Howl

The boiler at our other house has already cost us more money than I care to think about, and our local plumber has now given up. Today the boiler company are charging us an arm and a leg to get it going again, and L is down at the house now attending the engineer, as our tenant is currently away (fortunately as it turns out, since it's taking so long to sort it). After this chapter is concluded, I'll head off for my penultimate round of Census collecting. I shall be so happy to finish tomorrow. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to earn some regular money for a few weeks, but knocking on doors becomes wearisome after a time, especially when they are the same doors over and over again. The wind has been making the job awkward these last couple of days too, threatening to wrest my sheets of addresses from my clipboard, and whirling my hair into a charming 'hedge backwards' look.

I am not good at occupying myself in odd little interim chunks of time like this one. I can't make a nice cup of tea or coffee, as one of my Census routines has been a kind of nil by mouth strategy for a few hours before going out, to avoid the need for a toilet, since there are no public ones in the vicinity. I am struggling to get into anything much with the prevailing feeling of just wanting to get my last two Census shifts over and done. Then comes Wednesday, when I return to the school, and Friday when I make my teaching debut at the university. Even though it is quite a laid-back course, and the content not overly challenging, I am still nervous. I am not by any means a teacher. I've done training with volunteers - quite a lot of that really, so I'm not afraid of standing up and talking to a group of people. But medical students are an unknown quantity. I have at least met them, and on the whole liked them.

I went to see Howl on Thursday. I loved it, though the critics have not been overly kind. Imagine making a film of a poem - how audacious! Some of the animated sequences which accompany the section by section reading of the poem, were a bit silly, but I kind of got into them as it went along. And the other strands - the young Ginsberg reading Howl for the first time in a club; the only slightly older Ginsberg being interviewed about the poem and the creative process; and the obscenity trial which followed the poem's publication - all worked beautifully. Interesting, moving, inspiring. And the poem was indeed the star of the show, raw visionary rant that it is, full of wildness, flight and the sheer joy of language.