The Plashing Vole: y traethodydd

Learned we may be with another man's learning…

2012-02-13T18:30:00.002Z

Teaching did not go well today. On the agenda was a short children's novel, Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons, a leftwing Robin Hood adventure.

Of the twenty or so in the seminar, three had read it. I went through the admin - including announcing that I'd arranged a theatre trip if they wanted to take the offer up, gave a quick potted history of the socialism and literature debates going on in the 1930s, and then realised that a) they wouldn't have anything to say about the novel and b) I didn't want to fill the silence with an extra lecture. So I cancelled the class.

I may well have sounded much huffier than I really am. I actually really like this class and look forward to it every week, which isn't always the case even though I love teaching. I'll still look forward to teaching them next week and hope there isn't a froideur in the room.

I also worry that I may have been a touch unreasonable: lots of the students have jobs and children to look after, and I may have asked them to read too much, though none have said so and I hope I'm approachable enough for them to mention it.

What does Montaigne have to say on the subject? In 'On Idleness', he has words which reprove both my students and me, for my blog wittering (you'll have to forgive the inaccurate biology - he was writing over 500 years ago):

…just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept bust by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts… When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say if you are everywhere, you are nowhere.

That works for me as a definition of good teaching. I don't teach my students what to think and I don't make them more or less intelligent. I do show them new ways of thinking and hopefully provide them with texts which are worth thinking about - not necessarily in terms of judging quality, but ideas and subjects which illuminate their lives and widen their intellectual horizons. Sometimes they might be 'boring' texts: certainly the extract I gave them from Poly-Olbion last week couldn't be described as thrilling, but it does illustrate one perspective on Renaissance Britain.

Montaigne also has some sharp words for us teachers. In 'On Schoolmasters' Learning', he quotes some Latin doggerel from Rabelais' Gargantua which translates as the 'biggest clerks ain't the most wisest' and goes on lament that 'a soul enriched by so much knowledge' often fails to 'be more alert and alive' (how I wish he'd been on my PGCE course and not the new-age charlatans endlessly referenced instead). He goes on to speculate that:

…our minds are swamped by too much study and by too much matter, just as plants are swamped by too much water… our minds, held fast and encumbered by so many diverse preoccupations, may well lose the means of struggling free, remaining bowed and bent under the load

although he actually believes that the best minds expand the more they learn. I guess I'm not in that first rank: the more I learn, the more I worry how much more there is to learn before I have a basic grasp of anything, which produces a terrible paralysis. But Montaigne's right to attack the scholar who loses sight of the ultimate purpose: to expand the circle of scholars. By failing to consider my students' needs and capabilities empathetically and by giving up, I turned away from my usual progressive collaborative pedagogy back to a hierarchical, oppositional stance which serves nobody. Empathy has always been key to me: I ask myself what stage of life, what situation my students are in, and how literature might improve/destablise/challenge/broaden their cultural states. Having a bit of a strop doesn't really help. Montaigne feels keenly the usual division between the learned and the good in a way that Michael Gove and co. don't:

…the cares and fees of our parents aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge: nobody talks about judgement or virtue. When someone passes by, try exclaiming 'Oh, what a learned man!'. Then, when another does, 'Oh, what a good man! Our people will not fail to turn their gaze respectfully towards the first. There ought to be a third man crying 'Oh, what blockheads!'.

We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty… our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it on the tips of their lips, only to spew it out and scatter it on the wind.

Montaigne despises those teachers who treat learning as a secret which elevates the scholar above the concerns of the world and of those who use their skills for personal profit: he approves of those who like Heraclitus, preferred playing with children over ruling alongside the citizens who reproached him: I think Montaigne would have worked at a post-92 university like mine rather than an ivory tower.

But what is worse, their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed form hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements… 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi sedum' (They have learned how to talk to others, not with themselves').

I certainly think that my students aren't entirely to blame for not doing their reading. Our education system from a very early age is dedicated to the generation of certificates rather than the acquisition of wisdom, and this is only getting worse under the current regime. League tables, SATS, classifications: is it any wonder that students under so much pressure try to get away with the minimum? Especially in my kind of institution where the classes are not filled with rich teenagers with no shortage of time or books. Wisdom, compared with the terror of unemployment and debt, is a luxury. I try my best - presenting them with texts they'll never see in a glossy BBC adaptation or on the shelves of Waterstone's, to provide alternative views of the things they think are simple and solid. But collaboration needs more than one enthusiast.

Whenever I ask a certain acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about anything, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of 'scabs' and 'arse'.

Montaigne here is heading towards a very modern view of meaning: that it isn't in the books, it's in what the reader does with the books. That's why I don't just lecture and send out reading lists. My classes aren't indoctrination sessions: my students create meaning, if they speak. Without them, there is no meaning.

I could quote Montaigne all night, but I'll leave you with this analogy of his, which explains rather neatly why my students need to contribute as much as I do:

All we do is look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own. We closely resemble a man who, needing a fire, goes next door to get a light, finds a great big blaze there and stay to warm himself, forgetting to take a brand back home. What use is it to us to have a belly full of meat if we do not digest it, if we do not transmute it into ourselves, if it does not make us grow in size and strength?… We allow ourselves to lean so heavily on other men's arms that we destroy our own force… Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.*

I'm quite a nervous and shy person (most voles are). Given the chance, I'd rather give a pre-prepared lecture to 300 people and leave. Instead, I make myself rearrange the classroom so that a small number of people have to look each other in the eye and rely on each other to make meaning. It's terrifying - which is how you know it's important. Let's not throw it away.

*And yes, I'm aware of the irony in thinking through an event by quoting someone else's wisdom.

Book news…

2012-02-13T13:59:00.000Z

The book drought is ongoing. I didn't receive a single one last week, though I may have ordered one or two. Over the weekend I bought and read Brian Aldiss's Greybeard, in which a nuclear blasts renders everyone infertile. The novel tracks the social decay resulting from a land without young people. It's compelling: often lyrical, more concerned with death, the pointlessness of posterity and the philosophy of decay than the typical SF obsessions which group round this story line, and quietly rather beautiful. It's not an SF novel, in a sense: the nuclear blast is a plot device which happens decades before the novel's setting. Instead, very little happens: some ageing men and women travel around a degraded English midlands meeting other desperate or hopeless people.

If you think it sounds like P. D. James's The Children of Men, you're not alone: Adam Roberts's introduction pretty much accuses her of plagiarism, and adds a charge of religious clumsiness.

The post also brought me a rather interesting text, Patricia McKee's Public and Private: Gender, Class and the British Novel (1764-1878): not my period, but certainly themes in which I'm interested.

The Life Academic

2012-02-13T12:15:00.000Z

This was circulated at the weekend:

It's pretty clichéd, but some of it rings true. Certainly all my friends talk about 'three month holidays' (er, no: that's when we do a lot of marking, admin, module design and finally catch up with the research that's meant to keep us at the cutting edge), while my family appear to think that I just chat about books. Well, some of them. The others ask me why I don't want a 'nice' job teaching English at a boarding school ('you'd get free accommodation'). This suggests that they don't actually know me very well, or the job. If you're not an academic: add what you saw your school-teachers and lecturers do in class to an office job. Then extend the working day to run 9-9, which is our teaching schedule.

The other HE snippet I caught this weekend was risible bum-obsessed poet/professor Craig Raine's reply to the question of how to avoid sleeping with your students. 'I read their essays', he said. Funny, but yet again extending the myth of humanities lecturers as dirty old men preying on naive young star-struck women. Well, not here. Some of my colleagues ARE women. Some of both sexes are homosexual. All of us have a friendly and respectful relationship with students - and then we go home to kick the cat or dribble in front of TOWIE. The idea that universities are hotbeds of illicit romance is derived from cheap literature and bad TV: written I suspect by similar dirty old men. We see quite enough of our students in class, thanks.

Today's the day for indoctrination

2012-02-13T11:55:00.000Z

I've been teaching a module for final-year students called 'Positions' - my role is to lead the strand dealing with class, both in literature and as readers. The idea is that we don't just look at how social class develops as a cultural theme, we take a Gramscian approach to literature as an hegemonic vehicle, and a reader-reception/Barthesian take on the reader's role in creating meaning.

On the course so far, we've done some Chaucer, some extracts from Piers Plowman, an extract from Michael Drayton's interminable Poly-Olbion, and Anthony Munday's The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, a play which hasn't been revived for the simple reason that it's structurally all over the place, though very interesting in many ways. The Drayton and Munday both feature Robin Hood, because I'm using him as a way to examine class as a site of social anxiety - Robin starts off as a threatening, shadowy figure, before becoming appropriated for aristocratic purposes: Munday is the first to make him a peer.

Today we're taking a different approach to Robin: Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons, a 1930s children's novel which is a rare example of children's communist propaganda. Last year it got a very good reception as a novel, but the propaganda element went largely unnoticed.

I don't think it's because my class were unsophisticated - they're familiar with the relevant theory and history. Instead, I think it's because the general culture is very disinclined to examine class in a political sense. Downton Abbey and various working-class soaps and comedies prove that there's plenty of cultural mileage to be made out of class differences, but the irresistible tide of individualism, allied to the downfall of mass employment means that political class-consciousness seems to be a thing of the past. We'll boo (or thrill) when a toff behaves arrogantly in Downton, and scoff at Vicky Pollard or the Big Fat Gypsies, but this is all class as lifestyle: the implied audience is securely middle-class, and the ways in which class is portrayed (snobbish, patronising, loud, drunk etc) are viewed as individual choices to some extent. The slew of these shows is meant to discipline us into adopting middle-class values: don't be common, aspire to the Downton lifestyle but don't be arrogant either.

I wonder if this year's class will be different: whether Occupy and Greece and Tahrir Square and bankers' bonuses and a government made up of the landed gentry will alter their positions as readers. I think my generation and the ones after me have lost the sense that we have a collective identity. We consume, usually as individuals. We work as individuals, jealously guarding each demarcation and distinction. Union membership has been crushed outside the public sector - and even in it the least well-paid are excluded by their insecure contracts and fear of victimisation.

After Trease, we're doing two plays about the clash of new and old money - Massinger's A New Way To Pay Old Debts (1625) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, a comic and tragic play in rhyming couplets about the clash between aristocratic corrupt bankers and pushy working-class corrupt bankers, from the 1980s. I saw the Birmingham Rep revival a couple of years ago, and was stunned by how prescient the play was.

If you get a chance - go. Then we look at some of Gerard Winstanley's pamphlets, Churchill's play about him, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and end the module with Lewis Jones's misunderstood Cwmardy and - in total contrast - Waugh's Vile Bodies - now adapted for the stage.

Cornish men are fishermen…

2012-02-10T16:13:00.001Z

A Cornish song, famously turned into a graffiti challenge on a mine's wall, ran 'Cornish men are fishermen/Cornish men are miners too/When all the fish and tin are gone/What are Cornish men to do?'.

I thought of this last night while listening to Paul Uppal MP, Emma Reynolds MP, Ken Harris and Jane Nelson debate employability. They - and we - all support further education for all, apprenticeships, transferable skills and all the other current jargon. Emma, Ken and Jane also spoke up for the humanist values, very hearteningly.

But we still have a problem. Not everybody can be a web developer or a graphic designer. Economies can't run on serving each other coffee, cutting each other's hair and doing people's nails. I've found my personal solution: 4 degrees and I'm in the 12th (yes, 12th) year of temporary contracts. The current one expires in June. No contract, no mortgage, no planning for the future.

But I'll be OK. It's what used to be called the working class that's bothering me. What's the point of apprenticeships if there are no jobs out there? The UK abandoned investment in industry after WW2: no innovation, no specialisation, no energy efficiency - then affected to be shocked when the metal-bashing jobs went abroad, quickly followed by the highly-skilled manual jobs which could have replaced them. In recent years, the Labour government provided mass higher education, but didn't develop an economy to take advantage of these skills, leading to degree-holders colonising the jobs traditionally taken by the less-educated. It made HE look like a way of massaging the unemployment figures rather than a serious plan.

Some sections of society will be fine: bankers, hedge-fund traders, shareholders and especially the executives who've diverted what should go to shareholders into their own profits by way of bonuses and what they disgustingly term 'compensation' (for what?).

We have a problem. In the old days workers sold their labour, and owners profited from it by selling physical goods. The UK has abandoned goods in favour of intellectual work - rather than ripping stuff out of the ground, business monopolises the fruit of state education and workers' ingenuity. This makes executives rich, but it privatises intelligence and - more pressingly - leaves massive swathes of the country not just unemployed, but unemployable. What are they to do? In the boom times, taxes from the City covered the benefits payments and we left these people to a life of not-very-pleasant indolence. Now that cash has gone and the government's suddenly discovered that these people are 'benefit scroungers', feckless, idle people 'too comfortable on benefits' (as Uppal and one hysterical audience member claimed last night).

I don't think they are. The problem is that there are 60 million people in Britain and we've abandoned mass employment. They aren't unemployable because of their individual failings: they're unemployable because our economic structure is designed to exclude them. Capitalism relentlessly replaces workers with machines and - in the modern period - physical work with mental work. We used to pity those with arduous jobs: now millions of people envy those lucky enough to be struggling along on the minimum wage in some dead-end drudgery.

Governments used to be 'for' the people, at least in theory. Now they operate in the interests of capital without any qualms. They shrug their shoulders and point at China: how does the British worker compete with a billion people ready and willing to work harder, for longer and for massively lower pay? The government's answer, of course, is that we should join the race to the bottom: safe in the knowledge that the political class and their children will never have to suffer personally. It's ludicrous anyway. Those jobs aren't coming back. When the Chinese demand too much money, the British, American and European corporations which control industry will move the factories to somewhere willing to accept even less. The needs of the workers here and in China will be left far behind in the pursuit of even greater profit margins. We're used to thinking of unemployment as a temporary, shocking aberration which happens on a mass scale at moments of crisis: we need to start thinking of it as a permanent and necessary condition of successful capitalism. Lots of unemployed = ever lower wages. Increasing mechanisation = ever-increasing unemployment = permanently declining wages.

But what should we do? Is there meaningful, non-exploitative work to be done? I think there is: our infrastructure is, you may have noticed, knackered. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. The corporations which depend on the transport, education and health system to provide decent staff (this is how they privatise the common wisdom or what Marx called the 'general intellect') spend their time exporting jobs and hiding profits from the taxman, while citizens have been encouraged to see taxation as extortion rather than the subscription we pay to join a civilised society. The Greeks bought off their middle classes with massive state employment - and now the bond markets are taking their revenge. In the meantime, billions of people sit around, unwanted. In first world countries, contraception slowly reduces their numbers, but that's a very long-term and quite sinister solution. In developing countries, poor health care, high mortality and manual labour encourages large families - reducing the chance of developing an educated society in a vicious circle of deprivation.

The logic of this is the total abolition of international proletarian solidarity, and the dissolution of national solidarity too: the upper classes are walling themselves into gated communities, living off their bonuses and share options, hating and fearing the not-wanted-on-voyage poor: many of whom have been educated just enough to understand what's been done to them. This is of course quite useful: as Paul Mason frequently points out, the conditions of revolution require a vanguard which is educated, articulate and excluded - all those graduates suddenly finding that they're poorer than their parents.

How the state buys off these potential revolutionaries is as yet unclear. Apprenticeships and internships might help a tiny minority, but the fervent hope of the ruling classes is that the education system is so dedicated to the maintenance of the hegemonic elite that the disenfranchised youth won't have the tools to elucidate their situation. I disagree: it will take a long time, but consciousness will return.

National Unemployed Workers' Movement

What seriously depresses me is the passivity of the long-term unemployed. In the 30s, across the US and Europe, militancy rose quickly and gloriously - perhaps because unionisation was prevalent, and because the workers knew that mass employment was the normal condition in industrial societies. Now, mass unemployment is a fundamental element of the capitalist structure. They've got used to it, and nobody has any trust in governments any more: the state works for the banks and the City, everybody can see that.

The working poor aren't going to strike - it's been made legally difficult and self-harming. When the university staff went on strike recently, virtually all the picket-line crossers were the lowest-paid: cleaners, caterers, security guards. Why? Because they're desperate to retain the tiny stake they have in society, however oppressive. They're all on zero-hours contracts: sackable in an instant. During the academic holidays, they're left to fend for themselves, unpaid. We teachers, conversely, have pensions and contracts (however temporary): we're not yet proletarianised and we're fighting desperately to stay that way. For the cleaners, the battle's over and they've lost. If a university can't treat its staff properly, what hope for contract cleaners at merchant banks or supermarkets? The militant student isn't fighting alongside the ex-working class: s/he's fighting to avoid joining it. When the underclass does revolt - as in the riots last August - the mode is one which horrifies or baffles the rest of us. Smashing up Snappy Snaps and nicking water bottles might seem stupid to us, but it's a mark of the depoliticisation and dissolution of a class which in the 1930s was capable of sophisticated analysis and concerted action.

Instead of meaningful work, we've become the willing servants of the information economy: every time I blog, and every time you add something to Facebook, we're handing over a free product to be sold to advertisers and corporate interests. They know that information is a commodity: we haven't yet caught on. The old solution was to kick out the bourgeoisie and circulate the profits of industry amongst the actual workers: now there's no work and the profit is in intangible, low-employment activity. I suppose we could all work in Farmville or playing MMORPGS to generate online goods like magic swords for sale to talentless rich kids (as featured in Ready Player One) but it's a minority pursuit and not good for social cohesion.

I don't know what to do about the millions who would have once made things. We're in the process of taking away the benefits designed to keep them calm and obedient: is the government sure it knows what to do when these people start to lash out?

The Downton Manoeuvre: where DO the Tories get their ideas from?

2012-02-10T12:53:00.003Z

You may have noticed that the Tories have floated the idea of letting the super-rich off some of their taxes in return for employing more servants. No, really! As if the rich don't already have enough money, most of it hidden from the Revenue in any case.

It's a mad idea economically: that a modern economy with 60 million citizens can be heaved out of recession by employing a few more maids and butlers. It's offensive too: it indicates that the landed gentry running the government really believe that Britain's salvation lies in returning to Downton Abbey, where contented servants tug their forelocks in gratitude to the Master's generosity. No doubt the sub-minimum wage salaries will be enhanced by a few eggs and the left-overs from banquets. The ultimate in thoughtless trickle-down economics.

However, there's more to this than meets the eye. Although the inspiration is supposed to be a stupid rightwing Swedish tax break, the idea rang a bell in the recesses of my weird little mind.

Come with me on a journey to the outer fringes of the confused, weird and sinister 1930s British aristocracy…

After the depression, most European countries spawned fascist or neofascist political groups: the New Party/BUF in Britain, the laughable Blueshirts and Greenshirts in Ireland, the Nazis in Germany, Action Française and others - loads of them, some successful, others not. We're familiar with the most famous groups, but there was a multitude of groupuscules out there, competing for ideas and space. In Britain, many of these anti-democrats rejected Mosley's fascism - too European, too violent, too political, too proletarian, too urban (according to some, too Jewish!).

Out on the fringes, an agrarian, environmentalist, medievalist movement stirred. Some of them were utopian idealists who fell in with the wrong crowd, amongst them the Kibbo Kift, whose themes of organic, 'natural' communities soon saw them associated with racial purity movements. Starting off innocently, their naive concern for stability, static communities, independence and purity led in small steps towards a much more disquieting set of beliefs.

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift parade in their clan, tribe and lodge divisions

Others, like the Catholic-inspired Distributivists were concerned with social order and called for the return of Guild practices and a peasantry protected and nurtured by a true aristocracy. Democracy of course was out, but an organic link to the land (which implicitly excluded migrants, the urban and Jews in particular) and a total distrust of finance (those pesky Jews again). From these origins came the rightwing element of the modern environmental movement: members owned rather a lot of England and wanted it to stay green and pleasant.

Amongst the groups urging this return to a quietist English fantasy were the English Mistery and its successor, the English Array, led by Gerard Wallop, the 9th Earl of Portsmouth and Viscount Lymington. Like many of the hyper-nationalist English aristocrats of the day (including Churchill and the Astors), he was half-American and spent his early years in the US, a product of the Victorian-Edwardian aristocracy's importation of heiresses in return for titles.

Banner of the English Mistery

The English Mistery believed that only those who had a long-standing and large stake in English society truly possessed the wisdom required to organise a country - the landed gentry, who would protect an obedient peasantry and maintain the monarchy's prestige against foreign (ironic, given the monarchy's recent origins), Jewish, urban and socialist attacks - it was very similar to Action Française's authoritarian, hierarchical neofascism, though lacking the numbers to be anything more than a Tory ginger group.

Poster for the English Mistery - beautifully illustrating their concerns

Lymington's leadership meant that the Mistery had a degree of respectability: he gathered around himself a motley crew of peers, authors and environmentalists: Rolf Gardiner of the Kibbo Kift was a member, as was Colonel Seton-Hutchinson, later exposed as a Nazi spy. Amongst the ideas they promoted, funding the aristocracy to employ (or shelter, as they saw it) many more servants was a key idea: that way, the working classes wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of the coal market, for instance. Organic food and farming were also important: naturally better and requiring more workers - the movement refused entry to women and openly espoused the virtues of benevolent feudalism. They weren't the only ones either: the aristocratic, pro-Tory, pro-Mussolini British Fascisti - who viewed the BUF as upstart commoners - got there first (thanks for reminding me, Simon)

The English Mistery collapsed in the mid-30s, to be replaced by the English Array, attracting plenty more well-known people, such as Edmund Blunden, AK Chesterton (who edited Lymington's New Pioneer) and his Catholic-Distributivist group. Lymington and his supporters, though never making a big impact as a group, utilised their aristocratic network to become leading members of the wider WW2 government, founded what became the now irreproachable Soil Association and other early green groups (alongside former fascists such as Jorian Jenks), and took political and administrative posts under Churchill. Lymington ended up in the pro-Nazi British People's Party and eventually emigrated with lots of other unpleasant aristocrats to Kenya.

The central tenets of the Mistery, the Array and their allies were: an essential link between 'pure' English blood and the soil (key to Aryan German politics too); feudalism; anti-democracy; distrust of finance (which they associated with Jewry); hatred of socialism; a deep and abiding faith in the inherited wisdom and benevolence of the aristocracy.

It's probably a coincidence that David Cameron, a multimillionaire aristocrat and George Osborne, a multimillionaire aristocrat who will inherit a Baronetcy, are proposing a silly policy first dreamed up by some deluded maverick toffs in the maelstrom of the Dark Decade. But that doesn't mean that there's no link between them. These two are directly descended from the circles which formed the Array and the Mistery. They share a deep faith in aristocratic values and contempt for the poor ('benefit scroungers'). Their political mission is to persuade us that they are indeed the 'natural' ruling class, in whom we should put our trust: this is why ideology is rarely mentioned in Conservative discourse. Instead, the narrative is about tradition and benevolence. Our role is to obey, not to question. Despite the modern finance-led economic positions they take (there's certainly no anti-Semitism left), the current Tory leadership is firmly within the tradition of aristocratic patronage.

Do your patriotic duty: become a butler.

Live-blogging the Uppalopacalypse

2012-02-09T20:29:00.005Z

Probably 40 people here - a scattering of staff. On the panel: Emma Reynolds MP, Paul Uppal MP, Jane Nelson from the university Executive and Ken Harris the SU President, moderated by Dan, a very good student activist who looks somewhere between 1970s Gerry Adams and Ricky Tomlinson in that family comedy whose name I can't remember. The mood so far is muted expectation. Uppal's in a very decent suit (he is, in case you don't know, a multimillionaire). Jane's wearing pop-art polka dots and Emma is in scarlet and resembles Kathy Newman from Channel 4 news.

A little misleading: Ms. Reynolds is a lot smilier than this photo implies. On the right is Ken, the SU President.

Ken in full flow

First q: is education a public good?
ER: Yes. We're concerned about it. The original fees was controversial but at least we capped it. We increased the quality of education and improved provision. The government is taking funding away from humanities and creative subjects. The funding cut is almost privatisation.

They say living well is the best revenge, eh Paul?

PU: Yes, it is a public good and I benefited from it. It is a universal truth that parties in power impose fees and in opposition oppose them. That illustrates the heart of the issue. Tuition fees came from the Browne Inquiry. If we have an honest and mature discussion, we must say that the route was a fait accompli. More private money is the reality to get an education system fit for the twenty-first century. £9000 is a good news story: applications are actually up. You have to be careful to look for the positives though I appreciate it's difficult for some. I got a free education but didn't get a grant. I value education. It's been a foundation for me. Those in opposition always oppose but always go impose it in power.

JN: it's a public and private good. Neither party has tackled the issue head on. Participation was very low when I went to university but tax was very high: juggling that balance is always difficult. The policy we now have is a mishmash and won't reduce government expenditure in the short or medium term.

ER chatting to a student after the event

KH: It's a public good. I wouldn't be here otherwise: working with a family, I decided to come back to education, calculated on affording £3000. Now I wouldn't have left my job to go to university. It's a barrier to higher education. My oldest son (13) is already making me worry about the costs of university in a few years' time. My sister has 4 children: she can't afford to send her children. We don't all come from a privileged background but we can still succeed and it looks like the door is closing.

Q2: Now the fees are trebled, will a sector of society be put off?
ER: I am really concerned about this. Applications are up here but the national rate is 10% down. It's not black and white but £27000 is a lot of debt for the start of your life. Getting on the housing ladder is harder, the jobs are harder to find. This might lead to fewer students. I went to Oxford: I don't want the elite universities to bar the brightest from going there. We already have a problem in that very few of their students come from the state school system. I don't want to discourage people though. Education is also a private benefit, hence our introduction of fees: 60% of young people not in HE need help too.

ER meets an overseas student. Paul Uppal had a train to catch and couldn't hang around. Damn: I wanted his autograph.

JN: I'm quite optimistic. There aren't many other options post-school at the moment. The detail of how the funding works has been obscured by the politics: you don't pay fees until you're earning £21k. When you start repaying what you owe, it relates to your earnings, not your debt, so if you go to an expensive university, you simply repay for longer. It's all income related. When fees went up to £3000 in 2006, applications peaked the year before, dipped, then levelled out again.
PU: Try to take the politics out of it. Debt or investment? The advantage of having a degree is enormous. It's a matter of perception. At the Grammar School they see this as an opportunity to grasp (?!). Earn above £41k and you pay more. We've faced choices in government and if we want first-class education this is the best option on the table. I've been to India in recent months: their students covet an English university education: a UK Plc brand (vomit). I'm optimistic. My extended family won't be put off.
KH: I've been fortunate to work on student recruitment for 2012. 95% of them don't like fees but still intend to come here. There aren't any jobs out there. It will lead to a more informed choice of subject and discussion of earning potential. With the focus on STEM, what about arts and humanities, where's the creativity? What legacy are we going to leave behind?

From the floor: I think the HE system needs a kick up the backside. The people responsible are dimwits running education - civil servants, think tanks: targets etc. miss the whole point of education. We're letting students down badly. Under Blair, education didn't lead to jobs. We need plasterers and engineers and having to import them.

Q2: Should degrees be focussed on jobs?
PU: There can be a disconnect between provision and the work ethic and what employers want. The chair of the Black Country LEP is working on school-business involvement. The 9 primary schools and 3 secondary schools improved their GCSE results by 25%. The preparation for a life in work hasn't been explored enough. Vocational training needs more attention.
ER: when I was at school in Codsall I did several language exchanges. In Spain, they don't often do degrees in non-vocational subjects. Our system is better than that. Academic studies encourage people to think and make arguments, which is why other countries in Europe envy us. I take the point that we need to concentrate on non-university people to provide skills but we're not going to survive with low-skilled workers in a globalised system. Young people need skills transferable between lots of jobs. I'm proud we expanded the university population. China and India are producing thousands [millions, I think] of graduates and we can't be left behind.
KH: Degrees fit for jobs? We've shut down the manufacturing. We've seen Birmingham's car factories go, my employer Cadbury's is declining. We need to go back into schools and provide better role models and celebrate success and achievement so that kids naturally want to go to university. We have a society of get-rich, get-famous and we need to stop this kind of aspiration.
JN: The majority of graduate jobs don't ask for a specific subject: employers actually want the ability to think. Even if you do a technical degree, a 40 year career can't depend only on a 3 year degree: these things date very quickly. Most graduates will have 10 jobs: the particular skills they need for their first job won't sustain them: it's the other qualities they acquire.

From the floor: 'quite a lot of degrees don't go out of fashion: philosophy, for example'.
JN: As a politics and philosophy graduate, I completely agree with you. Distinguishing between what's necessary and sufficient is one skill I use regularly.
ER: my degree is PPE - very useful
PU: I studied politics too.

Chair: employability - unemployment is at a high. What does the audience think?
From the floor: you learn a lot at university that isn't on the curriculum - political socialisation. I've been here for many years and have watched governments remove all sorts of subsidies. There's been a concerted effort by both parties to shift the balance of what both young and older people learn in university. If we look at the privatisation argument, the public/private funding split was 55/45 in England in 2009. Getting rid of grants, bringing in fees in stages educates students in a narrower way: to expect low-paid routine jobs and a life of wage-slavery. Blunkett and Browne et al made the case that you pay for what you get out of it: individualisation, marketisation, competition. What students don't learn is mutuality, support, empathy: the postwar values once supported by both parties.

JN: on political socialisation - I've seen the expansion of the system and its intake make universities much less rarefied places. The extra-curricular concerns coping with families etc, rather than living away in isolated activities. Students now aren't shut off from everyday life: they're more grounded. There are some advantages to that.
ER: being at uni isn't just about the education. It's about socialisation but I agree with Jane that expanding the intake creates a much more diverse social environment. When my parents were at university, the percentage was tiny. It's fair to ask students to make a contribution but now we're insisting in arts and humanities that you pay for the whole thing. I think that's the danger with the 85% cut in the teaching grant.
KH: People do learn different things at university, but the fees system is commercialising education. Coventry is bringing in the Netto degree at £48000. Some people - mature, mortgaged - will be tempted by that. What people won't realise is that you won't get the things that come with a full university: library, academic support, an SU, social interaction… If I wanted to be lectured at then go away I'd have done an online degree. I've really appreciated interaction with students at seminars and elsewhere. With new providers offering cut-price degrees the learning experience is going to be completely different. We'll have multiple tiers of institution and the employers will judge you on the institution not the degree classification.
PU: I was at Matthew Boulton Technical College for A-levels. At university I was the only non-white person there. Met my first double-barrelled person. That social aspect explodes vocabulary and soft skills. I took that from university more than anything else. The fundamental aspect is human interaction. People talk about new media but human interaction is the authentic extra yard that seals the deal. If college can enhance those skills, that's something that's still an asset. My relatives have been transformed by university. But increasingly preparation for modern work is for 9-10 careers. Social interaction and networking is essential for this.

Q3: You mentioned non-white faces Mr Uppal. After several years of lobbying, the government is considering whether or not to include caste under the Equality Act. It hasn't been done yet despite the report finding discrimination in the UK. Will you lobby for this?
PU: This predates the current government. It's not an issue that's come onto my radar. Give me your details.
Q. That tells me about your position and caste status: had you belonged to a lower caste, you'd be aware of it. Had you been a victim you'd have been concerned.
PU: Some of my best friends are lower-caste.

Me: tax breaks on property developers or cuts in disabled property? You're a millionaire.
Uppal: I haven't called for tax breaks. You're just reading it that way. I am independently wealthy. I'm not a developer I'm an investor [eh? Isn't that worse? He's contributed nothing to society. He also got a bit huffy that I wasn't 'looking at' him - I was typing his response. Apparently his assistant was looking a bit twitchy too].
ER: I think taxes should increase. I agree those with broader shoulders should pay more. I don't think the 50p tax rate should be abandoned and I don't think bankers bonuses should carry on. It's not right that the incredibly wealthy get too far ahead. We need equality - not just 'equality of opportunity'. Unequal societies have higher crime, worse health and more expensive health systems. We need to take tough measures to tackle this. On the benefit changes it's disgraceful that if you've had cancer, you lose your ESA after a year because you're deemed to be better. There is a real problem with fairness with this government.
KH: If you can afford to pay more, you should. What we're doing now is taxing the poor. If you're on low wages, your cash goes on taxable expenditure - heating etc. The changes are moving us backwards. We're supposed to be civilised. These changes are abandoning the old sick and disabled. We're all going to be old.
PU: On who should share the burden of course it should be carried by those with broader shoulders. I think we should keep the 50p tax rate. But inequality grew at a phenomenal rate under Labour and venture capitalists paid less tax than their cleaners. I'm sorry Emma chose to be partisan. Welfare reform is important. I have been dirt poor. There's no nobility in poverty. My government will provide a ladder out of poverty which is why I voted for the Welfare Reform Bill.
ER: I'm a politican and I'm Labour. Our divisions are healthy. I did say we didn't do enough but we did redistribute. Even Peter Mandelson is no longer relaxed about people getting filthy rich. The crisis has underlined that people risking our money are still being rewarded. We need to fix a culture in those sectors that are out of control.
JH: I support the 50p rate and taxing the rich. But the system of tax and benefits is hugely complex, as is student funding. At least income tax is simple and there.
PU: Lib Dem idea of raising the threshold is good.

From the floor: I've got 2 disabled children. We didn't choose to have genetically-poorly children. My wife had to give up to care for them. Cutting their support isn't a route out of poverty. Raising the tax threshold doesn't help: care allowance will have no effect on that whatsoever.
ER: I agree. I don't understand why welfare reform is hitting people like the disabled. The government shouldn't make it more difficult.

Time's almost up! Oh god - feels like we've hardly started.

Q4: Do we trust markets to solve employability or do we look to government to solve the unemployment crisis?
ER: Both. Government sets the conditions. We're losing public AND private sector jobs - this is economic madness. There do have to be spending cuts or tax rises, but too much too quickly puts people on the dole, damaging the public funds. Another quarter of negative growth puts us into recession officially.
KH: It has to be both. My first job was in a government office. There was a lot of waste - nobody seemed to care. Reforms are good but the cuts are too big. Something needs to be done but I do know personally that it's too easy not to work and be on benefits - that needs to be reformed.
JN: I'd like to see government money going into public infrastructure, especially public transport - a win/win approach.
PU: It's a combination. Of course I disagree with Emma. Credibility is the watchword. Governments not seen as credible are dumped by bondholders non-politically [this is utterly naive and/or deceptive]. Bondholders approve of what the UK government is doing. I will lobby for public infrastructure if you want. There is good news out there: the trade gap is lower than since April 2003.

No interest in green questions at all! I didn't realise it was meant to be a theme of the evening: I'm massively concerned about the environment and feel awful when my students scoff at green issues.

Q5: Why is the government not enforcing benefit scrounging crackdowns with harsh punishments? I know people scamming the system who are never punished.
PU: It's at both ends of the scale. People want fairness at the bottom as well as the top. Work should always pay. A lady on Rugby Street told me that [he's used this one before kids] she's ridiculed by her neighbours for going out to work.
ER: I agree with what Paul said. There's a lot of focus on scroungers - but we need to find jobs for people, and tax-evaders get away with a lot more than benefit scroungers.
[Actually - the benefits system suffers from massive errors and minor fraud, and plenty of people don't claim what they're entitled to - but it suits the Tories and New Labour's right wing to bang on about scroungers, something Emma didn't do].

Time's up - so soon.
Final score.
Jane Nelson: I like Jane. She's got a sharp mind and humanist values tempered by experience and a strategic outlook.

Paul Uppal. I'll admit it up front: I already don't like him. Today saw a tactic I've seen before. When he's amongst friends, he spouts hardline neoconservative viciousness. When he's in front of an audience like this, he attempts to manufacture a post-ideological consensus: he keeps saying things like 'let's not bring politics into this'. Er… he's an MP. What this actually means is 'I'm dealing with reality, you're playing games', and it's a way of closing down debate by making people like me sound rude. I have to admit that I didn't ask my question entirely coherently, but he was rattled, from what others say. He's very smooth and practised.

Emma Reynolds: I'm a Labour member, so you'll probably expect me to be on her side, though I will point out that I'm from the irredentist neo-Trotskyite Time For A Purge wing of the party (or in my tradition, the Party). But - she's brilliant. A really good communicator with a first-class mind but also the human qualities lacking in so many politicians. She also likes a bit of a fight: she clearly believes that with ideology comes competition for ideas and allegiance which we should be proud of. A bit of a star.

Ken Harris: he's the SU President. The institution's been moribund for years, until Ken, who is a very charismatic guy, started the recovery. He's a mature student, working-class with kids, and his politics are populist/centrist: not predictable. Always good value on a panel.

Final event of the evening: the Vice-Chancellor popped up to gloat about Sunderland's win against Stoke. Bah. I almost got to the end of the week without bumping into him. You win, VC!

Anthropomorphising Energy

2012-02-09T17:19:00.000Z

This is rather a cute video.

It's also an ad for Ecotricity, the green energy supplier. I was a customer, but left them for LOCO2 - another green provider (depending on the tariff). I was happy with both, but LOCO2 are a lot cheaper. Either way, I'm comfortable enough to choose a more expensive tariff if it means less fossil fuel use: hopefully before long green energy will be as cheap as the bad stuff.

Extraction without extortion

2012-02-09T16:33:00.001Z

Right, I've been to the dentist. Now it's over I'm so happy that I'm going to name him. His name is Christopher Layne and he is the greatest dentist that ever lived. Friendly, kind and totally painless. And the bill was amazingly moderate: extraction without extortion. Maybe because he's American and has read this:

No website to which I can direct you, but if you're in the West Midlands and your face hurts: he's your man. He's also very cultured - he took our MA in English for fun!

I'm not paralysed by anaesthesia nor crippled by pain - so bring on the Uppal!

Uppal: will it all end in disaster?

2012-02-09T14:45:00.001Z

Obviously Uppal's career is going to end disastrously, but I'm worried about me, tonight. The last time I had to stand up and utter condemnation to a public figure, it was pathetic.

Our previous Vice-Chancellor had managed, through her and others' incompetence, to lose us several million pounds by deceiving the government. She told us she took 'full responsibility' and that 150 of us would be losing their jobs, none of whom would be those responsible for the error.

I then stood up and told her that she and her executive team (her: £240k per year, them £100,000+ pa) should resign in disgrace. It should have been delivered in the stentorian tones of Proletariat Militant, an earth-shaking moment of denunciation and disgust.

Instead, because I'd had flu all week and had lost my voice, it came out in a whispery croak like that of an asthmatic ghost, and I had to repeat myself several times before she even understood my words. The response, needless to say, was 'I feel it's my duty to stay and put things right'.

I can feel history repeating itself. I want to tell Mr. Uppal to 'stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once' (that's Macbeth, kids) and for him to feel my righteous wrath. Unfortunately, I'm off to the dentist shortly and the anaesthetic may not have worn off by 7.30, in which case he'll see a scruffy fat man drooling inaudibly and pathetically in public, then sobbing in pain as the drugs wear off. A bit like this:

Female composers' special

2012-02-09T13:32:00.004Z

There's an interesting discussion going on over at the Guardian about why there are so few female classical composers. My hunch is that in past times - and still regrettably today but to a lesser extent - it's because women were though incapable of higher reasoning: writing, composing, philosophising etc. Book IV of Paradise Lost makes it clear that Adam's to do the thinking and Eve's 'happier' because she can rely on him. She likes prettiness and flowers and wind and water while he worries about the theology.

Women were also excluded from the formal and informal social networks which produced composers: universities, the master-student relationships which provided informal apprenticeships, access to orchestras and performance commissions. Like their author sisters, I suspect that women composers existed, but didn't get performed. In this regard, at least, pop music is streets ahead, though there's plenty of old-fashioned misogyny there too.

I'm largely talking about the modern period of course: before that, composition was - like most creative work - not something to which an individual attached his or her name. There were - as a Mel Marshall points out - 'squillions' of 'nun composers', one of whom is known to us individually, Hildegard von Bingen (I picked this particular clip so you can compare the advert's treatment of women and medieval culture's respect). Then there were occasional oddities, such as the rather impressive Barbara Strozzi

It's getting better, but there's still a worrying disproportion. So here are some snippets by my favourite female composers.

Nicola LeFanu:

Her Irish mother Elizabeth Maconchy:

Some Sally Beamish:

and finally some wonderful Nadia Boulanger:

Uppal roundup

2012-02-09T11:37:00.001Z

The great man is appearing at the university tonight, by popular demand, alongside Emma Reynolds the rather excellent local Labour MP.

Obviously I'll be there and live blogging the event, but I thought you might like a quick potted guide to Uppal's ignominious career in case you're planning to attend:

Knowingly misleading Parliament (and here): he said there was an ongoing investigation into electoral fraud during the 2010 election campaign. The Electoral Commission told me that a) there wasn't and b) he knew there wasn't, while the police told me they'd received no complaints.

He doesn't like the Internet, and when forced to have a blog during the election campaign, happily deleted all critical comments.

He has never once, when calling in Parliament for tax breaks for multimillionaire property speculators, mentioned that he is a multimillionaire property speculator. None of his election material mentioned this at all. But his friends in the British Property Federation think of him as 'our man', in an article now suspiciously deleted (quoted here). I thought, naively, that an MP was 'our' representative, as constituents.

He received a free education (Warwick, Politics, though he won't tell anyone what class of degree he got). He has now decided that HE is a private benefit rather than a public good and voted to impose £9000pa fees on students.

He always manages to quote 'a constituent' who expresses exactly what Mr Uppal believes. How very convenient. In the example linked to, he tells us the rather tall story of the person 'ridiculed' by her feckless dole-choosing neighbours for 'choosing to work' and claims that young people have 'looked [him] in the eye and said that life on benefits is not such a bad option'.

He doesn't like having his photo taken, or strangers at public meetings.

He described Liam Fox's murky and illegal activities in Sri Lanka as 'sterling work': though when I asked him what this meant, he couldn't give a single example of what 'work' Fox had done.

He thinks our high streets have been ruined for 'shoppers' (he doesn't believe in citizens) by 'charity muggers' - and not a recession which has closed over 30% of this town's shops.

He appears to think that deregulation will save the economy, whereas everyone else on the planet outside Newt Gingrich's skull thinks that deregulation let the banks ruin the entire global economy for everyone. He said this in January 2012, so he can't even plead ignorance.

In the past couple of weeks, he's voted to slash benefits to disabled children and called for tax breaks for commercial property owners (without - of course - mentioning that he is one of those commercial property speculators).

His current campaign is straight out of 1960s Mississippi (and the current US South): making it harder for the poor and the mobile to vote - like students. This of course has nothing to do with his wafer-thin majority of 600 and the imposition of £9000 fees. I'm looking forward to the 2015 campaign. I'm going to give every student a picture of Uppal with the slogan 'this man personally made sure that you paid £9000 each year'. Job very much done.

A proud day

2012-02-09T11:03:00.000Z

I've always wanted to get a letter into Pedantry Corner in Private Eye (it used to be called Pedant's Corner until some pedants said it should be Pedants' Corner), and I've finally managed it.

Someone wrote in last time to correct an error: a contributor wrote Bingham when they meant Bingley, the character in Pride and Prejudice. Unfortunately, the letter added a mistake: spelling the Bennet family's surname as Bennett.

I'm a bit torn: I'm proud to be in Pedantry Corner. But is it really pedantic to insist on getting the names right for one of the most famous novels in the English language? I correct them all the time in essays…

In Memoriam

2012-02-08T18:27:00.001Z

My friends Christine and James are in mourning for their large, relaxed cat. James writes movingly about it here. I'm not sure whether they'll find this poem amusing and consolatory, or insensitive. I guess I'll find out:

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

BY THOMAS GRAY

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,

Where China’s gayest art had dyed

The azure flowers that blow;

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima, reclined,

Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;

The fair round face, the snowy beard,

The velvet of her paws,

Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,

She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide

Two angel forms were seen to glide,

The genii of the stream;

Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue

Through richest purple to the view

Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;

A whisker first and then a claw,

With many an ardent wish,

She stretched in vain to reach the prize.

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent

Again she stretch’d, again she bent,

Nor knew the gulf between.

(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)

The slippery verge her feet beguiled,

She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mewed to every watery god,

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;

Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;

A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,

And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;

Nor all that glisters, gold.

Carry on Dick(ens); Or, What A Difference 60 Years Make

2012-02-08T17:20:00.002Z

One of the things I repeatedly bore my students with is that we all have to be suspicious of literary canons. I point out to them that Shakespeare, though respected in his day, didn't become a colossus until the Victorian period. Even then, he wasn't put on a pedestal: I show them the Nahum Tate King Lear, in which everybody - including Cordelia - survives and lives happily ever after, and run through the tradition of bowdlerising and prettifying Shakespeare (e.g. Romeo and Juliet waking up and being fine) - the Elizabethans were seen as pretty bloodthirsty and barbaric, and in need of improvement.

Which brings me to my main - though undoubtedly muddled - point. Here's the opening sentence of 1948's The Great Tradition, by the dominant period of his day, F. R. Leavis:

"The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."

Who's missing? Lots of people, obviously, and don't ask me what 'great' means: Leavis claims they change 'the possibilities of art for practitioners and readers'. But the name that most people would add to this is Charles Dickens, born 200 years ago today. Now securely on his pedestal (though the new biography suggests his personal life was less cheery than some of his novels), we forget that he hasn't always been the National Novelist - and that despite his enormous sales, he had several very serious rivals, including Dinah Craik (aka Mulock), from Stoke on Trent, who was up there and sometimes beyond Dickens and Eliot in the stratosphere of celebrity authors. Just as Leavis excludes Dickens from serious consideration (he did later recant), Craik was considered beneath critical attention too: George Eliot had this to say about her despite some respect for Craik's religious seriousness (thanks to Sally Mitchell for this)

Miss Mulock — a writer who is read only by novel readers, pure and simple, never by people of high culture. A very excellent woman she is, I believe — but we belong to an entirely different order of writers.

Craik didn't seem to mind the snobbishness - she felt that popularity was morally useful:

"The modern novel," she writes, "is one of the most important moral agents of the community. The essayist may write for his hundreds; the preacher preach to his thousands; but the novelist counts his audience by the millions. His power is threefold — over heart, reason, and fancy."

Craik had a good deal of respect for Eliot - but also a sting in her critical tail:

But take it from another point of view. Ask, what good will it do? — whether it will lighten any burdened heart, help any perplexed spirit, comfort the sorrowful, succour the tempted, or bring back the erring into the way of peace; and what is the answer. Silence. (444)

I think Dickens would agree with this: moral purity is fine, but if nobody wants to read your work, you've reached nobody. This is something I discussed with my students yesterday: the role of popular fiction. We talked about Arnold and Leavis, and about Cultural Studies turning attention to what and how people read rather than judging literature according to its High or Low moral/artistic standards (leading into a chat about Gramsci).

The lesson of Dickens v Craik is that becoming a Secular Saint as Dickens is now, is not altogether a matter of literary quality. I suspect that many of those bounding round the TV studios pronouncing on his genius are unfamiliar with large tracts of Dickens' massive outputs. Survival is often arbitrary, or the result of hegemonic manoeuvring. I have no doubt at all that Craik's obscurity is partly due to her gender. Political pliability helps: nobody objects to giving orphans a bit more gruel, whereas there are plenty of more directly political novels which languish in obscurity.

Dickens is interesting because he seems to transgress all these boundaries, hence Leavis' discomfort. Some work (Hard Times, for example, which I really love) is almost agit-prop (given the chance, I'd duct-tape Michael Gove's eyelids open and clamp in front of the opening two pages for a whole school term), whereas other works are whimsical, individual, or concerned with private impulses and trajectories.

There's a game academics play in David Lodge's Small World, in which they compete to boast about who hasn't read the most famous works of literature: the professor who claims not to have read Hamlet wins the game but loses his job. Plenty of my colleagues read Vole, including the Vice-Chancellor, but here goes: I can't stand an awful lot of Charles Dickens' work. There, I said it. I have read quite a lot, and I re-read Hard Times, Great Expectations and Bleak House fairly often. Prolix, overly-pleased with himself and just not funny.

Pickwick Papers: read. Hated. I'd like to gouge out Alfred Jingle's tongue.
Oliver Twist: read. Indifferent. I did not 'want more' (see what I did there?).
Nicholas Nickleby: read. Can't remember a word of it.
Barnaby Rudge: haven't read it.
A Tale of Two Cities: this one I did enjoy. Morality, passion, politics, love and revolution. No supposedly humorous characters and not to many dubious plot twists.
A Christmas Carol. Read it. Vomited copiously.
The Old Curiosity Shop: oh god. It does have a character called 'Dick Swiveller' (I have a serious problem with comedy names, but this is beyond parody). I found TOCS to be the worst sort of emotional manipulation. Even Richard Curtis would be ashamed of parts of this. If Little Nell had any kind of spine at all, she could have become a Moll Flanders or Roxana. As it is she passes away in one of the worst death scenes ever committed to paper and then her grandad pines away by her grave until he too joins the immortals. Pass the sickbag.*
Martin Chuzzlewit: sorry, the name puts me off. Trollope was good at names. So was Mervyn Peake, in the same vein, but without the 'I'm zany, me' element.
The Chimes - I have, and I bet you haven't. Despite being a Christmas book, it's rather good: short and to the point, with a theme of social justice.
The Cricket on the Hearth: no, me neither.
The Battle of Life: no. Apparently it's quite good: not too preachy.
Dombey and Son: orphans, loveless marriages, runaway 'polluted' wives: balanced by rather too many coincidences and complications.
The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: no - more Christmas stuff.
David Copperfield: bah. Uriah Heep? Mr Micawber? Another bildungsroman, Charlie. Please…
Bleak House and Hard Times: pointed, passionate, wonderful.
Little Dorrit: I haven't read this one, even though its themes (debt, who really loses out in society etc.) rather appeal to my tastes. Maybe when I've finished the 2000 pages of Trollope novels currently on my nightstand.
Great Expectations: I do like this one, though I could do with a lot less pathos and comedy names. As a brooding take on the vicious emotional undercurrents of Victorian society, unparalleled.
Our Mutual Friend: this really is a novel for our times: it's about money, and what it does to us. Recommended
Edwin Drood: never read it.

So there we have it: find some Mrs Craik novels and see what you think. Don't let the Canonisers push you around.

However, although I think that sanctifying an author marginalises others and doesn't do much good to critical approaches to the individual works, I will say something else that I think is important, again something we discussed in class yesterday.

I read and loved The Lord of the Rings when I was 14 or so, and thought it was the only book worth reading in the history of literature. When I tried again in my 20s, I thought it was amongst the worst books I'd ever read. The text hadn't changed: I had. I've grown to love some books that left me cold as a young man. I've lost affection for others. I do think that there are books which speak to us at different points in our lives. Maybe I'd feel more well-disposed to cute children in Dickens if I had children of my own. As I pass through the Ages of Man, I suspect I'll have a little more time for characters who've watched the world pass beyond their comprehension or sympathy. The big event, I guess, is death: I've lost grandparents but nobody has been snatched away from me in an untimely fashion, whereas the Victorian obsession with death is understandable given the mortality rate (with no antibiotics, Charles Lamb died from a minor cut).

We grow into - and out of - books, which is why I always have another go at books I've not got on with at first. A fair amount of Dickens is on that pile.

A correspondent chides me for criticising The Old Curiosity Shop, and reminds me that Quilp is as sickened as we are by the sentiment. Here he is (thanks to @CAPittard):

[Little Nell as Comforter] by George Cattermole. "Mr. Daniel Quilp, having entered unseen, was looking on with his accustomed grin." — Chapter 9, The Old Curiosity Shop. Original date of serial publication: 20 June 1840 (tenth plate in the series).

Image scan and text by George P. Landow. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL.]

Calling a spade a cranial surgical tool

2012-02-08T14:56:00.000Z

A while ago, while digging a friend's garden, I idly speculated on the (quite lengthy) list of people whom I felt deserved a spade through the face.

Lo and behold, here's a list of (sadly fictional) deaths-by-spade to inspire us all.

Seeking Closure, with Paul Uppal MP

2012-02-08T14:29:00.000Z

You may remember that Paul Uppal has repeatedly, and dishonestly, claimed that he's been the victim of electoral fraud (despite only Conservatives being convicted of this crime in the area over recent years) - presumably it's the only way he can account for a majority of only 600 given his magnetic personality.

I'd have thought it's time he gave up, but no: he's on his hind legs calling for new rules on electoral registration:

In theory, this sounds fair enough - there have been cases in which votes have been stolen through lax procedures. But that's not what Paul's really up to. As is apparent from the article he posted last week, he's been rolling in the sewer that is American politics, and he likes what's stuck to his clothes.

The most poisonous area of American politics is gerrymandering. Look at US constituencies: weird, illogically-drawn areas designed to maintain total single-party domination. But worse than that is the ongoing war against the poor and the black. Republican areas spend massive amounts of time and money in adding further roadblocks - legal and blatantly illegal - between poor black people and the ballot box.

I welcome the Government’s initiative on individual voter registration, especially the provision to deny the postal vote to people who are unable to provide national insurance details. Does my hon. Friend agree that we might expand that principle by considering the option of requiring individual voter ID from people voting at polling stations?

Most of the civilised world is horrified by this, but not Paul. Why? Well, he knows that when the poor and mobile vote at all, they vote Labour. He's a marginal MP with a massive student population. At the moment, most universities register students to vote automatically. Paul's not keen on this at all: the students are a teensy bit annoyed that his party has slapped £9000 per year tuition fees on their education. By the time of the next election, all 25000 students at this institution will be after blood: Paul's blood.

Under the soft words, there's a nasty-minded campaign of exclusion under way. What about the students and other EU migrants who have the right to vote in this country, but may not have NI numbers? What about those moving about to find work (as the Tories demand) and have difficulty providing ID? What counts as ID? I don't have a driving licence, or a UK passport, but I'm entitled to vote. The imposition of further steps in voter registration isn't a drive to tighten security: it's using a bureaucracy to discourage people with little time or patience for struggling through the 'red tape' that Uppal is so keen to strip away from business legislation, yet he's cynically happy to use it against those whom he thinks are unlikely to vote for him.

Disenfranchisement is a huge civil rights issue in the US, because it's a solution without a legitimate problem. It's rich (often white, though not in Uppal's case) people trying to exclude the poor from the political process. There is no meaningful electoral fraud: in the US, 86 convictions resulted from 190 million votes cast. Electoral fraud in this country is almost non-existent, and a Parliamentary briefing (which Uppal should have read) states that there is 'no evidence' that postal voting has increased fraud. Between 2000-2007 there were 42 convictions for electoral fraud in all the general, devolved, regional and local elections together.

This is 'dog-whistle' politics as they put it in the US: red meat for the core voters who just want the poor, disorganised and ethnic people to shut up and go away. Shame on Uppal.

'…And lose, and start again at your beginnings'

2012-02-07T10:23:00.004Z

I just got an email from a fencer asking for a copy of a photo I took of him at the UK School Games. Browsing through, I noticed some shots of defeat I'm quite pleased with. Fencers look identical on the piste - white clothes, mask obscuring the face - so it's hard to add character to photographs of the sport.

One of the ways I try to do it is to snap them in the seconds after victory or defeat. The female fencers dramatise defeat more obviously - the males are more demonstrative in victory, and victories are a bit less interesting and varied than losses. Here are a few 'defeat' photos - maybe I'll do some victory ones tomorrow when I've a little more time. I see I've chosen monochrome for most of them - as though loss is better expressed in serious black and white. In the final shot, I've gone for a heavy vignette to emphasise the isolation of the defeated - down the other end, her vanquisher is surrounded by cheering team-mates. Click on them all to enlarge.

I'm also keener to shoot defeat because it's something I'm used to. I win most of the time at my club, but when I lose, it's to someone who I know should beat me every time. I don't shout, scream, collapse, hurl my mask across the room - perhaps I should: I lack the fighting spirit to take every point as though my life depended on it. I lose equably and win humbly. When I went to competitions, I knew that I'd rarely get to the finals and even more rarely win (it did happen occasionally): I learned to lose gracefully early on.

I went for the wide angle to get a sense of the different fates: Craig on the right goes on to another round. Dickson gets an early shower.

The ones above are from the UK School Games - the following are from the European Championships

Cassara (left) loses the European Men's Foil Final to Avalo

Many more dramatic action shots here.

Bah…

2012-02-07T10:15:00.000Z

Teaching from 11-4 without a break today - exciting but very wearing, and I'll miss my daily hit of the Leveson Inquiry. Nothing will top yesterday's blustering, dishonest, pompous and arrogant appearance by the Daily Mail's editor Paul Dacre (virtually none of which makes it into his paper's account of the hero's singlehanded salvation of the newspaper industry), but the whole thing is a wonderful, tawdry exposure of the vainglories and pettiness of a trade rotten to the core.

What's on my agenda today? A 2 hour lecture on Derrida to media students, which I fully expect will go down like a bucket of cold sick, followed by three hours on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale applied to Joanna Davies' Freshers/Ffreshars. There's nothing like a dose of structuralism to make first-year students feel confident of their analytical abilities.

Meanwhile, I've found a new phrase to add to my marking repertoire. Given the fractured syntax and tangential logic, I'm convinced that many of them are in fact generated by automated systems. 'Are you a spambot?' will do nicely. The similarities are too strong to be coincidental.

A word in your shell-like, Mr Dacre

2012-02-06T18:38:00.001Z

Over at the Leveson Inquiry, the Daily Mail editor sounded like one of his own rag's columns: ill-informed, splenetic, outraged, out of touch and blustering. He ended by accusing the inquiry of promoting a 'bleak' and negative view of British journalism.

Bleak? Negative? At least he knows what he's talking about: click the image for a bigger version. This is a random screen shot - wallow in the hatred here.

75 repetitive years

2012-02-06T13:46:00.001Z

Happy birthday to one of my very favourite composers, Philip Glass. I love his strict, gruelling minimalism and his more expansive post-minimalism. I heard him play at Lichfield Cathedral a few years back - he was so enthusiastic that he played for an hour longer than scheduled and then came out to chat to everyone.

I first heard the minimalists with Philip Gale, a friend from school who was light years ahead of the rest of us. The rigour, the mathematical clarity and the wonder paradoxically produced from anti-romantic music just astonished me (this is why I'm an atheist too: a seashore or a galaxy is beautiful and inspiring because physics can do anything). I know people - mostly women, for some reason - who hate minimalism. The repetition really sets their teeth on edge, whereas I can get lost in it. Perhaps it's my autism…

Some of my favourites:

Music for Voices: postmodern polyphony:

Glass's work is both cerebral - pushing the definition of music as far as it will go - an emotional, somewhat paradoxically. But he's also a deeply humane man: his operas have tackled terrorism, urban alienation, environmental collapse and our determination to separate ourselves from nature. He's one of the good guys:

The contradictions inherent in presenting a Gandhi opera at one of the world’s most richly endowed performing-arts institutions, even as protests against income inequality erupted downtown, inspired a notable demonstration on the last night of the run. A group allied with Occupy Wall Street gathered at the edge of Lincoln Center Plaza, berating the police, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the right-wing billionaire David H. Koch, a Lincoln Center donor. When “Satyagraha” ended and operagoers left the Met, some defied a police barricade and joined the protest. Glass did as well, and he addressed the crowd, making use of the “human microphone” of call and response. All he did was to utter the final lines of his opera: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” He said those words twice more, mingled for a little while, got into a cab, and went home.

'They have to learn about Tek War one day…'

2012-02-06T12:52:00.002Z

Doing a lecture on popular fiction again this week. Mostly drawing on Pierre Macherey, Susan Suleiman and McCracken on pulp fiction. Can't resist this clip from the Simpsons:

Edna: And look at this: the only books we have are ones that were banned by other schools.

Skinner: Well, the kids have to learn about Tek War sooner or later.

Oh, and this is what teaching is really like:

From the Lisa Simpson Book Club.

Compassionate conservatism starts at home

2012-02-06T10:55:00.002Z

Lying in bed this morning, I was contemplating the intellectual vacuum that is Paul Uppal MP (a stranger to the art of the apostrophe), as is my wont.

In particular, I was thinking about the government's swingeing attack on the welfare system. Amongst other evils, it plans to limit the maximum amount available to a family on benefits to £26,000, the average wage. It's a Victorian morality exercise: rather than provide according to need, the government's decided that the feckless should be punished.

There are a number of problems with this: those living in expensive cities need more; why should, for example, the children be made to suffer for the 'sins' of the parents; given that the majority of benefits are claimed by those in work, how have we ended up with a system in which the taxpayer subsidises a low-wage economy?; with 2.5m unemployed in the biggest economic slump since the 1930s, where's the evidence that the jobless are simply lazy bastards?

But I digress. Paul Uppal, as a slavishly loyal and intellectually-deficient backbench Tory MP voted for the benefit cuts. He genuinely believes - in so far as he believes in anything other than his own greatness - that benefits lead to dependence and fecklessness.

But only for the poor.

What do I mean? Well, I recall a speech he recently made in parliament which called for the abolition of local property taxes on empty commercial property:

I have found that empty property rates often make individuals who own commercial or industrial property view that property as a problem. Consequently, they will sometimes consider measures to try to mitigate the empty property rate tax. So the tax actually changes the mindset of property owners; it changes how they view the property. They do not view it as an opportunity but as a millstone around their necks.

So what he's calling for is less taxpayers' money for the disabled, the poor and the young, and more taxpayers' money for rich property owners (he is, of course, a commercial property owner). The poor require the big stick to make them work: the rich require bribes. The poor should accept less because labour is noble in itself: the rich should not be forced to drop the rents to fill their property.

The sheer ideological poverty of Uppal's mental landscape is summarised in this article he posted:

To borrow a phrase from Reagan in the end it is free enterprise, not government regulation, not high taxes nor big government spending, but free enterprise, which will lead to the creation of a better Britain.

The free market put children up chimneys. It gave India to the East India Company as a private hell. It promoted slavery. It resisted the Clean Air Act and poisoned our rivers, it fought the Minimum Wage and the NHS. The free market called for the abolition of banking regulation - and we all know how that worked out, don't we?

Is there any place in which 'high taxes' and 'big government spending' works? Er… how about Norway - the richest country in the world. It taxes business and individuals heavily, and it's a paradise. The gap between the rich and the poor is minuscule compared with the situation here, in which Bob Diamond takes home £40m per year with virtually no taxation, while his cleaner depends on benefits to make a living wage.

Uppal's been reading too many Republican speeches - and he's wrong. Reagan talked about the free market, but the American economy during his time was underpinned by government military spending - welfare for businesses. That's something he's learned from them: demanding tax reductions for private property is not exactly 'the free market': it's using government to support capitalism by directing taxes into the pockets of supposed free-marketeers.

Right, I'm angry now, and I've got to read Poly-Olbion for this afternoon, so you can all run along to the Leveson inquiry. It's Paul Dacre, the Daily Mail editor today, so it should be fun.

Let's Play Bullshit Bingo!

2012-02-04T10:15:00.005Z

Here we are in Loughborough for the School Games team manager orientation weekend. I'm particularly looking forward to the Venue Orientation session, because the venue is the Olympic Park, whereas we're 150 miles away…

I'm gradually ticking off the buzzwords. We've already had 'challenge', 'opportunity', 'going forward', 'empower', 'going forward' (this last makes me yearn for the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition), bloody 'journey', and a painful ice-breaker involving holding hands and moving round without breaking contact. This seems particularly redundant, given that a) I've known these people for at least ten years, and b) my room-mate and colleague paraded round the room in the nip this morning. I consider the ice well and truly broken. I hate the 'bonding' culture. It's against my Irish cultural inheritance: answer every question with a question. Give nothing away. Repression is everything. They're only after confiscating my land.

Now we're on to 'Values'. Apparently we're not allowed the same 'values' as the Olympics. Are they copyrighted? I've suggested we adopt this set of values:

What every dapper young chap is wearing this season

2012-02-03T23:21:00.000Z

Ah yes. The Carling Black Label lager jumper. Breathable for strenuous bouts of domestic violence.

Welcome to Loughborough

2012-02-03T19:19:00.000Z

Initial impression: it has a Tesco. And a Subway. The hotel has no pedestrian entrance.

I realise that this may not be what Loughborough's Tourism Czar is hoping for, but I must admit that I am a teensy bit biased. From my undergraduate days I remember two things about Loughborough University: its reputation for being a track-suited redoubt of the Nice-But-Dims, and a thoroughly-deserved name for being deeply Tory. Not the aristocratic Toryism of Oxbridge and their wannabes, but the chippy Toryism of the Mail-reading classes. I know, what a snobby thing to say, but I distinctly remember seeing a picture of the Students' Union president proudly displaying his office portrait of John Major. On such things are lifelong resentments founded.

I'm sure that it's a much nicer place these days. I resolve to be a kinder nicer person this weekend that hitherto. What am I doing here, anyway? Well, it's the annual orientation and management training day for the School Games. This is Michael Gove's truncated, cheaper and meaner version of the UK School Games, which was meant to be part of the Olympic Legacy. Gove couldn't stand allowing a Labour idea to live, so he's replaced it, and lost a huge number of young athletes and schools along the way.

Still, the event lives on and I'll do my bit: the fencers and the staff are all the same, so it'll be great. All I have to do this weekend is grit my teeth and say nothing when sports-management buzzword follows sports-management buzzword across the PowerPoint screen. In Comic Sans.

I've done this for five years now and still love it, even the bits which involve standing in the rain at 2 a.m. surrounded by crying teenage girls (thanks, Cardiff University's silverfish infestation) or dealing with allegations of the kind of thing that comes up in youth sport now and then. I like the tension of team events, I like seeing the underdogs come through, the ripples of scandal that move through the crowds, seeing friendships made and rivalries come to a head. I particularly like the kids' cheery disdain for whichever suited politician makes a dull speech at the opening ceremony (poor Seb Coe wasn't universally popular last time). Head here for a photographic taste of last year's event.

Mr. Peake's Progress

2012-02-03T11:32:00.000Z

Last night was a lecture by Sebastian Peake on his father Mervyn's life and work. Largely anecdotal, it was both hilarious and moving, especially Sebastian's account of his father's very early death due to Parkinson's.

Long John Silver

Although I've read most of Peake's written work, I didn't know what a talented and hugely prolific artist he was. He drew pictures of and for his sons every weekend, and seemed to sketch (and write) the way the rest of us text or Tweet. It was fascinating to see how his artistic practice changed, particularly after entering Belsen as a war artist: his illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (now in the Wordsworth museum at Dove Cottage) are clearly and heartbreakingly influenced by the shrivelled husks he watched die in the camps as the war ended.

The Albatross is shot in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

If you haven't read Peake, you really should. Gormenghast is a mad melange of his Chinese childhood, Dickens and Cervantes and a sense of a culture rotting from within - derived from his late entry into British society. Peake's social world was utterly removed from our's: he married a News of the World heiress, but never depended on her money (she was also a talented artist). Dylan Thomas used to walk their son Sebastian to school, telling him pirate stories along the way - and in his Welsh accent, not the cultivated English RP one he affected in public - before borrowing yet more money from Mrs Peake. Rex Harrison's fourth wife bought their house and whitewashed Peake's murals (argh), Leon Goossens played in their home, and so on: they lived in a world of art and intellect, yet never seemed to pursue fame or money. One of the fascinating things about Peake we learned is that - despite the gloom of his novels - he was enormous fun and remained an optimist, despite his experiences of the concentration camps. He seems to have been an apolitical liberal who sought the good in everyone - even retaining some respect for a war criminal he met and sketched 12 hours before he was executed in Nuremberg.

I went to dinner with Sebastian afterwards - enormous fun. Having attended 9 schools in 13 years, he failed to achieve a single O-level, and went on to live in several countries learning languages and serving an apprenticeship in the wine trade - he spent his life dealing specially in German wines. An old-school gentleman, he has a knowing way with anecdotes and a very touching interest in the lives of others, while retaining a degree of other-worldly separation - his amused surprise that his nephew Jack Penate is a 'a pop star' was very sweet. His story about Prince Charles's total lack of interest in the specially-bound edition of Gormenghast made for him (his grandmother knew the Peakes and commissioned a set of pictures for Charles's nursery) was a sad story of aristocratic ignorance: the jug-eared buffoon didn't even glance at the book.

What came through very strongly is the pain caused by his father's miserable, cruel end: dead at 57, having ended his days in an old people's home looking as though he was in his 80s, unable to draw or write, and Sebastian's struggle to reconcile the loss and the joy he takes in his father's work and our interest in it.

May God smite me down for my greed

2012-02-02T14:55:00.002Z

This year, my pay rise was 0.05%, which when inflation of 5.2% is taken into account, constitutes (again) a massive pay cut.

But that's OK, because I don't do this for money (shelter, food, clothes), I do it for love and that's the way God wants it, according to this Alabaman ~~nincompoop~~ politician:

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach,” said State Sen. Shadrack McGill

And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

“If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.”

Jobs that aren't vocations or callings, and therefore do need pay rises, conveniently include 'politician':

“He needs to make enough that he can say no, in regards to temptation.”

Senator McGill practices what he preaches: he voted for a pay increase for politicians. What have we learned? All politicians are implicitly male. They're all so morally weak that they have to be bribed by taxpayers not to take bribes, whereas teachers' poverty keeps them dedicated. Anyone who chooses a job for reasons of public service is asking to be paid badly! At least this man is admitting that he is naturally corrupt and that politics isn't a calling or public service.

It's an interesting argument, and yet one I suspect his Republican masters wouldn't entirely subscribe to. After all, the argument for bankers' bonuses is that their salaries aren't sufficient motivation for doing a decent job…

Obviously coming from Alabama, there's a tradition of this kind of argument. Slaves, for instance, worked damn hard, because - obviously - they weren't in it for the money. If you'd paid those black chaps and chapesses for their labour, you'd not have attracted those with a genuine calling for tobacco picking and sexual abuse. Once emancipation occurred, Alabama was lost.

The logical and holy thing for me to do is to give back my entire salary, as it's morally tainting everything I say in class. The lower the salary, the more dedicated the worker. Except for politicians, obviously.

I for one welcome our new PCC overlords

2012-02-02T14:19:00.001Z

Down in that London, the head of the Press Complaints Commission has said a couple of odd things:

He says he has had a "very good" discussion with Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes blog. Staines told Hunt that what he writes is "always accurate".

and he's also claimed that Staines would consider being 'kite marked' by the PCC - as should all bloggers.

Well. Where to start?

Firstly, Lord Hunt is a Tory peer who was chosen by a Tory peer to succeed the previous Tory peer as head of the PCC, following in the footsteps of the first Tory peer in the job. See where I'm going with this one?

Secondly, Guido Fawkes, amusing though he can be, is a bitter, vicious, partisan Tory scumbag (I only object to the last two adjectives in that list) who uses his website to conduct ad hominem smear campaigns, in the service of the Tory party.

Thirdly, I don't think that in an era of phone-hacking, it's quite good enough to accept the word of a gentleman on these matters. A quick look at Guido reveals a cesspit of lies, racism, homophobia and reactionary propaganda.

But: repellent as Guido is, he shouldn't be used to regulate us. I work hard to be right about things, which is why I obsessively link to sources or provide evidence. I accept that as a blogger I'm legally difficult: I'm writing in the UK but the server is probably in the US. None of this really matters though, because I'm only superficially similar to the PCC's members. I have virtually no readership or credibility. If I libel someone, no reputational damage is caused. The idea that I should pay for, and obey, a press regulator as though I were The Sun is absurd. Fawkes makes a lot of money via advertising, but most of us don't.

I haven't hacked anyone's phone.

I should mention that I'm in a VERY bad mood

2012-02-02T10:27:00.001Z

Thus far this week:
1. Stinking cold.
2. I broke a tooth last night. It's going to cost me several hundred pounds and I'll have to wait until next week to get it sorted.
3. I've got to go to Loughborough (pron. 'low brow') for the weekend to be patronised by eager young sporty types, aided by dull Powerpoint slides with 'motivational' slogans.
4. I'm struggling to find a way to explain deconstruction to first-year students.

There's a soundtrack to this mood:

Feeling Peakey?

2012-02-01T10:27:00.001Z

Thursday at 6 in my august institution: a public lecture on the life and work of Mervyn Peake, semi-surrealist satirist and illustrator, given by his son Sebastian. All welcome.

I got to know Peake's work through my French teacher, Mike Elkin. A veteran of the 1968 barricades and a devotee of underground literature, he would bombard me with alternatives to the 'classics' pressed on me by my equally charismatic English teacher, Caswell. The pair of them balanced perfectly, so between them I got a brilliant, though unorthodox education.

Peake grew up in China before being sent to a religious English boarding school at the age of 13, and as a war artist, entered Belsen in 1945: his work reflects an outsider's view of British society (and humanity in general) as absurd, labyrinthine, often threatening but always darkly comic. His most famous work is the Gormenghast trilogy, in which post-war England is represented as a vast sprawling castle fossilised in ritual and incapable of coping with the evils of ambition and Nietszchian Will (amongst other things). Under the surface, evil always lurks in the human heart. Much like Ronald Searle, who also turned his war experience into humour, there's always something disturbing going on underneath.

A Good Knight Out?

2012-02-01T10:12:00.000Z

So Sir Fred Goodwin, formerly of the Royal Bank of Scotland (an institution currently shuffling around the City moaning 'Brains… Bonuses') is now Mr. Fred Goodwin, comforted only by his tens of millions of pounds and unshakeable self-belief, having been stripped of his knighthood.

How does this make me feel? Slightly conflicted, actually. I despise the honours system: it's one of the little baubles which ensures a degree of affection and loyalty to an outdated class structure - not helped by David Cameron reviving the 'British Empire Medal' for the little people, while calling Argentina 'colonialist'!

I can see why stripping Goodwin of something he wanted might cause a few moments' satisfaction, but it's only momentary and it's a bit deceptive. The fact is that Jeffrey Archer, the Lord who went to prison for perjury, gets to keep his title and his permanent seat in the legislature. Plenty of other expenses cheats and crooks sit in the Lords, untouched.

In the old days (supposedly), Goodwin would have retired to the library with a revolver and a bottle of whisky, to do the decent thing. The problem with this kind of petty revenge is that we're in a new age. He won't do the decent thing because capitalism has bred a society of guilt-free individualists. The serious point about Goodwin, unlike Lord Archer and Co., is that we're reduced to removing his title because he hasn't done anything wrong. Or more clearly, he hasn't done anything illegal.

The Establishment is taking its revenge on him not because he sinned, but because he got caught holding the baby. Labour, which rewarded him, encouraged the kind of privateer capitalism in which he engaged. The SNP followed suit for patriotic reasons. The Conservatives cheered from the sidelines, occasionally calling for less oversight and regulation of banking. They thought - and continue to think - that he and his kind were imprisoned by a state tyranny.

Fred Goodwin, though a thoroughly unpleasant man, is the victim here. He acted according to the ideological nostrums of the day. He massively enriched himself and his colleagues without a thought for the future because self-interest and the concealed hand of the market were thought (by academics, politicians and economists) to lead to perfection. The theory was that leaders like Sir Fred had a moral duty to get as rich as possible as quickly as possible in the name of market efficiency. If you didn't join him, or lost out, that's your fault (it's a very 18th-century concept). It was only mugs like you and I (and Karl Marx) who knew that this was utter nonsense.

I'm currently reading Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which should be prescribed reading for everyone at the moment. The central character is Augustus Melmotte, a dubious financier who might well stand in for Goodwin (or Stephen Hester): we all know he's a crook, but nobody wants to say so while the cash is flowing freely:

When the Melmottes arrive in London everyone agrees their manners are wanting, their taste is execrable and their lineage and background decidedly shadowy. But their money is far from revolting, and city society quickly makes allowances for the mysterious financier and his family. Soon hearts, minds and family savings are swept into the whirl of Augustus Melmotte's lavish parties and exciting investment plans - but is it all an elaborate swindle?

So there's something very distasteful about the Establishment - which hasn't stopped believing in this theory, despite all the evidence - hanging Goodwin out to dry as though he was the bad apple who ruined it for everyone else. Exactly the opposite is true: he was a loyal and orthodox capitalist. He schemed, bullied, grabbed and gambled with the best of them, cheered at every step by those now punishing him. The only difference is that he got caught out, and for that the punishment is severe. Unless the same treatment is meted out to an entire section of society, there's only one lesson to be learned: nobody likes a loser.

(And if we're removing titles for economic incompetence, let's strip George Osborne of his baronetcy).

The internet is now complete

2012-01-31T16:58:00.000Z

A massive and hearty 'welcome back' to Days of Enlightenment, which was always one of the best-written, most personal and downright oddest blogs I'd read. You'll laugh, you'll cry, your toes will certainly curl and you'll be glad you're not him. Go there. Now.

Snot a joke

2012-01-31T10:30:00.002Z

I have a stinking cold. It feels like this:

Meanwhile, as it's football transfer day and Ewarwoowar hasn't heard of Half Man Half Biscuit, here's an appropriate song, 'The Referee's Alphabet', followed by 'All I Want For Christmas Is a Dukla Prague Away Kit' and 'I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan'.

The last word on public intellectuals

2012-01-30T19:00:00.000Z

As you may have read, I wrote a piece on that vanishing creature, the Public Intellectual, positing that existing media structures make it less and less possible to be a public intellectual, let alone have something we could call a public culture. It got republished by a couple of interesting websites, including the LSE Public Impact blog, and then I wrote a short follow-up on the corrosive effect of media politics on intellectual standards.

Just for information rather than comment really, here's what Tony Judt, a wonderful political thinker, had to say on the subject in his posthumous book about intellectuals, Thinking the Twentieth Century (as quoted in Saturday's Guardian Review, which seems not to be online). He doesn't pull his punches, and names David Brooks of the NYT (currently flogging a weak psycho-political book) as a key example:

Here we had the public intellectual who now occupies not only prominent television space, but also op-ed pages of the most influential newspapers in the English-speaking world: and he knows nothing… Men like Brooks know, literally, nothing… it's all done with smoke and mirrors - there is no expertise. The apparent capacity consists of the capacity to talk glibly each week about any public event in a way that readers have gotten used to thinking of as sort of enlightened commentary.

How very different from my teaching routine. Ahem.

Judt also fingers Thomas Friedman as a peddler of:

…the notion that your expertise is a function of your contacts… It doesn't really matter, actually, who it is. It's the notion of access to something special. In Friedman's case, access to information is very carefully recalibrated as the acceptable middle ground on any given policy issue'.

And of the genuine intellectuals out there:

…Michael Ignatieff, or David Remnick, or Leon Wieseltier, or Michael Walzer. Instead of asking questions, they all behaved as though the only function of the intellectual was to provide justification for the actions of non-intellectuals.

All ageing white men, I see - perhaps a function of the cultural context of the NYT and its readership, or of Judt's élite Anglophone culture. But he has a point. Lots of these people have lost confidence in a) intellect and b) the public: they therefore cannot imagine a position which clashes with that of the hegemony. Of course, the hegemony is what rewards them, which is why Judt's right to finger 'access' as the problem. Convivial lunches with very important and powerful people makes the thinker/journalist/academic feel important, a member of the inner circle. Selling that access as your USP becomes your purpose. Politicians know this: they feed journalists with tit-bits, and shut off access if you cross them. Add to this an editor wanting the 'inside story' and you have a hostage situation. The author becomes a rock-star ('as the Prime Minister said to me last week…'), but access is both granted and withheld: some newspapers, some correspondents get it, recalcitrant ones don't. When was the last time you saw a Prime Minister appear on a hard news show? No chance, not while there's a comfortable breakfast TV sofa waiting, and questions about your favourite biscuit and what you read your kids.

Eventually you reach the stage Judt associates with Friedman and Brooks. They become a function of their location on the political-cultural nexus. They are fronts for - or justifiers of - those with real power. They don't question (and the NYT is currently in the midst of a debate about whether impartiality means that politicians' claims be fact-checked): they explain the motives of the powerful to the weak. The media is no longer a way to hold power to account - it's a conduit for unchallenged power.

'…the relics of a world that progress threw away' (on Libraries and Sex)

2012-01-30T16:49:00.001Z

OK, I'm not very good at erotica, but if libraries and porn go together in your filthy minds, this article in the Paris Review should be checked out (arf). I've no need to associate libraries with sex - they're sites of extreme pleasure without it. Though there's something masochistic about entering somewhere in which the books can only be handled, borrowed, but never owned. The teases!

I like the way he's holding on to the book. It's probably on short-loan.

Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal

Sadly, the author's conclusion is that modern library porn removes the action from the library itself: the stereotypical female librarian is the object of the fantasy (never the subject), rather than the location. She is assumed, with her spectacle and bun, to be repressed and needing sexual liberation: recognition is rarely given (I should confess I haven't read many of these) to the liberatory possibilities of the knowledge contained in the library, unlike the 18th-19th century library porn: for the Enlightenment, sexual and intellectual liberation were of a piece and so libraries were natural sites for discovery in both senses.

On the other hand, our author suggests that modern library porn enunciates the alienation found in sexual cyberspace: devotees and characters search for a more personal and more intellectual climax than the atomised and individual life of the sex-surfer:

Lucy’s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library’s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It’s the last argument for the library’s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books—both of which are, ironically, called into question by the very existence of Lucy. This book, like all recent library-porn books, cannot not be found on any actual shelf in the real world. It lives exclusively in virtual space.

The threat of extinction has become a mainstay of recent library porn: again and again, the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.

The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. “Throw me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,” says the narrator of “Checking Out,” the final story of 2011’s Nympho Librarian. “Fuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.”

This is certainly something that speaks to me. In this country, libraries are being closed every day, thanks to the philistine government's preference for bombs over books. Here's a taster from the age of Austerity Erotica.

Soaked to the skin through her clinging, low-cut silk blouse and short skirt, lissom Lisa scurried up the steps of the library, knowing that within its close and labyrinthine walls, fulfilment - in so many ways - awaited her. Grasping the smooth, hard knob, she paused a moment before taking the plunge into a world of self-discovery. But as she slowly turned the handle, she spotted a sign pasted on the window.
'This library is now closed to improve customer experience. Clients may now take advantage of the Mobile Learning Centre (Fridays 6 a.m.-6.33 a.m every other month) or follow us on Twitter'.
Her hand fell from the door and, shivering now in the freezing rain, she trudged home to a low-fat Horlicks and a copy of More. The dream was over.

Of course, libraries are no longer up to it architecturally. Too much plate glass, too many 'talk zones' and 'group…study areas'. Coffee bars and computers have taken over from dark corners and wide sturdy tables. They're explicitly social sites now, rather than places in which individuals skulk, seeking enlightenment or furtive romance.

Are you Irish? Take the quiz

2012-01-30T16:22:00.002Z

Rick O’Shea, an Irish radio DJ on RTE’s 2fm , recently asked his listeners what questions they think should be asked on an Irish citizenship test....

• You are told that someone is "going spare," should you (a) Find him
a job (b) Find him a girlfriend (c) Avoid him

• Do your parents ever start conversations with "Do you know who's dead?"

• Ming the Merciless is (a) A comic book character (b) A TD and Mayor
from Co. Roscommon

• What is a holy show? (a) Religious programming (b) Something garish
worn without the wearer knowing the impact

• Do you live in mortal fear of leaving the immersion on?

• Someone says "I like your top." Your response is (a) Thanks (b) Penneys

• If a feature on the RTE news reports that an incident took place at
tea time what time did the incident occur?

• "Story horse!" translates as (a) A child's toy (b) A greeting between friends

• "Bleedin rappih" means (a) It's very fast (b) It's very good

• If someone was a 'gas man', would they (a) work for the gas company
(b) be really funny

• You'll get "some land" means (a) you're about to become the owner of
some property (b) you're about to be surprised

• Do you have an ineradicable belief in the restorative powers of flat 7up?

• When you're telling someone a great yarn and they implore you to
"Stop," do you (a) stop (b) keep going with gusto

• If someone offers to "put you in the pot", should you (a) flee from
the cannibals (b) accept their kind offer of dinner

Poetry corner

2012-01-30T13:04:00.000Z

Spotted in this weekend's Guardian Review:

They fuck you up the government
You may not know it but they see
That you're a mug and so you'll spend
Nine grand on what they got for free.

(Jay Bernard, '11.16').

Amongst those who got free education were David Cameron (inherited multimillionaire) and George Osborne (inherited £3m from a tax-avoiding family trust fund while he was at university) - these are the people who think you've had it too easy for too long.

Bernard's poem is a parody of Larkin's famous 'This Be The Verse', one of my very favourite poems, especially the final stanza. He was a university librarian with a somewhat dyspeptic approach to students. I suspect he'd have loved fees. But he knew about families. His father had to be asked to remove the Nazi decorations from his office in Coventry Town Hall, several months into WW2.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

We know where you live

2012-01-30T11:54:00.000Z

Here's an interesting piece for you students and academics:

With the best of intentions and the worst of outcomes, anonymous marking discredits lecturers and serves students badly.

We used to do anonymous marking here. The idea was that it would lead to personality-blind results: no favouritism, no revenge on those who never turn up or ruin classes, no racism, sexism etc. I can see the point: it treats every student equally, wherever they're from and whatever they're like. The work gets a grade, not the student.

On the other hand - shouldn't the student get a grade? What happens when I have two essays written in poor English and fail them both, not realising that one is by a dyslexic student? Should the direct entrant from another country get some extra credit for catching up so quickly, and in a second language? Should I not mark according to my knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of individuals? Why should a student who disrupts classes or doesn't bother to prepare get the same consideration as one who works hard but struggles? The balance is between the academic standards of the institution and the good of the student - and it's difficult. Anonymous marking assumes that individuality is a negative - I'm not so sure.

Then the administrators changed the form - without consulting any academics - so that students' names are fully visible on the essay coversheet and marking sheeting. Voila: goodbye anonymous marking, whether we like it or not.

Anonymous marking is also - as the article suggests - a tacit assumption that academics are bigoted and biased. I should be trusted not to mark down women, or black students, or a student with whom I have political differences. If I can't be trusted to do this, I shouldn't be in the job. The point of marking isn't to play 'gotcha': it's like being a doctor diagnosing a patient. We're here to help rather than judge. It's a long time since people wrote things like 'This is a disgrace: you should leave the university immediately' (true story). If we're open to students about what we're looking for, we shouldn't need anonymous marking (though given the sizes of our classes these days, an awful lot of marking is essentially anonymous because we don't know most of the students' names, which is awful).

Maybe there is a problem which needs the heavy hand of anonymity though - I haven't the resources to analyse all my marking over the years to see whether I've been biased in some way. What's your experience?

And how do you feel about this marking system?

On the last course I taught there were no complaints about my marking, even though none of it was anonymous. I returned essays with an evaluation of how students had performed against each assessment criterion, but without telling them the mark (it is well known that if you give a mark, most students will read the mark but will pay less attention to the comments). I then asked them to come and see me for a brief one-to-one tutorial, and tell me what mark they thought they had got and why. I was impressed by the accuracy of their guesses, and on the rare occasions when there was a serious discrepancy, we had a useful discussion about how the essay did or did not conform to the criteria - occasionally resulting in my revising the mark upwards.

My solution would be to follow the lead of Alverno College in the US and abandon grades altogether. This would release assessors from the absurdity of trying to distil complex qualitative judgements about a student's performance over a range of incommensurable assessment criteria into a single numerical grade. It would also wean students off their current obsession with grades, encouraging them to focus instead on developing the diverse range of skills a university education fosters.

The media cycle… ugh

2012-01-30T11:32:00.001Z

This weekend, the news was dominated by Stephen Hester and the £1m bonus he was due to get (on top of his £1m salary) for managing the disposal of RBS, the bank we all spent £45bn rescuing.

The Tories didn't want to stop him getting his bonus, nor did they want to talk about it. After all, the Chancellor was given £3m on his 21st birthday, so he doesn't really have a problem with acquiring large sums of unearned currency. Nor did the Tories want to talk about the other £35m Stephen Hester will 'earn' by the end of his 5 year contract.

So what do they do? They follow the time-honoured tradition of throwing out some moral outrage for the Mail readers. This time, it's a plan to deny injury compensation for anyone with a criminal record - a statistically tiny amount. Aided by the claim made by Soham child-murderer Ian Huntley after a fellow prisoner slit his throat, they're trying to foment a lynch-mob on the issue.

Personally, I think Huntley and any other victim of crime should get their compensation. The point of laws is that they apply equally to everybody, whatever they've done. If you start making moral exceptions, you end up with tyranny. Good laws are made on points of principle. Bad ones are made using extreme examples to whip up horror.

However, the wider point is that this is another importation of American politics. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? asks how poor Americans have been brought to the point of voting against their own economic interests. This is how: they're encouraged to focus on personal and moral politics (gay marriage, guns, 'family values') while the professional politicians continue to create a Land Fit For Financiers. This is exactly what the Tories are doing: while we argue about criminals, they enrich themselves and their donors.

None of this is helped by Labour's David Lammy MP making a grab for rightwing territory himself, by claiming that the ban on beating children led to the summer riots. A couple of points for you David:
1. How do you know these people weren't beaten as children?
2. Most were in their late teens and twenties - the ban only came in during the late 1990s.
3. Grow up.

Floundering politicians always reach for the smack.

Meanwhile, Vole discovers a new toy

2012-01-27T16:07:00.001Z

I've been told (thanks to an academic contact on Twitter) about Google's Ngrams: they use their database of pretty much every book written to extract raw data. For instance, I'm wondering about writing a piece on the use of 'banditti' in literature and the media, if - as I suspect - it's used in English with an anti-Catholic subtext. With Ngrams, I get a really good chart showing me how much and when it was used (click to enlarge):

So the term wasn't very common at all, but usage started fairly suddenly around 1730, there were four peaks - probably connected to Gothic literature like Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791) and slowly declined. Google links to the texts which use the term (not newspapers, sadly) and allows you to crunch the raw data yourself.

Endless fun. What a great tool. Who knew, for instance, that the word 'git' reached its peak in 1940? Annoyingly, it doesn't distinguish between 'git on up' etc and 'git' as in idiot. I'm certainly looking forward to reading The Magic Git-Flip. (Neal's favourite word, 'gitwizard', appears not to have been taken up in literary circles as yet). 'Plashing' peaked in 1860, used in a very poor poem, in Dickens' All The Year Round magazine. Interesting, my names bump along as a choice in fiction until about 1980, since when usage has increased massively. Which makes me cool. Doesn't it?

Font swoon

2012-01-27T14:10:00.000Z

Like punk rock? Hell yes. Like typefaces? Ohhhh yeah… Like classic 1960s/70s Penguin book design? Do I ever!

So it's obvious that I'll love the work of Swissted: cool Swiss modernist posters for gigs that actually happened. I'd love some good gig posters - American college towns seem to have beautiful ones whereas the UK doesn't - but the only place I know which sells them is extortionately expensive, of the one-kidney-isn't-enough kind.

But these… stunning.

Yet another uninformed comment on Lana Del Rey

2012-01-27T11:30:00.001Z

I'd become reluctantly familiar with the Great Lana Del Rey Authenticity Debate weeks before I ever heard of her music. She might be a pop construction, she might be a musician in her own right. She might be from 'the streets', she might have a multimillionaire daddy. People are getting seriously worked up about this stuff.

Some points: looking for authenticity in pop music is a fool's errand. That's the point: pop is a line of coke, not a spiritual experience. It's about fantasy. Nobody refuses to read science fiction on the grounds that the authors have 'never been there'. Don't be ridiculous. Pop is about dressing up and play-acting. The only real question is whether it's any good, depending on what you mean by the term. My two-cents on this: not really. Bad lyrics, sub-Coldplay attempts at profundity. But not awful. If you like her voice, try Hydroplane or Paradise Motel instead.

What's much more interesting - to me at least - is the iconography employed in Lana Del Rey's videos. I watched three, 'Video Games', 'Blue Jeans' and 'Born To Die'. They're all very interesting - drawing on French and other European styles and imagery, yet very determined to present a postmodern version of America. 'Born To Die' makes the American flag central to the performance, as the extended backdrop to a supposedly 'alternative' man and woman. The other videos too include the Stars and Stripes amongst a welter of interesting references: 'Video Games' stages or references a series of 'iconic' political and cultural scenes, while 'Blue Jeans' seems very interested in the way European tropes (in this case, Monaco and Monte Carlo's casinos) are recast in the US - in the form of Las Vegas and petty crime.

The flag thing is fascinating. Is it part of a nationalistic turn in American popular culture, an extension of nationalism dominance, or an exploration of the contingent and contextual nature of what it means to be American? Certainly the lyrics don't help (along the lines of 'I'll love you 'til the end of time'), but there's something going on here. Americans relate to their flag in a way that's probably quite alien to liberal Europeans, but nothing in these videos is incidental. Your thoughts?

Twitter revolutions become a thing of the past

2012-01-27T10:52:00.001Z

One of the most tedious features of the last 20 years has been politicians spouting off about the revolutionary (in both senses) potential of new media. Most of them are strangers to electronic communication: Alastair Campbell's memoirs record receiving his first amazed text message from Tony Blair, after he resigned as Prime Minister.

Politicians' advisers tell them that new media will break down global barriers. They make speeches about information wanting to be free. They also make speeches about rooting out piracy, libel, subversion and immoral content via laws and technical fixes. Freedom, it seems, is something you wish on your enemies, not your donor corporations. In fact you encourage your tech sector to export censorship software to the dictatorships you claim to oppose.

With the Arab Spring, elevated claims were made about Twitter, including the story that the White House prevailed on Twitter to postpone a maintenance shutdown because the platform was being used to spread resistance (that it was also being used to spread disinformation and threats is rarely mentioned, nor are solid actual figures: a massive rise in traffic doesn't tell you how many people are involved).

That's all over now. Twitter has announced that it intends to censor Tweets on a country-by-country basis. The US claims it has a freedom of speech guaranteed by Constitutional Amendment, but this is obviously - and to some extent understandably - limited. However, the political rhetoric has been that Twitter and other media sweep away national boundaries. The truth is that we're not in a post-national situation, and corporations don't want one. They prefer to own countries rather than supersede them: governing is boring, expensive and complicated. Twitter is, let's not forget, a capitalist enterprise. It doesn't care about your repression, or your freedom of speech. It wants to make money. If you're a woman, atheist or homosexual in Saudi Arabia, don't rely on Twitter to facilitate your self-expression or activism. The same goes for union leaders in China, democrats in Ukraine and jihadists in the UK.

We need to take a more sceptical and evaluative approach to new media. The empty speeches by boosters and politicians are shaped by electoral calculation and profit-seeking respectively. Our usage of new media/social media isn't revolutionary: it's shaped by the economic, social and cultural contexts in which we find ourselves. Blindly announcing that Twitter is (or should be) a force for freedom and apple pie is as ridiculous as claiming that space travel will get us out of our environmental fix, or that the motor car = liberation. Blindly rushing to be first in the neophiliac queue leaves commentators looking very silly later, as Hillary Clinton found when she praised net freedom to the skies, before realising that Wikileaks took her literally: in her words, 'an attack on the US'. she and others haven't yet worked out that social media radically disperses interpretive authority (I'm trying to avoid claiming that information is power, because at bottom, millions of outraged Tweets are still outweighed by lots of guns and/or the means of production).

What have we learned?
1. Politicians: try to resist making sweeping generalisations which will inevitably be exposed the moment the demands of realpolitik change. Your citizens aren't as stupid as you assume when you make empty references to 'freedom' etc. I hope.

2. Citizens: don't put all your eggs in one basket. A pretty interface and free access doesn't mean that new media corporations are any less evil (whatever their mottos) than the big nasty companies they left behind. They're not activists or idealists: they want to make money and they will lobby governments, fund political parties, sell you, block you and silence you if that's what it takes.

3. Everybody: no issue is as simple as you think it is. This is a good thing.

Further reading: Mozorov's The Net Delusion.

Your favourite blog and you!

2012-01-26T14:25:00.006Z

Over at Slacktory (which clearly isn't a British or Canadian site, given the negative connotations of 'Tory' amongst the non-evil sections of their populations, and the name reminds me that I invented the term 'slackademic' last year), there's a handy guide to what your favourite blogs say about your personality. It's based on popular hipster sites rather than blogs written by individuals, so yours truly isn't listed (bah! and no PZ Myers either), but some caught my eye.

Of the sites listed, I'm an ex-reader of Huffington Post, before I decided its politics were smug, narcissistic privileged woo:

Most of your pleasures are guilty pleasures.

a reader of BoingBoing:

You’ve voted for a satirical political candidate. You are someone's favorite uncle who taught them how to build their own toys. You are someone's "cool" aunt who sends the amazing Birthday gifts from far-off lands. You know swear words in fifteen languages. You have built seven completely different and contest-winning party costumes around a single vintage fez.]

a condition to which I aspire, though they missed the use of Arduino chips to create a working replica of the Enterprise, I'm a fan of Think Progress:

You can communicate multiple levels of disgust with your snorts.

and I intend to be a reader of The Awl:

You aren’t snotty about keeping books in good condition, you acknowledge that dogears and scribbled notes are healthy, but you have a few special editions you’d only lend out to a very close friend.

So what does your presence here on The Plashing Vole tell us? Many of you are current or ex-students, so you've been conditioned/brainwashed by my mordantly boring lectures. You clearly like sarcasm, Stoke City, and the sight of an innocent local Member of Parliament being bullied like an unwanted puppy, you heartless bastards. You tolerate my lengthy political and educational rants and take comfort from not being me. Reading Vole is, I suspect, the online equivalent of rubbernecking at a car crash: all very well when you're cruising past, not so great if you're being pulled from the wreckage and shovelled into a series of evidence bags.

Clearly you're all at the top of the scale for intelligence, wit, culture and attractiveness. Except for you, Zoot Horn.

Toodle-pip.

More culture on me than a live yogurt

2012-01-26T11:55:00.000Z

OK, so fresh from the political fray with David Miliband, I headed off to Keele University for a performance by the Vanbrugh Quartet, Ireland's foremost classical band - led by my cousin Gregory (though it was so long since we'd last met that I thought the cellist was my relative - good job I didn't give him an enthusiastic hug and kiss).

It wasn't the first performance of the night: I had the dubious pleasure of hearing some fine 1980s thrash metal at full volume on the bus, leaking through the headphones of an antisocial little gimp who should be thrashed to within an inch of his life. I like 1980s thrash metal, but find the reproduction qualities of cheap headphones add very little to the upper frequency ranges.

However, music soothes the furrowed and all that. The programme was Haydn's String Quartet Op. 76 No. 2, Shostakovich's Quartet No. 9, Arvo Pärt's Summa and Beethoven's Quartet in C minor, Op. 18 No. 4. The Haydn and Beethoven were lovely, but a little pretty for my tastes - what kept me hooked was the quality of the performance.

There's something astonishing about the interplay between four people who have to know absolutely everything about their colleagues' creative abilities, emotional approach and intellectual perspective to produce something that's more than four people playing what's in front of them. It was fascinating to see them wander off to different lodgings afterwards without really saying goodbye to each other, as though the bonds between them are far deeper than quotidian relationships. I wonder if rock bands have the same kinds of links and tensions. Do classical groups snort coke when they go off for the encore? Certainly the groupies differ somewhat - by about 45 years if last night's audience is representative.

The Arvo Pärt piece was short, reflective and pretty typical of the composer's mystical-minimalism - Gregory told me that when they played it for Pärt recently, he was pleased that they played it so much faster than everybody else. For me though, the highlight was the Shostakovich quartet: passages of beauty mixed with snarling, paranoid darkness, demanding total dedication from the musicians. It was disturbing and fascinating at the same time.

The encore piece was a short arrangement of a polka from Shostakovich's The Golden Age: unexpected light and funny.

Some clips (not by the Vanbrugh, sadly):

Live-blogging David Miliband

2012-01-25T15:08:00.004Z

OK, here we go. Apologies for the massive block of text.

I've posted the photos here, or you can click on these samples to enlarge for your erotic pleasure. If you want to compare the brothers, here are the pictures I took of Ed when he came to The Dark Place.

He's here on stage, wearing a Silk Cut shade tie, white shirt, no jacket - the standard sartorial grammar of the Third Way. Intro from the Dean (which mentions his candidacy for the Labour leadership but not the result!), then 'in conversation' with Keith Gildart, Reader in Labour History (as in work, not the Party) and all-round good egg. After that, the floor opens. To reveal the Hellmouth.

Ed likes to use his hands. Like A Muppet On A String.

Turnout very impressive - c. 290 in a 300-seat lecture hall.

Foreign policy questions:
Straight in with 'intervention/nonintervention': was the balance right, with reference to Iraq and Afghanistan.

WTF mate?

A. 'Central feature of the modern world is interdependence: economically, ecologically, public health and security. We have to intervene, there's no question. We just have to understand our rights and responsibilities with regard to abuses of rights and responsibilities elsewhere'. Mentions Anne Frank and calls the 1930s a tragedy of non-intervention, (OK, when are we going to invade Saudi Arabia, say I: one of the worst human rights abusing countries on earth)?

'What if you're attacked by a non-state actor - Al-Qaida, hosted by a state? I argue you have a responsibility to do something about it. Winning the war in Afghanistan was easy: winning the peace was more difficult. Military action no use without political understanding'.

OMG! Whateva!

Q. Given the outcome of Iraq, will the balance between intervention and non-intervention change?
A. The break-up of Yugoslavia without intervention was wrong. We had migration issues even if you're not concerned with moral arguments. Later Yugoslav intervention over Kosova was right. There's been a swing away from intervention after Iraq.

Q. What are your thoughts on the future of Europe?
A. I feel strongly that this is an interdependent world, a global village. Your immediate neighbours are where foreign policy starts. We have a strong interest in strengthening the EU and solving the Euro crisis. Small powers can't survive without a stable neighbourhood. IN respect of the Euro crisis started as a €50bn Greek crisis - a small problem which blossomed because it wasn't solved: now a global slump is looming because the markets think that if the EU can't solve Greece's problems, it can't solve Italy's, Spain's or France's problems. Answer: the ECB must fund to prevent market speculation. Debt-holding countries must take some responsibilities, and so must debtor countries. Greece only has olive oil and tourism: the other countries have more resources. We're a European country, and the EU and Britain are stronger when they're both strong. Cameron didn't veto anything: he walked out without stopping the other nations continuing. We look weak and we've said we can insulate ourselves from EU economics and politics - a tactical and political blunder which he thinks is a master-stroke in political terms. He feels the EU will be less important when India and China come through, whereas being in the EU will help us when that happens.

Q. What about the 'special relationship' with the United States? How will US foreign policy develop with an election coming up?
A. Obama is likely to win, but it's not certain and it will be close. The money involved is corrosive but both sides have enough to be competitive. Obama understands that the US has to make alliances and engage these days: a multipolar war. I'm very concerned about Iran and military intervention would be disastrous - as would Iran breaking the Non-proliferation Treaty. The EU needs to contribute its fair share too. The Americans will think less of the UK if it loses credibility in Brussels.

The Americans use the term 'special relationship', but only to keep the British media happy.

Look guys, y'know, c'mon… Very Blair pose.

Q. How should Labour respond to the Austerity argument?
A. We should say that this austerity programme has crossed the line and is actually a masochism programme. Govt. spending is down, exports are under pressure, business investment is low and consumers are too scared to spend. Put those together and it's not a surprise that the economy has shrunk. We need to tackle the deficit, but if we kill off growth, the deficit will grow, we'll have to reduce public spending even more… we have a fundamental quarrel with the way the government has gone about it.

We also have to be honest about our role. The crisis was born on Wall Street, not Downing Street. But claiming to end Boom and Bust was wrong because that can't be done. We shouldn't project spending based on expected earnings.

Q. Do you see ideological battles coming up, like after the 1979 defeats? Does Labour have a coherent ideology?
A. We'll get one without a civil war. Labour is a specialist in long-term opposition. Under Ed, we aren't having a civil war. New Labour was culturally open. It didn't confuse idealism with doctrine and dogma?

Q. Social mobility: didn't Labour lose touch with its electoral base?
A. No. We got our best result ever in 1997. We didn't foresee the global forces impacting social conditions. Equality, yes - but of what?
Q. Education?
A. No. Educational inequality actually diminished under Labour. We didn't defend our record well enough. If we don't, the Daily Mail or the Guardian will do it for us [I think he means they'll criticise Labour].
Q. Where do you disagree with the coalition?
A. They'll make social mobility much worse. Youth unemployment and long-term unemployment is very high. You students need to work hard. But those 250,000 long-term unemployed may never work again. The trebling of tuition fees and abolition of social sciences/humanities subsidy hasn't been done anywhere in the world. In South Shields, there's no university campus or culture. The danger is that too many young people will see university as not for them. The gains may be thrown into reverse.

Questions from the floor compered by Andy Cooper, Associate Dean.
Q. Will you run for Labour leadership again?
A. [Groans] I don't know. No vacancy for along time anyway.
Q. You were favourite to win the leadership. How did you come back from that psychologically?
A. I've never gone! You should never try for anything if you don't really want it, but you shouldn't run if you think it's the end of the world if you don't get it. I've got a chance to reflect, which is important after 15 years at the top of politics. I've got room for new things: the Movement for Change Community Leadership Academy, which you might think is odd for me to run! I'm doing grassroots politics, for the people and by the people. I still feel strongly about the stupidities and injustices I see about me, but I'm trying new ways to do things about them.
Q. Would you describe yourself as a socialist?
A. Yes, though other people might not describe me as one. There are 2 traditions: one as an economic system of public ownership- not my tradition. The other is about values: social justice, equality, common endeavour - ethical socialism. I'm a social democrat in a better description: shared goals with socialists. Socialist values are good values, but economic socialism can be very oppressive.
Q. What definition do you give for international students? What role do you think international students play in British society?
A. Where are you from? (Cameroon). The internationalisation and expansion of universities have been inspirational. Universities have transformed our cities. Internationalisation was key to this. 85,000 Chinese students. Very pleased you've come to the UK rather than to a French university (Cameroon is francophone). International students educate home ones. The Tory reduction of student fees is 'idiotic' and 'stupid', economically and culturally. It hands advantages to other countries. I'm really very clear that internationalised education has been a really good thing.
Q. In the last election, the Greens won seats in Parliament. Is Labour's under threat from minority parties?
A. They're a warning that people feel you're not taking their concerns into account. Our electoral system keeps 4th/5th parties out, unlike Europe, which practices PR. Postwar Holland used to be a beacon of multicultural life, but it's now riven by ultra-rightwing politics. On Green politics, this is the defining issue of our generation. We're serious about it - unlike the US. Obama's do-nothing Congress holds him back and the Chinese have overtaken the world in technical and regulatory solutions! The Greens are a healthy warning - but don't vote for them.
Q. It's a year since the Egypt protests. How does the Arab Spring affect foreign policy?
A. Where are you from? (Pakistan). Heritage? (Pakistan). The Arab Spring comes from the Arab innate demand for dignity. Brought about by corruption and kleptocracy on behalf of the Mubaral regime, and from the global village, which introduced ideas of democracy and freedom via technology. [This is v. unconvincing]. Tech enabled organisation too. I call it the 'civilian surge', happening in Russia, parts of China. What do we make of the rise of political Islam? These are people in democratic politics inspired by the Qu'ran. Some in the Muslim Brotherhood would say they're the same as Christian Democrats, like Merkel. Others would take a different more sectarian view. My view is that this will play out in a way the West can't decide. We should engage strongly with the Muslim Brotherhood, not demonise it or push it underground. We should be clear about our own values of non-racist respect, and in foreign policy, we've got to see that Arab democratisation is a force for long-term stability whereas dictatorships are short-term stability not long-term. In Pakistan, Islam has either been used to beat up democracy as under Zia, or as an alternative to democracy, neither of which is good. Pakistan was founded as an Islamic democratic state. It needs the debate of ideas within this space. Its failure was to fail to reconcile Islam and politics.
Q. Possession of nukes by some countries will always be a threat to someone: don't we need to be more serious about disarmament at home?
A. You're right. 2 years ago it would have been harder to answer that question. Disarmament looks more likely. The US and Russia are disarming very fast. We should be very serious about multilateral disarmament. The NPT has 3 parts: non-proliferation, rights to civil nuclear, responsibility of nuclear states to disarm. Israel, Pakistan and a couple of others haven't signed. We should disarm. We're down to a minimum deterrent now.
Q. Foreign policy: Your party went to Iraq to disarm a dictator. There are other countries still under dictators. People think Libya was an economic intervention. If you are a party leader, is it possible to dispel this suspicion that England goes to war for self-interest?
A. Our wars weren't for economic gain. No country puts its own country at risk for economic gain since the 19th century. Wars are too expensive in treasure and blood. People voted for war for other reasons. Honestly, I promise you. I was there. You don't have to believe me.
Q. As an MP, what's the hardest ethical conflict you faced?
A. Er… easy to answer: how to protect the country, who you co-operate with, what tactics you use. We are committed to public safety and national values. How you resolve that… The hardest thing is when not to commit to actions when security is compromised.
Q. During your time as Foreign Secretary did you have anything to do with North Korea and what do you think of the new leader?
A. Basically no. Outside UK sphere of interest. USA and China led on that. I don't know about the new guy. He's a mystery. He's got a very tough job and it's unclear what tools he has: mental and other resources.
Q. What do you think about CSA charging lone parents?
A. It's really important. The saddest cases I have as an MP, the most frustrating, are family break-ups, when women and men tell me heart-rending stories about money not coming, property grabbed, visiting rights infringed. There are problems with the CSA. It was going to be wound up - the residual CSA leaves parents faced with the courts or a charge on the parent chasing their money. Because the CSA had such a bad reputation, there was no alternative to closing it - it became a bureaucratic nightmare dealing with incredibly complicated families, liars etc. I haven't a better alternative but I don't like it. Have you? (Questioner: charge the fathers - negotiation is impossible when a man walks out). A. Charging the father was the idea - but it hasn't worked. Where the route to the father is blocked, state support and welfare is essential.
Q. With unemployment so high and £9000k fees, what are the remedies for youth and fees alternatives?
A. The easy answer is fees = terrible. But it's not an honest answer. It's right that graduates pay for some of the cost. I supported the introduction of tuition fees. But there isn't a fee - what we have is a system of loans paid back if you get a decent-paying job. Maintenance is a separate issue. Where the current government went wrong is tripling fees with no concept of the consequences for students and universities. The original fee wasn't popular, but non-university training isn't subsidised. Taxpayers AND graduates should contribute. But it's not a fee: you pay back when you earn £21,000. No party promised to triple fees - this brings politics into disrepute. But I can't say we should scrap graduate contributions. The taxpayer should be a partner with the graduate. I fear we'll throw away the UK HE system.
Q. Aren't people being taxed twice? Tax often at higher rate + fees.
A. In a way, a graduate tax is problematic: courses have different lengths and costs. You aren't paying twice. Just a bit more.

[Running out of power - don't be surprised if I conk out].

Q. Is it time the British public had a referendum on EU membership bearing in mind other countries have had them since 1975.
A. I don't think that's right. Ireland's had 2, but that's because their constitution says any treaty requires one. We should have them when fundamental changes are proposed, e.g. joining the Euro. I don't see referenda are the answer in parliamentary systems unless major constitutional changes are proposed, which they aren't. Don't confuse the EU and the ECHR/Council of Europe. We should be in there shaping the EU to our advantage. You're proposing to revisit our original terms? I can see the argument but I'm not persuaded.
Q. Is there enough self-doubt in your political life, Labour and the political sphere? (My question)
A. Self-criticism or self-doubt? (Me: both). Self-criticism is public, self-doubt is private. I've reflected a lot on my own politics. Labour needs to understand why people voted against it and respects it. We need to understand why we're perceived as out of touch and statist. Self-doubt is a different area: you've always got to have the humility to know you might be wrong and be open to see how other people might see you, without getting buffeted by how the media see you - don't follow fashion, you might not be wrong.
Q. Scottish independence?
A. I'm not for Scottish or English independence. More devolution gives the best of both worlds. It's up to the Scots. Independence would be bad for Scotland and bad for Britain. The bailout of RBS cost 4 times the GDP of Scotland: a potent argument for pooled sovereignty.
Q. Movement for Change: will it expand internationally?
A. We're linked to an Egyptian group. Go to the website and see what's there. I'd love there to be community leaders across The Dark Place. We map power, explain how to organise power and make it felt. Labour Students in this university are campaigning on a living wage on campus.
Q. What would you say to Michael Gove about education?
A. Stop worrying about 100 or so schools - look after the thousands of schools.
Q. You fraudulently claimed hundreds on expenses including a £450 bed. Are you going to give the money back and can't you pay for your own bed?
A. I didn't like the expenses system, but you can't accuse me of fraud: that's a criminal offence.
Q. Something about Islamophobia - Miliband answers that even the day after the London tube bombings, the British people and press behaved well. The questioner then claims that 7/7 was an inside job and Miliband points out that one of Britain's strong points is that he has a right to claim such things. This receives a round of applause.

I totally pwned your ass.

Overall: I'm nowhere near his politics, and never will be (the Labour Party is a broad church), but beneath the slick professionalism of a career politician, Miliband comes across as human, likeable, thoughtful and decent. He converses well and doesn't pander to his audience - and deals with the mad quite effectively.

For my less political readers

2012-01-25T12:55:00.000Z

I'm not all about the political LULZ. As a favour to those of you more interested in the cultural sphere, I have a special treat for you.

I was reading today about the history of newspaper corrections and readers' editors (this constitutes excitement in my life), and found myself reading about one of the most famous corrections in the New York Times, a great newspaper, but also one of the most boring, visually unattractive and pompous publications since Pharaohs dictated their own obituary hieroglyphs.

The correction in question was on the subject of My Little Pony, not a cultural scene to which the NYT has hitherto paid much attention:

An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

This lead to the author's discussion of Ponygate (as I'm calling it), which contained the revelation that there's a massive underground My Little Pony scene, presumably amongst the kind of hipster who when I'm in charge, will be reassigned to night soil collection duties. There's even a music scene based on My Little Pony remixes, known as Dubtrot. Here's a sample, though if you're wise, you won't play it.

Is this just hipster foolishness? Only if you habitually use the word 'just' in reference to cultural phenomena. Deserving of painful deaths though they are, hipsters are a feature of late modern capitalism and as such deserve cultural deconstruction. I think they're part of the Western capitalist extension of childhood, alongside adults and BMXs and skateboards, computer gaming and a range of other leisure activities which require adults to maintain their consumption and collection habits from their childhoods. Assigning emotional value to lowest-common-denominator artefacts like My Little Pony is a natural extension of the market. You no longer need to 'grow out' of forms of play: the economy demands that toys become 'collectibles', that you find supposedly subversive, ironic or countercultural meanings in items and activities which once you would have discarded. Once, growing up meant getting a job and earning money to spend on adult leisure activities. But in the US, getting a job is a) hard, b) badly-paid (American working and middle class salaries are no higher than they were in the mid-1970s and c) leaves little leisure time: Yanks work long hours and have on average 2 weeks' holiday per year.

This means of course that leisure must be intellectually unchallenging - these people are tired - cheap, and provide an instant emotional hit at a low cost. Hence the appeal of remixing ripped cartoons and watching The A-Team film. Adult life isn't profitable for the corporations, but childhood is because parents indulge their children. If you extend childhood beyond the traditional limits (the way parents interfere with their children's progress at university implies that we're now well into the 20s), you open up new opportunities for profit.

In this sense, My Little Pony is no different from Hollywood's obsession with remakes: the people running the studios are the fat kids who spent their lives in front of the TV, and have no concept of quality. Instead, they have a keen marketer's understanding of the value of nostalgia.

Don't buy it. Send My Little Pony to the knacker's yard.

What a cultured life

2012-01-25T11:34:00.001Z

Today's agenda: Shakespeare, then attending David Miliband's appearance, then seeing the Vanbrugh Quartet perform Beethoven, Pärt and more. If only I had the same dedication to writing as I do for pleasure.

I'll be live-blogging the Miliband experience, so feel free to leave a message via the comments or Twitter (@plashingvole) if you've a question or comment you'd like me to pass on. I'm filtering a range of questions: given that I think he's a genuine war criminal with no ideological integrity, I don't think he'll directly answer anything other than the softest of questions. But hopefully I'm wrong.

My major problem with David and Ed Miliband is that I genuinely don't know what they're for. Nor am I convinced that they know. They're Labour aristocracy (their father Ralph was a leading intellectual socialist who would be appalled by them), but - sadly unlike their evil Tory rivals, who have a very clear ideological position summarised as 'f•ck you' - they have no coherent ideology. Calling for 'fairness' is like voting for nice sunsets, while 'moral capitalism' makes me think of the mice deciding to bell the cat. They - and the Labour Party, of which I'm a member - have fallen for the belief that the Daily Mail and the Sun represent the Great British Public. Perhaps (the horror, the horror), they do: but I see absolutely no faith in Labour's upper reaches that the people are intelligent and unbigoted, hence New Labour's relentless pandering to the nastiest racist, hanging-and-flogging instincts they perceive Out There.

If the public is as awful as these papers and our political leaders believe, Labour's duty is to change that. It won't be easy, especially given the overwhelming bias of the media. Old Labour politicians know this: they used the language of the mass meeting and of the pulpit to espouse a moral crusade. New Labour is a follower, not a leader. From this, all its neoconservative and neoliberal policies flow. Extradite suspects to countries that torture? Yes: can't look weak. Privatise the universities and hospitals? Definitely: can't look charitable. Lynch the unemployed? Certainly: the Mail says they're all scroungers. Deregulate the banks? Of course - otherwise we look bitter and jealous.

The politics of fear leads to Labour ceding the public sphere to the Tories. Labour seems to assume that the population's default setting is Conservative, so they spend their time looking for managerialist and presentational differences - often manufactured - rather than making a clear and positive case for voting Labour. This is cowardice.

I actually think a lot of people like our public services, don't want people to be homeless and hungry, have quite an appetite for radical financial reform, and hanker for the days of Attlee. But we'll never know, because the imagined public is much more important to our politicians than the real one.

Books in…

2012-01-25T11:16:00.000Z

I feel like I'm running a branch library. Though unlike my university library, I'm still acquiring books, and unlike municipal ones, I'm still open. Or I will be again, once whoever borrowed my copy of Gender Trouble returns it. You utter git.

Bumper crop yesterday, thanks to the Oxford University Press Sale - serious academic texts with massive reductions - and other sources.

Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme.
How to be an MP, Paul Flynn.
Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, Paul Bew. Bew's a former left-winger (aren't they all? Shades of the neoconservatives who started off as non-communist left-wingers grouped around Partisan Review and eventually became militant anti-Soviet Cold Warriors) who took a Barony and advised David Trimble, so not exactly my cup of political tea, but he's an interesting writer.
Shakespeare, Sex and Love, Stanley Wells.
Dark Eden, Chris Beckett.
Modern English War Poetry, Tim Kendall (I'm trying to persuade a student to do her dissertation on war poetry from Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than WW1 like everybody else).
Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch.
Myths and Memories, Gilbert Adair (a British version of Barthes' Mythologies).
Exodus, Julie Bertagna (another in the flood (ho ho) of YA eco-collapse novels).
Nation and Novel: the English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, Patrick Parrinder.
Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature, Marah Gubar.
William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, Duncan Wu (he's a window cleaner now).
Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 years by Louise Foxcroft (preliminary reading for my MA module on Victorian fads, though the book looks more lightweight than I was expecting).

I shall be absorbing these books via osmosis.

Leave those kids alone

2012-01-24T10:38:00.004Z

I once thought that Christopher Woodhead was the Demon Headmaster: a Chief Inspector of Schools who seemed to openly despise state education and all who sailed in her, a reactionary blowhard whose positive view of sexual relationships between school pupils and staff may not have been entirely unconnected to suspicions that his own relationship with an ex-pupil might have started earlier than he let on… This is the man whose next job after several years of unfounded, bitter attacks on state schools was CEO of a chain of fee-paying schools - and called for the leaving age to be reduced to 14 (obviously all the most successful countries believe in less education).

Pretty bad - but it's time for Chris to move over: there's a new massive wanker in charge of OFSTED now. I'm used to governments putting their most unintelligent, populist, sinister and dangerous MPs into the Home Office (Straw, Blunkett, Howard, Waddington…): the same treatment seems to have been instituted in education policy. Privately-educated Michael Gove is hellbent on abolishing state education, while his Universities Minister, David Willetts, seems to see himself as the Man Who Abolished Universities.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, OFSTED's new head, seems to be instituting the equivalent of corporal punishment for teachers. To him, teachers are layabout scum, whose namby-pamby niceness to pupils will lead to ANARCHY and HAPPINESS:

We tell the youngsters and we tell the parents we don't care really what background you're from; it's where you're going that's the most important issue. If you take into account ethnicity, free school meals and a whole range of other indicators, it can give the impression that you're making excuses.

Superficially positive, isn't it? I've a colleague who told us all that we should treat our students as blank slates, with no identity at all. Their backgrounds were irrelevant: she claimed this was a form of radical, progressive liberation, which is typical of privately educated people who've never had to struggle. It's dangerous and reactionary. Many of our students are from genuinely poor backgrounds. A lot are from minority ethnic groups which have been badly served in school and in the wider community. These are hurdles we need to appreciate and adapt to: not by making excuses, but by tailoring our educational approach to their needs. Wilshaw rejects this, and therefore firstly denies his students any cultural identity - a classic example of hegemonic racism and classism by someone who has never had to struggle - and secondly ensures that any failure is automatically the student's fault: never mind if she's a primary carer, or he's got no study space or access to books, who cares if the kids in front of you are hungry?

But that's not all: how's this for charming?

A good head would never be loved by his or her staff, he added: "If anyone says to you that 'staff morale is at an all-time low' you know you are doing something right."

I can think of several leadership models he's learned from. Stalin. Hitler. Pol Pot. More importantly, the idea comes directly from Sun Tzu's The Art of War and from Machiavelli's The Prince. Both these texts are taught on MBA programmes and the kind of 'leadership' courses beloved of the terminally shallow. I am profoundly worried by the idea that the country's most important educationalist envisions schooling as a state of permanent internecine warfare in which those at the top must ceaselessly crush factions jockeying to overthrow him. The idea that any management system must be based on fear is frighteningly unintelligent - or the product of a deeply damaged psyche - I wonder what his schooldays were like.

I don't know if you watched Educating Essex last year: the fly-on-the-wall documentary filmed in an Essex comprehensive school. Staff and students faced appalling problems: behaviour, mental illness, resources problems, the lot. Each episode was a lesson (sorry) in emotional maturity. The headmaster was warm, witty, passionate, caring and loving, both of his students and his staff, and they reciprocated. If you treat your colleagues as the enemy, you'll end up alone and paranoid - the point of Educating Essex was that every member of staff adored each other, the boss and the kids - a healthier, more successful way to success.

The other point about Wilshaw is that he's utterly contradictory: while proclaiming a credo of uniformity, respect and obedience to the kids (literally: uniforms, mass standing up, silence etc), he's practising a life of radical individuality in which it's him against The World (his colleagues, whom he despises). Clearly not a reflective thinker.

In contrast, a school managed through fear will poison the children, who will learn (as if The Apprentice and similar shows aren't enough) that only individualist victory over everybody else (the enemy) is the criterion for success. It's a vicious, backwards mentality which will only aid social decay. Children aren't evil spirits to be contained and bent to your desires: Educating Essex was the perfect antidote, because that school did its very best to persuade a bunch of spiky, complicated, messy kids that education is a personal and social good. Wilshaw wants to produce obeisant robots - students and staff - through terror: Passmore's school added to its students individuality by widening their horizons, whereas Wilshaw wants to remove any trace of personality.

The Demon Headmaster has a catchphrase - one which Wilshaw could easily adopt.

I hope you are not going to be a person who won't co-operate with me . . . "

Start 5 minutes in for a taste of Wilshaw's reign of terror.

Advice for Uppals

2012-01-23T18:52:00.003Z

As you know, my normal mode of communication with Paul Uppal MP is shouting from the moral heights down at him in the moral depths, but for a change, I'm going to pass on some advice (though he probably won't be able to tune in - as he sometimes does from a House of Commons computer - because Parliament's IT services have blocked all blogspot sites - including those of several MPs).

OK, to the advice. It's 'buy Paul Flynn MP's new book, How To Be An MP'. I know it's a bit late, given that you've been one for a couple of years now, and you won't be one for much longer (you only got in this time because loads of Labour voters abstained: the Tory vote hardly shifted) with your majority of 691.

Flynn's seen people like you before. The cover of the book features the 'types' of MP, including 'virtuoso bore', 'single issue eccentric' (though your dishonesty on the matter of tax breaks for yourself makes you more than an irritant) and 'irritant'. However, having started off by misleading parliament and joining a rather dubious list of all-party parliamentary groups, I think he might, given enough time and opportunity, aspire to becoming a 'Sleaze Monger':

Little talent or qualification is required, only guile and a thick skin. The job is to ask questions, fix meetings with ministers and make speeches prepared by Avarice Unlimited plc, Despot-stan, or Pharma-larceny… exceptional mental flexibility is required to pile up private riches while posing as the servant of the masses… Self deception is a potent force when lubricated with money.

I think I've found his niche…

Other useful sections include 'How To Tweet':

Constituents can enjoy a constant communion of ideas and inspiration with their Honourable Member. Strive to find the best words to create a striking aphorism or a haiku… The best MPs use Twitter to argue and debate with people they might never have met but whose ideas are interesting and important (and sometimes idiotic and obnoxious, but that's democracy).

If you're familiar with Mr. Uppal's Twitter stream, you'll understand why he needs to read this section twice. Or have someone explain it to him. He rarely replies to anyone, and they're always Tories when he does - he sees Twitter as a propaganda tool rather than a conversation (unlike Flynn). The 'How to Blog' section probably isn't worth reading: he faked one before the election, deleted some comments he didn't like and gave up. He's one of those of whom Flynn (an excellent blogger) sees as 'terrified of saying anything interesting. They hold that thinking is optional and originality dangerous for MPs'. Whereas blogging, says Flynn, 'is a welcome discipline to jump-start the synapses into daily callisthenics'. Works for me… or does it?

I won't quote the 'How To Please Constituents' section, because he's shown no interest in that at all: he turns up at Tory-friendly events, says something shifty to retain their votes, then slinks back to his tax-planning. Suffice it to say, a good MP does more than wheel out his or her own financial interests and loony beliefs, prefixing each sentences with 'my constituents tell me' as though we can't see through that. Paul can also skip the 'How to be Re-elected' section (he's beyond help), though 'How To Resign' might come in useful.

I'll close with this quotation, sent to me by an expert in Jacobite drama, which she felt might suit the errant MP:

…to hold a place
In Counsell, which was once esteem'd an honour,
And a reward for vertue, hath quite lost
Lustre, and Reputation, and is made
A mercenary purchase.
From whence it proceeds,
That the treasure of the City is ingros'd
By a few private men

Philip Massinger, The Bondsman.

Aural sex

2012-01-23T13:17:00.000Z

That got your attention, didn't it?

Anyway, my more distant relatives have separate fingers, rather than webbed paws with which we mash the keyboard inarticulately. One of my cousins is in fact so much higher up the evolutionary ladder that he's put his opposable thumbs to musical use, as a member of the Vanbrugh Quartet, wonderful interpreters of classic and contemporary music.

If you don't believe me, see for yourself: 7.30 in the Chancellor's Building, Keele University, this Wednesday.

Here's an excerpt from their rendition of a Dvorak quartet, and a bit from a documentary about them. They've even been on an Irish stamp! Beat that, Kronos!

People who just don't get it, part 94

2012-01-23T11:45:00.000Z

This is Chris Dodd, the former Senator and now head of Hollywood lobbyists the Motion Picture Association of America (see how corruption works?)

"You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker."

There's a man who really doesn't get it. Yes, there are some loudmouths doing slapdash things on the internet. I can see one reflected in the shiny screen of my MacBook Pro right now. But the strength of web culture is that there are millions of fact-checkers - and the vast majority of them aren't being paid to be the mouthpiece of philistine billionaire self-interested corporations (who have the resources, I would think, to do their own fact-checking. I write this stuff for free. Not only because nobody wants to pay me, but because free relates to my opinions too.

Here's my Guide to Social Media for Chris Dodds:

Lobbyists and PR: taking money to unreflectively have somebody else's opinions.
Gits with blogs: not taking money, propagating their own opinions.

That is all.

The music stops

2012-01-20T11:54:00.000Z

The day has suddenly become unutterably gloomy. I've just heard that Cob Records/Recordiau Cob in Bangor is closing down. This one place is where I became an adult, where I developed my tastes, where I felt accepted and welcome (and frequently laughed at).

In the heady days of Britpop, I arrived at university in 1993 with two cassette tapes (a Best of Vaughan Williams and R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People) played on a crappy white double-tape player from Argos - soon replaced by a rubbish 1970s record player from my parents' attic. Determined to become a hip young gunslinger, I put on the black leather biker's jacket a friend had abandoned in my room at school, bought some Doc Martens and headed down to Cob Records. I must have cut a pathetic figure.

Record shops those days weren't comfortable. Customer service was anathema. You crossed the threshold knowing that handing your choices over the counter was volunteering to be judged. It was terrifying and exciting. Cob was staffed by looming, burly men who thought nothing of teaming male pattern baldness with tie-dye t-shirts or Datblygu merchandise. They revelled in being the local arbiters of taste. They would take my purchases and make judgmental remarks about them to their colleagues - in Welsh for added alienation. I struck lucky with my very first choices: a Tindersticks 10" EP and a 10" Gorky's Zygotic Mynci album, Patio. The Tindersticks scored for being sophisticated, while the Gorky's album was local, in Welsh and unhinged - exactly what Cob's staff loved. The weird format also helped my credibility too. I still have them, lovingly looked after.

My first purchase: Tindersticks' cover of Townes Van Zandt's 'Sweet Kathleen' b/w E-Type Joe

The whole process was terrifying. Cob stocked CDs at the front for the yuppies, and a massive selection of vinyl records: wading through the dust floating in the limited daylight which pierced the murk to get to the vinyl earned you a few credibility points. Handwritten placards divided the soul from the indie from the Welsh-language from the metal from the rave. Learning which sections to avoid was a rite of passage, as was acquiring the manual handling skills which enabled you to nonchalantly flick through a rack of albums while avoiding cuts from the plastic sleeves. As I gradually became inducted into the cult, I'd learn to spot side-projects from bands I liked, or labels whose output I'd buy whether or not I'd heard of the individual band (Ankst, Too Pure, Bella Union, Fierce Panda, Sain, Secretly Canadian, Les Disques du Crepuscule, Sarah/Shinkansen, PIAS, Elefant, Chemikal Underground, Ché, Creeping Bent, Domino, Damaged Goods, Wiija and so many more). The secret references in band names and album titles became a hermeneutic code to which I'd been granted access. Slowly, mind you: I was a slave to the opinions of the NME, much to the scorn of Cob's staff.

But eventually, I became an object of kindly contempt rather than a sucker. They started to talk to me rather than wave my purchases around for the amusement of the cool kids. As my addiction grew, they'd show me the pre-release list every Thursday so I could order next week's new sounds. On Monday, I'd call in hopefully. On Tuesday, I'd get my hands on the loot, stuffed into Cob's distinctive yellow plastic bags, of which I still have a few lying around. Each 7", 10", picture disc or LP bore a little sticker with my name and the price - I reckon I spent £20,000 or more there over 7 years, but never a discount did I get, despite effectively putting their kids through college! Before long, the number of bags increased, and Alan, Owen and the others got bold: they decided that I needed educating, and started adding records they thought I should have - mostly comprising stuff they couldn't sell, or records by their own bands: Ectogram, Y Seirff / The Serpents and a whole range of krautrock/psych/hippy/drone experimentalist Welsh-language material. Through them, I discovered the limitations of Britpop and my tastes expanded to cover the past and the hidden corners of music: minor labels, the Celtic fringe, the underground. I started going to see their bands - one memorable gig at a horrible pub called The Barrels featured David Wrench (still a favourite) backed by various members of Gorky's, Super Furry Animals, Melys and Ectogram. The paying audience was: me. They still played - superbly - and David bought me a pint. For a 19 year-old geek, that was my equivalent of doing coke with Led Zeppelin in 1973, or sharing a burger with Elvis.

Cob Records is a scruffy place. The decor was old posters and peeling paint. There were no easy chairs, no coffee outlets, no pseudo-friendly recommendations. Going in there was a test, and I often failed. Just because you gave them money didn't buy you obsequiousness: they'd sell you this stuff but they made damn sure you understood what a load of shit it was - until you earned their respect, and then a whole new world opened up to you.

Whenever I go back to Bangor, I call in at Cob, and regress to that speechless rake-thin (I wish) teenage nerd. The guys behind the counter (it was a very geek-male place) grin and produce some unsold tat and I buy it without question. It feels like home. Friends joked that I kept that place going: they might have been right.

Without Cob and places like it, music becomes nothing more than a commodity, lacking range, depth and emotion, something to be consumed like fast food. From Cob I gained friends, an identity, taste, enthusiasm for the unknown and the alternative. They showed me new worlds in a way Amazon never can. More specifically, record shops generate and sustain local cultures, from which new bands and movements spring. Without Cob, the Welsh language scene which produced so many great bands would have struggled: Amazon doesn't care what's happening in North Wales, or King's Lynn or Macclesfield.

I'll miss their scorn, the dust, the smell, the time never wasted while searching for that new/old sound, the fading flyers for long-vanished bands, the mix of enthusiasm and weariness, the sense that selling music was about sharing a way of life rather than shifting units, the idea that music promised a set of emotions and experiences rather than a means to riches. Cob Records wasn't a shop. It was a culture.

Bye Cob. I'm sorry I left you.

So THAT's what happened to the public intellectuals

2012-01-20T10:37:00.004Z

A few weeks ago, I posted a long and quite diffuse piece on the declining prominence of public intellectuals: leading thinkers who used the mass media to introduce a degree of thoughtfulness and complexity into public debates. It got republished by the LSE Impact site, and by an American site too, so clearly it's not just me.

I was thinking about it again last night, having decided for some reason to watch the BBC's Question Time programme, in which political and public figures are invited to respond to current affairs questions from the general public. It's the TV version of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?, which also has an unlistenably reactionary phone-in element, Any Answers?, the nearest this country gets to Alabama.

The shows have a long and arguably proud history, but they're also at the heart of the problem. The format of several politicians plus a couple of 'colourful' or eccentric celebrities lends itself to propaganda and demagoguery: the pressure to be entertaining leads to the selection of controversialists who have media careers to push, while the politicians have become less and less thoughtful. 24 news, media monitoring and a hysterical press means that any politician on the show is forced to remain robotically 'on-message', parroting the briefing of the party's communications team. Individuality, ambiguity and indifference are in short supply. Last night's episode featured Baroness Warsi, a Tory who couldn't get an MPs seat because a) she's quite stupid and b) the Tory party is still very racist, and Stephen Twigg, a former New Labour MP. Neither of them had a single intelligent thing to say, because they were obsessed with repeating their party's 'talking points': Twigg was dull, while Warsi wheeled out inappropriate and unoriginal attack lines because she was incapable of responding to questions in an individual and flexible fashion. The other two guests were Charles Moore, a conservative but quite interesting journalist, and Germaine Greer, exactly the kind of media star picked for her predictably 'outrageous' opinions. Only Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, was intelligent, responsive and measured - which led to Baroness Warsi denouncing her for not being an imperialist. To see the daughter of Pakistani immigrants proclaiming her love for the British Empire was shocking - a triumph of ambition and ideological inflexibility over intelligence.

Rather than take the Douglas Adams approach occasionally ('I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that I don't know the answer', he once said), panellists feel they have to have a definitive response to everything.

Shows like this act as gatekeepers of public opinion. Germaine Greer should understand that she's there not for her media-friendly intellect, but to give the audience a little frisson - ooh, isn't she outrageous with her slightly wacky ideas? The show exists to maintain the dominance of a narrow version of political and intellectual life: the BBC's apology for not editing the 9/11 edition, in which the public expressed harsher opinions than politicians was incredibly high-handed, while the Nick Griffin episode was used not as an opportunity to expose his views as laughable, but for all sorts of celebrities to hold their noses and grab hold of the high ground. I also think that shows like this are dangerous because they imply some sort of accessibility and accountability. Politicians show up, run the risk of being booed sometimes, and feel they've 'faced' the public. It's fraudulent: they're exhaustively briefed on the party line, and their job is to make this preheated pap sound like their own opinions. If they get away with it, they report back to HQ that 'the line' has been propagated: there's no chance that they get back into the limo and ponder another panellist's ideas, or - heaven forbid - something an audience member said. The show looks like 'citizens' two cents' but it's actually a thinly-disguised propaganda outlet.

Question Time is the victim of political and celebrity culture. It's fallen into the trap of believing that everything is a party-political issue requiring representation - this leads only to the robotic utterances of Twigg, Warsi and their colleagues - while restricting discourse to a narrow field by adding a couple of guests by whom we're meant to be outraged or thrilled at their zaniness - Caroline Lucas manages to escape this trap by being hugely intelligent, whereas Greer and people like Alex James don't. Guests who don't take the same discursive approach, who don't accept the playing field set by the party politicians and received opinion are there to be laughed at or reviled - maintaining cultural and political hegemony by excluding whole swathes of opinion rather than examining them. Cannier guests - and I'd very much place Germaine Greer in this category - work out exactly what's wanted of them. She's tailored her 'product', or become a 'brand'. Having started out as a glorious radical feminist who made a huge difference to public culture, she is now a professional celebrity, reliably wheeling out slightly wacky opinions and good personalised putdowns: she adds the appearance of edgy radicalism while making no serious contribution to moving the goalposts away from the mainstream game. She's 'colour' rather than a threat to consensus. She knows this - it's how she makes her living.

Here's one of the most awful episodes: unelected Lord Adonis and Baroness Williams, Tory know-nothing loan-shark advertiser Carol Vorderman, comedy politician Boris Johnson and (thank Christ) Will Self, a man who eats morons for breakfast, though even he isn't immune from the 'opinions for money' syndrome.

Excerpts from the 9/11 episode:

What would I like? More boring guests. Experts. People who don't see an appearance as the route to occasional gigs on News 24 and a column in GQ or the Guardian if they manage to crack out a couple of zingers. People who don't feel the need to frame every question within the paradigm of party politics or triangulation. People whose careers don't depend on repeating a party line in the hope of preferment. People who introduce subordinate clauses to their answers and don't depend on audience applause for validation. People who aren't afraid to say that a question is complicated, difficult or even not worth discussing.

It's not likely to happen. The combination of rolling news (which creates vast swathes of space and time looking for something to fill it) and the gotcha politics of parties with no real ideological differences means that politicians in particular are terrified of saying anything which might give the opposition the chance to attack them for five minutes on Sky News. The cardinal sins in our public discourse are doubt and delay. A politician - or anyone else in the public eye - who says 'I'll need to think about that' is automatically painted as incompetent or untrustworthy. Egg donation? Libya? CDOs? Bankers' bonuses? Steve Jobs? Scottish independence? You've got to churn out the opinions without ever being given the time to research and ponder. (And yes, I know that's a little cheeky given that I'm a blogger).

Lest you think I'm feeling sorry for the politicians, I'm not. It's their fault. The determination to sound decisive and certain on every single event and issue communicates a contempt for the citizens. They've decided that we're all morons, and that we want and believe in the possibility of absolute conviction. We've been trained to belief that uncertainty = weakness, that any politician who doesn't have a snappy answer is out of his or her depth. I don't think that's true: in our own lives we're capable of holding multiple, contradictory or temporary opinions. In my profession, ambiguity and complexity are the highest virtues of contemporary literary studies. So why should we expect our politicians to hold the key to the Ultimate Questions? It's because we've been trained to assume that speed and simplicity of response equates to intelligence.

New Labour was the classic example. An élite group of highly-educated people from private schools, Oxbridge and political careers (very few of them were working class or had ever held jobs outside politics), they were fed the idea that the voters were angry, dumb and often racist. Rather than work out whether this was true, try to change opinions if so, or even meet some of these people, New Labour decided to pander to these perceived questions. It's hard to imagine now, but political communication relied on incredibly simplistic messages (pledge cards, sentences without verbs promising happy families or reduced immigration), while the serious politics (deregulation, interest rates, complicated diplomacy) was hidden away - too boring and complicated for the voters. Now, we're all experts in credit default swaps, bond markets and the intricacies of Syrian opposition groups (aren't we?), but our politicians haven't caught up: they're still treating us like hyperactive children to be pacified until our attention span means something shinier catches our collective eyes.

OK, I've strayed somewhat from my main point. Question Time isn't the cause of political cynicism, celebrity vacuity and the restriction of political discourse to an elite version of 'mainstream' - but it's symptomatic of a degraded and exhausted public sphere.