And now, the news according to Mrs May

So one of the big announcements from government is that TV shows may now be vetted in advance to make sure nobody says anything subversive. Presumably some retired spooks now working for Serco, Atos et al. ('This office will require the whole time of not a few overseers, and those no vulgar men…we may easily foresee what kind of licencers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remisse, or basely pecuniary') will be contracted to watch everything about to be shown in case uncomfortable opinions are expressed. Not all uncomfortable opinions mind, just 'extremist' ones. What does 'extremist' cover? Well put it like this: Ayn Rand's descendants won't have to worry much. We're talking about extremists with brown skin and non-Christian views. For now. Then it'll be animal rights activists. After that, trades unionists. And after that, who knows?

We've been here before. From 1988-94, after a long period in which Northern Ireland broadcast material was banned in various legitimate and illegitimate ways, the Conservative Government decided that Sinn Féin – a legal political party which contested elections in Northern Ireland – was 'extremist' and should be denied the oxygen of publicity. Having failed to ban it, they hit on the wheeze of forcing broadcasters to dub their spokesmen's voices: you could hear their exact words, and see their mouths move, but not hear their actual voices: those were provided by actors (except during election campaigns). I know this sounds like the policy of someone on all the drugs but it really happened. If I'd been in charge of the news I'd have trolled the government royally by dubbing Gerry Adams with a Margaret Thatcher impersonator (or more subtly, a Gerry Adams impersonator) but they lacked the gumption.



which led to Chris Morris and Steve Coogan's parody (thanks to Andrew Bailey / @scopperil for reminding me of it):



It wasn't just news either - documentaries, dramas and even a Pogues song about the (innocent) Birmingham Six was banned because it expressed 'general disagreement with the way in which the British government responds to, and the courts deal with, the terrorist threat in the UK'. That's right, disagreement.

Fast forward twenty years and here we are again: a politician proclaiming 'British values' of (as usual) fair play etc. etc. etc. while announcing the kind of powers usually associated with the most authoritarian regimes, as even Tory MP Sajid Javid asserted.

It may not surprise you to learn that we've been here before: but not on such a scale since, um, 1643. That's right: Theresa May's big plan to silence 'extremists' is a re-hash of the Licensing Order, which the Commonwealth of Britain brought in once it realised that those old monarchs were onto something back in the day. Beset by Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists Quakers and others on the left, and by Royalists on the right, all printing Broadsides in secret, Cromwell's government decided that the stability of the state depended on the ability to pre-authorise newspapers.  Instead of publishing what you wanted and then facing the wrath of the courts afterwards, you were meant to hand in your draft for the government to approve.

Whereas divers good Orders have bin lately made by both Houses of Parliament, for suppressing the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and government. Which orders (notwithstanding the diligence of the Company of Stationers, to put them in full execution) have taken little or no effect… 

It is therefore Ordered by the Lords and Commons in Parliament, That no Order or Declaration of both, or either House of Parliament shall be printed by any, but by order of one or both the said Houses: Nor other Book, Pamphlet, paper, nor part of any such Book, Pamphlet, or paper, shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale by any person or persons whatsoever, unlesse the same be first approved of and licensed under the hands of such person or persons as both, or either of the said Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same, and entred in the Register Book of the Company of Stationers, according to Ancient custom, and the Printer therof to put his name thereto.

The Guardian might recognise too some of the thinking behind the Order, having had its computers smashed up by MI5 (which appears not to know about cloud computing):

the Gentleman Usher of the House of Peers, the Sergeant of the Commons House and their deputies, together with the persons formerly appointed by the Committee of the House of Commons for Examinations, are hereby Authorized and required, from time to time, to make diligent search in all places where they shall think meete, for all unlicensed Printing Presses, and all Presses any way imployed in the printing of scandalous or un licensed Papers, Pamphlets, Books, or any Copies of Books belonging to the said Company, or any members thereof, without their approbation and consents, and to seize and carry away such printing Presses Letters, together with the Nut, Spindle, and other materialls of every such irregular Printer, which they find so misimployed, unto the Common Hall of said Company, there to be defaced and made unserviceable according to Ancient Custom

Poet and high-ranking government functionary John Milton was not impressed. No liberal, he nevertheless felt that true freedom resided in the full expression of all views (except perhaps those of Catholics because Catholicism is itself tyrannical) as long as the publishers and authors were ready to face legal trial, torture and/or execution afterwards. All this is expressed in Areopagitica (1644):

A

SPEECH

OF

Mr. JOHN MILTON

For the Liberty of UNLICENC'D PRINTING,
To the PARLAMENT of ENGLAND.

No society is perfect, he argues, and a society which suppresses opposition is one which can never be reformed:

For this is not the liberty which wee can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth, that let no man in this World expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider'd and speedily reform'd, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain'd, that wise men looke for.

 There's more we can learn, he says, from the circulation of ideas, even if they're wrong (clearly an early dialectician, our John): a licensing scheme will only reinforce what's already thought to be true

it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of Truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindring and cropping the discovery that might bee yet further made both in religious and civill Wisdome.

unlesse warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life.

Milton's keen to demonstrate that while he opposes Licencing, he's no fan of 'licence' either, and takes the reader on a learned tour of Classical censorship. Philosophers weren't received particularly well by the Greeks and Romans at times, he says, though the Romans were quite happy for saucy material like Catullus's poems to circulate. While poets might have been banished, he says,

Books were neither banisht nor call'd in.

…at least until the Republic became the Empire as you Star Wars fans will understand. Under early Christian rule, censorship was only fitful: a lot of the time books were denounced as heretical but there were few attempts at censorship or proscription until the Popes achieved tyrannical status:

engrossing what they pleas'd of Politicall rule into their owne hands, extended their dominion over mens eyes, as they had before over their judgements, burning and prohibiting to be read, what they fancied not

until eventually

their last invention was to ordain that no Book, pamphlet, or paper should be Printed (as if St. Peter had bequeath'd them the keys of the Presse also out of Paradise) unlesse it were approv'd and licenc't under the hands of 2 or 3 glutton Friers.

Like the Popes and Bishops, Theresa May no doubt feels that censorship isn't a problem as long as it's conducted for the right purpose: I read recently of a new government in the 1970s bringing back censorship. Challenged about it, the minister replied that under the old regime, bad people were condemning good books for bad reasons: under the new government, good people were condemning bad books for good reasons. Milton was way ahead of them.

But some will say, What though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good? It may be so… I am of those who beleeve, it will be a harder alchymy then Lullius ever knew, to sublimat any good use out of such an invention.

Milton then launches into a long and learned defence of reading books in general, drawing mostly on the early Church Fathers. St Paul, he said, would quote from the heathen Greek poets, whereas Julian the Apostate banned Christians from reading non-Christian texts. In modern terms, it's the equivalent of May telling us that hearing the arguments of those we fear or disagree with will hurt us. It assumes that only people like us have access to truth, and yet we're so weak that just being exposed to falsehood will destroy society as we know it.

In fact, says John, banning the works of the Greeks just made the Christians dumber and more vulnerable:

So great an injury they then held it to be depriv'd of Hellenick learning; and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the Church, thenthe open cruelty of Decius or Dioclesian.

Instead, he says, learn from the vision of Dionysius Alexandrinos, to whom God appeared in a vision after a priest accused him of defiling himself by reading pagan books:

Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter. To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, Prove all things, hold fast that which is good. And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same Author; To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil'd.

We, however, are considered not sufficient to judge aright the words of Anjem Choudhury or whomever is nominated Demon of the Week.

Theresa May thinks we're so stupid that we need protection, while others think we should only read 'improving' material: my parents, never fiction readers, would rip books out of my hands when I was growing up, convinced on the flimsiest evidence that most of it was corrupting. If only they, the Tories and their equally authoritarian Labour counterparts had read Areopagitica:

bad books… to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

If only I'd thought of that argument back in the day.

For Milton, true freedom resides in the exercise of the independent intellect.

God committs the managing so great a trust, without particular Law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man…God uses not to captivat under a perpetuall childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which hertoforewere govern'd only by exhortation.

It's a key theme of the Protestant Reformation: sweep away the Latin Bible explicated only by priests and bishops to their own advantage - read it yourself, at home, and draw your own conclusions. Four hundred years later, clearly we're considered far too untrustworthy to experience uncensored speech.

Furthermore, how can we tell what is seditious or un-British speech (how I hate this appropriation of Britishness)? May assumes that it's easy: she'll have some experts with a list. Milton thinks this in utter nonsense: good and evil often look alike superficially, he says: Adam and Eve ate of the fruit because it looked good:

Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv'd and interwoven with the knowledge of evill

Adam, he says, learned what's good by doing evil. We aren't going to get that chance. Instead, we're to be preserved in a state of what Milton calls an 'excrementall whiteness': untested, unthinking, never exposed to a single unsettling thought

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd & unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. That vertue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evill, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank vertue, not a pure; her whitenesse is but an excrementall whitenesse

May thinks that if we hear bad thoughts, we'll all run off and join Isis. Not right-thinking people of course: in common with all moral panics, she's only concerned for the weak-minded mob who might be infected. Really? says Milton: you'd better ban the Bible too – it's full of filth and heresy.

for that oftimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnall sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader

If we ban exposure to bad books, he says, it's the end of learning too because the boffins aren't exempt:

books, & those in great abundance which are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine, cannot be suppresstwithout the fall of learning, and of all ability in disputation, and that these books of either sort are most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the common people whatever is hereticall or dissolute may quickly be convey'd, and that evillmanners are as perfectly learnt without books a thousand other ways which cannot be stopt, and evill doctrine not with books can propagate, except a teacher guide, which he might also doe without writing, and so beyond prohibiting, I am not able to unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licencing can be exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts.

No doubt lots of us are thinking that May's censorship of TV is ludicrous anyway: it'll stop the rigorous public examination of ideas on the freely available airwaves, while millions watch Youtube clips, Vines, discussion boards and the like far from public view, and free from any kind of informed challenge. Milton's there too: pre-licencing print media is like

the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Parkgate

What's the effect of banning speech? It makes the speaker cool. It gives him or her cachet. 'The man they tried to ban'. Rather than ridiculing a bad argument, we're conferring martyr status on any old demagogue. Imagine George Galloway's reaction if he was banned from the airwaves! He'd love it, and so would his fans, proved right again that the System is scared of him. Again, Milton knows:

instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them and invests them with a reputation: The punishing of wits enhaunces their autority, saith the Vicount St. Albans, and a forbidd'n writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seeke to tread it out.

I've detained you long enough (as no Home Secretary ever said). Milton goes on to expound many, many more arguments against this pernicious system, all of which are relevant to this latest version. I'll leave you with one more. A society, he says, which assumes that all the good ideas have already been discovered, is a dying society. To wilfully close one's ears to different and new perspectives is to be intellectually dead.

Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care to be more then worldly wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant and slothfull, to be a common stedfast dunce will be the only pleasant life, and only in request.

Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloath, and our wooll packs. What is it but a servitude like that impos'd by the Philistines, not to be allow'd the sharpning of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licencing forges. 

Where would our own society be if this course had been adopted long-term? We might never have overthrown the monarchy (sadly temporarily). Slavery would be legal, democracy would not. Capital punishment would be rife, and education a hollow shell. Human rights would be a fantasy…oh wait, that's coming too.

Would Milton be allowed on the news under the Tories' new law? I doubt it.

Papal bull

Here's a song that could have been written for the Papal Conclave which as you know, vents white smoke when a Pope has been elected and black smoke when a ballot is inconclusive.



It's Tindersticks' 'Black Smoke'. 'I told myself I was greedy for it… checking out my reflection' – rather appropriate for the red-hats jockeying for power in the Church. 

What else has caught my attention today. Well, I've got lots of preparation and marking to do, but I'm finding it hard to concentrate. It doesn't help that my colleague kept hold of my marking pile for a whole week but still wants them done within the time limit. Not helpful and not conducive to me turning to the pile first. 

Instead, I've been reading, teaching Paradise Lost (today's question: is it as misogynist as one might think?) and opening parcels of books. Mostly a pile of Jim Crace novels for a research project, plus a reprint of Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth, fuelling my 1920s-1930s obsession. In pursuit of this, I've also been reading the interesting James Laver's 1933 collection of mock-epic satires, Ladies' Mistakes. It's a knowing and witty homage to Pope's work, full of film-stars, trips on the underground and weedy young gentlemen transformed into studs by a moment's dalliance. It's also very funny, and beautifully illustrated by Thomas Lowinsky. Highly recommended! It felt quite strange to be reading Bright Young Thing poetry in the utilitarian atmosphere of the works canteen. 

What else? Well, I read an appalling report pitch on the virtues of online education by one Sir Michael Barber and his chums Donnelly and Rizvi, who basically thinks that online videos mean everyone can be taught by 'celebrity academics'. As he said to that reactionary know-nothing John Humphries on Radio 4, 

Why would you go to the quite ordinary lecture by a quite ordinary lecturer when you can get Niall Ferguson online?

Er… Mostly because 'celebrity academics' have stopped thinking by the time they get famous. They hit on a big idea. Then they make TV programmes about it. The producers ask them to cut out all the waffly bits and sharpen the lines. Complexity and ambiguity are lost. They start to believe their own reviews and get suspicious of alternative or newer approaches. They certainly get fed up with the 'ordinary' academic's cycle of writing, submitting to peer-review, rewriting and re-submitting. What do these people have to say to a Celebrity Academic? Niall Ferguson is an ideal case in point: his books are largely polemic these days, facts and opinions shaped to suit his ideological perspective rather than exploring events or ideas. 

I have another anecdote which may explain why you might prefer the 'quite ordinary lecture' to the superstar. A young friend of mine was sent off to an Oxford study weekend as part of his preparation for university applications. Simon Schama was dangled in front of the aspiring scholars as bait. 'What shall I say to him, Dad?', my chum asked his father, who had been taught by the good professor in the early 1980s. 'Ask him if he's read and marked my essays yet', replied Dad. 

Anecdotal, it's true. But the Celebrity Academic (and quite a lot of high-flying non-celebrity academics) rarely trouble themselves with undergraduate lectures, tutorials, and marking. After all, what are hourly-paid PhD graduates and post-grads for? You're more likely to find the Celebrity Academic in the departure lounge or Radio 4's Green Room than slaving over a module guide or attending the Staff-Student Forum. 

But what of the other element of Barber's rather silly claim? Why not watch a video at a time of your choosing from the comfort of your own home? I've gone on about this rather a lot in the past, but nobody's listened so I'll say it again. A video lecture is a very useful resource. You can play it and replay it and stop it to make notes and extract a good deal of wisdom from it. But what you can't do is put up your hand to ask a question, or make a point, or disagree. The online video implies that you have no role other than to accept what's put in front of you. This is particularly true of the Celebrity Academic Video, which is more like an MTV pop promo than an educational event. Here is a Star, it says. Worship it and a few flakes of star-dust might fall about your shoulders. 

What's entirely absent is the glorious possibility that you, yes YOU might have something to say, and that all the other people watching might equally have something interesting and intelligent to say about the subject in question. That you might speak to each other, and pursue the lecturer's thoughts. If you watch a video, you're part of the mass audience. If you come to a real-life lecture, you're a participant. You can stop me to ask for clarification, to propose another idea, to put me right (these things happen to me all the time) and I will respond, often delighted that somebody's listening and thinking. The Celebrity Video Star will never, ever be halted mid-flow by somebody else's idea. Additionally, the Video Star can never tell you you're wrong, or that you need to work harder, or read more. You're the consumer, the customer, and you are Always Right. That's why the real-life encounter is Education and the online video is a simulation of education in which the Celebrity is simply 'product'. 

Of course, the most eminent researchers are not always the best teachers, nor is fame an index of quality either: where I work, many quiet, modest teachers earn their students' respect without showiness. In the brave new world, they'll be discarded or reduced to the level of piece-work marking machines. Despite this, they'll still know when a student is struggling, or has worked the night-shift to keep the family fed, or has a particularly personal response to a text or loves one special critical approach: all the things about which the remote Celebrity Academic will not give one solitary hoot. 

The Celebrity Academic is the grinning, styled face of a pyramid scheme Victorian in its outlook: that Great Men (and women) deliver Enlightenment from on high (hence my application of Capitals to this blog post) to the undifferentiated masses. This is of course what's known technically as 'bollocks'. Take my Milton class today. Afterwards, I went downstairs to Ye Olde Slopperie for some gruel and spotted a group of the students slurping sugary drinks and pointing at bits of Paradise Lost. They were educating themselves and each other: hopefully agreeing with bits of the lecture and disagreeing with other bits. You don't get that from watching a video in your home or on your phone. 'No man is an island', some clever bloke once wrote, and it's never more true than in education. You don't simply absorb a lecture's words and become educated: you think about them, talk about them, test them in debate. Then you're educated - but that's not a very profitable model. It requires buildings and staff and libraries and all those things – particularly emotional and intellectual commitment and bravery – which can't be assigned an IP address and be billed via Direct Debit. And that's ignoring the issue of control. Who do you want decided on the curriculum? Some TV-friendly bloviator and his corporate chums, or people you know personally, and know you?

But we shouldn't expect Sir Michael to acknowledge this: he's the Chief Education Adviser at Pearson, a company betting the farm on replacing Ordinary Lecturers You Can Talk To with Celebrity Academics' Greatest Hits, for money. He is, simply, a salesman. 

Will the children of Barber and Co. be educated via video-link? You bet your ass they won't. They'll be buying physical access to the Dreaming Spires like all the rich kids. Video's for the plebs. Which is what really annoys me. Educational technology can be brilliant. Look at the Open University and the wonderful things it does. I personally use forums and Twitter and all sorts of lovely toys in my teaching. What I don't do is employ shiny things to disguise the fact that what Pearson, Clay Shirky (who thinks video-Ed is the educational Napster) and their friends in government want isn't better education: it's cheaper education for the great unwashed. 

But don't just take my word for it. Here's Andrew Ng on the value of classroom interaction:

“If you think about your favorite teacher you had back in college and the conversations you had with him or her, there’s just no way to replace that with a computer,” Ng said. “But you need to figure out the economics and the logistics to hire more teachers to deliver those sorts of amazing interactions.”

Who he? Only the founder of Coursera, one of the world's biggest (and most interesting) online-education providers. 

What's the link between my original subject (the Papal conclave) and the Barber report? Simple: they're both hierarchical models which valorize the linear transmission of uncontested truths to the obedient masses without any possibility of the masses contributing, let alone seeking their own way to enlightenment. I may have been brought up a Catholic but when it comes to education, I'm a thoroughgoing Protestant. 

On repeat…

The clip above is of Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato, which has provided my marking soundtrack for the day. It's a Dutch version of minimalism: much more melodious and European than the American version, which draws on rock, blues and African influences to a far greater extent. Canto Ostinato can last for a mere couple of hours or a full day, because it's built on repeated sections which the composer likened to genetic code. The weakness of the piece is its sweetness: it can quite easily turn into aural wallpaper in the wrong hands, whereas 'classic' minimalism's motorik rigour demands attention.

So in a way, ten Holt's piece is perfect for the marking I've been doing today: online forums examining a Satanic soliloquy in Milton's Paradise Lost (Book IV, 358-92) and asking them to draw on their close reading skills and critical reading to explore Satan's characterisation. Given that a large number of students are asked to consider the same few lines, the result is much like Canto Ostinato for the marker: lots of repetition, quite a lot of pleasure, but little variation or risk-taking. I find it hard to take in too much in a single session, and to reply with much originality 30 times, though I do my best. Certainly the standard was high and there are moments of light relief. 'What's Satan's state of mind here', I asked. 'Pissed off', came the reply, accurately enough. 

What else has been going on? Well, talking of sterile repetition, I watched Question Time last night, despite knowing in advance the response of every panellist. Last night's crew could have formed the celebrity cast for Huis Clos ('l'enfer, c'est les autres): imagine being trapped forever with Melanie Phillips, Stephen Twigg, Bob Crow, Ken Clarke and a UKIP candidate, all endlessly rehearsing manufactured outrage. I'm used to the audience consisting of racists and conspiracists, but the BBC seems to have decided that panellists should all now essentially behave like trolls. Just once I'd like to watch an episode in which some of the commentators expressed a degree of humility or self-doubt. When David Miliband visited The Hegemon, I asked him if there was any room for self-doubt in modern politics and he literally did not understand the question. I think it's important to be open to challenge and self-examination. The other day I had a long exchange on Twitter with someone about education. We disagreed on absolutely everything, but did so thoughtfully and respectfully. It was really enjoyable to swap ideas without treating the other as a deluded moron. But political life has no room for complexity, ambiguity or doubt. To get anywhere, you have to behave as though whatever you're saying at any given moment is obviously and permanently and completely true, despite knowing that very few things outside gravity fulfil these conditions. We have always been at war with Oceania. If you remember otherwise, your memory is clearly at fault. 

Melanie wrote a book calling London 'Londonistan' and tends to believe that if you disagree with her in the tiniest way on anything at all, then you personally are guilty for 9/11 and the Holocaust. 

Bob Crow: reminds me of the junior Vogon in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: '"Resistance is useless," bellowed the guard, and then added, "You see if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior Shouting Officer, and there aren't usually many vacancies for non-shouting and non-pushing-people-about officers, so I think I'd better stick to what I know."

Still, Mad Mel managed to be unhinged, insensitive, paranoid and viciously reactionary without denouncing Islam, which is a major achievement for her. Either that, or I've gone deaf. Between her reactionary certainty and Bob Crow's bellowing and blinkered brand of socialism (I like him, but I'd love a bit more nuance: I imagine he starts breakfast by demanding his wife provides THE WORKERS' MUESLI NOT AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE BUT IMMEDIATELY BEFORE CAPITALIST BANKERS TAKE IT AWAY TO FEED TO THEIR PONIES, whereas Melanie Phillips would merely announce that the cereal box is empty because Islamofascist anti-Semites have brainwashed ordinary people into renouncing their Traditional Breakfasting Values), before long, I was entertaining myself by imagining Bob and Mel scarfing down the free warm white wine backstage before rutting like animals in the Green Room. 

An image that will not quickly go away, unfortunately.  

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Last week I was talking about sex. This week I was on about Milton and National Lampoon's Animal House. The two seem to have merged in this discussion. The Red Witch points out the bit where the Angels explain that they have sex too (this is a big theological deal: St. Paul and his grumpy friends see sex as a shameful post-Fall duty), in Book VIII, 617-629. 


It's pretty good for Adam and Eve before the Fall too: Book VIII 510-519 are the Renaissance equivalent of trains going into tunnels, rockets firing and all the other humorous representations we're used to from ironic films - only not ironic, and there's an undertone of fearful wonder as Adam realises that he's weakened by desire. 

To the nuptial bower

I led her blushing like the morn: All Heaven,

And happy constellations, on that hour

Shed their selectest influence; the Earth

Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill;

Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs 

Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings

Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub,

Disporting, till the amorous bird of night

Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening-star

On his hill top, to light the bridal lamp.

Thus have I told thee all my state, and brought

My story to the sum of earthly bliss,

Which I enjoy; and must confess to find

In all things else delight indeed, but such

As, used or not, works in the mind no change,

Nor vehement desire; these delicacies

I mean of taste, sight, smell, herbs, fruits, and flowers,

Walks, and the melody of birds: but here

Far otherwise, transported I behold,

Transported touch; here passion first I felt,

Commotion strange! in all enjoyments else

Superiour and unmoved; here only weak

Against the charm of Beauty's powerful glance.

Conversely, having posted some of those films last week, I should give you a bit of this: Pulp's 'This is Hardcore'. For me, it's their greatest song - a bitter, plangent lament for two things: the end of Britpop's innocence and their role in it, and for the pornification of culture. It's also about artifice in quite a profound way.


It is, in many ways, the post-Fall version. If you've seen children in 'Porn Star' t-shirts, heard tales of the way sexuality has been poisoned by the replacement of joy with mechanics, read of the way people's understanding of relationships have been degraded by the way pornography has reached into every aspect of popular culture, then this is the song for you. 





Baudrillard would understand. He'd say that love and desire have been entirely displaced by the hyperreality of porn. What we do and how we look has replaced the emotional connection, hence the requirement to shave and bejewel, perform certain acts and loudly proclaim them as liberation: these simulate the real thing but simultaneously hollow it out. We might not like it, but for him, there's no going back.

The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal. . . which is entirely in simulation.

This is what he says about universities:

The exchange of signs (of knowledge, of culture) in the university, between "teachers" and "taught" has for some time been nothing but a doubled collusion of bitterness and indifference (the indifference of signs that brings with it the disaffectation of social and human relations), a doubled simulacrum of a psychodrama (that of a demand hot with shame, presence, oedipal exchange, with pedagogical incest that strives to substitute itself for the lost exchange of work and knowledge).  In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge.  Because current generations still dream of reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it--as a whole the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together.

How to teach Milton…

Here's Donald Sutherland's attempt in that pedagogical classic, National Lampoon's Animal House (from 7.00-8.30).

If anyone can find an embeddable version, let me know and I'll post it.

Oh happy day

What a day I have ahead of me. 2 hours of Milton (great for me, slightly bemuses the students), then going to the Paul Mason appearance - he's one of the best economics journalists around: you may have seen him on Newsnight - then 3 hours on Beauty: the book with which I'm getting more and more uncomfortable, not maquillage tips. Though I reckon I could do that too.

Here's a little piece which rather dignifies labour: I'm a huge fan of Cannonball Adderley and this is 'Work Song'.



Let's have my other Cannonball favourites while we're at it: 'Why Am I Treated So Bad?' and 'Space Spiritual', both Axelrod productions.

Oh happy day

What a day I have ahead of me. 2 hours of Milton (great for me, slightly bemuses the students), then going to the Paul Mason appearance - he's one of the best economics journalists around: you may have seen him on Newsnight - then 3 hours on Beauty: the book with which I'm getting more and more uncomfortable, not maquillage tips. Though I reckon I could do that too.

Here's a little piece which rather dignifies labour: I'm a huge fan of Cannonball Adderley and this is 'Work Song'.

Wednesday conundrum

One of the problems of subscribing to the otherwise wonderful London Review of Books is that it keeps bringing to my attention books that I really, really want and of which I wouldn't otherwise have heard. Such as the Oxford University Press 2-volume Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, the (temporarily) most radical thinker and activist of the Civil War period - in some senses the father of English communism and eco-activism.

The only slight wrinkle is that it's £189. What do you think?

Meanwhile, it's a great day of teaching: Milton and then Raphael Selbourne's coming to talk about his very interesting novel - set in The Dark Place - Beauty. After that, it's the school's prize-giving ceremony, or as I like to call it, The Montgomery Burns Awards for Excellence in the Field of Excellence (and plagiarism).

Actually, that sounds far too bitter: last year's graduates were stunningly good (I'm looking at you, Ed, amongst many others), and they deserve recognition - it's just that this particular event seems a little disorganised.

The core of freedom of speech

There's a lot of whinging around at the moment - people claiming that anything 'offensive' to their ears should be banned.

Nonsense: I don't want to live in a world in which I hear nothing with which I disagree. I want to hear my opponents, then put them in camps (I believe this is the core argument against prior licensing of printed material in Milton's Areopagitica).

Philip Pullman says it better than I could:

Reading makes you moral

I can't really speak for my students, but I thought that Friday's Commonwealth/Restoration seminar went rather well. We discussed Areopagitica in the context of The Satanic Verses and Geert Wilders's Fitna (as expected, my Dutch students were very relaxed about such things), then looked at Bacon on the productive but destabilising social effects of single men, and all sorts of other things.

As a fan of reading, I'd like to draw your attention to these words:

…books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them… he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself…

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice [this is Mark's defence] is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

(John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644)

Teaching and reading

I've spent the morning mainlining Civil War texts - no room in the curriculum for pamphlets, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers etc but Milton, Bacon, Pepys, Donne and Lovelace aren't bad - remains to be seen how well the kids take it, but I do despair at how we can summarise one of the most intellectually fascinating periods of history in 2 hours… It has reminded me how much fun all this stuff is.

Day of Remembrance

For lefty types like me, it's a special day. Firstly, Oliver Postgate died today - grandson of George Lansbury the Labour Party Leader, cousin of Angela Lansbury, the creative brain behind Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and many more. I've never seen Bagpuss and don't give a flying one for childhood TV nostalgia, the last redoubt of rugger-shirt wearing students, but I know enough of Postgate's work to understand that like Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman, they're responsible for the generations of enthusiastic, open-minded, imaginative and thoughtful cultural socialists we have: liberation socialists, we could call them. There might not be many of them, but they're out there.

UPDATE: Zoe Williams makes my points much more eloquently - but then she's a professional journalist. Channel 4 News last night also claimed that Ivor the Engine was set in Wales because Postgate was a huge fan of Dylan Thomas - and there is a (gentler) ring of Llareggub about the cartoon. Also, Professor Yaffle was inspired by meeting Bertrand Russell. Everything I learn about the man makes me sadder that he didn't run the country rather than make cartoons in a cowshed.

Which brings me on to Milton - not forgotten at all, as the Today programme's grumpy slot claimed. I teach Milton in an ex-Poly, and some of my colleagues specialise in his work. I'm not an unalloyed fan of JM - the mouthpiece of a genocidal regime as far as Ireland's concerned - and as Ackroyd's Milton in America suggests, he could so easily have become an Ayatollah figure, but he was also a Republican in body and spirit, and a force for rationality and liberation in so many ways. Here's Philip Pullman reading Milton and here's Terry Eagleton's summary of Milton's greatness (the poetry's pretty good too).