Student day

Too many ideas compete for space within this adled, ageing brain of mine.  I'm waiting for a ten o'clock tutorial to start; sitting in the lae-summer sun on the balcony of the (allegedly notorious) Manning Building of Sydney University.  It's early (for a university) on a Friday morning.  Whatever it is that gives this place its reputation is, I imagine, still tucked up in bed - oblivious to the hangover waiting in the corners of conscousness to testify to excesses of an undergraduate's Thursday night.

I've read and re-read my tutorial presentation on Thomas Pynchon's The crying of Lot 49.  It's as ready as it's ever going to be; too long but ready.  I killed some time between my student union's breakfast of fried egg, tomato, hash brown (insipid yellow is closer to the mark) and toast and now by reading articles on The Guardian web site; a piece on the short stories of William Trevor, another on The Dead by James Joyce and a review by Peter Bradshaw (a man not easy to satisfy) of the new teen fiction move, The Hunger Games (to which he gave four stars out of five).

These different stimuli fought for territory within me.  Two thoughts emerge or stick.  One is an interest in the idea of paralysis in the short stories of James Joyce.  Critics don't mean spinal cord injury or any othe physiological phenomenon.  And linked to that I suppose was an observation in te Trevor article about the creative paralysis arising from the lack or absence of moral conviction.  Does that ring a bell for me?

I should reflect less perhaps.  It's a warm, sunny morning on my day as a student.  I have a tutorial to lead.  THere are harder ways to go through life.  Pynchon calls ...