They're trying to tell me something

I've just noticed that my own institution marks mail from my own institutional account to my junk folder. Which is charming.

The twin tenterhooks of my day are the ongoing News of the World story, and wondering how many 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged CDs will turn up at the office today. I intend to give them out as prizes. Which reminds me that I owe Ed my spare Emyr Humphreys critical anthology.

I'm whiling away my day playing bullshit bingo. 'Going Forward' appeared quite early on, causing massive damage to my attention levels. I have learned something though: academics can get away with some desperate rubbish when talking to lay audiences. It's inspired me to pursue a media career.

Talking of which, here's some good news.

Competition Time

I have inadvertently purchased two copies of Linden Peach's excellent The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (University of Wales Press, 2011), at a cost of £20 a go. I can't express how brilliant Humphreys' work is: he and Kate Roberts deserve Nobel Prizes. Try Humphrey's A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal or Old People Are A Problem for starters amongst his English-language work.

One copy will be awarded to whoever completes this sentence most amusingly:

My favourite thing about Michael Gove is… 

My decision is final, employees of Michael Gove are welcome to enter the competition.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeere's Voley!

Back in the office where I belong, faced with a massive pile of marking.

Yesterday's meeting in Cardiff was to inspect their halls of residence ready for the School Games. The journey down was beautiful. Deer, rabbits, buzzards and other fauna played in the spring sunshine, and the rolling hills of Gloucestershire and South Wales blazed with blackthorn blossom and wild flowers. Disembarking at Cardiff Central, the Welsh language fell on me like the softest of spring rain.

It was amazing to see their student body. Clearly more middle-class (did you know that Wolves has the most working-class intake of any UK university) and almost all white. They were all working hard - Cardiff seems to run more exams than us. The main university buildings are stunning: massive, gleaming white Edwardian architecture from the days when the cheapest bid didn't always win the tender.

If you haven't been, the city is well worth visiting. On the way back from the visit, I took the circular bus round the city. It went through Splott and all the dock areas, grey houses hunched against the environment. I saw Ninian Park (now abandoned for a new stadium across the road), and suddenly glimpsed the Welsh Assembly Building down at the front. It really is astonishing, a brown and grey hulk of bronze, stone and slate which both fits in and looks like a spaceship from that great Welsh TV show, Dr Who. Then of course there's the castle (I didn't get a chance to go in), Spillers Records - the oldest in Britain, and some bookshops.

On that subject, thanks very much to Anita. In recommending The Plan café, she neglected to mention that it's right next door to Capital Bookshop. I went in for a minute, looked through just one case, and came out with £50-worth of Welsh books. Most won't excite you much: a bibliography of Anglo-Welsh literature published between 1900-1965, a first English-language edition of Kate Roberts's A Summer Day in hardback with its dustjacket, an early edition of Alun Lewis's Raider's Dawn and Other Poems, biographies of Katherine Philips (Orinda) and Emyr Humphreys, a collection of conversations and essays by Humphreys, and Glyn Jones's wonderful The Island of Apples, a classic mid-century Welsh Bildungsroman.

I marked essays on the train. It appears that some of my students believe McDonaldization is a good thing because it means more leisure time for students, and lower staff numbers. As you can guess, that gave me a nice warm glow. Thanks to one of my commenters for linking to this, which sets out McDonald's' plan to offer academic qualifications. So while we're being McDonaldized, they're being Universitized. Or something. Shamefully, one of my American cousins 'teaches' at Hamburger University.