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South Lakes Cow
Not a very nice way to talk about someone
To Westmorland General with my daughter for her appointment with a gorgeous opthalmist. The latter was thirtysomething, dressed in straight-leg sea-blue creased trousers and a duck egg blue blouse with white polka dots and a deep collar. I liked the different shades of one colour, and her straggly dark blonde hair. As she leant forward to put a plastic spatula on the tip of her nose and told Melanie to look at it, I checked my unsighted angle behind her elbow: down the open crest of a crease-wrinkle of her shirt, the curve of a dark purple bra.
It was all over in ten minutes. We bid each other a civil goodbye. No wedding ring. Outside I said "Melanie, you've just been through a distressing examination which went on for at least six minutes. I realise you're a bit traumatised, so what we'll do is to have a recuperative dinner in Wetherspoons." We scoffed and drank and played a game on the serviette where you have to draw illustrations of famous book titles and the other person has to guess them. I like being with my daughters individually.
At 11ish that night I dashed down to my local. A rich man, Catholic, who seemed to latch onto me because I said that the last book I read was Brideshead Revisited, who lives in Mexico--something to do with oil--was trying to remind himself of the life he abandoned in favour of money, doing a sort of class tourism, interpellating us as authentic. When he went to the loo, we all shook our heads and I swigged his double whisky. I apologised and bought him another, hoping I made the point: we're not your subjects, however much money you've got.
J invited me back to the Musicians' Co-op (of which I was a founder member and which J now runs). We went upstairs to its recording studio and J put on some Clifford Brown and we smoked a couple of joints. I love Clifford Brown and I had to stand up and dance a bit. J talked about how the Council doesn't like something--the Musicians' Co-op--that is out of their control. I kept nodding, very much agreeing with his political points, but unable not to dance to Brown's visceral trumpet playing.
Full day tomorrow, as a couple of people are coming round to see the room, so I'm going to have to sellotape some of the drifting wallpaper down before they arrive, and put the heating on for the first time since Csilla and Petar left. One, a young girl who works locally, at 11, then the one I prefer at the moment, a 28-y-o female Naughty Boys Studies postgrad who wants to bring her cat, at 12.30. Straight over to Neil and Kev's for lunch and a run through for the Dickens night, then to Liverpool to meet the Scouse nurse at 5.15.
The Prof has suggested "drinks and tapas" next Wednesday at a place which looks a bit pricey to me. So say, with restraint, three drinks at three quid, plus four tapas at four quid? So that'll be twenty-five quid minimum then. Couldn't we just go down the local boozer?
I'm still wishing Kim hadn't recalled what she said.
10 comments
What an excellent observer and commentator on life you are, and so educational.
You used the word interpellating whiich I’d never heard of before, so I had to look it up.
“the process by which ideology addresses the pre-ideological individual and produces him or her as a subject proper”
Well I never! You live and learn. I’ll try and work it into my conversation today.
(See Homer, positivity)
Soncere thanks for mentioning Clifford Brown. I’d never heard of him either, but he’s got a lot up on YouTube. What a trumpet. I’ll be listening to more from him.
I still reckon the Prof’s your best bet. If it’s getting a bit expensive, why don’t you let the prof take the lead and treat you?
Such a feeling of empowerment may lead to to her devloping masterful feelings, and you may then end up in an unexpected position.
Possibly even with a ball gag.
Have fun, and keep up my education.
i am a woman. have been one for nearly 50 years. i could not identify the difference between “sea blue” and “duck egg blue". even at gunpoint.
i’m off to turn in my ‘woman card’.
DF: Well, thinking back to my days working in textiles, I think we’d say that sea blue is a bit darker, with a greenish tint. Duck egg blue is quite pale in comparison. That’s why it worked so well together–the sea blue lightened the other one. It might have been the nearest clean shirt and trousers she had to hand that morning, but if it was deliberate…kudos.
TSB: The best example of interpellation, which makes it much clearer, comes from Althusser, the French Marxist (and uxoricide), who asked you to consider a policeman hailing you in the street. With that action, you’re interpellated into a subject according to the rules that exist around a policeman, his powers, your allowed behaviours etc.
In the pub, I thought we were being framed (with an element of unwillingness) as interesting “authentic” nothern pub folk, and I didn’t like that–just as with the man being hailed by the copper, it reduces the degree of agency you have to be seen as autonomous, since all your actions are interpreted as those of a certain type of subject. Or maybe I wasn’t pissed enough.
Very glad you enjoyed Clifford Brown–I’ve also been poking around for some more of his recordings.
I’ll find out about the Prof next week, but even from day one, the financial disparity between us looms.
Right must dash, got to hide all the cider bottles before the potential new lodgers come round. It might take some time.
I too had to look it up. What a brilliant word ! It looks as it is, scarily officious.
I have to say I’m hooked. I like reading you in bed with tea and toast; it’s like a soap opera with brains, drugs and lots of captivating details, or perhaps I should say a modern day Dickensian serial where I’m always wanting to know what happens next.
The fascinating thing to me about both interpellation, and your own attempts to break out of it, shows how a certain kind of social interaction is practically anti-empathic:
* on the one hand, neither of Althusser’s policeman and hailee cares a fig what the internal emotional and mental states of the other is;
* on the other hand, you encountered someone whose family or close friends might think of as slightly damaged, or at least cut adrift from their traditions, like Hoggart’s grammar-school generation; yet as mere passing acquaintances your quite reasonable reaction was to subtly tell him where to go.
I stress that that’s not to say that what you did was wrong - he was after all using you as characters in his own narratives, which borders on the rude however you paint it - but it does make all those social relations at work look rather unforgiving.
Isabelle: Thank you, you (and the discount out of date Hobgoblin from the corner shop) have made my evening.
SB: “neither of Althusser’s policeman and hailee cares a fig what the internal emotional and mental states of the other is”
Don’t know - I think interpellation always carries with it an exercise of power. The pleasure in interpellating someone is partly derived from the withdrawing the subject’s control about the way his or her behaviour is interpreted. I think the hailee does care about that, since they’re aware of being called into an inferior position within a power relation which did not exist before they were interpellated. (The word’s starting to sound a bit silly by repetition now).
Re your last paragraph–I am turning into one of the Lancaster pub folk I always found so unfriendly when I move here 30 years ago!
Well, *that* happens to us all. I’m just waiting for someone to come along and build me a convenient local.
Don’t you have any paste for the wallpaper instead of sellotape? Sellotape turns brown after a while and looks awful
Yes it’s just a temporary solution–the whole house is in desperate need of redecorating. In the short term I’ll just paint over the (plain) wallpaper.
The wallpaper in the front room is absolutely awful IMHO – it’s Laura Ashley and very expensive. It makes your eyes do a Brigit Riley. The plan is to suspend some light poles and across the ceiling and hang some cambric or muslin over it.
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