extemporally

I spoke to my mum on the phone yesterday about where I should live next year and ended up with a rage headache and also chose East Oxford out of spite (except not really - it is a lovely college annex, and I do love the neighbourhood) and also had the worst essay due for today, and didn't sleep at all last night, gave up trying at about 3 AM, was at the library at 5.30 AM and basically hated life until I finished my essay and watched the new episode of Skins (o Season 6, why???). It's been a tough weekend.

On the bright side: my college will be flying the rainbow flag at the boat race this Saturday for LGBT History Month, I discussed poetry with a friend, there are no more two tute weeks for the next two weeks, tutorials with ♥Liz Fisher♥ always buoy me up no matter how difficult I find the reading, and I have Edward Said's Orientalism out of the library and also my copy of Dionne Brand's Thirsty arrived in the mail today. AND, when this afternoon is over I will have 100 times more clean clothes than I currently have. PARTY HARD!!!

Also, reviewing this book means I get to dwell on H.L.A Hart and his intellectual achievements and ambivalent sexuality and inferiority complex and complicated sense of ethnic identity and amazing wife and liberal humanism and Oxford in the 50s/60s, all over again:

A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, by Nicola Lacey.

BUT REALLY, WHERE DO I EVEN START. God!!! Okay, how about these bits, which I posted on Facebook and thereby convinced a fellow lawyer to START READING IMMEDIATELY:

This bit, from when Hart (later to become, you know, only the most brilliant man in both the legal and philosophical worlds combined) started teaching:

Browne was not the only student to induce a feeling of despair about his capacity to reach the standards of clarity in teching to which he aspired and - in a phrase which recurs frequently in the diaries - 'feelings of panic'. Another was Ian Little, later to become a world-famous economist and a friend of the Harts, whom Herbert was convinced took a very dim view of him as a tutor: 'He distrust...s and despises my whole approach to the subject. He also hates Moore whom I gave him to read. Bad and depressing. He has obviously discussed me with Browne and is pretty contemptuous. If he drops out too, the Warden will begin to be a bit uneasy.' Even once he had developed the technique of timing the stronger students' tutorials early in the week, so that the insights and confidence gained by surviving the early tutorials would take the strain off the later ones, he found the process enervating. Geoffrey Warnock, later a famous philosopher himself, recalled that he and other students would occasionally make Herbert go pale by saying in response to one of his arguments, 'But Mr. Austin said exactly the opposite in his lectures.'

And also Nicola Lacey goes through his diaries and it's kind of stunning how many times the phrase 'feelings of panic' arise re: his teaching and his work, oh my gosh it's like Hart is trying to break me.

And:

Herbert and [Isaiah] Berlin's friendship had always been marked by a certain competitive edge, and this must have been exacerbated by Jenifer's [Hart's wife] affair [with Isaiah Berlin]. Yet in 1981, when Herbert read Neil MacCormick's description of Berlin as Herbert's 'closest friend among his philosophical colleagues', he scored out the last four words.

Say it together with me, SAY IT: N'awwwww! (Also I love Jenifer Hart madly - in my Juris tutorial, actually, my tutor was talking about how she was standing next to Jenifer Hart at a speech in memoriam of Hart & his academic brilliance and the legacy of the book that, arguably, was his magnum opus, and afterwards she just kind of boomed, 'NEVER COULD SEE WHAT ALL THE BLOODY FUSS WAS ABOUT ANYWAY!')

Really, Hart in general has a particular gift for marginalia:

Yet even during his brief and unhappy time at Cheltenham, he made a mark on his teachers. On earning a scholarship to Oxford and on his graduation, he received several warm letters of congratulation from masters at the school. One of them wondered whether it would be appropriate to list Herbert's successes at Oxford as pertaining to an 'Old Cheltonian'. Herbert wrote firmly in the margin, 'No.'

I love stories about boarding schools very much, and one of the things I love even more about boarding schools is the boys who have miserable times there. Oh man.

Here is a bit I found especially helpful (especially, though it isn't quite ingenuous to read too much into authors' works and relate them to biographical detail, bla bla bla, in re: his discussion of 'internal attitudes towards the law'):

This disjuncture between public self and inner feeling is highlighted by Jenifer's ignorance of the depth of his depression and self-doubt. Given that their correspondence shows continuing affection and dialogue, this suggests a variety of things: a capacity for concealment and repression on Herbert's part; a lack of confidence that Jenifer could help him; a use of the diary as repository for extremes of feeling which did not characterise the whole of his life.

I have tabbed TOO MANY PAGES to even be coherent about this. Here are a couple of other things I enjoyed about this book:

1. Nicola Lacey's lucid writing. Amazing, amazing, amazing.
2. Her ability to engage with, despite Hart's towering reputation as a legal philospher, her biographical subject as an intellectual peer - the bit where she admits she's moved on from legal positivism!!! GUYS, I have a copy of her book on feminist jurisprudence reserved for me at the library, and I'm so looking forward to it I can't even.
3. His liberal humanism - which Lacey fully acknowledged could be frustrating.
4. As a corollary, his dislike of engaging with his Jewish heritage.
5. The fact that, although he believed that law wasn't necessarily moral, and despite the moral posturing (that's disdainful - the moral position) of the natural lawyers, he was seminal in the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England.
6. The snapshots we get of Dworkin ('"It is my opinion that" - is that a sort of English sneeze? Of course it's my opinion, why else would I say it?') and Jenifer Hart ('An Oxford secret is something you tell one person at a time'), oh man. I could drown in their brilliant back & forth all day.
7. The fact that Lacey kept pointing out what an old boys' network Oxford in the 50s/60s could be - I liked that she went in deep enough for the charm of what all these incredibly clever people talking to each other could be, to show? But that she kept pointing out, also, that there were no women.
8. That Hart, as President of Brasenose College, opened the college up to women and made Brasenose one of the first colleges to do so.
9. Because it just wouldn't make sense otherwise.
10. That Nicola Lacey puts, at the start, as one of three paragraph, a line from Ginsberg's poetry - "And there goes Professor Hart striding enlightened by the years through the doorway and arcade he built (in his mind) and knows - he too saw the ruins of Yucatan once -" oh my heart. ♥♥&hearts