I would like to take a moment to thank a small group of students for their almost suicidal honesty: the third year who didn't realise there would be an assessment for his modules, the one who apologised for not being able to attend due to being on holiday, and the one who needed advice about which essay title to choose because he 'hadn't read the books'. The vast majority of my students are mature and responsible people who get all the help we can give. A small majority aren't, but pretend to be, and they get help too. What do with those who can't even fake engagement is the topic of my next pedagogical research article* but in the meantime I think I've earned the right to be amused even while I administer the necessary advice and support.
It's actually been a good week in the academic sphere: I've had really good consultations with students and I'm actually looking forward to reading their dissertations. My colleagues are back from the holidays and none of them have been hit by a car for almost 3 weeks, and we had our union AGM, during which someone volunteered to share my secretarial duties at last. Next week isn't going to be so enjoyable: despite the prospect of marking, we've been told to expect 'an announcement'. I don't imagine it will involve massages, research grants, candy-floss or brown paper parcels tied up with string. However, despite my institution's many faults, it isn't as bad as the British Library (which has temporarily withdrawn the 'post-doctoral studentship' I mentioned last week, or Edinburgh University, which advertised an 11 month part-time job featuring a two-month unpaid bit in the middle. How they imagine anyone can live in one of the world's most expensive cities for two months with no salary is beyond me. Neither can they have ever encountered the British unemployment benefit system, nor a landlord. They will, I strongly suspect, have reacted badly if the poor chump in post declined to answer emails, attend meetings or prepare classes during the two-month layoff. After some social media pressure yesterday the post was altered so that the salary was spread over the 11 months, but I still consider £13,000 very poor reward for teaching students at a prestigious, rich and selective university (or for doing any other kind of job in any field).
I watched Newsnight the other day (too paralytic to change channel) and a Daniel Hannan MP expostulated (from about 28 minutes) that the world had changed. 'I don't think [our kids] are ever going to have "a job" as we understood that word in the twentieth century. I think they're going to be constantly retraining, constantly reskilling, constantly freelancing'. The question I desperately wanted to hear asked in response is a simple one: why is that a good idea, either for society or for individuals? I don't really want my nuclear power plant staffed by people who drove trains or milked cows last year. Come to think of it, I don't want my cows milked by last year's nuclear physicists. I don't want students taught by people who've never had the chance to develop their teaching or research abilities because every contract has been a six-month, minimum wage one. I can see who it benefits: shareholders in industries which have automated skills out of the door and have no intention of investing in their workforces. For everybody else, it just helps the quality of life get that little bit worse. The model depends on the assumption that no jobs (other than CEO and perhaps hedge fund trader) really require any deep, evolving skill or security - they're just gigs, performed by walking fungible assets, as a friend was described by his boss at a very big investment bank, hastening his departure to a better employer, who have to fake competence for a brief period before moving on (this is known as the Cabinet Minister model).
Anyway, enough of this - you've heard it all from me before. In book news, I read Milkman and found it every bit as good as everyone said, and not nearly as 'difficult' as the chair of the Booker panel claimed. Burns removes proper nouns to defamiliarise the Northern Irish political/cultural landscape and stress the communal experience, but other than that it's a fairly straightforward anti-Bildungsroman about the psychological and social damage inflicted by generations of conflict. With some jokes, I should add. I also enjoyed Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure - it felt Ballardian in its isolated setting and clinical narration of horror. My bank holiday reading is The Seasoning, the English translation (presumably by her) of Manon Steffan Ros's novel Blasu. On a side note: various newspapers and magazine do round-ups of translated books, and they never, ever, look to Wales or Ireland despite the wealth of novels either being translated or crying out for an international audience. They'll pick up Irish novels in English, but anything in Welsh or Irish may as well not exist, whereas books in continental European languages automatically attract a degree of cool. Grrr…
The other books I got this week were:
- Matthew Taunton, Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture which seems highly highly persuasive but is fixated on England, even when discussing proletarian novels of the 1930s, many of which emerged from the mining and steel communities of Scotland and Wales - even the postwar critic and novelist Raymond Williams is treated as an honorary Englishman.
- Francis Barker, ed, 1936: The Sociology of Literature. Two thick volumes of conference proceedings from Essex University, 1978, packed with excellent material on literature and politics in the mid-1930s.
- Mark Schmitt, British White Trash: Figurations of Tainted Whiteness in the novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King. I've never heard of King, but I'm friendly with Niall and rate his books highly. I've taught some of them and it's high time more was written about them.
- Nigel West, The Blue List and Cuban Bluff: two more politician's novels. West (real name: Rupert Allason) was a particularly reactionary MP in the 80s and 90s who imagined himself as a spymaster and historian. His novels aren't very convincing, but then again a judge described him in court as 'profoundly and cynically dishonest…one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen', a quote that doesn't make it into his Wikipedia page.. He's now flogging DVDs of his speeches as 'The Nigel West Lectures' at $24.95 a pop. Caveat emptor…
So that's my bank holiday sorted…
*I'm never going to write a pedagogical research article.
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