Impressions for a good example.

So it is sheer beauty this poem of Poe's is concerned with. If it failed in this charge then I would agree that meaning is all that could save it, but the poem certainly does not fail. It is perhaps premature of me to eulogise a poem merely through its use of several of my favourite words, but then being premature in one's opinions is part of the fun. 'Atomy', 'dissever' and 'tempest' are three such words, the kind of words which, used in sufficient quantity, put free space in my underwear at a premium (I have just realised this could be interpreted as a scatological remark... it is not. No infirmity haunts my alimentary canal. Just thought I'd make that clear).

There's a kind of disorientation permeating each line of this poem, and the rhythm is quite reminiscent of the way Shelley would write. This perfectly suits the subject matter, augmenting the already prominent ethereality that runs through the poem. Poe seemed to have a thing for dashes in his poetry as well, and they are used to great effect here; there is a real feeling of sensory overload. This is quite an unconventional poem but I think it needs to be. Just look at the way we realise the rhyme scheme has changed at 'Forever changing places' - I find that so charming. 

By the way, I have just discovered that women can buy high-heeled trainers. Well, men can buy them also. Even dogs can buy them if they have the money and a preternatural dexterity to facilitate the exchange of funds. But the shoes themselves, how gauche! I weep at the sight. This is what too often happens when pragmatism and aesthetics mix - the resultant mess is impractical and looks like crap. This is to say, you will be late to the fashion show and will be derided when you get there. Sometimes it is best to put all your eggs in one basket. This poem does just this - it does not pretend to be practical or meaningful, it is merely aesthetically pleasing. All poetry can be interpreted in this way if one so wishes. Therefore, I implore you to put all your eggs in one basket and hop aboard the Poetrymobile. 

[Later edit: Poe writes in The Poetic Principle, in a precursor to the aesthetic view on poetry that Wilde often gains sole credit for, of the absolute primacy of beauty in poetry:

'To recapitulate then:- I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.'

Reassuring to my sentiment on the matter, he then clarifies:

'It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage, for they may subserve incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the work: but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem.'

Clearly, then, the lack of 'meaning' in this poem is quite deliberate.]