Electric Quaker II

Weird.

Had a lecture at 10am today (Urgh), which was actually fairly interesting – one for the C19th module, looking at the relationship between some chap called John Thelwall, who’s been unjustly denied a page on Wikipedia, and the interaction between his poems and the Lyrical Ballads, which was actually really fascinating stuff…

…He’d got into rather a lot of trouble after lobbying hard for social freedoms, which in the context of the French Revolution, wasn’t a great plan (because, as usual, the politicians had gone “Agh, this new thing scares us! Let’s strip civil liberties to the bone!” and a bunch of reactionary old bastards went along with it, as per.)

Anyway, Thelwell got had up for treason, and spent a few years in gaol, which wasn’t great, especially since it was 1794, and the system was happily corrupt. They let him off, in the end, and he slogged up the Cumbria to root out Wordsworth, his dippy sister [I’m sorry, but she wrote a poem about how great it was that William had gone off somewhere, but had left behind an apple with his tooth-marks in it] and Coleridge.

Whereupon Coleridge gave him the push, because he wanted a break with his own radical past, and anyway, Wordsworth was just at that “creating an artificial rustic language” stage which the Romantics seem to have been so keen on (what? I’m paraphrasing the lecture here), so Thelwell was forced off to exile in the ruddy Wye valley, where Pitt’s people persisted in spying on him, his farm went belly up, and his six-year-old daugter died.

Meanwhile, Wordsworth & Coleridge had just printed off the 1798 Ed. of Lyrical Ballads, and all was going swimmingly, with Thelwell stuck in Wales, with sarky pitchfork weilding locals, roughs working for the government still out to off him to collect the bounty and some serious “If Coleridge hadn’t forced me to live in this stupid valley, my daughter probably wouldn’t have died” issues to deal with.

By the looks of it he wrote large quantities of poems mimicing the Lyrical Ballads and turning them very dark, and they’re pretty good. Not great in their own right, I wouldn’t say, but not too bad in the (“Yeah, Nature is really sodding great. Can it make me feel better? Can it bollocks.”) context in which they were written.

So that was fun. And then I wandered towards the Arts Centre to try and actually buy a copy of L.B. (I didn’t, I remembered I’ve spent all of this week’s budget on a couple of SATA HDDs from Overclockers, the people who ship fast, ship what you wanted, and don’t appear to sell any mid-low end rubbish (I’m still vaguely pissed off that Scan assumed that an Asus motherboard was somehow the same as the poxy Abit job I asked for…)).

Anyway, I was heading up from C22 round the corner where Hugh Owen creates and underpass out of D-floor, and wandered up past the library and out onto the plaza, whereupon a bloke ran up behind me and said “Excuse me, are you a lecturer?”

‘O, it’s a poor lost Fresher,’ I thought. “No, I’m a student,” I told him. And then he told me how great my back looked (uh-oh…) and how I really stood out amongst everyone else (this is going to involve my helping with something, isn’t it?)…

…”We’re doing Theatre Film & TV,” he said (Yep, there we go) “Can we film you walking up those steps again, it’ll only take a couple of minutes…?”

So they filmed me going up the steps, down the steps, and standing at the top of the steps pretending to have forgotten something, and were very pleased with me for being able to look “dark and menacing” and “walking purposefully,” which was probably nice of them, although I wasn’t actually trying to look dark or menacing at all.

And, of course, when they said “two minutes,” they meant “it’ll be two minutes of film,” with the result I was there about half an hour. Still, it was vaguely amusing, I suppose, and I ran into no end of people I’d otherwise have missed (although off the top of my head I can only recall Coff & Ben Michael – apparently they’d both been to the lecture, which is a new one on me…), Sundeep, and Twenty-Three-Hour Hannah.)

And now I’m going to, uh, either sleep, have breakfast, or play RA2… Hm…

Probably not eat, actually; I woke up with a toothache this morning. Usually a bad sign, especially since it’s one of the ones where fully closing my jaw hurts because of the pressure on said tooth. Alarmingly (although it’s statistically very likely, I guess) the tooth in question is one of the root canal-ed ones, which, I’d taken to believing, were fairly indestructible, unless the entire huge lump of filling clumps out and chokes me to death.

O well. Yet more troubles. Think I’ve an appointment at some point next week anyway, to be honest.

O, and I get shown how the clean the DSS place on Portland Road at 1700 today, so I’ll be able to follow the “clean it anytime between 1700 and 0900, weekdays” policy and have some free time in the early evenings from tomorrow onwards.

Have fun!