In haste…

Way too busy for a substantial blog post this week! Some good news though: not a single near-death experience on the roads: it's half-term!

It's not all been work though. After seeing my friends in an am-dram Poirot play, a bunch of us went to see The Comedy of Errors (hilarious misunderstandings involving two pairs of long-lost twins) at the RSC in Stratford at the ungodly hour of 10.15 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Even more barbaric, it was a children's version! I had visions of it being a modern-language attempt to be down with the kids, with all the filthy bits stripped out, but it turned out to be rather a triumph. All the saucy lines were kept in at high speed so the kids didn't get a chance to ponder what they'd just heard, the actors were hugely energetic and the audience interaction was beautifully done, especially the recruitment of a random little boy to play the arresting officer, complete with cape and a script. The cast also made sure he was called back for the final bow too. With no interval and a few judicious cuts, it worked beautifully - lots of high speed slapstick, some adult jokes for the parents and all wrapped up satisfyingly (except for Luciana, whom you'd normally expect to be married off to a spare twin) before lunchtime, which meant I got on the outside of an espresso martini or two several hours in advance of my normal drinking habits.

The other cultural highlight of the week was a visit by the editor of the New Statesman, Jason Cowley. I'm an NS subscriber quite often despite my better judgement: I like Laurie Penny, Helen Lewis, Tracey Thorn and the arts coverage in general, but I find the political coverage increasingly tedious. As Cowley said, he's covered what he called 'jihadism' in depth, leading him to some very dubious conclusions in my view, and the magazine also seems to be obsessed with Englishness, unionism (state, not trade) and the virtues of Christianity to an unhealthily muscular degree. Cowley had an interesting route to the editorship and he's fostered some excellent and forward-thinking writers, but his talk reflected his general approach: well-meaning liberalism almost incapable of considering the world from any view other than that of the decent cosmopolitan London chap: his political horizon is white and male and his Britain is actually middle-class southern England. The rest of us feature largely as puzzling ingrates.

Anyway, it was an interesting and thoughtful talk apart from the blokey football banter  Like the NS, there's a slight sense that Cowley's political perspective is like that of a man who can't understand why his wife has left him but knows it isn't his fault because he's a decent chap. Well-meaning, but shocked that the right isn't interested in common sense and decency any more, and faintly appalled by the brusqueness and energy of the left. To his enormous credit, Cowley acknowledged that NS took a long time to understand Corbyn's Labour Party, explaining that they never expected such energy, enthusiasm and fresh ideas from a group of people who'd been fixtures on the back-benches for decades, and that he made an effort to recruit writers and thinkers with whom he disagrees. I still haven't forgiven him for the magazine's disgraceful attempts to get Ed Miliband overthrown though - a clear case of stepping over the line between commentator and player.

As to the rest of the week, teaching has been fun (for me, anyway: the students may have a different view). Hamlet (apparently renaming Ophelia Opheliaarrggghhh in honour of Hallowe'en isn't funny), which somehow led me towards an ill-advised comparison with Team America: World Police (NSFW), and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The student leading the discussion was both honest and hilarious when she confessed to having bought and read The Invisible Man before realising her mistake – the HG Wells novel is kind of fun but very far removed from Ellison's civil rights classic!



It's on a module I lead on literary responses to protest and resistance movements – socialism, feminism, civil rights and so on. One of the great things about it is that it's an all-women group with a minority of white people: introducing such a group to works of literature about them by people like them and hearing how they relate to them (highly unpredictably, I should say) is a privilege, and a frequent reminder of my own social and cultural privilege, but also really enjoyable. Some weeks the student-led discussion takes over the whole slot, which is when I know it's been a success. Next week should be very interesting: Gil Scott-Heron's The Nigger Factory and Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race. Obviously we're starting with a conversation about that word, who gets to say and define it, and how to deal with it in the context of a literary discussion, which should prove instructive. It's a great novel too - examining the cultural and political divide between the gradualist civil rights leaders who led historically-black universities and the angry 1960s students fed up with playing nice (a divide which also appears in Invisible Man twenty years earlier). Scott-Heron was on a leave of absence from university when he wrote it - long before he became a jazz/rap/poetry star.

Here's Gil Scott-Heron's famous song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: I love his work and that of his group, The Last Poets, but quite a lot of it reveals the gaping holes in their liberationist philosophy - women and homosexual men come off particularly badly in songs like 'Gashman', for instance.



Other than that, I haven't had much time for reading. I finished Jonathan Coe's Middle England and enjoyed it very much while wondering whether its Condition-of-England theme really suited the concurrent conclusion of the Trotters' family saga. As always with Coe, I couldn't point at a paragraph or two of really stylish narrative, but the dialogue is absolutely spot on, as is the comic timing. Even when you can spot the punchline coming a mile off, the jokes are beautifully wrought, as are some of the set-pieces, like the feuding clowns. A moment of appreciation for the dust jacket designer too, who came up with a 1930s-50s style bucolic scene in watercolour like something from a Shell Guide, crudely ripped away to reveal a blankness where Englishness (that word again) was once thought to reside.



I also forced myself to finish John Buchan's astonishingly racist and imperialist African adventure novel Prester John, which might find its way on to my upcoming module on migration and emigration, and I've started T. C. Boyle's 2001 environmental comedy-tragedy A Friend of the Earth starring Tyrone Tierwater, 'half-Irish, half-Jewish' and therefore comically grumpy. It's less funny in 2018 than Boyle may have expected, given the speed with which his predictions have come true. I'v seen Boyle's work around for years but never got round to reading any and so far I'm enjoying it.

See you next week.