Hello,
I find myself painfully aware that over the last three to eight months I have attempted more ‘returns’ than Eminem has since 2005, the nasal refrain of ‘Guess who’s back?’ trying and failing to distract from the fact that, actually, he hadn’t ever really left properly. As it is, though, the intermittent posts since mid-August have been a means of trying to keep this from perishing and dissolving into the depths where all the other unloved, untended, silent blogs lie, whilst considering a) what I’d want to do with this blog when I did start writing properly, and b) whether it was worth salvaging at all. After all, my Freshers year has long since passed, and I don’t manage to cover football in enough depth to make a football-only blog regular or insightful enough, especially given the plenitude of blogs on the same subject available for one to peruse. I have also recently lacked those two things that a writer simply cannot do without: time and inspiration. To quote one of my Historian friends in a middle of an intellectual and emotional crisis, I have, over the past six months or so, felt that ‘I have literally nothing interesting to say.’
The dearth of time has alleviated somewhat over the past few weeks, and some tentative, toe-in-the-water attempts at composing poetry again have suggested that I may not have totally squandered my ability to write something of a vaguely passable standard, and these happenings, combined with an impending final term of Second Year, make this seem an apposite time to make a last attempt at returning to jacknmoran (to be rebranded ASAP, incidentally). Some blog controversy which I shan’t go into here was another reason for my silence; in the wake of a transient but nonetheless tumultuous storm, I felt that a period of reflection was necessary, and that some focus on work would be welcome. In the interim, however, I’d toyed with doing various things: this blog began by covering Euro 2012, and I’ve long been tempted to do the same with the 2014 World Cup. Book reviews, when time permits, are an enjoyable undertaking, and that was another consideration. Of course, the chief temptation was to continue the Oxford narrative that ended abruptly in the middle of last Trinity, trying to combine mirror-gazing self-absorption with rather more of actual use to those who want to know anything about Oxford.
The final reason for my ponderous caprice over the last few months has been an expectation that this was a blog devoid of readers, one whose slow, inevitable (though flailing) death would be greeted by the silence that it had taken on in the time it took to do so. After all, a blog without a readership is as a song without listeners: a triviality; a thing of no consequence; a ‘paltry thing; a tattered coat upon a stick’. However, I have had it alluded to on occasion by other people over the past months, and a conversation at our second end-of-season dinner in which the desire to read more was expressed served to be enough to convince me that, small though my readership might be, resurrection would still be a worthwhile endeavour.
There are, of course, personal reasons for returning to this blog. I shall start with the perhaps less creditable ones. In the event that Finals do not go as expected, a career in academia will begin to seem all the less likely – as one would expect. As a result, I would probably turn to the other cliched careers of an English student – journalism, or teaching (while, of course, trying to write while doing so). This requires, often, some evidence of consistently high-quality writing throughout one’s university career (and, sometimes, beforehand). The problem is that student journalism has never much appealed to me. The main reason for this is the restriction involved: when writing on sport, I dislike the concept of being limited to four hundred words. This is true whether writing a match report (in which the brief recapitulation of events is invariably neither insightful nor comprehensive), or a debate (in which four hundred words rarely allows any writer to do more than cite the most perfunctory, expected points, and often in a rather jumbled manner). Perhaps this betrays an individual inability to embrace concision rather than an inherent flaw in the medium; however, I do not feel that this changes matters. Even if my reluctance to write concisely were indicative of a flaw in my writing and cognitive processes rather than a flaw in the medium of student sports writing, it would still indicate that it is not a place that my writing would be suited for. I can only imagine the exasperation that an editor would feel in telling me, invariably, to cut three hundred words from each piece before it was suitable for publication.
Equally, the restriction involved in writing for a Sports department is a problem for me. Football is a topic of interest for me, but it is not one that I want to be constrained to write about weekly. Equally, writing weekly is a problem; even when writing frequently, I do not write regularly, and I am just as likely to be taken by the impulse to write at one o’clock on a Wednesday morning as I am to write three times in four days, each at different times. I intend to write about a number of things here, some of which may be of interest to numerous people; I fully expect that some might be of interest only to me. In any case, I am still at an undisciplined stage of writing, one in which I may decide to switch abruptly from a recapitulation of my week in Oxford, to a mini-essay on Paradise Lost, to a piece of poetry. This caprice ill-becomes a sports writer, especially one writing for a newspaper.
So the desire to build up a portfolio is a pragmatic reason for writing, but pragmatism is still secondary to my other reasons. The last of these is the hackneyed but nonetheless true observation that writing is, above all things, cathartic. Having had a long time to reflect upon my writing habits during my absence from writing, I believe that writing helped organise my thoughts and convey them in a manner that was conducive to the relative clarity of thought I enjoyed during my first year. I believe, additionally, that chronicling and creating narrative helped maintain a sense of purpose that has been fading recently, as I have become worryingly more desultory. Of course, any interest or benefit anybody gains from any posts I write, whether they be about training for races, Oxford life or even just writing is also an excellent reason to write. These things considered, I greatly regret that I went so long without updating. As it is, I am aiming to place that in the past, and will now briefly outline what will be coming up over the next months and year. As in most endeavours, thinking in the long term is conducive to good success.
So I’m going to try and cover a variety of things as before, and generally this will be unchanged. There will be a few additions and features, however:
1. I’ll be continuing the Oxford narrative, starting in 0th Week of Trinity, which is the 20th April onwards. It’s a year without exams, so readers may hear things about punting, Christ Church Meadows, and Balls, rather than just comments on the incessant pressure of work. This will act as the precursor to a fully detailed narrative of Finals year. Of course this will be enjoyable and cathartic for me to do, but I’m hoping it will serve a useful purpose as well. To be more specific: prior to applying, I, as I imagine is the case for numerous applicants, are taught to seek a lot about what to do prior to applying, what to do at interview and during the application, and, once in, a lot about Oxford (or university) life in the general. I think that having a week-by-week, detailed description of what Oxford is like when the real pressure of Finals and the impending entry into ‘Real Life’ has arrived would be something I would have been rather grateful for, even if just for the reassurance that there is a way to manage everything. Of course, if I collapse next year, I hope that it will be of equal utility as an example and cautionary tale of what not to do. In general, I think that anything that deals with the specifics of an experience – exactly how much work, exactly what papers, exactly when do things need to be done, exactly how do people cope – will be more useful than generalities about ‘high workloads’ and ‘pressure’. Obviously, then, the Trinity portion of the narrative will be short, but it’s going to serve as the precursor for a very detailed Finals Year one.
2. Football. I probably won’t do much coverage of football between now and the end of the year, as I’m extremely behind on work and want to get ahead (the quixotry, an old reader will note, has not quite dissipated) before the start of the World Cup. This is because I want to follow up my Euro 2012 blog with a day-by-day, almost match-by-match feature on the 2014 World Cup. At the very least I will cover a game or issue per day; if work is going well then I will try and do two games. I’ll also be writing a panegyric on the death of Barcelona and tiki-taka soon. There will be tears and immense sentimentality, of that I can assure you.
3. Running. I’ll be trying to go over and above just the sporadic references to my own runs, writing race reviews, thoughts on training, and anything else to do with the sport that occurs or appeals to me.
4. Writing. This is more contingent than the other topics, because it depends on me actually writing something of merit (always a contingency!), but I’m hoping to write at least two or three pieces of poetry in Trinity, and over the summer I may even start trying to write a novel on here, updating chapter by chapter. Perhaps.
5. Literature. I think I wrote three book reviews in the first year of this blog (Middlemarch, Lolita, The Rachel Papers), and I’d like to continue this. I have Money lined up, and at some point I shall go over Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life. If the fancy takes me, I may compose the odd essay for here as well, especially over the Summer Vacation, when I’ll want to keep my essay-writing abilities sharp before Finals. If I do, it will probably appeal to a more coterie readership, as it will probably be on things between 1350 and 1760.
6. Scrabble. Over the last six months I’ve taken more of an interest in Scrabble, signing up for a first tournament in Ayelsbury and sporadically attending a club. This, I imagine, will appeal to an even smaller coterie than mini-essays on fifteenth-century morality plays, but I’m going to write the odd piece nonetheless in the hope of conveying to others the interest that the game can hold as a literary, teaching, and amusement tool, as well as a good way to improve retentive abilities. It’s also a lot of fun, as well, so I’ll be endeavouring to convey that.
7. Miscellany. Because sometimes none of these will take my fancy, and I do like to believe I can exhibit variety.
So that’s a (not-so) brief outline of the attempted rejuvenation of the undead. I don’t have any time to write until Sunday, but from Sunday my intentions are as follows:
Sunday: A report on one of the two games being played.
Monday: The Oxford Vacation: What it is, and how to use it – I think it’s rather different from other Vacations.
Tuesday: Some thoughts on Second Year as a Humanities student.
Wednesday: An introductory Scrabble post.
Thursday: Review of Martin Amis’s Money.
Friday: Review of Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life.
Saturday: A brief resurrection of the ‘Oxford Narrative’.
I hope at least some of that will prove of interest. I also find myself rather rusty when writing, phrases and sentence fluency seeming rather difficult to come by currently. Hopefully that will improve after writing seven pieces in seven days.
‘Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.’ Or so I hope this proves.
Regards,
Jack
jacknmoran 