As usual this semester, I'm almost to exhausted to have opinions about anything. Not just physically exhausted, but mentally. The teaching schedule is punishing, I'm still recovering from ripping a calf muscle, and on non-teaching evenings I come home, stare at the ironing pile and retire to my bed. Currently my only retirement fantasy is to do precisely that: there's a long cultural tradition of people who 'take to the bed', surviving on a diet of red wine and chocolates. Admittedly on my pension taking to the bed will be more like Charlie Bucket's grandparents than the Queen Mother, but it's a seductive dream nonetheless.
But as I said, it's not just physical exhaustion. Writing a large number of lectures in short order week after week is tiring, while research just isn't happening: course administration is as relentless as it is often pointless. The highlight of my job is the opportunity to sit and talk to students about ideas and books, but I'm finding too often that the bureaucratic demands of the post are reducing the scope for teaching and learning well, and I find that profoundly depressing. It's also a period of high stress for students and colleagues – much of it avoidable if senior management cared to treat us as anything more than fungible assets or profit centres – and as a course leader and union representative I often see people at their most distressed. Being able to help is a wonderful thing but I also have to remind myself sometimes that happiness and collegiate working conditions are possible!
Beyond the immediate world of my working life, I'm also suffering from a severe case of Advanced Liberalism. The main symptoms are a kind of debilitating miasma, and the primary cause is paying attention to the news media. This week has seen the ongoing corruption of America's neo-monarchist regime; Trump's decision to increase nuclear weapons stocks; a tidal wave of sexual assaults by men in every sector from film to politics; the environmental degradation that's becoming little more than an ignorable background hum; constant economic bad news; Brexit and all the nastiness seeping out from under its leaders' rocks; the demonisation of the poor and the concurrent valorisation of corporations looting every country they touch, leading to the destruction of public services from libraries to mental health provision; the Catalunyan situation (particularly depressing to see Ireland, which unilaterally declared independence from the UK in the absence of any meaningful mechanism for legal secession, refusing to recognise the bind the new republic is in).
Of course there are diverting pleasures: I saw Wire play a small venue the other night, and teaching is sheer pleasure at the moment, between engaging texts (yesterday: Three Guineas and The SCUM Manifesto, and next week includes The Unlimited Dream Company, Hello America, The Handmaid's Tale, a selection of sonnets and Brick Lane) and really excellent students, but – and maybe this is because I'm teaching 15 weeks of JG Ballard – the cultural, political and physical landscape seems to be pretty apocalyptic. I bet Leicester tonk Stoke City tomorrow too.
Enjoy your weekend. Here's some Ballard to cheer you up.
1 comment:
Just come from a full-team Monday HR meeting which bore a couple of passing similarities to your first clip, though no Malcolm Tucker, much to my chagrin.
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