Despite being called 'Chilled Cans' and being held up by scaffolding inside, this place insists on pouring Guinness properly even with 10,000 people waiting. Unlike every single pub in the UK.
Tork Waterfall, Killarney
The Skelligs from near Waterville
I return to the cheery news that our faculty management, which has never been less than profligate when it comes to its own pursuits, has decided to cut costs by withdrawing the sweaty but free cheese sandwich it gave staff who came in on Saturdays to run Open Days. As a symbol of mean-spirited and misdirected economy in HE, said sandwich really takes the biscuit.
•It's only a Mid-Kerry festival according to a man from Castlemaine. He also told us his mother's house rules for Puck. 1. Don't vomit on the sofa. 2. Don't bring back any Beaufort girls. We didn't get to learn what she had against them.
If you're as old-fashioned as me and read actual newspapers at weekends, you'll know that the culture sections devote huge amounts of space to holiday reading recommendations by fashionable or dependable authors. It's often an opportunity for them to show off their superior intellects ('…but you have to read it in the original medieval Armenian to fully appreciate her genius'), to reward those who've reviewed them kindly, or to support writers with the same agent or publisher. If you're AS Byatt of course, you see it as another opportunity to pursue the sisterly rivalry which has so entertained the literary world for the past fifty years or so ('I may spend ten minutes noting the most egregious errors in my sister's latest so-called novel').
So in the same spirit (though sadly lacking a publisher), I'm picking my holiday reads as I'm off next week. Two weeks in south-western Ireland. Hopefully some cycling, swimming in the Atlantic, climbing some mountains and the world-famous Puck Fair. It will, naturally, rain incessantly. I tend to read the Irish Times and the Guardianevery day, and leaf through the CorkIrish Examiner, but that still leaves me with plenty of reading time.
It's tempting to bring these two volumes, which I came across yesterday while unpacking another box of books. I also own a surprising number of works by Stalin and Lenin, despite not seeing myself as that kind of authoritarian lefty.
A typical illustration from Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. They aren't all so eye-catching.
Early Lithographed Books. Sadly 'improper books' are not what you might think
One such improper book.
Instead, this year I'm skewing the list towards Irish work. The only hardback I'm taking is Anne Enright's The Green Road: coming from an Irish family which is spread across the globe and has been known to fall out occasionally (hem hem hem), it seems fitting. Also Irish but from a different era and culture, I'll read Maria Edgeworth's 1801 Belinda: I'm a bit of a fan and am trying to read all her novels.Early editions feature the first interracial marriages in English-language literature: her racist father prevailed upon Edgeworth to remove them from subsequent editions. I'm also taking Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, a comedy set in the world of banking during the crash. I shall stand outside the IFSC and try to raise a grudging laugh. As it's almost the centenary of the Easter Rising, I shall pay tribute to my ancestor Thomas who was in the GPO that week (taking part, not trapped while buying stamps) by reading Foster's Vivid Faces, his cultural history of the revolutionary generation. It will also help me with my current journal article about Brinsley MacNamara's scandalous The Valley of the Squinting Windows and Caradoc Evans's My People. I also take at least one old theory favourite: this year's choice is Foucault's The History of Sexuality volume one. To fuel my 1930s interests, I'm taking Margery Allingham's 1936 Campion novel, Flowers for the Judge. I read all the Wimsey novels recently, and gathered that Campion was Allingham's riposte to Sayers' creation, so thought I'd give her another go. I read The Tiger in the Smoke a few years back and thought it was interesting but very odd. I've no interest in crime at all, but do appreciate the machine-like beauty of a well-written genre piece. It's the same when I read the Jeeves and Wooster novels: the plots are negligible, you always know what's going to happen but the enjoyment is in the unfolding variations on the underlying formula.
What else am I bringing? The latest William Gibson because I like to keep up with his stuff even when I'm not convinced by some of the more self-consciously hipster elements; Le Carré'sA Most Wanted Man, Will McIntosh's The Soft Apocalypse because I'm fairly convinced by the argument that the brutal capitalism we keep voting for is rapidly eroding not just the workers' lives but also those of the bourgeoisie or professional classes. As a very mild example, we're currently slated to move into great big call centre-style accommodation rather than shared offices of 3-4 people. Nobody (obviously) has asked us what we think we need or (even more obviously) what we'd like, but I see it as a concrete example of the proletarianisation of what was formerly the professions. Private and permanent space is now a privilege of the hierarchy: the Dean has a (university-owned) Steinway in his office. No doubt his deputies have the luxury of shelving, photos of their kids and all the little things that denote stability. Beyond the obvious stupidity of 12 person rooms for academics (try reading a book, let alone writing one there), and the impossibility of counselling a student, giving a colleague union advice or maintaining a personal library available for consultation when a student calls in, the removal of intimate space really does seem like a power play. In hot-desking situations, the work-space becomes the 19th-century factory floor in which the worker is depersonalised. On my pinboard and surrounding my desk are gifts from colleagues and students, collections of interesting artefacts, multiple piles of books relating to my current research and teaching duties, and a whole range of stuff which are extensions of me.
Without it all, we become interchangeable machines for teaching. We are no longer permanent and valued colleagues, but hands. We cannot reach for something interesting and useful if someone comes in for a chat. I probably won't be there, because without a permanent space and storage, I'll just stay at home when I'm not teaching. I won't be available for impromptu meetings, tutorials and consultations. Work becomes a chore and anything beyond the mechanical becomes a private indulgence to be kept apart from work – all the things that we middle-class people thought signified the value of our labour.
Without wanting to be overly dramatic about this, the hot-desking, call-centre model is essentially a fascist vision. It is fixated on efficiency, which to them means the absence of clutter and total visibility. It means no lounging about talking or reading (this also drives the total removal of books from areas of the library visible from outside) because that doesn't look like working. Their version of our work is people sitting at computers, not speaking to each other, typing. Typing anything.
For any other kind of activity, they should leave. Desks should be clear. Books and papers (the past) should be banished, as should mugs with jokes on them, family photos and all the other detritus of social intercourse. All these things – along with privacy and adequate space – are considered perks rather than necessities, of the kind that come with authority. We're told that these spaces are required for efficiency, but I've never heard of a manager applying these principles to him or herself, because they are important and need private conversations whereas we (the ones students turn to when they're suicidal, sick or about to be evicted or deported) are not and don't. So much for the academy's self-confident assertion of its' own structures: now we ape the corporate world, with depressing results.
What happens when this is done to us?
and there's a way to deal with cubicle farms too:
There's a gap between not having a permanent desk and the final ejection of the middle classes from secure employment, but I don't think it's as huge as you may think. The driving force in contemporary capitalism is to automate as much work as possible, and 'outsource' the rest so that we don't see the conditions in which our products are created, while boosting profits and share prices. The professional classes will join the workers in the bin marked 'no further use' and at some point we'll have to work out what to do with all these surplus people. That's the major failing of western market societies: having brought mass industry to an end, you're left with a large group of people who have nothing to do. Some can become hairdressers, some will serve us coffee, but there aren't enough skilled jobs to fulfil everyone, or to keep an economy going. Personal debt keeps it going to some extent, and Labour extracted just enough from the finance sector to dole out tax credits and a minimum wage, but these are just sticking plasters. The Tories are abandoning the benefits system and reducing corporate taxes so that the state won't be able to provide subsistence for the workless many – and they're in any case proclaiming that these people are unemployed because they're lazy shirkers, not because we've designed an economy based on exploitation wages and job exporting. Maybe we'll muddle on a bit longer but I can't see a good ending to this one.
By tomorrow, I shall be on the west coast of Ireland for a few days. This means:
no phone
no laptop
no iPad
no Twitter
no blogging
no marking
no writing
no conference planning
no email
Instead, it means
3 daily newspapers on paper (the Guardian, the Examiner and the Irish Times)
lots of reading
some proofreading (an ill colleague's book on Victorian spin doctors)
walking
eating
perhaps even a swim in the Atlantic
I haven't packed yet, nor do I know quite which books to take. I've an Anthony Trollope and a Jack Womack which are definitely coming. Perhaps Joanna Trollope's re-write of Sense and Sensibility(or is that too many Trollopes?), and M Wynn Thomas's In The Shadow of the Pulpit, though taking a book about nonconformism to almost-post-Catholic Ireland might be wrong. I've also a backlog of Beverley Nichols and Jim Crace novels. I will take one Irish novel though - Mia Gallagher's Dublin junkie-hell Hellfire.
Should be enough for a week. See you on the other side.
Hi Everyone. I'd like to say it's an enormous pleasure to be back… but that would be a big fat lie. To some extent, anyway. I was back in the office on Friday but spent the whole day reading 600 emails, one of which accused me of failing a student for 'being Chinese' which obviously made my day. Given that the marking was anonymous and the dissertation plagiarised, I think my defence is fairly solid.
Anyway, before I get back into my standard rant/work/politics paradigm, I thought I'd share some of my favourite photos of the holiday with you. I know this is no better than physically demanding that any visitors to the office sit there and view every snap of What I Did On My Holidays, but you might like some of them. And if you don't, you can go here, though you may never leave.
My Irish holiday fell naturally into a few core activities. After a stop-off in Dublin to pay homage to the Messiah (i.e. my sister's newborn son) it was off to Co. Kerry in the far South-West. I read a lot: the luxury of three quality newspapers – on paper – every day (the Irish Times, the Irish Examiner and the Guardian) and a pile of books. I can thoroughly recommend Nick Barlay's downbeat urban morality tale Hooky Gear, which convinced me to read all his others; Ian Samson's amusing and informed but resolutely unstylish The Norfolk Mystery;Martin Green's amazing cultural history of the interwar period Children of the Sun even though it also infuriated me: thoroughly fixated on an aristocratic coterie and completely incapable of differentiating between 'England' and 'Britain'; Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema which was difficult to read. I agreed with everything it has to say about technology, new media, copyright and so on, but the plot's full of holes and it's little more than agit-prop. Endless pages of expository dialogue ('So Parliament works like this, right…'). You can download it for free here, though I read it on dead trees. Gordon's huge account of Emily Dickinson's family feuds, Lives Like Loaded Guns, was astonishing and addictive, even though her writing tends towards the Mills and Boon. I distrust any biographer who deploys ! all over the place. The scholarship is superb though, and I can honestly say that I was surprised at the amount of polysexual orgies going on in 1880s New England. I'll be going back to Dickinson with wider eyes, I can tell you. I thought I might run out of reading material so I slowed down for the last few days and came back with Patrick Hamilton's grimy Hangover Square unread. Once I've finished Robert McCrum's Jubilee, I'll get on with that one.
When I wasn't reading and eating enormous amounts of Proper Irish Dinners, I wandered around the countryside, swam in what 2000ADreaders will know as The Black Atlantic (some wimps were wearing wetsuits!), took part in the revels of Puck Fair, which celebrated its 400+ anniversary (it's probably much older than that but documents only go back as far – predictably – as the British arrival and takeover. This year featured a gymkhana, a horse fair, a huge parade, the Crowning of a goat as King Puck, a funfair and of course several days of mass inebriation. In short, a photographer's dream. The only shots I chose not to take were of the Traveller community. They're a superb group of people: culturally independent, proud and confident. They dress, especially the women, really distinctively, without any concern for anybody else's attitudes. I'd loved to have photographed them, but they're so harassed and despised by settled communities that it would be very easy to upset them, or just seem incrediby patronising and I didn't want to objectify them. Or get beaten up by stealing sneaky shots. Thankfully, Puck has no shortage of other great faces and photogenic events.
After Puck, the main event was a trip to the remote, dangerous and atmospheric Skellig Islands. I'll post night shots of Puck and the Skelligs in the next entry. Meanwhile, here are some pictures of Puck Fair. Click on them to enlarge and see the whole lot here.
One of the delights of the horse fair is seeing loads of really young kids riding around on their prides and joy, like city kids in BMWs.
The main Kerry to Cork road
Is this a Dragonfly or something else?
See the insect at the bottom of this bramble
I haven't touched the colour: its eye is naturally the same as the plastic sacks
Little did this busker know she'd be 'assisted' by the oul' fella.
The identical stances are what caught my eye.
I like donkeys.
'I've got a horse outside'.
I also have a horse outside
For three days a year, Chilled Cans is a fully functioning pub, despite being derelict inside
The girl on the left really makes this shot
King Puck on the way to being Crowned
The King surveys his temporary realm. After 3 days, he's released back into the wild.
I can imagine this man swilling port and beating the peasantry in about 1810
Hi everybody. How are you all? I'm back from my holiday and unsurprised to find that the UK has become an even meaner, nastier place than when I left. All thanks to a government which has decided that the poor, the sick and the needy are the real villains. According to Mr Osborne and the Mail, claiming benefits is a gateway to killing your own children. No, really. But perhaps he's merely trying to distract attention from today, which marks the abolition of the 50% tax band, leading to a minimum of £50,000 more in the pockets of the bankers, speculators and conmen who currently staff and fund the Conservative Party.
But before my carefree holiday spirit wears off, let me tell you what I did in south-west Ireland. I slept a lot. I read a daily newspaper, sometimes two. On paper. I walked. I attended two stages of the Rás Mumhan bike race (anglophones: however you think this is pronounced, it isn't) and took lots of photos. I went to a well-blessing up a mountain and visited the sub-tropical paradise of Kells Bay. I even got a bit red in the sun, which is rather a contrast to the UK's experience of the past few weeks and made me feel a bit smug. I ate way too much chocolate and meat (not my usual diet at all) and read several books, mostly for pleasure. Matt Ruff's Mirage is a very enjoyable and provocative reversal of the 9/11 (or for the rest of us, 11/9) attacks and their aftermath, though rather uneven. Cobley's Seeds of Earth trilogy is enjoyable space opera hokum without much else to recommend it and a rather dubious racial premise, and Jilly Cooper's Riders (chosen for a module on social class) is execrable. It's not fun. The plot alternates between men riding horses and riding women (as they put it). The women shop to make themselves feel good. Then they have sex with the men. Then they feel bad. So they go shopping. At one point, the hero explains to his wife that he had to have sex with the stable girl because she (the wife) isn't sexual enough. She accepts this and apologises. All without a trace of irony. The New Statesman is described as 'Trotskyist' and the IRA and the 'Socialists' are roundly horrible. The heroine joins an anti-hunt demonstration but is converted to pro-hunting because the antis have bad hair whereas the huntsman has a large penis. We're told that all women really want – even the career women – is a husband and nice wallpaper. Though they're unhappy when they get it and wreck their marriages. The one strident feminist is converted after one forced kiss by the hero, after which her hair and clothes magically improve. Bad women have arm and leg hair. They can improve by shaving their pubic hair off, a real marker of the 1980s.
Of the lower orders, we only see the horrid but talented Jake. Jake is a Gypsy, and therefore superstitious, inscrutable and chippy. And his horrible family all have horrid Birmingham accents. But at least being a Gypsy he's mysteriously attractive: the rest of the lower orders, like the IRA and the Socialists, are threats which loom large but don't really appear. Foreigners are bloody. The Germans are efficient and speak viz lots of vees and zees; Italians are stylish but lazy, Spaniards are lazy and smelly except for the Fascist dictator Franco who has 'wonderful manners' and dresses well; the French are stylish but untrustworthy; Americans are gauche and prudish. The English middle classes are unutterably boring, but better than new money Brits, who wear medallions and undo their shirts and sell cat food and prefer carpets to Cotswold stone. You can shag them but you have to despise them.
And so interminably on. One damn illiterate sentence after another, one repeated plot twist after another, all mixed with the most astonishingly patronising narrative commentary, almost as if Cooper assumes her readership consists of drunk moronic halfwits. There's even a horse called Revenge so that people can say things like 'Revenge is sweet' and 'I'll get Revenge if it's the last thing I do'. For 915 pages, roughly the same length as Trollope's The Way We Live Now which covered similar ground only about a million and a half times more interestingly. I keep hoping for a shaft of humour or self-awareness, but none appear. For Cooper and her readers, the world really is (or should be) like this: National Velvet mixed with a Tory Party manifesto and the offcuts of some Danielle Steele juvenilia. That this misogynist nonsense is written by a woman is simply proof that false consciousness isn't a discredited notion. Apologies all round to my students.
What I didn't do on my holidays: listen to music or the radio; watch much TV; check my email; surf the web; mark essays; Tweet; switch on my phone; buy books. Very restful altogether.
Anyway, enough of this. Some holiday snaps. Click on them to enlarge, or see the whole lot here.
Killorglin and the Dingle Peninsula hills in the background
Waiting for the off in the Rás Mumhan
The Holy Stone of Clonricert, recently upgraded to Class 3
An Egret
Remember this? It's called… er… it'll come to me any minute…
