writing home

'I could go on, about the cases of colleagues and their experience of managers’ ‘instructions’, arrogance and ignorance, and the devices they adopt to impose their will, but individuals like Anthony Forster and the executive dean for humanities are not single spies. They’re minor but willing operatives in a larger mechanics of power. Within this structure, they have been allowed to wrest authority for themselves, and neither literary scholars nor long-serving teachers have a say; individual students, once enrolled and committed, are not much attended to either.'

---Marina Warner, Why I quit.

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In a dream you find yourself at a familiar crossroads, the whole of London opening up before you. Bridges and the river one way, crass materialism the other. 'Every step an arrival,' every step a departure.You spend ten pounds on a poppy and think of a long walk (you have the tanned legs of a mountain walker). In a book you write a note: 'for all the people who have died in wars'...such universalist sentiments obviously quite unpopular today, so you add: ' especially for the people of my city, London'. And I get the approving glance, though belonging is a mystery to me. Later on Ubo out talks a lanky black Jazz musician who slumps in his chair, resigned to his voice not being heard

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Two biographies on Denise this year. The Dana Greene one in particular looks quite good. The Welsh/Jewish roots appeal-for obvious reasons.