To be honest, I'm not sure there's a lot to blog about. Political events have deepened my general sense of gloom without providing anything fresh (you've heard Donald's a racist? Just recently? Really?). The Toby Young scandal provided some diversion but it mostly depressed me: his appointment simple confirmed my impression that there's nothing worse than a ruling class simultaneously intellectually and morally bankrupt that has no effective check on its behaviour. Despite a wafer-thin majority, they're quietly stacking advisory boards and powerful committees with a gruesome crew of privatisers, bigots, eugenicists and party donors because they can. I know it's fashionable to say that all sides do it, but they don't. Old Labour retains a public service ethos that includes a sense of fair play: New Labour, bereft of all ideas, simply sought credibility by appointing the same cronies who would have been given sinecures by the Tories anyway.
Culturally I've just carried on reading the same stuff I had on the go at Christmas. I've only got one Nigel Strangeways novel left, but they've really run out of steam, although The Morning After Death is quite fun: lots of humour at the expense of Americans, American academics, literature scholars, Business Studies, Yeats and thirsty ex-IRA poets trying to cope with the beginning of the 60s. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same appalling blind spot as 1938's The Beast Must Die: Nigel always thinks that women who've been sexually assaulted are psychologically damaged or blocked not by the assault, but by their failure to admit that they enjoyed it. Once he's pointed this out, they immediately recover to become good compliant heterosexuals. Once I hit this and similar points in his novels, it's hard to credit them for the things that they do get right, such as their decent leftish-politics. I think I'm going to propose an MA module in Golden Age detective novels: Strangeways will feature as an example of what you can – and can't – do when you try to adapt an essentially conservative form to a slightly progressive worldview.
What else have I bought recently? Simon Morden's The White City was OK, though it felt a bit like a decent Doctor Who episode rather than a full novel. I liked his Petrovitch series a lot, though I found it hard to forgive his publishers for changing the previously-uniform cover design for the fourth in the series. Why would you do that? Fire and Fury is sitting on my shelf waiting for me to summon up the energy to spend 300 pages in Trump's company. I've acquired, for the sake of completism, a beautiful East German translation of Lewis Jones's Cwmardy from 1969 (cheap paper, beautiful binding and dust jacket), Christopher Hill's primer The Century of Revolution 1603-1714, Jesuit Matthias Bodkin's 1940 Church-and-Dev Irish invasion novel Halt, Invader (rallying the people to fight off anyone who turns up, English or German), and Armistead Maupin's memoir, Logical Family. That, at least, will be a treat. I've also picked up Janet Montefiore's Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, John Smart's slender Modernism and After: English Literature 1910-1930, Michael Young's satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy (I planned to taunt his eugenicist son Toby with it, and it's an addition to my politicians' novels pile), and crime novelist HRF Keating's curiosity A Long Walk to Wimbledon.
They'll all have to wait – teaching starts next week with Hedda Gabler (we're taking the students to the National Theatre's production) and at some point I'll have to get on with Angels in America: the stage production takes 6 hours so I'm sure the students will be delighted. It's worth it though - what a great play.
Musically it's a bit quiet at the moment - I've just been filling in gaps in my collection. Latest purchases are Pauline Oliveros's compelling The Roots of the Moment, two collections of Grace Williams's orchestral and choral works, John Adams's post-minimalist opera The Gospel According to the Other Mary and Scheherazade 2, and Simon Holt's A Table of Noises. I like NMC: it's always releasing interesting new music.
Despite its brilliant new conductor, I've gone off attending CBSO performances because austerity means they put on ever more familiar and conservative programmes, which means endless 19th-century stuff rather than new music. I intend to go to a lot more Birmingham Contemporary Music Group gigs this year.
Anyway, back to marking…
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