Modernism as ellipsis: Saramago and the cultural turn in Lusophone literature

To the University last night, to see a show by Mandy Romero, a man whose unconvincing demonstration of being a woman would be helped if he learned to walk like a woman rather than stooping forward with the clumping walk of a stevedore.

It was called Stevenage. I was attracted to the fact that someone else is fascinated by New Towns, by town planning, centralism, the "we know what's best" attitude of planners who would conduct others into New Towns then go home to live in polished tiled Victorian houses with cremeware vases of imported tulips on the windowsill.

We went into the theatre and wandered around a big black box, looking at what looked like original scale models of the first New Town in England.

Mandy, wandering about in cerise high heels and a mini-dress, delivered a dense but very interesting text, interspersed with extracts from 70s "naughty" films, starring the show's protatoginst Barry Evans -- Church Rave and The Girls amongst them -- and bits of John Clare's arresting poetry, on slides.

Both Evans and Clare had turned the act of escape into art, prompted by certain places in present day Leicestershire and Hertfordshire. With her slightly garbled, wet-mouthed diction, I wish she could have slowed down to let us drink in Walter Benjamin's lines (from memory), "Memory is not the method by which to discover the past. It is the medium in which it is contained, like interred bodies."

Today, as Roger Hill, he led an "artists' workshop". We had to talk to our partners, trying to elict the words "I'd never thought about that until now". An impossible task, but its very impossibility was the point. We walked about in the space and were asked to practice a movement which would convey in five seconds a pivotal moment of our past. Everyone was too embarrassed to do it with much gusto.

It ended. Roger gathered up his things, looking behind him, ostensibly for his belongings. "Well I'm going for lunch," he said. "Would you like any company?" I said. I extended the offer to a former MA colleague of mine. She didn't know how to say no. "Well...I've got lots of emails." We went for the kind of poor food that counts for lunch in modern England, tuna "mayo" sandwich and chips, and talked in a way that didn't really get beyond self-affirming re-statements of common political ground. I was hoping to get on to sex more.

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In the evening, I met Neil and Keith. Keith produced a most interesting book he'd found, written by Dickens' wife, of the recipes she'd recorded from their many nights of entertaining. Neil wants me to take part in a night of readings of Dickens' writings, from the latter's various lives as a journalist, novelist, and recorder of American mores.

It will be an evening for twenty-five invited people in the Cathedral's sumptuous Bishop's Dining Room, with a supper using Kate Dickens's recipes. For some reason I will never fathom, Neil, a gay man, is a practising Catholic. It provides a theological cloak for his occasional misogyny, but he mentally brackets out the child abuse and the homophobia.

Went round to see Kirsty and the girls, the latter of whom proudly presented me with a filled up double sided page of sponsors for Sport Relief, in which they are going to run for three miles in a three-legged race. Lots of wine, all of us talking at the TV, trying to persuade some gullible woman not marry a selfish ignorant man who ignored all of her wishes for the wedding. But it makes me uneasy to join in with the way that popular television invites us to look down at the practices of people who are presented as more stupid than us. Even when they are.