The Plashing Vole: y traethodydd

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.

The Newt Gingrich Caption Competition

2012-01-19T19:11:00.001Z

What is the serial adulterer, moral hypocrite and political know-nothing saying to this woman?

Me first, because it's my blog.

'Agree to an open marriage, or I'll rip your face off'.
'Who nose about us?'
'Say, were we married'?
Woman: 'you're a hypocrite. I've a nose for these things'. Newt: 'Then off it comes'.
'My wife's got no nose…' (etc.).

Despicable human being of the day

2012-01-19T14:36:00.002Z

I'm not sure who Mark Wahlberg is. Is he Marky Mark, or was that someone else? Either way, he's got a mouth on him:

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry.'

Mark Wahlberg on 9/11 flight he was originally scheduled to be aboard

Way to go. Does he really think that there wasn't anybody on that plane capable of bravery? Or that he's exceptional because (now I've looked him up) he has a history of racial violence and could therefore have killed those Saudis? Perhaps his roles in New Kids On The Block and I Heart Huckabees involved some kind of counter-terrorist training? OK, he's waved a toy gun, bulked up his abs and committed some revolting crimes - that doesn't make him any more heroic than those passengers he's implicitly attacking for being too weak or cowardly to take on the terrorists.

I don't normally give space and attention to that parasitical class known as 'celebrities', but this outburst was more than usually repellent. To use the violent deaths of so many people as a means of ego-gratification, self-aggrandisement and self-promotion displays a level of narcissism excessive even by Hollywood standards. It sounds like the kind of moronic rage more often found in Private Eye's 'From the Message Boards' parody ('Anyone comes near my kids I swear ill do time').

Who does Wahlberg think he is? Rudy Giuliani? (Of whom Joe Biden says every sentence consists of 'a noun, a verb and 9/11').

'Roads? Where we're going, we don't need… roads.'

2012-01-19T12:58:00.001Z

It looks like we might be getting hover cars after all, thanks to the Japan Institute of Science and Technology and their quantum levitation device:

Sadly, this is fake, a bit of promotional shit from Sony. But this one is real:

My favourite visions of the future are coming true…

Welcome, Wikinauts!

2012-01-19T11:14:00.000Z

OK, I'm not saying that Plashing Vole is the second-most popular and trusted site on the entire internet, but I think it's significant that when Wikipedia went dark yesterday in protest against SOPA, my visitors more than doubled. So actually, I am saying that in the absence of Wikipedia, I am the go-to guy for facts.

I suppose I should give you the answer to yesterday's true-or-false facts. Amazingly, nobody identified 'Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are serious Presidential candidates' as true - either you're not reading the newspapers or you haven't really the depths to which American political discourse has sunk. The other true fact was that Boris Johnson was indeed born in New York and is eligible to run for the Presidency - he was in fact an American citizen until recent years, which makes me wonder whether he used it for tax avoidance. Let's start campaigning for him - then we can have him deported.

You may have come to Vole for the facts, but stick around: I've got politics, music, books and general nonsense. Think of me as a thicker, more sarcastic Radio 4 (that's NPR for you Shermans).

Anyway, back to the marking… I wonder how my students fared without Wikipedia?

Self-defence

2012-01-18T17:24:00.000Z

The surely-not-long-now death of Thatcher is going to be a horrible time for those of us with a conscience: the right is going to behave as though she were a combination of Boudicca, Mother Teresa and Marie Curie. Carpers (i.e. anyone who points out that her legacy is global despression, inequality and war) will be as welcome as republicans at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

So here's a cheery and tuneful (no, really) song by Mogwai called 'George Square Thatcher Death Party'. I've a playlist of Thatcher death songs which I'll work my way through.

He's at it again

2012-01-18T10:58:00.000Z

I'm actually embarrassed by the intellectual frailty of my MP, Paul Uppal. As I predicted yesterday, his speech in Parliament was a shameful rehearsal of all the bees in his bonnet. Despite claiming that

Town centres are not just about retail

he quickly refers to the people in the city centre as 'shoppers' - not citizens or locals.

He's been going on about 'chuggers' (= charity muggers) for months - this is just the latest attempt:

I conducted a survey of small shops and businesses in the city centre to find out why people do not shop there. I was surprised by the No.1 reason—chuggers: people who fundraise, perhaps aggressively. Again and again, shoppers said that the aggressive tactics used by some street fundraisers leave them feeling harassed and intimidated.

It's very thin stuff (and I doubt he was really 'surprised', given his previous claims on the subject). Methodologically very suspect: how many people did he ask? What proportion were shopkeepers? What was the question? The very fact that he calls them 'chuggers' implies bias from the start. It seems very unlikely that fundraisers are a) aggressive (I find them annoying) or that they are the primary reason why people don't shop in the city. I'd be less than surprised to find that he asked a leading question. It seems to me that the reason footfall is down is because there's a massive recession on, one which his government has made worse. But apparently recession is a word that is never going to cross his lips, even in a debate about high street decline. Also, Birmingham, with a wide range of shops, is 20 minutes away on the train.

There's one rather glaring error in this survey, if indeed he conducted one on the street: he claims that shoppers in the city centre told him that they don't shop there because of fundraisers. Can anyone else spot the problem there?

What's his solution? Ah… again he's a little disingenuous:

In Manchester, there is an agreement between the city centre management company, CityCo, and the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association, a self-regulating body that monitors face-to-face fundraising. They have found a balance between fundraising and leaving people in peace to shop. It is important that that fine line is drawn.

It's a disguised call for the privatisation of public space: CityCo is a private corporation given control over what used to be public space by the elected local authority. It's a move to prevent ordinary people using public space for anything other than consumption: try handing out political or religious leaflets in a CityCo area - you'll soon learn the difference between public and pseudo-public space.

Why should people be left 'in peace' to shop? Teenagers aren't left in peace to flirt and play. The arts, sport and leisure have no place in his world. Only shoppers are to be afforded civil rights in Uppal Consumerist Wonderland.

What else does Uppal want? Well SURPRISE SURPRISE: he wants taxpayers to fund commercial developers. Does he mention at any point that he is in fact a commercial property speculator?

I should also like to offer the Minister some guidance on trust and clarity over tax-incremental financing, which is an issue for the developers of city centres. We have to go back to basics. If we are to see regeneration, we cannot look at the old model whereby development was funded only by bank lending; we need to look at partnerships between local authorities and businesses.

Er… no. Don't be ridiculous. He wants state aid for people like him, and cuts in public services - like Disability Living Allowance - for people like us.

So in summary, a classic Uppal speech: dishonest, intellectually weak and self-interested. I despair, I really do.

Welcome, Wikipedians

2012-01-18T10:28:00.003Z

Feeling lost? Homework impossible without Wikipedia?

Fear not, brave webnauts! Plashing Vole, as a service to readers, has harvested the key facts from Wikipedia which you might need to get you through the day.

Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations while on holiday in Arizona, in the settlement later known Area 51.
In Series 3, episode 2 of Doctor Who, a prototype mobile telephone can clearly be glimpsed in the Tardis.
The eye-in-a-pyramid on the dollar bill was designed by the Earl of Oxford on behalf of the Illuminati.
There are no Palestinians. Anyone who says otherwise is antisemitic.
David Miliband is the leader of the Labour Party.
WMD were found in Iraq.
The first UK Number 1 hit single was Noel Coward, with 'Half-Caste Woman' (1958).
Steve Jobs' 'death' was in fact part of the iSingularity - on general release Fall 2012.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were serious presidential candidates in 2012.
Charles Darwin converted to creationism in 1858, but his diaries were suppressed by the Royal Society.
Jon Stewart's PhD thesis was on North-Western Saskatchewan Women's Writing, 1930-1936). He was required to rewrite the final three chapters on the grounds of 'sketchiness'.
The 'Occupy' movement takes its inspiration from the Sudetenland, 1938.
On several South Pacific Islands, effigies of Montgomery Scott are worshipped as gods. 'Beam Me Up' is believed to relate to the Ascension.
The 'Hollywood' sign originally advertised Christmas trees.
Steve Martin's novels topped the Finnish sales charts in 1983, 1987, 1993, 1994 and 2003. Only William Shatner's Tek Wars series is more popular across Scandinavia.
Katie Price holds A-levels in Critical Thinking, Textiles and German. She chose 'Jordan' as a stage name after living in Petra as an ascetic for several months in 1998. The claim that she chose the name after her favourite pair of basketball shoes was an internet meme with no foundation.
Richard Madeley is a member of the Privy Council.
Boris Johnson was born in New York, and is therefore eligible to run for US President.
9/11 was executed by a rogue NSA/CIA unit. All Jews were evacuated from the buildings in advance. Film analysis places Oliver North and Gore Vidal in the cockpit of the first plane but their DNA was never recovered from the scene.

PS: a couple of these are true. Which ones?

Cynical, Moi?

2012-01-17T16:52:00.000Z

I spend a lot of time abusing politicians, I'll admit. In particular, one Mr. Paul Uppal, the Mediocre Millionaire.

To add a bit of class to my disgraceful behaviour, here's a short piece by Adam Curtis on how the politicians and media managed to poison their own wells.

This just in from the Department of Irony

2012-01-17T16:32:00.000Z

Well well, Uppal's tweeting from the House of Commons:

In the chamber, hoping to contribute to the debate on the future of town centres and high streets

If you're a regular reader of Plashing Vole, or you follow Uppal's exploits on They Work For You, you'll be able to write his speech in advance:

1. Shoppers only. No charity collectors, layabouts, anti-consumerists or citizens.
2. End all taxes on commercial property owners.
3. Public space to be abolished and turned over to commercial property owners. There is only one conceivable use for space: retail.

What you won't hear:

Mr. Speaker, I should declare an interest before I say anything else. I own commercial property worth millions of pounds and the British Property Federation described me as 'our man in Parliament'. So you should assume that everything I say is informed by my desire to enrich myself and my friends without regard to the public good.

Kidneys… or kids? Kids… or Kidneys

2012-01-17T12:11:00.000Z

Presumably they mean well, but this horrified me on moral grounds.

I visited a friend last night, and called in to Waitrose near his house (yes, well off my beat). After paying, I was given a green token, and told it related to charity. By the exit was this:

Each compartment was for a particular charity, and shoppers placed the token in the charity of their choice - Waitrose hands over some £1000 according to votes cast. It horrified me - the idea that somebody's future health depended on whether I preferred a renal charity over a bloody dogs' home or whatever the third organisation was. I don't want charity to exist at all - governments exist to solve these problems - but the Darwinian ruthlessness of this game-show scheme made me very uncomfortable. What's next? Cancer v. AIDS: who deserves to survive?

I put my token in the renal slot - balls to the animals until we've got decent healthcare.

Pity for the propertied classes

2012-01-17T10:01:00.002Z

Fresh from the triumph of his naked self-interest, Paul Uppal made another foray into grown-up politics yesterday. In a brave break from political orthodoxy, he's identified the true 'enemy within' as regards the housing market: first-time buyers.

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what steps his Department is taking to ensure that providing first time property buyers with a partial mortgage guarantee does not reduce access to the housing market for existing property owners.

OK, I accept that this is incredibly boring, but you should remember the phrase 'the banality of evil'. I think that Britain's housing market is distorted and dysfunctional, directly as a result of the Thatcherite belief that housing values should be seen as a personal piggy bank, which led to people remortgaging to buy bigger, or buy frivolous things.

But we're stuck with the system we've got, for now. The government is bringing in a system designed to help house builders - not homeowners - by guaranteeing mortgage payments if buyers fall behind. To Uppal, this appears to be a threat to the British Way Of Life. In a sense, I agree - why should corporations get these kinds of guarantee? - but I suspect he sees it differently. What I smell behind this little manoeuvre is another attempt to cosy up to the moneyed bourgeois whom he thinks will vote for him in 2015.

The people he speaks for aren't in need of protection from hordes of state-funded proles waving their new house keys at the suburbs. They have money and comfortable homes. The first-timers, on the other hand, are having to wait longer to buy a home (average age: 37), stump up a bigger deposit (20-40%, which means depending on parental help or years of living with parents to scrape it together) and higher interest rates. They're excluded from the market across wide swathes of the UK.

But what of Uppal's constituency itself? I picked a central postcode and drew on the ACORN analysis to see whether those already on the property ladder are somehow excluded from the market by these hordes of first-timers with their state guarantees. What do I find? Family incomes are 'low to medium' and mortgage holding is 'very low'.

Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be single elderly people living in council flats.

Over 40% of the population is over 60 and every other age group is under represented. Almost one in three people in this type is a single pensioner, and, unsurprisingly, levels of long-term illness are double the national average. For those of an economically active age, unemployment is relatively high and people tend to work in routine jobs in manufacturing and retail. The average household income levels for these areas are amongst the lowest in the whole country. Housing in these neighbourhoods is typically small, one or two bedroom, purpose built flats rented from the council or housing association. Very few people have access to a car and they rely on public transport, walking and occasional taxis to get around. These people have little discretionary spend. They are unlikely to go on holiday, but will go to bingo and buy lottery scratch cards.

OK: there's no crisis outside Paul Uppal's head. What we find is a poor city in which the population is financially struggling. Certainly there are some very affluent suburbs, from which he draws his support (he has a majority of only 600, the result of a decline in Labour supporters voting, rather than a surge in Tory support), but most of us are excluded from Uppal's worldview.

Even Mr. Uppal's Tory comrades think he's off his head with this one: here's the minister's reply:

Grant Shapps (Minister of State (Housing and Local Government), Communities and Local Government; Welwyn Hatfield, Conservative)

My Department is supporting the industry-led new build mortgage indemnity scheme. The scheme will apply to new build properties from participating builders and will be available to all potential buyers, subject to appropriate underwriting and selection criteria. This will include existing property owners who want to move house and buy a new build property.

Approximately 14% of transactions in England in 2010 were for new build properties. The scheme is intended to help builders to build more new homes, and support people to buy them.

So a) the scheme isn't for first-time buyers only and b) it's about saving the construction industry, not helping citizens. Another triumph for Uppal!

Back of the net…

2012-01-16T17:04:00.001Z

Speaking strictly for myself, I'd have to say that the last couple of hours were amongst the most enjoyable I've had in a classroom for quite some time. What my ~~vict~~ students thought about it, I wouldn't like to speculate, but the fact that the vast majority repeatedly spoke must say something.

I also found it quite educational. It was the first in a series of workshops on the connection - if any - between literature and social class. From next week, we'll be reading a couple of texts per week to discuss their approaches to the subject, but this week I wanted to situate them as classed readers in the literary marketplace. We discussed whether 'doing English' makes you middle class, whether particular genres are associated with certain classes, how class affects the resources you need to read (we didn't get round to discussing the claim that proletarian writers produced short stories more than novels because of their industrial work-patterns), how canons are formed and re-formed, the impact of the literary establishment - which they felt was dead other than educational institutions, especially as they don't read newspaper review sections, book design, misery memoir readerships, book clubs, uses and gratification theory, the commodification of literature, Arnold, Leavis, canon formation, whether poetry is hopelessly compromised, and a range of other subjects.

Very bravely, they each gave me a list of the books they read for pleasure - a category we picked because they do genuinely feel that course material is often picked coercively, even though they do enjoy many of the texts chosen. We discussed them in terms of their marketing, socio-economic position, genre and anything else that came to mind. It was very interesting to argue about why one vampire novel is Literature (Dracula), whereas Twilight (a very popular choice) is 'trash'.

My students' recent reading choices:
Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
Robin Ince, The Bad Book Club (which I intend to purchase)
Linda Lovelace, Ordeal
Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives

Khaled Hossaini, A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Stephenie Myers, Twilight

Bali Rai, Killing Honour

Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation.

Nicholas Sparkes, Safe Haven (apparently a romance with a 'weird' twist
Laurie Viera, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
Tate Hallaway, Tall, Dark and Dead.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter.
Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
Jacqueline Wilson, Girls in Love
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Terry Eagleton, After Theory
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems.

'I haven't ready anything for pleasure since being on this course'. We discussed the institutionalisation of reading and criticism here, which was quite useful.

J K Rowling, Harry Potter.
Running from the Devil, which could be this one about childhood mental health problems, or this one about childhood sexual abuse: we didn't find out, though I (erroneously) speculated that it might be a supernatural thriller.
Lizzie McGlynn, I Forgive You, Daddy. Another misery memoir. I did get some cheap laughs from discussing the way they're marketed and produced, but we did talk seriously about their place in the literary culture and why people might want to read them. Hopefully the anonymous student who's reading these books doesn't feel ridiculed.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, The Naughty Girls' Guide to Life.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Myers, Twilight.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (good discussion about whether this was 'trash' or 'literary fiction')
Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad
Bram Stoker, Dracula.

All in all, a fascinating list, as individual books and in the way students are reading them. It's pretty easy to work out that most of the students are female, mostly anglophone, outward-looking and fairly young (oldest is mid-30s), but other than that, there's a range of genres and period represented. Genre fiction is clearly popular - something we discussed - as is young adult/teen fiction. Entertainment is clearly important, and there are signs of a move towards non-fiction: Ince and Goldacre are doing a good job.

One of the interesting things was the discussion of the growth of misery memoirs, their readership and the marketing tactics. Do publishers demand more misery, as the market becomes saturated. Do the covers (of which the one below is exactly representative) tell you all you need to know? Are they read to exercise one's empathy, for personal recovery and empowerment, or for entertainment? (A question I floated but deliberately didn't follow, to avoid causing potential pain).

The session was largely about one's position as a reader, so here's a question I meant to pose to them, but ran out of time. Perhaps you can answer it in the comments section.

What books would you be pleased to be seen reading on public transport? And which ones would you/have you concealed?

With the advent of the Kindle and e-books, the opportunity to play this kind of game is disappearing. Poor Peep Show Mark won't be posing with Friends of the British Museum as a prop for much longer, and a little corner of public culture will have disappeared. No more literary conversations or flirtations - you could be reading anything from Zizek to Megaboobs on your black plastic square, and nobody will ever know.

What a fascinating discussion we had - the kind of session which makes everything else worthwhile.

Yee-ha!

2012-01-16T11:46:00.001Z

Over at the Leveson inquiry, the editor of the Daily Mirror has said this about bloggers:

Asked about bloggers, Wallace says: "The out and out cowboys – I don't see in the long term they can survive … people want information that is competent and true."

He's not entirely wrong, though I'd point out that his predecessor resigned after insisting that the front page photos of British soldiers urinating one Iraqi prisoners were true - which they weren't - so much for competence and truth. There are loons here, and I've been known to get stories wrong too - only the other day Paul Uppal contacted a third-party to correct them about something I said on here (which is a bit weird - check the comments section). But bloggers do have a legitimate space in the public sphere, and in a way, it's connected to my pursuit of Uppal.

My local paper is the Express and Star, a paper so astonishingly bad that it's named after the two worst national newspapers on the planet. It gave racist MP Enoch Powell a long-running column, it briefly employed Boris Johnson, it repeatedly demonises ethnic minorities, and it has never knowingly said anything critical of a Conservative. Local newspapers are essential to democracy. As well as providing a platform for the unhinged, they're meant to hold power to account, but this is a function they've largely abandoned. Local journalism is expensive, so the Express and Star has replaced it with publishing PR releases. In any case, it's got no interest in analysing Uppal's behaviour, because it supports the Conservative Party above the needs of the community.

Which is where I fit in. As an amateur, I've got no editor telling me not to bother with the story. Nor do I have financial constraints, because I've got no costs, and my resources are a sarcastic vocabulary and the fruits of my brain, such as they are.

There are downsides to this position of course: I don't have the time to really delve into Uppal's behaviour, nor do I have the skills or resources to track down documentation, interview people and generally get to the heart of matters. This means that I may be inaccurate at times. I also have a lower legal standard, which is what the Mirror editor is getting at: there's no PCC to tick me off (not that it's any good), but then again, I'm economically defenceless if Uppal decides to sue me. All I have to rely on is that it wouldn't look very good for an MP to sue a constituent, particularly as he never deigns to clarify matters here.

For the record, these are his 2010-2011 expenses in summary - I can't find any reference to website hosting, despite WHOIS listing Pinehurst Securities as the registered owner of his site:

Constituency Office
£2,584.42
General Admin
£3,744.19
Staffing
£63,462.88
DIRECT PARLIAMENTARY EXPENSES

Accommodation
£8,439.50
Travel and Subsistence
£2,442.10

Total: £80,673.09

Am I a cowboy? Certainly the blogosphere is a kind of Wild West, which is why corporations and governments are getting twitchy: they don't like criticism. I'd love to leave scrutiny of Uppal to the professionals, but they don't want to do it. Until they do, you're stuck with me.

Looking Brown In A Public Place

2012-01-16T11:04:00.000Z

Sadly, this sketch from the early 1980s is entirely relevant.

Despite smug bourgeois claims that Britain is the home of individual liberty, the police are allowed to stop and search citizens without needing any suspicion at all. This is the kind of thing usually associated with Nazi Germany or other repressive regimes: an autocratic state taking to itself the power to interfere with people on the whim of a uniformed bully.

You can guess who gets stopped most often: male black teenagers. I've seen it a few times in The Dark Place: a 'random' stop, harsh words exchanged, nothing found, increased resentment amongst the population, while white passers-by have their prejudices reinforced. I once stepped in at the train station after watching a cop harass some kids whose offence seemed to be 'being black in possession of a skateboard'. It was a very scary experience - demanding a name and number from a red-faced, angry policewoman who had clearly never been questioned before. I'd do it again though. I was at Birmingham railway station last year when they police were asking people to step through a metal detector in a 'random' search for knives. I pointed out to the Asian lad next to me that despite the vicissitudes of 'random' selection, no white people appeared to have been chosen, and encouraged him to refuse, which he did. Easy for white, middle-class me to suggest, brave of him to follow it through.

According to the LSE, you are 30 times more likely to be stopped and searched under the 'exceptional circumstances' legislation if you are black. Perhaps that's the 'exception' they mean. Are all these kids criminals? Not really - 0.5% lead to arrests for weapons possession, and I guess another tiny percentage are done for minor crimes. Apart from being nakedly racist, it's astonishingly inefficient.

This stuff makes my blood boil. The police are, or should be, public servants, but too often they act as an external force descending on an area or community as the representatives of power. I've had some very good experiences of policing too, but far too frequently, the individuals I've met have been on some kind of power trip, concerned more with the expression of their authority than with fact, justice or the wider ramifications of their behaviour. That's why the Lawrence murder dragged on so long: to the police, the two black teenagers attacked must have been 'up to no good'. No wonder young black people riot: their only experiences of policing are being stopped and searched in public for no apparent reason.

And it Burns, Burns, Burns…

2012-01-13T16:31:00.002Z

I see that unpleasant student politician Jim Murphy, now an unpleasant rightwing Labour MP, is calling on Labour to rally round the Union Flag in the referendum on Scottish independence.

Sorry Jim: it's a little more complicated than that. I'd have thought that a Scottish MP with an Irish background would have understood that. Scotland's a complex place: you've got urban v. rural, Catholic and Protestant sectarianism, huge economic inequalities, a separate legal system from England and Wales, a dying language, a very thorny relationship with Ireland, a very different class and social structure, and a long history of independence.

Labour's vote is drawn from urban communities in Scotland, but it's split between the quite distinct Protestant and Catholic (often Irish, poorer) groups, and rivalries between them have often been intense. The Irish - symbolised by Celtic football club - have often looked back to Ireland for cultural values and a degree of protection: one of my ancestors even ran the Irish Party in Scotland in the early years of the twentieth-century. So there's an Irish nationalist strand in the Labour Party, but also a pro-Union one which partly derives from Catholic distrust of the Tory Scottish aristocracy and Establishment, which can be viciously sectarian. The other strand of unionism derives from a traditional socialist distrust of all nationalism: it holds that ethnic division is an artificial imposition on human communities, whereas class solidarity should cross borders. In Ireland, for instance, nationalism hoovered up rebel energy, with the result that the British rulers were replaced with narrow-minded, reactionary leaders for 100 years after independence.

However, I think we should challenge the Labour leadership's assumption that Labour values must always be pro-Union. There's nothing socialist or democratic about insisting on Britishness above Scots, Welsh or Irish independence. After the 1968 New Left, it's perfectly possible to have a progressive, leftwing nationalist movement (indeed, Ireland almost got one in the 19th-century). Plaid Cymru and the SNP are inclusive movements, though it should be admitted that some of their voters would be Tories in England. As Labour moves further right, the nationalist parties have come to seem the repositories of liberationist, pro-state, progressive leftwing policy. Many of Labour's voters and activists are descendants of people forced to leave their conquered and denuded homelands to seek menial work in the Mother of Empire: affection for the Union Flag is much shallower than you might expect.

In the 1930s, Soviet Russia moved from a policy of World Revolution to Socialism In One Country. I wouldn't want to saddle any party with echoes of Stalin, but the phrase is one I think we can usefully recycle. Labour shouldn't take a stand on Scottish independence. Scottish voters should be asked whether they would prefer. The economic arguments should be left out of it - it's about which 'imagined community' the Scots feel is most important. Socialism can be built in Edinburgh or London, regardless of passport. Labour supported Irish independence as a matter of principle, rather than claiming that imperialism would be OK if the Irish voted for socialist London governments.

The pragmatic problem for Labour is this: Scotland is virtually a Tory-free zone. Labour needs those 40 MPs if it hopes ever to get into UK government again. But this is a selfish and self-serving argument. The Scots shouldn't be blackmailed by English politicians. Labour can fight and win elections in independent Wales and Scotland: why should the Scots be compelled to stay in a Union simply to help a party which has decided to support the UK for reasons of electoral strategy?

Unless, of course, Labour isn't being cynical. Perhaps the leadership does care passionately about the UK. If so, I'd suggest that it grows up. Just because the Mail waves the flag constantly, doesn't mean Labour has to. If Celtic nationalism is unsavoury, then so is UK nationalism. Cling to the glories of Empire (and they were only glorious if you were sitting in a bloody big mansion paid for by the proceeds of slave-grown sugar or whatever) is pathetic. Britain's (or England's, Wales's and Scotland's) future lies in Scandinavia: post-imperial small nations which have decided that they don't need to invade America's latest enemy, to wave nuclear weapons at anyone, to 'punch above their weight' on the world stage. It's time to relax, make some friends abroad, accept that this is a small country (or countries) and concentrate on diplomacy and domestic quality of life.

I do think that the socialist case for Union is perfectly honourable, as long as it's part of a discourse which leads to the abolition of all nation-states (difficult to imagine give the unresolved and bloody process by which the UK emerged and is gradually dissolving), but I also think there's a huge gap between socialist values and Labour policy (I know, it's hard to believe). Labour Unionism isn't principled socialism derived from proletarian solidarity: it's British exceptionalism which depends on some of the same chauvinism which dominates the Tory Party and the public sphere. It would take a brave party to move on from that - but perhaps now's the time.

Lots of British people have done wonderful things. Britain as an entity has done a few great things - but there's an awful lot of which to be ashamed. Why cling to a Union that's past its sell-by date? Time for Labour to leave the nostalgia to the Tories and accept the will of the people. An independent Scotland (Wales, England) might become a Danish-style powerhouse, a version of bankrupt Ireland, or an inward-looking, dour Puritan backwater. Fine: it's up to them. Just don't take Unionism as a political principle when it's actually a political calculation.

Down the Rabbit-hole with the Republicans

2012-01-13T16:03:00.000Z

The Enlightenment is, for Americans, very much over. Which is a shame, because it was explicitly founded on Enlightenment principles by the Founding Fathers, none of whom would ever survive a primary campaign in this day and age.

Science, rationality, intellectual ability, skepticism, doubt: all negatives in the Republican race (and in the Democratic one, of course). Actually knowing stuff is a deeply suspicious quality when the prime characteristics sought by Republican voters are a) feeling and b) total distrust of Washington, big cities, liberals, atheists, career politicians, foreigners, blacks, books, learning… and languages. Never mind that all the candidates are millionaire career politicians. Except for Romney, who's a billionaire who made his pile in asset-stripping companies and sacking hundreds of thousands of people.

Yes. In a true sign of progress, we've moved on from Republicans accusing Democrat opponents of 'looking French' (John Kerry spoke fluent French), to Republicans accusing each other of speaking French. Never mind that the Founding Fathers all had fluent Latin and most of them could read Ancient Greek too, as well as French…

This is a return to the 'Know-Nothings' and 'Ham and Eggs' populist movements, in which suspicion of outsiders was a mark of authenticity and honesty. A bit weird for a nation founded on immigration, and for one which has a military presence in more than two thirds of the world's countries, but American politics is well beyond logic by now.

To read: Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, about how struggling Americans have been persuaded that the financial system which ruined us all needs more freedom from government.

Marking mayhem

2012-01-13T15:00:00.002Z

OK, the vast majority of essays I mark are honestly and carefully written. Some are excellent, many are good, too many aren't very good, from which I can learn a lot about my own teaching practice as well as about the students.

But I'm not talking about them today. Instead, I offer you a few very basic tips to help you avoid falling into the trap of PLAGIARISM - or at least how not to get caught.

1. If you cut and paste somebody else's work from the internet, try to change the typeface to match the one you're using.

2. Leaving in the hyperlinks is often a giveaway. The same goes for the source's footnote numbers, especially if you haven't used any footnotes of your own.

3. Don't cite the first editions of Kant, Gramsci, Kierkegaard, Hegel or Marx. Most of them weren't written in a language you read. We don't have them in the library.

4. Do cite books we actually have. Very few things annoy me than references which in fact hide a Google search leading to a single sentence lifted from Google Books. It's really obvious that you haven't read any more of the book than that, and therefore don't understand it. If I haven't read it, or have read it but not understood it (looking at you, Deleuze), I'm going to be a teensy bit suspicious if you're rattling it off with casual abandon.

5. Unless you're a very special individual indeed, turning in work which is instantly publishable in journals which wouldn't accept a bunch of flowers from me, let alone a paper, will raise my suspicions. First-years who discuss Irigaray's theory of phallogocentrism in an essay on media representation are going to have to work rather hard to persuade me that they haven't nicked it.

6. Make sure the bibliography matches the essay.

7. Try not to start essays with (as a colleague recently read) 'In my previous paper on this subject (University of Oxford, 2007)…'.

8. If your English and punctuation is a little bit shaky, throwing in paragraphs of Judith Butler-style sophistication is always going to look a bit dubious. If you don't use capital letters in book titles and don't know that 'media' is a plural, adding post- or neo- to words, or scattering your text with 'discursive' tends to seem slightly suspicious.

9. If your web sources are things like 'megacheat', 'essaycheat' and 'freeessays.com': you've probably cheated. If you're happily nicking AS-level students coursework, you should reassess the level of your abilities. If it says AS on the tin, it's unlikely to be adequate for university, leaving aside issues of honesty. It was very nice of Kelly Brown to put her coursework on the internet, but you shouldn't be handing it in as your own university essay.

10. There's an incredibly simple way to avoid being accused of plagiarism. If you didn't write that sentence, use these things: ' '. Alternatively, you could add 'As X asserts…' at the head of sentences you've paraphrased. Bingo: instant credit for doing research.

The other way to fail an essay is to say things like 'women who have worked in pornography deserve no sympathy if they are subsequently raped'. Despite the correct use of 'subsequent'.

Back to the good essays. We know that you aren't professional academics. We know that academic writing is hard, and that ideas aren't always easy to grasp. We appreciate a clear statement of what you think and how it applies to texts. We don't expect you to have read everything in the field. We can tell when you've put the effort in and we look kindly on you even if you're not quite there.

Tips for success: if you're struggling, talk to us. Talk in the seminars, which is where we try to identify the chewy bits of a subject, talk to us in our office hours, stop us in the corridors. We love enthusiasm and we're always happy to explain things further. That's what we're here for.

Plagiarists tend to split into a few categories: those who don't quite understand that education isn't data-mining information; those who panic because they haven't attended, or managed their time properly; and those who are cynically ready to cut any corners because the qualification is far more important than the process. For the first two groups, the failure is partly ours: we need to explain why academic honesty and effort is worthwhile. For the latter, you're not only cheating us and your colleagues: you're gaining nothing from your time here.

How media works, pt. 94

2012-01-13T12:39:00.000Z

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, the Star and the Express, he painted a picture of the tabloid media as a sinkhole of greed, cynicism and incompetence. Only this last element truly surprised me: I've always assumed that the purveyors of this vicious, racist, cynical, misleading propaganda and filth knew exactly what they were doing. This is of course, even worse than being enthusiastic. I assume that Mail and Sun writers don't in fact vote for the BNP, leer over young women's breasts and endorse pogroms in their personal lives: they just advocate it for money to sell newspapers. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

Down at the level of the Express and Star though, things are very different. Richard Desmond's appearance was in a sense refreshing. The Mail claims to have some sort of reactionary mission: it's pompous, self-serving and hypocritical. This last charge can't be applied to Desmond and his henchmen. Their testimony was revoltingly honest: they say whatever sells newspapers (and take a cavalier approach to truth), whether that's accusing the royal family of murdering Diana (my two cents: drunk chauffeur, passengers too stupid to wear seat belts) or repeatedly accusing the McCanns of murdering their daughter without any evidence at all (and hearing Desmond add 'etc. etc. etc.' to his apology to the McCanns only added credibility to his opening statement: 'Ethics - I don't know what the word means'.

One of the most unpleasant elements of the Express's hypocrisy is its censorious approach to sexuality. Let's have a look at what was on its owners TV stations while he was giving evidence, shall we? Unfortunately, Portland TV's website is remarkably coy about what its '17 channels', but a little further digging finds Television X, the Fantasy Channel, and various Red Hot stations (showing such treats as 'Bathroom Bitches' during daytime hours) including Red Hot Only 18 and Red Hot Rears. Yesterday's treats included 'Indian Amateur 1', 'Lesbo Chicks Do Boy Girl 4' and 'Hot and Heavy 1'. Over on Television X, you could have watched the frankly baffling 'Cathy Barry Extreme Interracial 2', 'Jim Slip's [geddit?] Euro Matures 2', 'Ready Steady Chav 2' or 'Freddy's British Granny Hunt''.

Other highlights of Mr. Desmond's career include his ownership of a range of pornographic magazines such as Megaboobs, Asian Babes and Skinny and Wriggly, getting an executive tasered in the testicles during a violent confrontation with the Gambino mafia family and - my personal favourite - goose-stepping round a board room while singing 'Deutschland Über Alles' to Telegraph executives during a business dispute. Mr. Desmond is Jewish.

Now the salient point is this: Desmond explicitly sees newspapers as vehicles for selling advertising. He has no truck with high-flown notions of the public sphere. Newspaper content has no responsibility to the wider community: a position even the Mail, which has delusions of running the country, would find distasteful. To honest Dick, this is pompous nonsense put about by the Establishment which wants to freeze him out. In a sense, I agree with him: I wouldn't want to go back to a situation in which newspapers are solely owned by plutocratic peers of the realm who use their organs as vehicles for hegemonic continuity. Nor would I want a world in which only broadsheets are permitted. But is the media sphere - especially on the right - particularly independent now? They all hate the EU, foreigners, black people, women, socialists, the poor. To read the tabloids is to enter a world of fear, paranoia, hatred and easy bigotry. At least the Mail genuinely believes all these things: Desmond appears to promote them solely to sell advertising space.

Quotes of the day

2012-01-12T14:27:00.000Z

I've been following the Leveson inquiry as well as marking and attending a school meeting. In case you've missed them, there have been some jaw-dropping gems from the editors of the Daily Star and the Daily Express:

On the sources of Daily Star stories:

We don't just lift stories from the Mail website and put them in the Star... without at least checking them.

So that's alright then.

And then there's the Express editor explaining why his newspaper withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission:

He says one of the reasons for withdrawing was because it failed to stop the paper publishing defamatory articles about the McCanns.

"Because of the McCanns I think that was a huge problem for us and I think they should have intervened … no one was intervening at all. Everybody had too much leeway, it just went on and on,"

So to be clear: the Press Complaints Commission is useless because it didn't stop his paper publishing numerous libellous articles, leading to them being convicted in court and having to pay out huge amounts of money. Stop me before I kill again!

Dribble

2012-01-12T10:55:00.000Z

Just visit this site if you like books. But don't go there if you're ashamed of your uncool, scruffy book storage. My flat looks like the back room of a charity shop: hundreds of feet of books and vinyl records on cheap shelves with no saving design grace at all. I don't even have wall space for the numerous prints I've had framed - they're all piled up in the office.

I'd really like one of these - though I'd add a book stand for extra reading comfort.

New Year, New Uppal?

2012-01-12T10:29:00.002Z

Is Paul Uppal MP planning to turn over a new leaf?

Sadly not. He was up on his hind legs again yesterday, talking about exempting empty commercial property from tax:

Regarding regeneration, in my constituency, 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.

There are two problems with this statement, one a point of general principle, and one of simple honesty.

On the point of general principle first: Paul Uppal MP claims to be a capitalist. As such, he accepts that the market sets a price, and the owner of an asset should accept that price. Therefore if a property is empty, the owner should reduce the rent until he finds a level at which tenants will show an interest. Also as a capitalist, Uppal claims to believe that government should stay out of commercial affairs, yet here we have him arguing that the state should subsidise commercial property owners: let's not forget that despite a building being empty, it's still serviced by transport links, policing and all the other things local authorities provide. Why should the rest of us pay more to help out a landlord determined to take his ball home until someone meets his imaginary price? Shamefully, not one of the MPs in the debate took the view that landlords should adapt to the market - though at least Mark Pawsey MP declared an interest.

When Uppal talks about 'property owners' considering trying to 'mitigate the empty property rate tax', he's openly suggesting that landlords are forced to avoid paying their taxes, a view with which the minister agrees. It's an interesting concept: we should change the law because some people are trying to break it - not a view taken in other legislative areas, but apparently perfectly acceptable when the interest of the rentier class is involved.

Unfortunately, the minister's reply to Uppal is entirely sympathetic.

The personal matter is perhaps of more immediate importance. MPs are under a moral duty to acknowledge any personal involvement when they talk about a subject in Parliament. When Paul Uppal MP talks about 'commercial property owners' in his constituency, it's a dishonest way of cloaking his personal interests: Uppal is the owner of Pinehurst Securities Ltd… a commercial property speculation company from which he has made millions of pounds. Pinehurst owns '£10m of property in the southeast', according to Property Week (link now hidden behind a members-only site, but you can read the quote here). He also holds constituency surgeries in the company offices of Uppal and Singh Properties - presumably there's a family connection there too, though only Pinehurst makes an appearance in the Register of Interests.

(To be a nerd for a second, Pinehurst also seems to be the registered owner of PaulUppal.com, his MPs website:

Uppal, Paul  cpsu305@fsmail.net
    Pinehurst
    Winwood Heath Road
    Ronsley, West Midlands B62 0LU
    GB
    +44.1562710919

yet there's no declaration that the company is providing the MP with a commercial service).

But leaving that aside: here we have an MP telling a minister that people in his constituency are being forced to avoid paying their taxes by an unjust law, when in fact he's simply referring to his own private commercial interests, and those of his family, from whom he receives a benefit in kind (again, there's no declaration that he gets free or renumerated (clarification: I mean that he pays them, not vice versa) use of the Uppal and Singh offices on the Register). He doesn't want to pay for services he's receiving from the council because he wants to make more money. For an MP to abuse the privileged position and access he has is disgraceful… and simply part of a pattern of behaviour Uppal regularly indulges in. And yet nobody other than myself appears to care.

Update:
In case you haven't read the comments section, Mr Uppal contacted a third party to clarify that he rents a room from Uppal and Singh, and that there's no family connection. It's a bit weird that he'd communicate with them rather than me, but I'm happy to accept that. So we're left with the question of who pays for Uppal's website, and why he didn't mention, while lobbying for commercial property tax breaks, that he's a commercial property developer and he rents a room from a commercial property developer.

I'm with the band

2012-01-11T15:34:00.000Z

The few remaining band t-shirts in my possession. I was convinced I owned a 1993 Charlatans shirt and a PWEI one too, but can't find them.

Curve: Doppelgänger

Alfie. Lovely first album. Never heard from again.

Very Britpop Charlatans shirt

The Wedding Present, c. 2004. I always liked the 'My girlfriend's from further North than yours' shirt.

Attila the Stockbroker. Punk poet who when I saw him was waxing nostalgic about East Germany - a step too far even for me.

Here's his fantastic poem 'A Bang and a Wimpy' from the late 1970s.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

Melt Banana!

The Nightingales. Or 'my colleague Alan and his disreputable mates' as I think of them.

The secret life of books

2012-01-11T12:12:00.000Z

Another beautiful, hypnotic stop-motion video:

I'm a huge fan of good bookshops. Waterstone's is showing signs of improvement, but there are some wonderful independents out there: Burway Books in Church Stretton, Webberley's in Stoke and The Book Barge on the canal (if only it was in the same place as the Cheese Boat for a day). Support them while they're still there: they carry more interesting stock, they're friendlier and they tend not to take bribes from publishers to put books on the Bestseller shelf or in the window.

Is Ed Dead?

2012-01-11T10:46:00.001Z

The newspapers, Newsnight and Today programmes have spent the usually newsless first weeks of January telling us all that Ed Miliband is a dead Labour leader walking, supported by dubious comparisons with Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Foot. He's suddenly gone from being a public fratricide to a spineless jelly.

But is it true? It's certainly the case that if all the media outlets spend their time telling readers that you're useless, the public will think so, and Labour sure isn't getting equal access to the airwaves: I saw a Newsnight discussion the other night featuring a Tory MP, and Lib Dem MP and a businessman - hardly impartial programming.

I'm not a natural Labour supporter, because I'm a socialist, but I joined the party for two reasons: firstly because I believe that socialism requires a mass membership party rather than secretive 'vanguard' organisations which don't actually make any kind of impact or even stand for elections (the argument that elections are a democratic sham is fascinating but I'll save that for another day), and secondly to vote for John McDonnell when he tried to stand against Gordon Brown but failed to get enough nominations from fellow MPs.

I voted for Ed Miliband in the leadership election, as the least worst option. He was a genuinely good minister for the environment, and he wasn't a war criminal, unlike his brother David, who personally authorised the kidnapping of various individuals and their transport to friendly countries which could be relied upon to torture them. Ed Balls and Andy Burnham are right-wingers whose Blunkett-like position is that anything done by a Labour politician must automatically be according to Labour principles: this is how New Labour prosecuted illegal wars, arranged torture, deregulated the financial markets, tripled tuition fees (you don't think the Tories thought that up by themselves, did you?) and the whole host of reactionary policies they introduced. Diane Abbott's funny but not serious and a hypocrite. Which left Ed. I thought he spoke human quite well, had a clear view of where New Labour had gone wrong, he should have inherited some good ideas from his illustrious father, and he wasn't entirely tainted with New Labour arrogance. My friend Ben voted for David on the basis that he was more natural and personable, and therefore more electable. I can see his point, but to me, David apart from his war crimes (which I mean seriously, not like someone waving a 'Bliar' placard), he represented the managerialist machine politics of a post-ideological age even more than Ed, who at least showed signs of challenging the Blairite paradigm.

Fozzy Bear, anyone?

I still largely think that: I had a chance to attend a meeting (that's where I took these photos) he hosted and he was reasonable and thoughtful, which is partly why the media have turned against him: these qualities do not a thundering headline make.

However, I'm rapidly becoming disillusioned. Yesterday's Today programme interview was pitiful: Ed floundered partly because John Humphrys is a monotoned hectoring git, but mostly because he hasn't developed any substance beyond 'let's try to be calm and nice'.

He is, I think, entirely trapped by the British media, something all Labour politicians have to contend with, and it's not his fault. Surrounded by hostile rightwing newspapers who act solely as the mouthpieces of the Tories and their business allies, he's desperate to appeal to them. However, rather than accepting the right's discourse, he should be challenging it. For instance, he wheeled out the usual rightwing crap about armies of idle benefit scroungers without referring to the 2.5m who are unemployed: they can't all be lazy bastards, and called for 'fundamental change', yet totally failed to enunciate what he meant. It's just an empty phrase which means entirely the opposite. He wants to vaguely tinker with fiscal regulation to win some easy headlines about 'fat cats', but has nothing to say about the bond markets, derivatives trading, banking structures or any of the big issues about capitalism. He can't talk bold without being bold. I have literally no idea what his definition of 'fundamental' means, though the term to me implies structural change.

Personally, I think that there's a critical mass of voters who are fed up with being held to ransom by the City, and would welcome some German-style industrial dirigisme to make the City work for the real economy. They'd like to see some banks nationalised and others closed, and they'd like to see a tax system which rewards citizens, not massive mobile corporations which benefit from tax-funded systems (roads, schools, policing, healthcare) but doesn't want to contribute. They'd like a state transport system which actually works, and a government which is more interested in citizens' lives than posturing on the world stage as though the UK is in any way important. They want all schools to be good and controlled by elected local representatives, not by unaccountable sects and corporations. They want an NHS that works, not one that's sold off on the premise that 'choice' is a benefit. Ordinary people - i.e. not lefty ideologues like me - are angry and ripe for a leftwing, populist campaign.

I don't think these are particularly radical: they're easy wins for Ed Miliband. The problem is that he's being held captive by fear of his natural enemies. Can he break out of this spiral of mediocrity? I think he has the personal and political skills to do so - but I'm not sure that he wants to, and recognising you have a problem is the first step towards solving it. It's time he took charge of the debate - as he did over News International - and made the running himself, rather than triangulating with the discourse of the right.

The art of books

2012-01-10T17:14:00.000Z

I've a sneaking suspicion I've posted this video before, but what the hell:

Of course, it's easy to do when you've only got two bookcases. I've got 322 feet of books, with loads piled up because I've run out of room for more. Talking of books, today's haul comprises Alan Garner's Collected Folk Tales and his novel for adults, Thursbitch, and Anthony Cartwright's début The Afterglow which like his Heartland is set in the Black Country. I've also bought Maureen McHugh's Chinese-Marxists-take-over science fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, which features the magnificent cover below, some Robert Browning poetry (the poor man used as graphic rhyming slang in Sarah Waters' Victorian pastiche Tipping the Velvet) and Cavazzoni's fascinating postmodernist novel The Nocturnal Library. The cover features a quote which perfectly describes my friend and colleague Mark's house:

These were corridors where you didn't see a living soul… piles of books on the ground, as though it had been ploughed or was undergoing some upheaval. Table legs, glass, cupboard doors and splinters of wood were mixed up with the paper… like a Pre-Cambrian volcanic eruption… The air was so oppressive and sweaty that you almost felt ill. There was a smell of decomposing wood. Here the books were black; they crumbled like peat if you touched them…

An indie-kid's madeleine

2012-01-10T12:28:00.000Z

Not a promising starting image is it, but my Curve shirt got me thinking. 'Ou sont les t-shirts d'antan?', as Proust would have said if he'd had a decent record shop and a student loan in the heady days of the early-to-mid-1990s rather than some mouldy old biscuits and some unresolved 'issues'.

Band t-shirts were the staple of my wardrobe then: apart from some regrettable stripy hippy shirts, I expressed what passed for my identity through the medium of cheap XL tops stamped with the usually not very imaginative names of a string of mostly second-rate bands, in accordance with the rituals of my tribe. In some cases, the shirts have outlived the bands by over a decade: I have and still wear a particularly good Gorky's Zygotic Mynci shirt depicting various beard styles (I shall take a picture for you tonight).

The collection is a reminder of youthful enthusiasms, of a social context, of various design cultures, but also - sadly - of the inexorable growth of my guts. At first I was thin (my diet was largely carrots), and wore tiny skinny-fit shirts. Then I got fat, and voluminous drapery was the order of the day… And yet I have so few of these shirts left, and so little enthusiasm for buying more. At the time, buying the t-shirt (official from within the gig venue if I had money, cheap rip-off from the pavement outside if I didn't) was compulsory, along with the 2 picture discs with postcards which was obviously superior to buying one 7" single or - spit - a CD. Ugh. For some reason, all my anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist instincts were suspended whenever some cheap cotton promotional material hove into view.

They've virtually all gone now… my Ash shirt (try this blast of pop fun), the Gene ('Haunted By You') one, the skinny blue Bluetones one with silver foil lettering (listen to this), the font-tastic Elastica top ('2:1', oh yes), the pale-blue Belle and Sebastian 'Study at Stow' and Tigermilk tops (try 'Electronic Renaissance'), the glaring Stereolab T (check out 'K-Stars'), the Super Furry Animals 'Fuzzy Logic' top and a very poor white one with the SFA logo on each nipple (you'll like this one), the Catatonia one ('Sweet Catatonia'), and all the others I can't even remember now (help me out, eye-witnesses). I have a horrible suspicion about a Levellers ('Battle of the Beanfield') shirt and a Manics fleece (long story involving Mogwai - who 'Fear Satan' - and rain: listen to 'La Tristessa Durera' instead). All I'm left with is a Melt Banana (here 'celebrating' 'White Christmas') one which I've never worn because alcohol misleadingly persuaded me at the stall that I wasn't a porky git, the Gorky's top and my gifted Curve one. And a big pile of nerd shirts: science puns, one with Shakespeare reading 'prose before hos', a few book-related ones including a beautiful raven made up of Poe's poem, and some fencing-related stuff. And one with the Back to the Future DeLorean crashing into the Tardis, of which I'm particularly proud.

Are these things culturally significant? The internet says mostly no: I wish I'd taken pictures of these lost artefacts, because nobody else has. They were part of a culture, in which belonging was important, and it's a forgotten phase. It was fascinating to see high street clothing stores selling shirts for bands which buyers didn't listen to - Iron Maiden shirts suddenly became mainstream, for instance, as the band t-shirt became a signifier divorced from what it previously signified: belonging to an exclusive tribe, maintaining and developing individuality by being the same, and a host of other subtle meanings. Buying the shirt was a way to announce your sophistication, or your rejection of mainstream values. It was also a kind of education: the aesthetics of the shirt were often a way in to the art-school tastes many of the bands I liked had picked up.

Further reading: Wendy Fonarow's Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music and the fine My Band T-Shirt Tumblr.

PS. Why was this mainly a male thing?

It's marking day…

2012-01-10T11:14:00.000Z

OK. I'm wearing my new (old) Curve t-shirt to remind me of when I was young and hopeful. Music is playing (Sugar, Copper Blue) and the beta-blockers are at hand. All that's needed now is some inspiration.

And here it is:

Dear Vole, would you like to become a whore?

2012-01-09T20:36:00.000Z

I got this today, from jasper@blogcritics.org:

Blogger Request for Information: Technorati Media is looking to partner and work with POLITICAL Bloggers for Paid Outreach Campaigns

Ooh, partner used as a verb! They must be cutting edge. And yes, I whinge about politics rather a lot. But what's this? 'Paid Outreach Campaigns'?

We are hiring political bloggers, freelance writers and journalists to create "complimentary and synergistic" content for our clients focused on Jobs and the Economy, Education, Energy and the Environment, Equal Rights, Health Care, National Security, Immigration, Reproductive Rights and Volunteerism. We are looking to partner with liberal, conservative and non-partisan bloggers.

Do they really mean that they assume that some of my fellow bloggers, and even myself, are happy to whore ourselves out to make some chiselling politician look good? Or promote some evil corporate lobby scheme by making it look like they've got grass-roots support? I think they do.

Additional requirements: strong writing skills, passionate about politics, engaged readership, site/blog is updated on a bi-weekly basis (or more), blogger is engaged on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Hmm… it's up to you to determine whether I fit the first requirement. I'm certainly passionate about politics, my readership is definitely 'engaged', I update very frequently. I Tweet, though I don't touch Facebook, and like the entire rest of the planet, have left Google+ to its own devices.

But they've missed things off this list: the cheerful willingness to sacrifice all integrity, and the determination to lie to and mislead my readers by not letting on that I'm taking money to spout somebody else's opinions. There's no way to do this stuff honestly: if I tell you that I'm taking money to test people's policies or push their interests, I lose all credibility and readers. If I don't, I'm turning myself into a sewer pipe, showering you all with second-hand shit.

There are two ways to deal with this: ridicule, or going along with it to see what kind of thing they want me to mislead you with. If I had more time, I'd do the latter, but I'm lacking the energy to do a proper demolition job on these bastards. But be aware, people: PR companies have entire divisions dedicated to running blogs, leaving comments and tweeting about issues as though they're simply concerned citizens. If you find out that a company, politician, lobby group or similar is engaging in this kind of activity, you should immediately do the opposite of what they propose. If it was a good idea, they wouldn't need to pay people to pretend to believe in it.

Don't automatically trust the integrity of what you read on the web.

Except here, obviously. Tempting though it is do join this e-sweatshop, I'd be as bad an employee for Rick Santorum or whoever as I am for The Hegemon. Jasper can have this post for free.

And finally

2012-01-09T20:16:00.003Z

The last lot of shots from my holiday in Shropshire. I'll be back to moaning about things tomorrow, so make sure you come back, y'all. Click these to enlarge.

Landscape through a gap in the stonework at Stokesay Castle

Actual live mistletoe!

The 12th-century equivalent of a Bond villain's lair: Stokesay Castle

'…be more redy to hear then to give ye sacrifice of fools': good Biblical advice for students coming to lectures

More good academic advice from the uncovered murals at Stokesay Parish Church

Fluorescent ladybird about to be gobbled up by a carved fish

The Lawley and Caer Caradoc. I climbed both of those.

The Wrekin, The Lawley and Caer Caradoc

Ferns bending in the wind on the Long Mynd

Top tips for Church Stretton: Burway Books is completely magnificent - a brilliant range of stock and nice people running an independent shop: I bought some Browning poems and Cavazzoni's The Nocturnal Library, not something you'd find in Waterstone's. The Long Mynd Hotel is green, friendly and relaxed. The Studio is a tiny restaurant serving beautifully-cooked food by the friendliest people (and several cafés were rather sumptuous too). The village is pretty, relaxed and nestled between good hills. I bought a brilliant new waterproof (rock and roll) in an independent outdoor shop, gourmet packed lunches in Van Doesburg's deli, and fine local beer everywhere. Paradise!

While I'm feeling cheery, I'd like to publicly thank Mr Berghaus for his wonderful boots. I've had mine for ten years, and haven't ever bothered even cleaning them, yet they're still waterproof and I've never had so much as a blister from them. Usually when I buy things without friends to advise me, I end up with something totally unsuitable. Not this time. Best things I ever bought.

Toodle pip. It's all misery from tomorrow: marking season is upon us. I've just failed one essay for suggesting that women 'should' only want to find a man with whom to have babies, and asserting that any woman who's previously been involved with pornography deserves 'no sympathy' if she's raped. Thankfully, this chap isn't representative of the class. I hope.

King of the castle

2012-01-09T19:57:00.001Z

More samples from my walking holiday: rest here. Click to embiggen. All of these are from Stokesay Castle: very chocolate-box pretty, but I like the place.

Bucolia

2012-01-09T19:55:00.000Z

More shots from my retreat to rural Shropshire: click to enlarge or see the whole lot here.

Sunrise over Church Stretton

Sunrise again

Sunrise at 1/5000th of a second

Stokesay Castle, Craven Arms

Gatehouse and Tower, Stokesay

Stokesay parish church from the castle windows

What I did on my holidays!

2012-01-09T19:52:00.000Z

My chance to bore you with more photos - from a short break walking in beautiful Shropshire: Church Stretton, Caer Caradoc, the Lawley, the Long Mynd and Craven Arms. Full set here, or click on these samples for larger versions.

The Lawley from the top of Caer Caradoc. They're both pretty steep and stick out of the Shropshire plain like humpback whales.

Some mushrooms. Or toadstools. I don't know.

Abandoned Ford Capri.

The spine of The Lawley with The Wrekin in the distance

I took a lot of pictures of the multitude of buzzards. This poor effort is the best of the lot. I really need a faster lens of 300mm or more. My 55-200mm just doesn't cut it for this sort of photography.

Sunset over Caer Caradoc

Gagged!

2012-01-09T12:17:00.001Z

Hello all. Hope you haven't missed me (you'd be deeply sad if you did). I've been taking a refreshing break. I'm rested, but I'm certainly not a better or reformed person for it, so don't worry: 2011's diet of misanthropy and bitterness will carry over for the foreseeable future.

First up is this rather Orwellian report from Gizmodo, which discusses the Olympic Games organisers' plans to muzzle its volunteers:

workers are to:
not to disclose their location
not to post a picture or video of Locog backstage areas closed to the public
not to disclose breaking news about an athlete
not to tell their social network about a visiting VIP, eg an athlete, celebrity or dignitary
not to get involved in detailed discussion about the Games online

I should say that due to LOCOG's tortoise-like efficiency, I haven't had this briefing yet, though no doubt they'll be applying the rubber truncheons and nipple clamps to your own dear Vole sometime in the spring.

Some of this is common sense: letting the world know that an athlete has an injury might affect another team's planning and give an unfair advantage. There are also some proper security concerns, but the rest is nonsense which I fully intend to ignore (I'll be less Vole, more Mole). For instance: I'm part of the fencing organisation. 2 seconds on the interweb reveals that Fencing will be at the ExCel centre. If that was a secret, there wouldn't be any spectators! That's just silly.

It's the last bit that bothers me. I won't suffer from being banned from tweeting that Richard Kruse brushed past me in a corridor. Nor will you. But 'detailed discussion about the Games' (and some pictures) were going to be this blog's daily diet for August. What is 'detailed'? Why shouldn't I offer a volunteer's perspective on the Games? I'm already pretty conflicted about working on this corporate festival (McDonald's!) - I'm not signing away my right to freedom of speech as well, nor am I going to become a PR mouthpiece, as they envisage:

volunteers will be allowed to retweet “official London 2012 postings” as much as they like

This is standard fare for major events and organisations: both in their inability to understand that they cannot, silence everybody, and in their belief that the event requires an army of tweetbots automatically broadcasting bland, monotonal boostery.* In the new world, the hubbub of individual commentary will provide the first draft of history. Some of us will be enthusiastic, others snark, others factual, others critical, some reasonable, some unreasonable. That's what helps makes the Games a real event, rather than a Baudrillardian or Ballardian simulation of one.

*I'm avoiding the obvious Canute/Knut reference because a) the legend claims he was trying to demonstrate to his courtiers the limits of regal authority and b) the story turns up 200 years after he died, and none of the medieval histories are reliable. It was probably made up.

Treat your ears

2012-01-03T18:31:00.001Z

You may have gathered from previous posts that I'm a bit of a completist, especially when it comes to music. I don't accept that just because fashion's moved on, a musician or group is no longer any good. Conversely though, I do know that inspiration is a mysterious beast - a band which produces an era-defining album might well do nothing that's any good ever again (I'm looking at you, The Stone Roses). Being the right age, meeting the right people, having a perfect range of inspirations and getting enough encouragement all at the same time seems nigh on impossible.

In my teens and twenties, I read the music press avidly. Journalists and bands would talk about 'lost' music all the time: the people who produced an album - or sometimes even a whole lifetime of music - without recognition in their own time, before being idolised by subsequent generations. The bands I read about then were the Incredible String Band, the 13th Floor Elevators, Wire, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Slint (much more recently), Big Star, Gram Parsons, Lee Hazelwood, Orange Juice, the Velvet Underground, Palace (and all his other names), Galaxie 500… and so many more.

The question is, which are the artists who are unknown or forgotten in our period, but will be cited in hushed tones in twenty or thirty years' time?

I'm going to suggest one: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. I mention them because I've just received singer Euros Childs' new album, Ends, in the post. Gorky's were a bilingual (Welsh and English) exuberant mix of rock, punk, indie, folk, Bee-Gees and fun. Since they split, most of the band have carried on making music: John Lawrence went off in an electronic direction as Infinity Chimps, Richard James has produced beautiful elegiac work, while Childs has explored pretty much every genre going. As Gorky's, they made lovely, varied music, but the pressure to be 'successful' and justify record label investment clearly weighed heavily on them. I'd love the world to have whistled GZM tracks all day, but they were always a niche interest.

I always wonder what happens to musicians after their moment passes. Do they blame the world, or themselves? Do they sense their powers waning, or curse the fickleness of a system which consumes art and moves on? In the case of Euros and his erstwhile colleagues, I hope it's the latter. Their art hasn't declined, but attention has: Euros even sends out his albums with handwritten personal notes: a lovely touch, but I'd rather he sold too many records to make this possible. Does this happen in other genres? What do unwanted scriptwriters do next? Painters? Composers? I guess they teach…

OK< your nominations? Who will be resurrected in generations to come but remain unappreciated now? I'm going to add Joan As Policewoman, Tindersticks, Felt, The Bitter Springs, I Am Kloot, Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Laura Cantrell, the Delgados, the Go-Betweens, Mazzy Star, maybe Vic Chesnutt, Julian Cope, Throwing Muses, Stereolab, Low, Mercury Rev, The Phantom Band, Shack, Slowdive (and lots more…)

And who's going to be forgotten? It's tempting to point at Oasis, Belle and Sebastian (I'm talking 'indie' here, obviously), the Charlatans other than as a singles band, the Manics, Spiritualized, Suede…

08 Riverbank by National Elf

Ronald Searle, RIP

2012-01-03T17:45:00.000Z

Ronald Searle's dead. He's most famous for his Molesworth and St. Trinian's cartoons, though he did a lot more in his 91 years. You might think that the two school strips are yet more English nostalgia for the lives of the aristocracy (like Billy Bunter), but they aren't. Both worlds are thinly disguised versions of his experiences as a prisoner of war under the Japanese on the Burma railway. 'You wake up each morning to find that one of the friends sleeping on either side of you has died', is one quote which springs to mind.

So his schoolchildren aren't all jolly hockey sticks: they're spiteful, sly, violent, cunning prisoners, admirable when they turn their wits to beating the authorities, yet there's an undercurrent of inhumanity ready to emerge under pressure. The civilising influences of education, art and sport are minimal: the kids see through it to the mailed fist underneath (rather Gramscian, that).

I loved his work not just for their jaundiced view of humanity (definitely shades of his contemporary, Mervyn Peake) but for his style. The scratchy pen lines, the gloriously piggy eyes of Nigel Molesworth, the 'tough gurls' for whom violence is a way of life…

Waiting for Father Christmas

Out and about with Vole

2012-01-03T16:46:00.000Z

Purely for family - nobody else cares about people's pets.

The contours of this lane were very pleasing.

This cat is particularly dim.

This one's named 'Myrtle', after the farmer who gave it to us.

Christmas Chez Vole

2012-01-03T16:42:00.001Z

I didn't do much over Christmas. Lounged. Read books. Ate a cow's weight in cheese. Occasionally dragged myself out of the house for a walk. In case any of my dear family (yet another sister got engaged this Christmas) are reading, here are a few pictures of the old homestead and environs.

I like the demonic eyes on the second Santa

'…so sweet and so delicious'.

I spent a long time trying to photograph ducks. What a waste of time: my 50-200 f/3.5 is useless in twilight. If you loved me, you'd buy me a Nikon f/2.8 400mm. A snap at around £6000-9000

Comrades, come rally…

2012-01-03T15:58:00.000Z

Some more highlights from my photos taken at the People's History Museum. Click on these for larger versions.

Something the government would do well to remember

From the days in which socialists were proud and loud. Ed Milliband and friends don't really cut it in comparison to this.

Suffrage Atelier banner detail

I sense a new edition coming

This is the Spanish Civil War appeal poster the Manics appropriated.

A typically sensible suggestion for Thatcher's funeral arrangements from the Morning Star

We lefties hated the Murdoch press from the very beginning.

Return to the source

2012-01-03T15:52:00.000Z

I took myself off to the People's History Museum last week, to see their exhibition of election posters. Not just because I'm a massive nerd, but because it's a wonderful, unapologetically leftwing place. Going back occasionally is a way to recharge my batteries and cheer myself up.

The exhibition was fascinating: a lesson in how we've returned to the same arguments, over and over again. The Tories are still the party of the selfish rich. The workers are permanently exploited. The Liberals are still untrustworthy turncoats. Only the Labour Party has changed. It used to believe in things. Now its job is to soften the edges of Conservative Capitalism.

I took some photos: they're not very good because the museum lighting is low to protect the textiles and there's so much material that a good angle isn't always possible. Still, see them here, or click on these highlights for larger versions:

They're STILL using this. They keep saying 'the Labour recession' and 'the recession we inherited' despite the facts: the country wasn't in recession in the quarter before the election.

Labour instituted tuition fees, the scum. The Tories and Lib Dems have tripled them, despite campaigning to abolish them!

Deeply ironic.

One of my ancestors fought in the Irish Brigade during the Boer War. The anti-British Irish Brigade, that is. Later on he was the Dublin Commandant of the IRA and one of Michael Collins' closest allies.

This is a much more honest Tory poster about Ireland. The Union-Jack chaps are famous conservatives. The lad in the shamrock is an Irish nationalist getting a buffing.

What can I say? Has the Daily Mail changed at all? Although given that its owner, Lord Rothermere, claims to be French to avoid tax, perhaps it wouldn't support 'tax the foreigner' these days.

Poor old Manchester

2011-12-30T22:09:00.000Z

I took a solitary trip to Manchester today, primarily to visit the People's History Museum's political posters exhibition. I'll post some of the pictures I took on my proper camera when I get back to the Hegemon, but for now, here's a sign I snapped on the way to Salford: I don't think much commentary is needed:

The murder in the library

2011-12-30T22:02:00.001Z

I'm guessing that most of you don't watch New Tricks, the BBC's apparently lame comedy-drama set in a police office staffed by weird old retirees chasing cold cases. It's got Dennis Waterman in it, for a start.

But one of the fun things about popular culture is the way it can very quickly deal with pressing social issues without lecturing people. The most popular example was Melrose Place: unknown to the directors, the art producer was sneaking naughty references into the scenes via the scenery: a watercolour of the Manson murder house, a postal worker's satchel with a fabric ammunition clip sewn underneath ('going postal', get it?), and a duvet cover printed with the chemical formula for the morning-after pill.

This episode of New Tricks is called 'It Smells of Books', which is why I started watching it. The opening scene was of a slightly autistic ex-cop becoming rather upset by the students using their mobile phones, children singing, teens using iPods… all in the library. The show then moves on to investigate the murder of an academic frozen out of an ex-polytechnic university as his department is closed down by a business-school, money-obsessed, jargon-spouting Vice-Chancellor named Jeremy Ventham, suspiciously similar to Jeremy Bentham, inspiration for University College London, famous philosopher and who is still mummified in a public display case. There's lots of plagiarism, suspicion, autistic-academic jealousy, bad essays and all the other aspects of my life. It's very obvious why so many academics write campus novels: all human life is there.

OK, the dead man who spoke up for humanist values turns out to be a book thief (the plot revolves around a stolen book by Henri Duhamel), but the satire is broad and all the better for it: humanism killed by business-oriented ideology. This show's worth 20 demonstrations, and it's a welcome return to the 1970s, when committed lefty television makers inserted political points at every opportunity: even Dr Who!

Very satisfyingly, the humanist academic's murderer turns out to be the evil Vice-Chancellor. Let's hope my new VC (whom I'm told is an avid reader of Plashing Vole) isn't taking notes

Well worth looking up on iPlayer.

Catholicism Rocks!

2011-12-28T23:37:00.000Z

One of the joys of belonging to an ultramontane Catholic family is the multiple opportunities to attend religious services at times when sensible citizens are wondering whether there's 'time for one more' or gazing lovingly at a kebab. My mother managed to attend 3 Masses this time: a 9 p.m. ersatz midnight Mass, an actual midnight Mass, and a morning one, presumably in case she'd sleepwalked her way into mortal sin overnight.

For the sake of family harmony, I accompanied her to the proper Midnight Mass, secure in the knowledge that a web-equipped mobile device named after a fruit would enhance the experience considerably. Twitter and a variety of news sources provided an enhanced reality which far outweighed the entertainment on offer in meatspace.

Or so I thought… Having previously only attended Mass in remote rural locations, I wasn't prepared for the festive spirit of urban Catholics. I knew something was afoot when a gentleman who'd started his celebrations early shouted 'I want a word with you, Father', during the sermon. To be fair, I've often wanted to say the same thing, particularly when the subjects have been contraception, Israel/Palestine and a variety of other hot-button issues. The heckler was escorted out by a pillar of the community: but that wasn't the only excitement of the evening. The next addition to the liturgy was a pair of young ladies resplendent in 'Sexy Santa' dresses and hairpieces bearing Christmas illuminations. They giggled their way through most of the sermon (clearly drink had been taken, because the jokes were sorely undercooked) before they too were gently encouraged to sling their irreverent hooks. Rather a shame…

Finally, I spotted a chap whose condition was swinging rapidly between stupefied and somnolent. Sure enough, within a few minutes he'd dozed off, snored loudly, before doing a classic sideways pratfall from the pew to the bench. Up got the gentleman ushers once more, visibly weary with their new careers in ecclesiastical security.

Still, it's not always the congregation. Peace, love and harmony were noticeably absent from the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem:

Goodwill to all men!

Girls Allowed?

2011-12-28T00:58:00.001Z

One of my best students of recent years wrote her dissertation on female gamers. Before that, I'd assumed that most gamers were relaxed, liberal and male. Turns out that the male bit was largely right, and the rest entirely wrong. Reading her data, I realised that to use a female (or black, or homosexual) avatar was to invite a constant stream of misogynist, racist or homophobic abuse. Interestingly, it didn't seem to matter what kind of game it was. I thought the more reactionary the game, the worse the gamer, but no: every kind of game harboured thousands of people who believed that two XX chromosomes meant that you were desperate to hear their uninformed opinions on a) your gameplay b) your intelligence c) your assumed appearance and d) your sexual habits. Apart from my readers, it appears that everyone on the internet is vile.

Coincidentally enough, I've just finished reading Cline's Ready Player One, a very good read in which online and offline sexual identities are at variance, partly for the same reasons as people take on new identities now.

Here's a rather good video from some displeased gamers:

What you won't see on ITV

2011-12-23T13:21:00.000Z

Tim Minchin was asked to write a song about Jesus for the Jonathan Ross show on ITV. It's mildly amusing, and therefore the best thing on any Jonathan Ross show.

Or it would have been if the ITV Director Peter Fincham hadn't had thrown all his toys out of the pram and cut the song from the show. Which means a) he's a coward and b) viewers will be faced with Jonathan Ross grovelling to Tom Cruise, and nobody wants that, surely?

I couldn't deprive you of such a treat.

Let there be light…

2011-12-23T12:19:00.000Z

This is where I'm sending cash this Christmas. It's simple, cheap, environmentally friendly and transformative. It helps people read more, and that's important. Donate here. Each one costs $2, less than a decent Christmas card.

Warming the cockles

2011-12-23T11:55:00.001Z

Proving that genocide is the key to a good Christmas, here's something I spotted in Waterstone's a few days ago:

Waterstone's appears to have a thing about the Nazis: according to the Guardian, some branches have been recommending Mein Kampf as a 'festive' read.