Doing a Lecture

Preparing a lecture (see earlier post) is different from doing one. To recap, I'm thinking that my going to the pub beforehand is some kind of transcendental preparation, because you never know what's going to happen when you actually engage with an audience. And engage you have to, for the experience should be unique. Of course this runs directly against notions of order and structure now built in to whole tomes of university documentation, which attempts to condition exactly what a student might get, and exactly what a lecturer might say.
As far as it goes, this might as well mean that eventually material will soon (and inevitably) be sold facelessly over the internet, and universities seem oblivious, or perhaps embrace, such a concept; it appears safe. The fools! Such an approach will destroy the point of their existence! So I suppose this is another occasion where I fundamentally oppose the technological fix; which will end up with robotic, synthetic, inhuman (and bad) communication.
I never know what is going to happen in a lecture, it is pretty much spontaneous. OK, to paraphrase Keef, if I'm dancing around it's either going very well or very badly, but dancing around
I do anyway. It is an age old method towards engagement. Sometimes the gesturing surpasses the words.
By the end of it, I'm generally pleased of smiling faces, but there can be a horrible comedown. 'Christ .....what did I actually say?' might creep up, like some spectre of self doubt, the morning after. After all, I'm trusting Dionysus over Apollo. And after the immediate effect, you are, pretty much, left on your own. When I realised on Monday evening at Doomed Gallery (above) that my performance more resembled a political piece of rabble rousing than the dispensing of information, I collapsed into morbid circumspection.
But a colleague of mine was once very circumspect herself about that sort of thing, she said, 'Well Paul, you are a critic, you don't just dispense information'. Just as Dave Hickey demands the world splice in to farmers and pirates, I might be satisfied that maybe lecturers divide into those providers of information and 'critics', those infused with a quest, a spirit, that even they don't understand.
Academics don't trust the Dionysian spirit, especially these days. They too have become cow-tailed in to procedure, to method. Whatever their revolutionary credentials they never trust to luck, which is to my mind a fatal flaw. If, politically speaking, you believe humans are basically OK, don't browbeat them with theory as a prop; in teaching terms, don't worry too much about the referencing, but consider what might be being said, or at least enjoy the manner in which it has been delivered.