Star Wars and Me

There is no Star Wars and me really. Coming from a large rural family which viewed VCRs as an instrument of the devil, being inside and warm as sinful, and growing up before multi-channel TV, opportunities to see the films were very limited (in other childhood woe, we queued to see ET for hours until my dad got bored and made us go home, so I didn't see that until I was in my 20s). A few of my friends had Star Wars toys but I was always a reader and with six kids in the house, our toys tended to be more generic anyway. I did become a devotee of Star Trek however: being primarily a decades-old TV series it was cheap to air and easier to schedule. I gather that Trek is somehow seen as less cool than Star Wars but that's OK: as well as being enjoyably camp in some ways it introduced me to concepts such as human rights, discussion about intervention, just wars and all sorts of philosophical discussions. Given the time in which it was made and the space afforded by multiple series in episodic form on TV rather than cinema, it was always going to have the political edge over a few films which had to compete for the movie-goers' buck. Perhaps that's why the Trek films were less successful: they tried to recreate the intelligence and depth of the series rather than adapting to the demands of the blockbuster. I tend to see Star Trek as mainstream America painfully wrestling with its imperial conscience in a time of simultaneous paranoia and optimism: you can see these upstanding semi-military types coming to terms with the hippy movement for example, or moving from a pro-Vietnam War (A Private Little War) stance to an anti-War one (The Omega Glory), and its construction of the Federation Utopia is very revealing. Perhaps that's why I've written about Trek and Doctor Who rather than Star Wars.

A Private Little War: Kirk agrees to supply weapons to maintain the balance of power

The Omega Glory: a civilisation ruined by ceaseless pursuit of ideological battles

By contrast, I always saw Star Wars as a product of late-1970s American wounded imperialism. The first film appeared in 1977- not long after the deep wound of losing the Vietnam War and only a year after the Bicentennial Independence celebrations, it seems to this partially-informed commentator that it was an attempt to recreate the feeling that the American people were the freedom-loving rebels rather than the Evil Empire (to nick Reagan's later appropriation of the movies' terminology): apart from Vietnam and the middle East as usual, the US spent the 70s and 80s aiding the torture and murder of thousands in military dictatorships across South America. Like Jaws which came out not long before, the movies tried to imply that decent American values were being threatened by implacable evil, but I imagine that any Vietcong seeing Star Wars would have cheered on the Rebel Alliance. Mind you, perhaps Lucas was quietly critiquing US foreign policy: after all, it was 'a long long time ago' that the Americans were the freedom fighters against the evil British Empire. There is another interpretation available which might chime with our times more easily: Luke as the naive young man from a desert plant looking for any kind of adventure, when along comes a robed gent and a good line in mystical patter about destiny who recruits him to their band of religiously-inspired terrorists…

The first Star Wars movie I saw was The Phantom Menace, having been dragged along from Bangor to Rhyl one very rainy day (one of the worst places on earth) by obsessive fans desperate to see the latest instalment in their beloved series. Despite being adults, some of them appeared to still own various bits of plastic tat that they'd carted around since their toddler years and were transported back to their childhoods by the prospect of seeing an actual new instalment. Perhaps this infantilisation explains why we went to McDonald's on the way to stuff our faces with baby food.

Snobbery aside, it was one of the worst cinematic experiences of my life. Lacking any emotional investment in its universe, I saw a nonsensical plot, objectionable characters and facile attitudes, all rendered on a computer to look no more sophisticated than the PC game I was then playing obsessively, Civilization II. It was so awful that I couldn't even bring myself to tease my heartbroken friends. We emerged from the fleapit cinema into the cold and damp, and just stood there in silence until someone stammered out a few disappointed words. They weren't even angry, just shocked by the lazy, cynical, greedy appropriation of a world they thought belonged to them as much as to George Lucas.

After that, I didn't make any effort to watch the originals, despite everyone telling me they're 'so much better except for the one with the Ewoks'. I've caught large chunks of them while idly flicking through the multi-channel hell, and I think I've watched all of the middle one now, but my main exposure is through catching the Family Guy parodies, which at least give me an insight into the devotion people have for the originals. That doesn't seem to have changed. My boss went to a midnight screening last night, and another friend saw it at 9 a.m. this morning. the phenomenon is fascinating and demonstrates some of the arguments cultural studies and reception studies thinkers have been having for decades. I can imagine Adorno and the Frankfurt School dismissing Star Wars and most Hollywood products as machine-generated propaganda, social and cultural disinformation pumped into the cortexes of passive victims. However, my friends are happy to dismiss the elements of the films they don't like: 'that's just George Lucas, ignore those bits' they say, and no doubt they'll discount the Disney influence in the new ones, demonstrating Barthes's point about the Death of the Author. With a text this widescreen and an audience so huge and intelligent, the author's intentions and concerns are set aside in favour of the individual audience member's interpretations and the emotional personal contexts they bring to the experience. In that sense, it doesn't really matter whether the films are any good in cinematic terms, because they serve a whole range of uses beyond that.

Which is all a complicated way of saying that I should stop being such a snob and wish my Star Wars-loving friends a good weekend in the endless queues.

Phasers on Stunned

I appear to have broken one of my friends, a colleague and a co-writer!

I've been pretty quiet this week because I've been working really hard on a conference paper (and hopefully journal article). The conference is on The Politics and Law of Doctor Who: its energetic progenitor Danny Nicol has even set up a blog well in advance to kick ideas around outside the closed circle of academia, which is the kind of thing that makes me happy.

I've been thinking for ages that I should put my interest in popular culture and science fiction to good (academic) use rather than treating it as a private pleasure. The geeks have seemingly inherited the earth, looking through cinema and TV listings, so it's not as if SF is a guilty pleasure any more (the extended version of this rant is very similar to the defence of Media and Cultural Studies I will deliver at the drop of a hat).

So anyway, this conference seemed like an ideal opportunity. I toddled off to my esteemed colleague who works extensively in pop culture (particularly serial killers, pornography, 'underground' fiction, comics and so on) because I knew he'd love to have a go at this. Cue months of wading through the oceans of material he found: production notes, spin-off novels and comics, scripts, the lot. Eventually, we picked one Who seven-part adventure ('Inferno')* and a single Trek episode, 'Mirror, Mirror'.** They're both about dangerous searches for energy sources, both feature mirror universes and both appeared on TV in Britain at exactly the same time: 'Mirror, Mirror' aired in the same week as the last episode of 'Inferno'. Who could resist?





'Mirror, Mirror' is famous as the origin of the science fiction trope Beard of Evil, because Spock in the Evil universe has a goatee so you can tell them apart:

In actual fact, Beardy Spock isn't evil, he just behaves cruelly because that's the logical thing to do in a cruel universe. It does mean that Evil Kirk gets to utter the immortal line 'Has the Galaxy gone crazy? Where's your beard?'.

By an amazing coincidence, 'Inferno' also uses facial hair and features to differentiate mirrored characters. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (uptight but decent old stick) has a military moustache. His evil counterpart Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart has no moustache but does have a scar and an eyepatch.

Nasty

Nice

So that's the aesthetics sorted out. What we're interested in is how these popular SF TV shows constructed their 'ideal' politics by representing an 'evil' mirror.*** Bearing in mind that they were made in the late 60s and early 70s, it's interesting that they don't choose Communism. Instead, 'Mirror, Mirror' depicts a piratical world of violent oppression by an Empire, while 'Inferno' chooses a fascist regime, albeit one with Orwellian Stalinist overtones mixed in with a general Nazi atmosphere. So what we think is that both shows avoid criticism of the political cultures which generated them by presenting horrific regimes which some viewers may find resemble states against which they actually fought. 

All seems quite simple. And then I decided that Foucault would be useful here, and I went back to Discipline and Punish, adding 'Technologies of the Self' to the mix. That led me to Kant and the Federation's slightly confused invocation of the categorical imperative, and before long I'd generated 100 pages of notes which seemed to suggest that the Empire (which applies an Agoniser to incompetent crew members) and the Republic (which practises summary execution) are far less oppressive than Who's normal Britain and the Federation, because the Empire doesn't give a damn what you think as long as you do what you're told (and makes you carry around an Agoniser that superior officers use on you when you're not performing up to scratch), whereas the Federation has ways (philosophical 'technologies') to make you love it. It doesn't need to torture you because you've internalised its values and spend your time worrying about whether you've lived up to them in your daily life (hence the importance of the Captain's Log): you govern yourself and become a subject by examining yourself for signs of deviation. The conclusion is that the Doctor's preferred England deserves to survive because it has room for sexiness and intellectual flexibility, whereas the fascist Republic gets blown up because the mad scientist and his party friends are too rigid to admit they need help (and sex). Star Trek's Empire will probably fall or be reformed for the same reasons, with a little help from Not Actually Evil Spock once the 'good' Kirk points out the logic of not committing genocide while giving him a device allowing him to murder his way to the top of the Empire. The Federation, I feel, is a little smug in the way that hegemonic American culture tends to be: I like Doctor Who's rather English assumption that bumbling along without having to be absolutely right all the time is probably the best way to go. Foucault disagrees: he thinks that 'tolerant liberal' states are just subtler at turning individuals into tools of state continuation. 

My colleague thinks this is a slightly fascistic argument, but I'm sticking to the line that it's radically poststructuralist. I've just sent him a largely incoherent and obsessive cowpat of this argument and he's got to a) hack a 20 minute presentation out of it and b) cross out all the bits he thinks are bollocks. The good outcome of all this is that he can't do it tomorrow so I have a day off. The down side is that I've just remembered that rather than go for a long bike ride, I'm going to a funeral instead. 

But when anyone asks me what I do, I can quite truthfully say that students' massive debts pay me to work out what French poststructuralist philosophy has to say about 1970s Saturday evening TV. It's a hard job, but someone's got to do it. 

* That's a link to the Tardis Data Core because I love the fact that there's a whole Wikipedia just for Doctor Who. No lives have been wasted doing that at all.  

** And that's a link to the Star Trek equivalent of Wikipedia, Memory Alpha. It's a hell of a lot bigger than the Data Core too (and one day will outstrip Wikipedia because frankly a lot of knowledgeable men care a lot more about SF shows than they do about the rest of our achievements as a species. 

***'Inferno' also has some rubbish monsters called Primords but they make absolutely no narrative sense at all, so we've decided to ignore them. 

Plashing Vole's Cultural Capers

Hi everybody. Monday going well for you all I trust? I'm marking dissertations. Well, I'm meant to be marking dissertations… I'm not entirely goofing off: lots of people have been coming in looking for help or helping me with things. And I overslept, thanks to a protracted nightmare which involved an alarm clock which wouldn't switch off even after I'd disassembled it. I think that counts as irony.

I had a rather magnificent weekend. Apart from marking some dissertations, I went to a recording of Any Questions, the Radio 4 predecessor of TV's Question Time, saw the new Star Trek film, and saw Athlete's final gig on their 10-year anniversary tour.

Question Time was rather good fun. It didn't start well: I had my own personalised monsoon, which lasted for precisely the time it took to get from the bus to the Keele University bar where I met my friends. I'm not sure I have ever been so wet. The rain was heavier than it's ever been, and my very expensive Montane waterproof jacket seems to have been designed to channel all the water directly to the crotch of my not-at-all waterproof trousers. My question to the panel should have been 'does anyone have any dry clothes please?', or given that I had a couple of scoops, 'would the panel fancy a kebab?'. However, despite steaming and chafing throughout the recording, it was fun. The guests were the awful Christine Hamilton (who seemed to imply that all immigrants are free-loading criminals and tax-avoiders: to an audience of overseas teachers and students); Patrick McLoughlin, a ponderously dull Tory government minister whose only claim to fame is that as a former miner, he's betrayed his class, the walking organ-donor Stephen Twigg, meant to defend public education against the depredations of Michael Gove, though I've never met anyone who knows who he is, and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, the rather excellent, witty and thoughtful journalist whose work I never read because it's in the Independent. 

We had a good heckle, which encouraged the students around us to do the same, clapped the progressive points and roundly booed the xenophobic and reactionary ones. I'd planned to ask the panel whether modern politics has enough room for humility and self-doubt, because as far as I can see, it doesn't, to its detriment. I posed the same question to David Miliband, who signally failed to understand it. However, my question wasn't chosen. The panel discussed transport, Europe, immigration and several other topics, and the audience seemed split between a UKIP minority and a liberal-left majority. All in all: good clean fun. Get it here, if you're in the UK: listen to me heckle Christine Hamilton for unselfconsciously blaming crime on immigrants, despite her husband taking bribes to ask questions in Parliament.

And then to Star Trek: Into Darkness. My, what a glorious caper. It looks great, the action sequences are brilliant, it's paced well, the slightly lame ST humour is intact, the performances are excellent - a great popcorn movie. Plus all the 'uneasy lies the crown' stuff, the homosocial bonding etc etc. And we get the original music back at the end. Heaven



But there's more to it. For the Trek fans – of which I'm one, though not as dedicated as the couple who turned up in Starfleet uniform – the movie plays affectionately fast and loose with the canon. The film is effectively a prequel to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which as we all know is about Khan's revenge on Kirk and ends with Spock's death (don't worry: the rather weak but lovely Star Trek III: The Search for Spock regenerates him). Into Darkness introduces characters central to the earlier films' plots, is spattered with lovely references to episodes to the original series and stages an astonishing reversal of the final homosocially heart-breaking scene of The Wrath of Khan. Audacious, yes, though it somewhat strips Spock of agency - you'll know what I mean when you see it.

Into Darkness is also an explicitly political film too. Kirk is sent off by the supreme commander of Starfleet to murder a terrorist using torpedoes: no trial, no warning. His plan, it becomes clear, is to provoke a war and turn Starfleet into a military organisation rather than an exploratory one. In the grand Star Trek tradition then, the film takes on Iraq, Afghanistan, the death of Bin Laden and Obama's policy of preferring drone attacks to trials, even of American citizens. It's also an interesting film culturally. While a chunk of London is blown up at the start (American filmmakers like blowing up London and Paris: far away enough for American audiences not to mind, yet still recognisable even by Texans), it's rare for films to trash American cities since 9/11. And yet here we have the renegade villain (Benedict Cumberbatch) demolishing half of San Francisco. Clearly Americans are ready for this stuff, though I suspect the conservative viewer wouldn't mind so much: Starfleet's HQ is there in honour of that city's famous commitment to peace, love and understanding - San Francisco is a byword for liberalism in conservative circles.

Finally in this hectic weekend, I was given a guest list ticket to see Athlete, celebrating the 10th anniversary of their début album Vehicles and Animals. I have one of their LPs somewhere, but I have to confess to not knowing much about them: there's a gap in my musical library between about 2002-2008 when I was a) broke and b) mostly buying experimental classical stuff and folk. So I knew Athlete are nice chaps with good tunes: anthemic and upbeat. Well, seeing them live was rather a revelation: their quite pretty songs came with a lot of muscle, and the crowd really made a difference. I had no idea they had such a devoted cult - but this crowd (young and old, mixed sex, mostly white) sang every single word. For someone like me, lacking emotional commitment to the band, it was hugely enjoyable to watch 1500 people united in song. Oh yes: great theremin playing too.

Here's 'Out of Nowhere' - the one with the theremin.



and 'Black Swan'.



Right. Back to the marking.

Paul Uppal and Captain Kirk

In several Star Trek episodes and films, trainee James T. Kirk's solution to Starfleet Academy's Kobayashi Maru test is spoken of with alternately, admiration and disdain. Here's the version from the recent film:



The point of the Kobayashi Maru test is that it's unwinnable. A captain who tries to win misses the point that it's a test of character in an impossible situation: facing death is the real test. James Kirk cheats: he reprogrammes the simulation to make winning possible. Here's Kirk's explanation from The Wrath of Khan.



Which brings me to Paul Uppal MP and Equal Marriage. When he was lobbied last week, he expressed a view that he opposed it: firstly for legal reasons and subsequently on the grounds of religious freedom. Personally, my feeling is that he reckons the Daily Mail voters on the western fringe of The Dark Place plus the Sikh vote will get him re-elected if he panders to their prejudices enough. I also think he's wrong: Sikhs, like everybody else, vote according to a range of personal concerns and can't be treated as a block. They won't vote for him just because he too is Sikh.

The other impulse pulling Paul Uppal was his craven loyalty to David Cameron. As I said yesterday, he voted for student fees, NHS dismemberment, EMA withdrawal, multiple wars, benefit cuts for disabled children and any number of vicious and retrograde laws. He is a man for whom the mirage of advancement means much.

So there he was, last night: his own personal Kobayashi Maru. Vote against equal marriage and lose his 100% record of unthinking loyalty but appease the bigots who elected him. Or vote for equal marriage despite his own views and alienate said bigots, making re-election even less likely? Luckily (and I should have seen this coming given his record thus far), Paul did a Kirk. Rather than face the test, he bottled it and abstained. In one of the most symbolic votes in years, one which firmly divides the political class between humane progressives and reactionaries, Uppal took the coward's way out.

Will it help him? I don't think so. He presumably calculates that Cameron's revenge will be focussed on those who voted against the Bill rather than those who quietly ducked the challenge, while the anti-equality voters will similarly give him a free pass. Wrong. The Conservative leadership will despise him as an unprincipled coward while the bigots will take the view that the Tories enacted equal marriage and won't make any distinction between abstainers and supporters when it comes to putting an X in the box.

Uppal won't go on to save the universe and breed with multiple glamorous aliens. He's destined for humiliating defeat and a life of bitter contempt for the voters. He faced the unwinnable situation and cheated in the most spineless fashion possible.

I know Captain Kirk. And you, Mr Uppal, are no Captain Kirk.

Intruding on private grief…

My usual two hours of shouting abuse at the radio edition of the Daily Mail (a.k.a the Today programme) reached a peak this morning when the producers decided that Disney's purchase of Lucasfilms and decision to flog a horse so dead that its carcass forms the major ingredient of tinned dog food by promising an endless succession of lazy Star Wars sequels merited more coverage than the Coalition's determination to replace our planet-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons with even bigger nuclear weapons. You know, the nuclear weapons that kept us out of all wars since 1945. As long as you don't count Northern Ireland. Or Suez. Or the decolonisation wars. Or the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. And the Gulf War. And Gulf War 2. Oh, and Afghanistan. Plus the bombing of Libya.

But that's beside the point. I could understand if the Disney takeover merited a mention in the business news headlines, but there's no way that a faded commodity deserves the attention it's getting. I would propose that Disney is the Empire, except that George Lucas's cynical outfit hardly fits the role of heroic upstarts, unless you think doing violence to people's childhood memories in exchange for billions of dollars is a subversive act.

I should admit from the start however that I have not a scintilla of emotional attachment to Star Wars. Unlike most of my friends, I'd never heard of it until I went to university. I guess school chums must have had the toys but I don't recall any discussion of them. My first proper exposure to Star Wars was accompanying friends to a cinema in Rhyl (quite painful enough) in the depths of a freezing winter to sit in a smell cinema and endure the first of the 'prequel' movies. I was bored beyond tears and found the graphics reminiscent of Civilization II, the computer game which filled my supposed study time. Even without being familiar with the original movies, I could tell that this was jaded hack work and as we emerged from the foetid swamp of late adolescent bodies, my friends had the look of veterans who'd seen their comrades die in the trenches for nothing. Their childhoods had been sullied, their faith in Hollywood destroyed. Mine not so much - my parents virtually never took us to the cinema. We queued for ET until my dad got bored, so I only saw that in chunks if I happened to catch it on TV. Cinema was somewhere I went on other people's birthday treats. Particularly horrific are my memories of Howard the Duck - awful, but notable for the first topless scene I'd ever witnessed, albeit a topless duck - and whatever that Michael Jackson film was called. Moon-something?

I should confess too that I'm a (critical) Star Trek fan, particularly of the original series. It's essentially a liberal (though not reliably so) retelling of the exploration of the American West with a side-salad of Cold War politics: early episodes of the show explicitly supported the Vietnam War, while later ones became anti-imperialist. Until we got to the execrably Next Generation, Liberal Interventionism In Space with a slathering of New Age bullshit in the shape of Ship's Counsellors and all that bullshit. It's not enough to Explore: you've got to Emote. Christ. For me, the original Star Trek used familiar plots to explore current political and social concerns in interesting ways. I'd also like to draw the jury's attention to my enjoyment of Space: 1999, a surprisingly gritty European SF drama, to the camp pleasures of Buck Rogers, and above all to the original Battlestar Galactica, which depending on who you're listening to, is either Wagon Train in space, or Virgil's Aeneid in space, which is both ambitious and impressive. I haven't seen the 'rebooted' Battlestar, but I gather that it has 'boldly gone' into the realms of political commentary - especially about the Iraq war - which is exactly what good science fiction does.

Since that awful day in Rhyl, I've caught most of the major scenes of the original films, though I've not seen a single cel of the other prequels, nor would I ever want to. Star Wars: A New Hope dramatised exactly Walter Benjamin's theory of the reproducibility of art in the mechanical age, and Jean Baudrillard's concept of multiple-order simulation. The 'original' Star Wars re-enacted the American myths of the war of independence as a way to recoup that nation's fantasy that it is the eternal underdog battling for truth, justice and freedom ('the American Way'). The Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Watergate saga, plus the United States' enthusiastic support for every fascist state in South America, Africa and Asia were making a few Americans wonder about whether they'd lost their way after 200 years.  In fact, some of them felt a bit like this:



So Star Wars isn't, for me, a joyful celebration of America's natural rebellion: it's a deeply conservative appropriation of liberal values for the purpose of making an Empire feel better about itself. The real rebels - and perhaps you could read Star Wars in its context like this - are the North Vietnamese.

So Disney's plans to treat Star Wars as yet another commodity to be ground at is both unsurprising and not particularly interesting. In Baudrillardian terms, each film is a more faded photocopy of the original, each one trying more desperately to capture the essence and passion of the original, and each one fated to be less and less artistically successful. No doubt rabid fans will turn up in droves, and the publicists will hail each film as a 'reboot', but the concept has long since moved from the category of art to commodity, if there is indeed any separation between them in a capitalist economy (thinking of you, Damien Hirst). I doubt the new films will even have the political significance of the first Star Wars films.

You Star Wars fans can regain your dignity quite easily. Just refuse to acknowledge the existence of the  new films. Behave as though George Lucas is dead to you. He's a greedy old man who cares only for the green. He is, in fact, Han Solo without the redemption, or even Jabba the Hut. He's encased your culture in carbonite (is this right?) and he's sold the corpse to the Emperor - and he's not sorry.

Cherish your childhood memories and seek out pastures new.

Out of the mouths of babes…

No, not that kind of babes. Merely young people - two rather talented young writer/actors starting with Shakespeare and going off in interesting directions. Sent to me by a colleague:



a rather cynical (i.e. accurate) analysis of what it takes to win an Oscar:



And finally the apotheosis of culture: Frasier meets Star Trek: Voyager. How have I lived without this?

Friday conundrum

Monteverdi or Star Trek on Sunday?

This:



or this?



(or this)

Revenge of the Nerds

I have this track on the original 7" vinyl. The dub mix ('Dub Trek') has to be heard to be believed, but it's not online.

Phasers on stun

Hello campers. Enjoying the countdown to the weekend? We're only 28 hours from the Star Trek Marathon on an obscure freeview channel. At least, you are: I'll be doing bloody cultural stuff that's good for me, instead of goggling at Kirk's overacting, Scott's Scottish-Canadian-Los Angeles accent, admiring Hikaru Sulu's fencing technique, mimicking Chekhov's accent, raising my eyebrow like Spock and admiring Uhura's communications skills.

Oh well. I've got the original series on remastered DVD and the entire Buffy run - for work purposes, naturally. In tribute though, here's Urusei Yatsura's 'Phasers on Stun'. A classic in my world.



Last night, I went to see Stewart Lee in the company of many friends and quite a lot of our students. The support act was Simon Munnery: funny in parts. Lee was exactly what I wanted - a very clever man with a routine which was self-lacerating, intelligent and highly reflexive. His 'thing' is to explain what he's going to do, comedy-wise, do it, then explain what he's done - he even spent time on a gag satirising his own deconstruction of his routine.

Oh, I can't explain. Here's some Stewart Lee. He's funny and miles more intelligent than us.

Friend or fan

Yesterday morning, it was all so simple. I was going to spend Saturday walking to Mitchell's Fold (a Bronze Age stone circle on the Shropshire Hills), then go to the Monteverdi concert on Sunday with my mother.

Not any more. Film Four are having a Star Trek Marathon. All ten films, with introductions and discussions. Oh my. Even the rubbish films (III, parts of IV - which was nominated for four Oscars - all the Next Generation ones) are sorely tempting.

Hm. Daddy or chips?

Your thoughts? Or abuse…

Nerds… in space

A couple of books in the post today:

Infinite Crisis - the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths shakeup of the superhero world
and
Star Trek 365 - a massive brick featuring glossy photographs and discussions of the original series. It's culturally very important, you know.

I know, I'm a geek.

Would you cheat?

The usual cautions apply to this: it's a survey, and it's in the Daily Telegraph (thanks to Adam for sending it to me).

However, this article claims that a Manchester University study shows that half of students are willing to cheat - primarily through plagiarism and buying essays from the internet. Supposedly the paid-for essay sector is worth £200 million.

I think I'm pretty good at catching cheats, because I'm good at spotting language that doesn't come naturally to, say, a first-year undergraduate. There's been a rash of plagiarism this year - one student's essay claimed that she was an expert at 'intersectional theory', which is a) not relevant to the subject and b) news to me. Then again, I obviously don't know what I've missed when marking.

The problem is that students are paying a lot of money to get a qualification. In a consumer capitalist situation, the educational values are forgotten in pursuit of a certificate. The goal isn't learning, it's winning, and too many students are willing to use any means necessary.

The Manchester study questioned 90 second and third year students at three universities. It found they would be prepared to pay more than £300 for essays gaining a first class mark, £217 for a 2:1 and £164 for a 2:2 piece of work. Longer dissertations can cost up to £2,500. Some offer a cash back guarantee if the student is not awarded a certain degree classification.

"What is quite striking is that it appears that students did not see this form of behaviour as unethical," said Mr Rigby. "There was very little stigma attached to it. One student told me how he was working in the library next to someone who openly got out his credit card and paid for an essay off the internet.

"One could argue that in the modern university, the student is treated as, and increasingly identifies as, a consumer demanding 'value for money'. Perhaps subcontracting some of the work is seen as just an other rational choice by many informed consumers on campus."

Let's be clear: university work isn't the Kobayashi Maru test - it's possible to succeed, but the grade isn't the important bit, it's the intellectual growth. If you cheat, you cheat yourself and your colleagues. Have I ever cheated? No - I felt bad enough when an unseen poetry criticism essay was on a poem I'd read before. Also, my undergraduate education was much more personalised. We hand-wrote essays and gave them to a tutor whom we saw in very small groups, and discussed the face-to-face. I guess the analogy is with shoplifting or tax evasion: you wouldn't con a little old lady but you might not feel so bad ripping off a massive multinational. I wouldn't have tried to deceive the teachers I knew well and respected, but The Hegemon can feel like an impersonal machine. (That's not an excuse, by the way, it's an institutional failure).

Still, when I get sacked, I can make a living writing essays for you.

Oh yes. My weekend starts here.

A goodly haul today:
Irene Gammel (ed.), Making Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (U of Toronto Press 2002)
Irene Gammel (ed.), The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery (U of Toronto Press 2005) - probably not as racy as you think it is
Siân James, A Small Country (Collins, 1979).

and finally

Star Trek (the new film). Man cannot live on Anne of Green Gables and Stephen Greenblatt alone.

A random accretion of things

'Anonymous' (must be a big family) has left another Twitter alternative which absolutely deserves your applause.

Twitter for dermatologists: Zitter.

I shall inform Vole's father, a dermatologist, forthwith.

It's raining today. Being a watervole, this makes me very happy indeed, even though I'm stuck in the office rather than being up a mountain. The Map Twats are off stargazing on Saturday night, without me. I'm competing in the Shropshire Closed on Sunday and just can't manage the logistics to do both. Very disappointing.

Still, I did my own stargazing yesterday. While ironing, I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. To be honest, it's a bit cheesy, a little too touchy-feely: the climax is Decker achieving 'a higher state of consciousness' rather than a deep-space battle, which isn't a very subtle way to drag the franchise into the 70s. Still, the industrial architecture is beautiful, and McCoy's still irascible. There's definitely a subversive streak in that man.

Tomorrow I'm running away for a day off. More specifically, I'm going to Oxford with Zoot and others to buy books, leave CVs at their establishment (ho ho ho) and see Zoot and Deer Friend perform live. I'll take some pictures, but won't be blogging so you'll all have to entertain yourselves.

The clocks struck thirteen

Won't be blogging much today - I'm stuck in MC331 waiting for you all to collect your essays.

I'm still feeling utterly miserable about the elections, amongst other things. Yesterday, I should have phoned my local MP or branch and joined in with the process of recovery, indefatigably knocking on doors, putting forward the case for a hard-left turn, persuading people to see the light.

Instead, I bought a massive sack of Marmite-infused cashew nuts (thus proving that industrial food can be a good thing), a box set of all the decent-ish Star Trek films (1-6) and went to bed at 7 p.m., to catch up on the weekend's newspapers and some sleep. I didn't even listed to any news later than Channel 4's at 7, which is unprecedented for me: usually I take in The World Tonight on Radio 4 from 10-10.30, then turn over to Newsnight from 10.30-11.20, then the midnight news on Radio 4. Sometimes I'll even listen to the World Service news at 1 a.m too. That's how I know stuff.

By the way: if you eat at Café Rouge or Bella Italia, make sure you give the staff a tip in cash, but be careful. These restaurants, and many others, keep the tips to make the staff pay up to the minimum wage if you pay by card, and they're sacking staff who mention what's going on. From October, staff will legally be paid the minimum wage (currently £5.72 for over-21s) without counting tips. Of course, in a civilised society, everybody would be paid enough without tips, but being a waiter is a horrible job (as I know from experience), and they deserve something extra.

(title of the post is from 1984)

Hailing Frequencies Open

I guess, as a man with a blog, that my attendance at Star Trek last night was somehow predestined. Despite being a bit rushed, and depending heavily on Oedipal themes (wit elements of The O. C. and 'bromance'), I loved it. There were plenty of in-jokes without excluding new viewers, the plot was suitably familiar but still well done, the action and effects were impeccable. I've long dreamed of a decent space opera on the big screen (some Iain M Banks? M John Harrison?), and this is the closest I've seen for a while.

I also particularly liked Hikaru Sulu, who volunteers for a mission demanding personal combat skills. Once on board, he confesses that his skill is fencing (though his fight showed little grasp of the discipline, partly because a good fencing bout is over in seconds without any blade contact, while a film fight demands clashing, to-and-fro etc.).

However, I received a considerable degree of ridicule, even from fellow nerds, for professing my preference for Star Trek over Star Wars. I certainly wouldn't want to defend Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation and haven't seen Enterprise, but the original series, some of the films and perhaps Voyager and all the themes tackled are so much more grown up and culturally significant than Star Wars.

Partly this is because Star Trek was a TV series, though it didn't last long. It could respond to current affairs that much more quickly than a film series, and it appeared in a tense moment in history. Through the two series of the TV show, you can detect themes of international relations (hence the presence of Sulu, a recent enemy for Americans and Chekhov - a current one), race (Uhura - black space secretary who gets kissed by Kirk) and war. Star Trek dealt with Vietnam while the war was going on - moving on from being reluctantly in favour to eventually strongly against. Sometimes the franchise has been plain wrong, at other times embarrassing - TNG was horribly touchy-feely bollocks, and sometimes interestingly countercultural (capitalists look very old-fashioned in Deep Space Nine), but it's never claimed that anything is simple and clearcut.

Which brings me to Star Wars. Appearing in the late seventies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that plucky rebels fighting a crushing, technologically superior Empire led by a corrupted leader was a parody for Vietnam with the Rebel Alliance being the North Vietnamese and the Empire being the US, lead by disgraced Nixon and the other presidents.

But no: it's an attempt to kick the Vietnam Syndrome by recasting the Americans as leaders of a disparate band of freedom fighters, looking back to the only time this was even vaguely true, the American War of Independence. There's something in the American psyche that clings on to this despite all the evidence piling up that it is an Empire in the mould of (but even more powerful than) the British and Roman versions. Having had their bottoms kicked by the peasants in Vietman, Spielberg appropriates the Vietnamese narrative to help the losing side feel better about itself.

In doing so, the universe is reduced to the moral equivalent of an old-fashioned Western of children's parable. Nobody ponders their actions, nobody possesses shades of grey - they're Good or Bad, give or take the odd deathbed repentance (which itself is desperately hackneyed). Say what you like about Star Trek's hokey liberal idealism, characters face difficult choices, often fail, and have to come to terms with the ramifications of their actions. This film lives up to those ideals (and has genuinely good jokes)

Given the choice between America as Star Wars and America as Star Trek, I say Beam Me Up.

I get readers - accidentally

I've had an astonishingly lazy day - got up disgracefully late and read the newspapers until now. I'm not even awake enough to be angry about anything (except for the Gillette advert which uses the word 'refuel' to make using moisturizer 'macho' - which merely reinforces sexual stereotypes). Almost got me there  - but an ad for Star Trek has calmed the bile. 

I know the web is meant to reforge social networks - but how does someone in South Africa searching for 'West Midlands Limo Hire' get to my thoughts on Jade Goody?

May is shaping up

… to be a great month for culture. ATP, the Star Trek movie, and Pride and Prejudice With Zombies, about which I blogged a couple of months ago, and which is now available from some behemoth online corporations. I also got Hunger and the new Doves album, Kingdom of Rust in the post today. I've always had a soft spot for them. They're like a happier version of Tindersticks (and the title reminds me of Joan Baez's heartbreaking 'Diamonds and Rust', about her split with Bob Dylan). The video is a live performance from 1975.

And so to bed

Well, not quite. But I am going home now. I only ordered one book today (Vince Cable's The Storm), received Season one of the original Star Trek (for work, of course) and received the news that I don't have to appear in court tomorrow. This is always good to hear - my reign of terror continues.

Actually, I don't have to give evidence in a case because the defence have accepted my statement without question. It's true: I did fly in from Krypton, land on the hoodlum's head, melt his knife with laser eyes then delivered him to the Chief of Police with a tortured pun (actually, that last bit's quite true to life). I still have to attend the crown court for the more serious charges so I'll still get to shout 'You want the truth? You can't handle the truth', though I've never seen the whole film because the sight of Tom Cruise makes me grind my teeth and be randomly cruel to babies.

Engage!

Kirk's chair - now available in replica for $2,717. My birthday is in July: make it so (and yes, I know that's from a subsequent, and inferior, branch of Star Trek.