Male Models

Good morning everybody. I should of course be marking…

OK, one of the things that caught my eye this week was Diane Abbott MP's claim that masculinity is in crisis, in a speech to think-tank Demos. Her central points were that men are being failed by economic and cultural conditions, leading to damaged men and damaged relationships with and attitudes towards women.

At this point, I'm tempted to upload a copy of my PhD thesis, originally entitled '"There's something wrong with us blokes": Constructions of Masculinity in Four 1930s Welsh Novels In English", though the quote was cut for archiving purposes. I've also written a piece recently called '"The Male Shoutings of Men": Masculinity and Fascist Epistemology in How Green Was My Valley'.

Stakhanov, the USSR's productivity pin-up

Soviet hero-workers

The point of both these pieces is that they explicitly say that capitalism both constructs and destructs masculinity, particularly in periods of economic crisis. In the books I write about, masculinity is entirely constructed through manual labour, primarily mining. Physical strength, the ability to provide for one's family, the camaraderie of all-male labour, socialisation and trades union/political activity created a society and society in which women were publicly invisible and masculinity seemed awesomely powerful.

However, while mining provided comprehensible models of masculinity, it also destroyed individual men. The harder one worked, the more broken the miner's body became. The diseases associated with mining and other manual labour rapidly turned the hero-worker into a battered hulk if it didn't kill him outright in an accident. The ability to provide for one's family became subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Then there's the relationship between capitalism and labour. How humanising is the requirement to sell your body to a corporation anyway? Less abstractly, if your masculinity is tied up in work and wages, what happens when there is no work? In some areas of South Wales, unemployment reached 100% for long periods. Men used to work, to bringing home the bacon and earning the respect of their families were forced to depend on the state, charity and the resourcefulness of their wives. Some adapted admirably: others did not, with a rise in domestic violence, alcoholism, depression and despair.

In the books about which I write, these contradictions and tensions are writ large. My argument is that this crisis of masculinity lead in many cases to the adoption of extreme politics. In the case of Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and other left novels, Communism was a most attractive creed. Apart from its obvious critique of capitalism's obvious failures, it lionised (as these images indicated), the Super Man. The latest edition of the novel features another Soviet propaganda piece without - I think - any irony at all:

Detail from John Hastings' 1935 The Worker of the Future Disrupting the Economic Chaos of the Present, mural at the Marx Memorial Library, London (thanks to Cath Feely for this attribution).

However, there's a lot more to the gender politics of Cwmardy than most commentators acknowledge. Firstly, the proto-feminism of Communist women is both admired and feared: Len's partner Mary loses humanity as she becomes an activist, culminating in her sending Len to his death in the Spanish Civil War. Len's father is the classic victim of capitalist masculinity. He's called Big Jim. He's a miner, a fighter, a soldier and a lover: yet all these things are taken away from him as the effects of a career below ground wreck his body and unemployment humbles him. Len is a classic failure of hegemonic capitalistic masculinity. He's thoughtful, depressive, sexually timid and physically weak. Unfitted for manual work and too shy for boisterous bouts of heavy drinking and singing, he eventually finds a solution in the arms of Communism, which dissolves individualism in another ideology of mass masculinity: solidarity with ones brothers and sister. Sadly, it's not enough to soothe Len's oddnesses, and accepting death in Spain (another, militaristic version of masculinity) is his solution. 

In another leftwing novel, Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow for thy Sons, three brothers are faced with twin crises of masculinity and capitalism. Herbert the shopkeeper opts to mimic middle-class feminised prissiness, yet it's clear that he's faking it and that economic change will destroy him. Alf – a miner until the mine closes – becomes a socially disruptive force, locked in battle with a corrupt female charity worker and sexually exploiting a woman with severe learning difficulties: without old or new versions of socially responsible masculinity (though the Party offers some hope), his masculine aggression becomes dangerous. The third brother, Hugh, educated out of his class, is aware that this is how hegemony works: his response is to refuse escape and to conduct affairs with the wives of capitalism's managerial class as a form of revenge. 

On the other side of the political divide, Fascism also valorised extreme forms of masculinity. While Communism was pro-feminist to some extent, Fascism required the separation of male and female spheres. Men were fighters, en masse and outside. Women belonged in the home. In Welsh literature, How Green Was My Valley opts for a Welsh Fascism with distinctly Nazi overtones as a solution to masculine and cultural decay. Mining is wrecked by the workers, seen as 'lice', 'pigs', 'monkeys' and 'dogs', subverted by Marxist agitators: there's no serious economic analysis. The hero, Huw, relocates masculinity in individual craft labour, chivalry, resistance to cultural and physical decay - fairly standard stuff. But then one day he gets his first erection, and life is very different. Sex with women is dangerous to him: 'soft', curvy, rounded women are a trap: young women in the novel are essentially whores (Ceinwen) or symbolic of Welsh cultural ruination, doomed to an early death. It's not sex that makes Huw a man - it's the masculine power that comes from puberty. Huw starts having visions, mostly modelled on Nazi art and rallies: men in armour, carrying flaming torches. He learns from these visions that 'real' men aren't miners, don't join unions. Real men are militaristic leaders, scourges of Jews, bankers, half-breeds, socialists and proletarians. Real men must be higher up and separate, looking down on the rabble from the mountains. 

It's easy to see the roots of fascism in male crisis, but we need to stress that the origins of all masculine failure are in capitalism. Masculinity in a capitalist system is about performing particular roles: worker and consumer. The same might be said of femininity: both concepts are constructed in particular ways to serve the needs of capitalism. But in the post-industrial condition in which Britain finds itself (read Christopher Meredith's Shifts), the male crisis is most pressing because working-class men have moved from mass employment to mass unemployment, or from manual labour to service industry and consumerism. There's no doubt that male mass society damaged men, women and relations between the sexes, but it provided some form of agency to men. 

Now, the children of miners and steelworkers are marooned. Many haven't adapted to the emancipation of women, and they're not helped by – as Abbott points out – capitalism's relentless objectification of the female body as a sales ploy. From Fairy Liquid ads which constantly portray women as house-bound, voluntary domestic slaves to popular culture's obsessive presentation of women as willing, available, compulsorily heterosexual unpaid prostitutes, men have no space in which to develop a secure, open, stable and progressive masculinity. The result is teenagers texting each other pictures of their female classmates in degrading sexual poses, widespread homophobia, emotional damage, failed family structures, violent crime and paranoid defensiveness. 

I don't think there ever was a golden age of masculine security, nor that there's a potential fixed form of masculinity that would suit everyone, for ever. Nor do I think that abolishing capitalism will solve all our problems in one fell swoop: all economic and ideological structures deform the individual, as Len finds in Cwmardy (something the novel's Stalinist fans do their best to ignore). Culture is hard to shake off, too. 

Abbott says that markets produce

• A generation of British men without realistic heroes, who feel like they have been set up to fail.
• A ‘we’ve got nothing left to lose’ generation of British men.
• A nation of atomised, lonely, entrepreneurial boys, who often have lives without meaning.
• A society where British manhood is now shaped more by market expectations – often unachievable ones - than by fathers, family values, a sense of community spirit and perseverance.
• I believe we need to say loudly and clearly, that there is a powerful role for fathers. The truth is that just as loving fathers are a benefit to children, so loving families are a benefit to men.

I don't disagree. Men suffer under consumer capitalism just as women do, and often make things worse for themselves and women. I don't share her belief that there was or must have been a nice society formed by happy families in stable communities in which Daddy is strong and emotionally resilient (reading social history or discovering the sexual horrors of this and previous ages dispels this), but I think her analysis of the current problems are supported by cultural analysis. She carefully doesn't blame families or feral kids or whatever: we have a structural problem, which is something the Tories don't talk about. If you engineer mass unemployment, or a low-wage economy (I'm looking at you, too, New Labour), or demand that people leave London because housing benefit won't cover the costs, thus separating families from their communities, extended network of relations etc, then you get unfocussed anger and social decay.

Imagine being 20, male or female, unemployed and suddenly being dumped in Stoke. All your friends and family are in London. You have no social circle. No prospect of employment. Hostility from your new neighbours who are struggling themselves, and from the authorities who blame your unemployment on idleness rather than a national crisis. Result? You spend your time killing prostitutes on your X-Box, take up drink and drugs, and engage in antisocial behaviour. There's no chance of education, you can't find capital for your business ideas, you don't have a union or older role models: you're Alf of Sorrow for thy Sons and you're going to hurt yourself and those around you. You may become a parent but the odds are against you being a decent role model, however good your intentions. Without the opportunity to engage in the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, people develop hyper-real versions of these things: with men, it's often violence and the sexual degradation of women. Or as Abbott puts it:

I’m particularly troubled by a culture of hyper-masculinity – a culture that exaggerates masculinity in the face of a perceived threat to it. We see it in our schools; in the culture of some of our big business financial institutions; in some of our in inner cities; and even on many student campuses. At its worst, it’s a celebration of heartlessness; a lack of respect for women’s autonomy; and the normalisation of homophobia. I fear it’s often crude individualism dressed up as modern manhood. 

Decent, fulfilling work may help men. Marx wavered between the Dignity of Labour and a vision of the Communist Future in which a small amount of work subsidised a life of leisure and intellectual fulfilment, but it's fairly clear that decent work is psychologically beneficial - and yet capitalism relies on reducing men and women to drones, and keeping a reserve army of desperate unemployed people on hand to depress wages and frighten the rest of us into obedience.  

What of women? Abbott talks, rightly I think, of porn culture's infection of everyday socialisation. Young, working-class and often highly-educated women have been persuaded that even the most degrading sexual activities and attitudes are 'empowering' – you may recall that I recently wrote about teaching Jilly Cooper's Riders and the way it depicts fellatio as a sexual adventure for women rather than one-way gratification of the abusive and cruel men in their lives. Porn is mainstream and it teaches men that their sexuality depends on progressively more demeaning use of women, rather than mutual pleasure. Fifty Shades of Grey is symptomatic of this: it presents female submission as somehow empowering, while uncritically idolising unearned capitalist success: Christian Grey is where sexual and economic violence come together (no pun intended). 

Abbott's solutions are clear and OK: better transmission between the generations of positive, emotionally-open masculinity. Stable, fulfilling work, and state provision of health and psychological services. But we need to go further. Banning porn or exploitative games or whatever aren't solutions: we need to end a culture which benefits from the consumption of goods which promote atomisation and antagonism. 

And that means ending capitalism as an economic structure and as a cultural condition. My 1930s Welsh authors knew this (well, the leftwing ones did). And now you do too. 

The wanderer returns

Hi everybody. I'm back from the 25th Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (though there was of course considerable overlap between the two languages), held at Neuadd Gregynog near Y Drenewydd / Newtown in Powys. I am bursting with energy and enthusiasm, having spent a few days in snowbound natural beauty talking about all the things I love – and more things I didn't know I'd love – with lots of other enthusiastic, friendly and intelligent people. It was like a mini-holiday.

Gregynog itself was built as a Victorian experiment in concrete. It's a huge, rambling pseudo-Tudor structure with all the quirks that implies. Antique toilets retained for show, enormous rooms with complimentary draughts, beautiful antique and art (there's a fine-art printer, Gwasg Gregynog, on-site – I bought a beautiful pamphlet of Gwyn Thomas's poetry, and left it somewhere I know not where), cake and wine shovelled down your throat seemingly every 23 minutes and no showers. Great big baths, begging for luxuriating in only with 65 other people queuing it seemed rude to really wallow. The grounds are enormous and beautiful, a beauty sharpened by the snow which fell continuously for 36 hours.

Here's the view from my bedroom window at 6 a.m. one morning and – explaining my sadness at returning – the view from my flat last night. You can see all the pictures I took at Gregynog here. To see these samples larger, click on them.

Consequently, the conference felt like it was only one murder or power-cut away from an Agatha Christie mystery. We had a library, a music room and all the other venues for a country-house drama or a live (dead?) edition of Cluedo. I thought, too, of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Box of Delights, all texts which require large country houses, a sense of isolation and lots of snow. Sadly the one realm accessible through my wardrobe was an REF panel demanding to know where my articles were and the Student Experience Committee wanting to turn me to stone. Little disagreement about my PowerPoints.

The conference itself focused on Literary Topographies: Mapping Welsh Writing in English literally, literarily and symbolically (focussed, that is, once we'd all stopped repeatedly laughing at England's humiliation at the hands of Wales in the 6 Nations). I couldn't go to everything, as there were usually two sessions running in parallel, but those I did attend were magnificent. M Wynn Thomas and Tony Brown launched their new books on RS Thomas. MWT, who examined my PhD has written RS Thomas: Serial Obsessive while Tony co-edited the Uncollected Poems of RS. I was really pleased to discover that most people share my feeling that the later, less didactic poems are better than the nakedly political earlier work. In the questions we got to talking about presence and absence of nation and god in the poetry, and RST's search for them both. Also launched were the new edition of Allen Raine's A Welsh Witch edited by Jane Aaron and Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich's collection of essays on the wonderful Margiad Evans.

M Wynn Thomas in the midst of full-on hwyl

The books being launched. Did I buy them? Of course. And more…

The first keynote speaker was Damian Walford Davies, one of a clan of extremely accomplished critics and authors. His subject was Swedenborg's Skull, Swansea and the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins. He took us through the details of the Swedish mystic's posthumous indignities (his skull was repeatedly purloined, substituted and traded), including its sojourn in Swansea in the mid-twentieth century. Vernon Watkins, friend, mentor and obituarist of Dylan Thomas, said DWD, subtly channelled the Swedenborg story in poems covertly memorialising his deceased friend, along with references to the Mari Lwyd tradition (parading with a mare's skull) and perhaps (I added) to the Celtic tradition of collecting your enemies' skulls and of talking decapitated heads. Entertaining, erudite and  enjoyable.

The Gregynog Dragon - all fire extinguished

Then, it being 10 o'clock, we headed to the cellar bar to carry on the discussion. Next morning, I was up at 6.15 not to beat the queue for the baths (nobody needs to see Plashing Vole en dishabille) but to go for a walk with my camera before everybody stamped through the deep, undisturbed snow. I met Kirsti, a pheasant and a lot of very depressed sheep standing around in what became quite a snowstorm. I make no apology for the huge number of pictures of sheep. I like them. They have a quiet dignity only enhanced by the sure and certain knowledge that they will soon be dinner. Here are some of the snow shots I took. 

Depressed pheasant

Gregynog Hall

Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

Before long the sheep appeared to look upon me as their Saviour and followed me around the fields bleating piteously. Mind you, I was covered with snow: perhaps they thought I was one of them. 

After a hearty breakfast larger than my usual entire day's intake, I went to the Transformations session. Reuben Knutson presented a fascinating ethnographic documentary/art production examining the hopes and dreams of the 1970s eco-incomers who made their homes in Wales, escaping from what they saw as damaging and self-destructive urban English life. One of the organisers was a child of this movement, as is my colleague Steve, so it was fascinating to see their lives in a wider framework. 

After that, Andy Webb of Bangor University examined poetic responses to the spate of reservoirs built in Wales by English city councils in the 19th and 20th centuries. He used new approaches from human geography to get us to see the reservoirs and the massive amounts of surrounding land as industrial, capitalist products. Without the water, the English cities couldn't expand and develop. So they acquired enormous tracts of Welsh land, flooded historic villages and valleys, and entirely stopped development in the watersheds, meaning that the land we're encouraged to see as natural beauty and as a leisure resource is deeply implicated in capitalist and national imbalance. The poems we discussed were by Ruth Bidgood, RS Thomas, Gillian Clarke and Harri Webb. I didn't know much of Bidgood's stuff: now highly recommended. 

The final presentation was Anwen Jones and Rowan O'Neill's discussion of Owen Rhoscomyl's fascinating and frankly bonkers National Pageant of 1909 and Cliff McLucas's ethnographic-art-human geography-ethnographic-cultural studies exercises he calls 'deep mapping'. All completely new to me but compulsively interesting. I'd like to see some of McLucas's work at some point. 

Quick stop for cake and coffee, then I went to the session on Placing Literature. Jon Anderson and Sarah Morse talking fascinatingly about the porous borders between fiction and reality when texts take 'real' places as settings. The result is that places 'make' texts and texts 'make' places: I know that I'm always aware of the literary significance of the places I visit, such as Lud's Chapel appearing in Gawain and the Green Knight. They also discussed the importance of 'plotline' as a means of readers orienting themselves in a text, in very creative and individual ways. Following that, they showed a film they made tracing the various Cardiffs of several authors, overlapping each one's fictional setting. They also presented this quotation from one of my favourite books, Gwyn Thomas's A Welsh Eye (not the poet Gwyn Thomas previously mentioned):

the geology of remembrance is damnably deep and will need to wait overlong for its final textbook. It will prove to be more insolent and unyielding than the rocks and destructive bubbling filth of this eroded and ambulant clinker. And legend has made our particular case more than usually complicated. 

The final session was a presentation by Bronwen Price, 'Literary Tourism'. Holding a PhD in Welsh literature and working for Llenyddiaeth Cymru / Literature Wales, she organises literary tours around Wales: the Dylan Thomas canoe tour, a talk on RS Thomas in the Manafon church he hated being vicar of, a Tolkien's Wales tour and several others. Some sound tenuous, others fascinating, and I shall be attending several in 2014.

After lunch, I went to Robert Clark's keynote on 'Critical Literary Geography'. Clark runs the subscription site Literary Encyclopaedia and described himself as a 'humanities enterpreneur'. I happened to share the train ride home with him and he told me a lot about his friendships with the late, lamented Angela Carter and Lorna Sage. Clark is soon launching Mapping Writing, which uses Google Maps to locate events in authors lives and in their works, such as Robinson Crusoe's journey. A long time ago it occurred to me that this kind of thing would be excellent. Imagine clicking on, say Bloomsbury to find out that Virginia Woolf wrote a chapter of Orlando in this house on that particular day, while over in Mayfair Bertie Wooster was rudely awakened by Aunt Dahlia. Of course, authors and their texts aren't (and shouldn't be) literally reliable, but it's a fascinating exercise. For instance, Clark explained that calculating the costs and distances travelled by Austen's characters gave one a sense of their social positions and her careful approach to accuracy. From the novels, one can even work out which maps she used, and how these maps created a particular cultural perspective (e.g. by depicting the Great Estates rather than the villages nearby). Bergson, Chatwin, Swift and Lefebvre were all fed into the mix. Interestingly, he also claimed that French intellectuals are swiftly consigning Foucault and Lacan to the intellectual dustbin. I must confess to being surprised, but then I don't keep up with the debate, embarrassingly.

The site works with Safari but it's not quite ready and is better viewed with Firefox. Contributors are being sought and I'm rather tempted.

Robert Clark

I must confess that I skipped the next session. Exhausted, I bought more books and retired to my single bed in the room larger than my entire flat and dozed. Following more tea and cake, I returned to the fray for the Masculine Modernities session. It could have been designed for me, both papers touching on work I've recently done on Welsh masculinities and walking tours. Steve Hendon covered David Jones's and Llewelyn Wyn Griffith's 'Representations of First World War Masculinities' (if you haven't read Jones's In Parenthesis, you're in for a treat: one of the most impressive modernist texts you'll ever encounter), while Tomos Owen discussed WH Davies's and Ernest Rhys's accounts of walking tours through South Wales. I learned an awful lot and took copious notes.

Actor and academic Peter Morgan examines a research poster.

Detail from an enormous painting leaning against a wall

Prof Jane Aaron examines Nor Hashima Isa's poster

Llenyddiaeth Cymru / Literature Wales walking tour guides

After that, more wine and a poster session on new research, followed by dinner and another keynote, Tristan Hughes reading hilariously from his novels and talking about his Canadian-Anglesey life. I'd never heard of him before, but have now ordered all his work. I particularly enjoyed his short story about a flaky, aggressive, deluded New Age hippy. When I was a student at Bangor, every Surrey-dwelling Tarquin and Annabel donned a tie-dye disguise, grew dreadlocks, got faux-Celtic tattoos and tortured us all with bloody digeridoos everywhere we went. I would put them in camps. Or at least take away their trust funds.

The day was only enhanced by the other event on over the weekend: Welsh Young Musician of the Year trials. Gorgeous live music emanating from random rooms wherever I went.

Another trip to the bar ensued, this time chatting to poetry Demiurge Kathryn Gray, Eighteenth-century expert Elizabeth Edwards and the whole CREW (little in-joke there) of postgrads from Swansea, quite the coolest bunch of people I know. I got several tips for my Welsh SF plan and caught up on all the gossip, particularly the tale of the egregiously self-promoting and entertainingly bitter Julian Ruck, a man with even more opinions and fewer brain cells than me: the Swansea crowd got caught up in the media coverage of the man's latest little outburst against the 'Taffy literary establishment' which won't print his appalling books. They spent the day wrecking our heads with the 'missing pound' maths conundrum then spent the early hours wrecking their heads with copious quantities of alcohol. Their disgusting youth meant that they turned up to breakfast looking fresh and relaxed after only three hours in bed. The serene bastards. 

I stayed in bed on Sunday morning rather than go for another walk in the snow. (In case my mother's reading: even this Pope would have forgiven me skipping mass, and anyway I'm an atheist now mother and there's nothing you can do about it). After that, I fancied some genre fiction, so I went to Alyce von Rothkirch's and Catherine Phelps's 'Big Data' take on Welsh crime fiction. I don't read much crime fiction other than Pryce's Aberystwyth noir-parodies, but they demonstrated some fascinating conclusions about the ways in which Welsh crime fiction can be categorised. Then Katriona Mackay discussed Underworlds and the Gothic in Pryce's work and Torchwood. As I'm going to do something on Welsh SF, her material was fascinating and very useful. She and Katie Gramich are doing some fascinating work on Welsh Gothicism, so I'll be keeping an eye out for their stuff. Finally before lunch, Paul Vigor presented his preliminary thoughts on Tolkien's possible use of the Marcher wars as models for his Gondor v Mordor fantasy history, drawing on topography and place-name meanings for support. I've never voluntarily sat through a paper on Tolkien before!

Finally, I went to the session on Writing Places 2. I really wanted to hear Steven Lovatt on Dorothy Edwards (about whom I wrote my MA), but he couldn't make it. Instead, Gwyneth Tyson Roberts and Rita Singer gave what I thought were exemplary papers. Tyson Roberts spoke about two early poems by the 19th-century poet and essayist Jane Williams (Ysgafell). She handed us copies of the poems and pointed out that they were derivative, conventional and even (whisper it) clichéd homages to 18th century poetry rather than the more current Romantic trends. Oh god, I thought. This is going to be dreary. Wrong. Roberts demonstrated with utter conviction that the poems were deliberately written with the taste of literary authority in mind because Williams was 19, sequestered in a Welsh cottage as an au pair and desperate to be accepted as a poet. And if that wasn't enough, Roberts uncovered the covert biographical elements of these seemingly non-specific texts in a virtuoso demonstration of close reading and cultural contextualisation. Afterwards, Rita Singer did something similar with the early 20th-century novels of Allen Raine, explaining that there's a cultural and moral geography at work in her interesting (and finally re-published) texts. 

Readers, returning to the Dark Place and the pile of marking was a struggle. How I wish we'd been snowed in for another couple of days. I had enough pairs of clean under crackers, the wi-fi worked, there's a grand piano and a fully-stocked library. And bar. Instead, here I am in the office once more. 

PS. As you can seen, I'm a prime example of Michael Gove's 'Bad Academics', one of the Enemies of Promise, a Marxist 'Hell-Bent On Destroying Our Schools', one of 'The Blob'. Poor Mr Gove appears to have overdosed on McCarthy speechs, Tea-Party videos and 50s alien invasion movies. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite. If he was merely dim, one could forgive him. But Michael's a sold B-grade student: not up to originality, but quite intelligent enough to know better. And he does know better. That's what's so sad. He doesn't really think that the country's schools and universities are packed with traitors brainwashing students. He just knows that's what UKIP voters and Mail readers believe, and he's all too willing to service them. This kind of cynicism is far worse, far more reprehensible than merely being a bit limited in the Grey Matter department. No amount of re-sits will help him now. He should be gently ushered out into the world of work. I'm sure there's a level crossing he could operate, or a lift old-fashioned enough to require an attendant. He'd like that.

Reflections on the piano

The Library corridor

Another library room

I'm quite pleased with this still life of Daffodils

I just liked the symmetry of the stairs

Books reflected in the harpsichord

Again, I just liked the architectural lines

A wonderful opportunity

If you were one of my students this year, you'll have been exposed to the delights of Welsh literature written in English: Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas, R. S. Thomas and others. So, desperate to explore this world further, you'll all be applying for an AHRC-funded PhD in the field at Bangor University, won't you?

It's a top quality university, and your options are: bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, Arthurian literature (one of my hobbies) and Welsh Writing in English, though other proposals are welcome. And at £13,950 per year, the scholarship is a lot better than the £6000 I survived on.

Apply today!

Buried in concrete once more

On Saturday night, after a long session of real ales and singing Welsh songs in the bar and calling someone 'an idiot savant disguised as Rolf Harris' (totally accurately), I was lulled to sleep by owls hooting and foxes slinking off to work. Last night I fell asleep to the sounds of sirens, breaking glass and vomit splattering my doorstep. Yes, back in the Dark Place.

I usually find conferences quite stressful, whether I'm presenting a paper or not (and this time it was 'not'). There's the unfamiliar place, large numbers of strangers all trying to network and establish themselves in the academic pecking order, and the sheer weight of learning. But this one was utterly delightful: large groups of friendly and interesting people, fascinating topics and a delightful setting. Over the course of the three days I variously wished I was a Romanticist, a translation expert, a poetry specialist and a whole range of other fields as speaker after speaker made their field sound like the summit of human endeavour: even the one who got us all to sing the Welsh-language version of the Marseillaise… (you can sample Tystion's hip-hop version here).

Anyway, amongst the many and expensive books I bought were a couple of lovely examples of book design: Bert Coombes's I Am A Miner (1939) which looks graphically very fresh, and Gwyn Thomas's first novel, Where Did I Put My Pity? (1946). Coombes was a Wolverhampton man who pretended not to be and wrote a memoir (These Poor Hands) about becoming a miner in Wales which turned out to be mostly fiction… James Frey is a very late entry to the field. Gwyn Thomas was a bitter, darkly comic genius who invented a literary style apparently from nowhere to express the plight of people like him: hugely intelligent, fluent, and trapped by capitalism. Later on he became a bit of a media darling and his books lost their bite, sadly, but his first few (The Alone to the Alone, The Dark Philosophers, Sorrow For Thy Sons) are astonishing and deserve to be famous.

GT hated the Welsh language movement, probably because he couldn't speak Welsh whereas his parents and older siblings could. For my own amusement, I've got the book in the same protective packet as my copy of nasty neo-fascist Saunders Lewis's pamphlet Is There an Anglo-Welsh Literature? (his answer: no). 

The Romance of Wales

The conference I'm at (Wales and Revolution) has been hugely interesting partly because it's not all about the industrial 20th-century work I'm familiar with: we've had medieval literature, Romantic revivals of Welsh medievalism, and lots of work on the French Revolution and Welsh experiences/understandings of it - from popular novels to letters and diaries.

It's so idyllic. My main problem right now is that the birds are drowning out the Bach Cello Suite (my favourite music of all) being played beautifully by someone a floor below. I got99 problems and the Bach is one…

Unfortunately, it's proving to be a hugely expensive weekend too: there are an academic bookseller and a rare books dealer here, and I've succumbed in a big way: £160 and counting. It could have been worse: I picked up a big stack of beautiful illustrated retellings of various myths from 1914, misreading the price as £22.50. It turned out to be £225, so I bought just one of them, a prose translation of Dafydd ap Gwilym's poetry by Evelyn Lewes, printed by the very sought-after David Nutt, for £25. Just for the cover design and typography it's worth the price, though I now have an aching desire for the rest of the set.

Not sure it really shows up, but the rider's coat is a deep metallic gold colour.

It's been a good day for picking up interesting book designs. Here are two classics: I Am A Miner (1939) by Bert Coombes (from Wolverhampton, claimed to be from Herefordshire, became a South Wales miner and author), which seems to be a socialist periodical called  Fact and Gwyn Thomas's first publication, Where Did I Put My Pity?, from 1946. I'll post photos of those when the Blogger server starts to behave itself…

I also picked up Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt's (eds) Wales and the Romantic Imagination, which looks excellent (Pratt once taught me), Mapping the Territory: Critical Approaches to Welsh Writing in English ed. by Katie Gramich, Linden Peach's The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys (scandalously under-rated author), Sarah Prescott's Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales, Aaron, Altink and Weedon's collection Gendering Border Studies, a translation of John Gwilym Jones's The Plum Tree, Gramich's new biography of Kate Roberts (who I think is one of the best writers of the 20th century), Glyn Jones's Gwyn Jones Lecture pamphlet Random Entrances to Gwyn Thomas (none of them related), Garlick's historic An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (I only had a photocopy before), an original 1939 edition of Saunders Lewis's provocative lecture Is There An Anglo-Welsh Literature?

Now I'm off to a keynote lecture by H. Gustav Klaus, another of my academic heroes. I've earned this!

His Dark Materials?

In my pigeonhole today were a number of interesting objects.

Superman: War of the Worlds, an interesting insertion of the Man of Steel into the H. G. Wells story, bought mostly because Oswald Mosley, the wannabe British Hitler, makes an appearance and I'm thinking of writing a piece on literary representations of this odious individual. It was packaged beautifully: clearly nerds are much more careful with their belongings than ordinary book dealers.

The new (Spring 2011) issue of New Welsh Review - full of good poetry, short fiction and reviews.

John O'Sullivan's A Photographic History of Mining in South Wales. I'm giving a paper on masculinity in mining fiction at a conference on Saturday, so it should provide some good images. Once I've written the damn thing.

Eirene White's very, very short The Ladies of Gregynog, the fascinating story of these Victorian/Edwardian couple, leading arts patrons and cultural icons.

Stead Jones's reprinted Make Room For the Jester, another piece of forgotten Welsh Writing in English reissued by the Library of Wales.

A remote control for my Nikon D7000. Rather pleasing that it cost £6 considering the huge cost of the actual camera.

Gruff Rhys's new solo album, Hotel Shampoo.


Nicholas Daly's Modernism, Romance and the fin de siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914.


Sally Ledger's The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the fin de siècle.

Finally, and most oddly, this piece of craftwork. I have no idea who made it, so thankyou to whoever put it there. File me under 'bemused but touched'.

My hero

It's a while since I nattered on about Welsh literature, my primary passion.

I just received from Academi two packets of postcard portraits of Welsh writers in English. All the usual suspects: RS Thomas, Dannie Abse, the profoundly under-rated David Jones (I have one of his prints in the office), Alun Lewis, Richard Llewellyn that disgraceful fascist hack and many more (mostly male, but not exclusively).

I expected to see one of Lewis Jones (1897-1939). He wrote two wonderful novels (Cwmardy and We Live) and a few short stories. He also managed to be a miners' leader, a Communist Party councillor (though he was repeatedly suspended from the Party and my PhD claims that he was a syndicalist with reforming tendencies), he went to prison for 'sedition', he organised the Welsh branch of the National Unemployed Workers Movement (perhaps it's time to restart it) and led their hunger marches, he recruited for the Spanish Civil War (he tried to volunteer but was refused) and he deliberately insulted Stalin, in person, in Moscow, at the height of the liquidations. In the midst of all this, he apparently had a love life that made Lloyd George look shy and retiring, and had a massive… work ethic. He died of a heart attack after speaking to 200,000 people at 30 mass meetings in one day in aid of Spain.

None of us are likely to match that commitment or energy.

Here's the picture I found of him, greeting Arthur Griffiths, another great Welsh socialist who played his part in Irish freedom too, joining the Irish Citizen Army.

Anti-Means Test (for welfare) postcard

Papering over the cracks

I've had an appalling day. Two extremely long meetings, in one of which Zoot Horn suggested that I close down Plashing Vole as part of our recruitment strategy. I don't what the addled old hippy's getting at, but be assured that I'm rooting through my files for embarrassing pictures, Zoot my old mate.

Then a 90 minute lecture with far too much material to keep the audience's attention - had to be done, but even I was bored before the time was up. Then another seminar in which only two students had read the material. Too morally weak just to throw them out, I droned on for 45 minutes before giving up, exhausted.

There is some joy however, and it comes in the form of printed and folded sheets of paper. Specifically:

A beautiful reprint of Tove Jansson's The Dangerous Journey comic strip and poem (finely translated by Sophie Hannah).
M. Wynn Thomas's magnificent examination of the interaction between literature and nonconformism in Welsh culture, In the Shadow of the Pulpit;
Steve Bell's new collection of nasty-minded political cartoons, If…Bursts Out;
a second-hand copy of Bruce Sterling's Distraction - near future dystopia. I'm currently reading Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, set in a post-literate post-hegemonic dysfunctional United States. It's good, but not as clever as it thinks it is (and rather nationalistic in an ironic sense. We're apparently meant to be horrified by the idea of Chinese hegemony. Having lived under US hegemony for my entire life: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Oh yes: and the new Orange Juice boxed set. Mmmm

Now I'm off home to eat junk and do nothing.

Yet more books

An odd lot in today - Anne Lister's diaries (good for teaching Victorian culture), Emma Smith's thesis on masculinity in Welsh men's writing (her chapter on Lewis Jones is very similar to mine, unfortunately, though the others aren't so there's hope yet) and - for fun - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF. I'm not sure why I keep buying this stuff: between BP and the ongoing and unthinking poisoning of every place and organism on the planet, I could just read the newspapers.

The ground cut away beneath my feet

I've been planning to rewrite my PhD as a book - it's a study of masculinity as constructed in novels by Lewis Jones, Gwyn Thomas and Richard Llewellyn. Imagine my horror when I find on the web this book:

Masculinity in Welsh Writing in English: The cases of Lewis Jones, Glyn Jones, Gwyn Thomas and Ron Berry by EMMA SMITH

Now I'll have to spend £71 on this thesis, and hope that my approach is sufficiently different or better. I'm pleased that someone else is thinking about this stuff, but also highly nervous!

Helping RS with his 'Afforestation'*

A couple of really interesting books have come in over the last couple of days - the Welsh bildungsromans I hadn't read on Rachel Trezise's list. I've received Catrin Dafydd's Random Deaths and Custard, which looks like fun, Aneurin Gareth Thomas's Luggage from Elsewhere, and Joe Dunthorne's Submarine. They're all set in urban south Wales (or South Wales - there's a heated argument about that): on the edge of Welsh but not fully included or totally excluded. Being Welsh hovers around the edges as a possibility, a mirage, or a position which makes all the ordinary teen horrors ever so slightly different (the narrator of Submarine, for instance, hides his part-Englishness, having been bullied for being Welsh when he lived in England: difference = weakness in the playground).

I read Submarine in one go the other night, even though I was exhausted from 12 hours of marking. The beautiful dustjacket helped, as did the narrator. It's the teenage boy to whom all the events happen, so there's a lovely gap between what he thinks he knows and what we know is actually going on, between his cleverness and how clever he thinks he is. The usual stuff happens: sex, parental marital problems, bullying (he's a guilt-ridden perp, not a victim) and meditation. It's comic, sad and knowing - well worth reading.

*How am I helping? Well, 'Afforestation' is an RS Thomas poem about the commercial forests imposed on historic Welsh locations in the 1950s and 1960s by the British Forestry Commission - historic villages and working farms were wiped out, covered in sterile, alien trees which supported neither animals nor workers, in pursuit of money in a way that wouldn't have happened in England. Every Welsh book is a blow FOR FREEDOM! Etc.

Welsh fiction's moment in the sun

The Guardian has a short feature on Welsh books (in English or translated into English) for cool kids - urban and hip rather than concerned with the loss of land, language and work. I've read most of them and have the rest on order, and will be teaching Freshers (originally Ffreshars) next year.

It's worth a read - non-metropolitan work doesn't often get a look in, thanks to the economics and cultural position of the publishing industry, but new perspectives are always interesting, whether you enjoy the books themselves or not.

Of Trezise's list, I'd recommend anything Niall Griffiths writes. He's interested in the Liverpool-North Wales diaspora and the consequences of community and cultural decay, which goes both ways, and is influenced by Irvine Welsh but I think he's got more depth. So Long, Hector Bebb is a brilliant, technicolor punch in the face (it's partly about boxing) of the dreary Chapel-obsessed moral novels and One Moonlight Night/Un Nos Ala Leuad follows Caradoc Evans in excavating the twisted horror underlying the Nonconformist rural Wales of postcard fame. I'd say that anything Gwyn Thomas (the novelist who described his work as 'Chekhov with chips', not the poet) wrote is stunning, and the same goes for Chris Meredith (men marooned in post-industrial Wales) and Wiliam Owen Roberts, whose experimental novel Y Pla or Pestilence unites medieval Wales and Vietnam to amazing effect. Y Pla has been translated into English and several other languages but his other novels haven't, which is a shame as he's such a brilliant exponent of what might be called postmodern writing.

I notice that these are mostly by men - accidentally. Wales is bursting with talented female writers - Catherine Merriman, Fflur Dafydd (a personal favourite), Menna Elfyn, Kate Roberts (who I think is one of the top ten writers of the twentieth century), Dorothy Edwards, Eiluned Lewis - and I've not even got on to the poetry.

Finally, if you want a laugh (with some suspense), try Malcolm Pryce's Aberystwyth series of noir parodies set in a twisted alternate Wales. Glorious.

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.

It's not all doom and gloom though

As George Eliot wrote, 'the world outside books is not a happy place' (or something similar). It's great inside though, and I've just taken delivery of another consignment. A wall is rising around my desk…

Rubio and Waterston's Norton critical edition of Anne of Green Gables;
Lauter and Fitzgerald's anthology Literature, Class and Culture (rather too American for my plans, but fascinating anyway);
Kate Roberts's The Awakening, a new translation by Siân James (whose A Small Country is a wonderful, rich text) which looks excellent.

I realise that this may be of interest to precisely none of my readers

… but my PhD is on Welsh Writing in English, so I'm very pleased to have discovered that CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) has a blog, on which fascinating issues of theory, interpretation and canonisation have been recently discussed. Croeso.

Books books books… yn Gymraeg

It's not often that I'm moved to buy a book by someone of whom I've never heard, on the strength of an academic article.

Er, OK, it is often. But I thought I'd share this one with you in the (vain?) hope that you'd go with me on this one. I've been reading Almanac (no working website), the Association for Welsh Writing in English's yearbook of essays. Amongst the many genuinely fascinating pieces is Rob Gossedge's attempt to revive the reputation of Nigel Heseltine, who I hope isn't related to the evil Tory bastard Michael.

Anyway, Heseltine was the son of monstrous Peter Warlock, an interesting composer who died early, and a difficult mother. They were the rag-ends of the Welsh squirearchy, a particularly obtuse, moronic, traitorous and unsympathetic bunch of wastrels, and its this class which Heseltine satirised in Tales of the Squirearchy, before he became a prolific translator, travel author and literary commentator.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Unfortunately, I've just spent £25 on one of only three copies available on the web, all in the US. What an undignified end to what seems like a talented life.

OK, if satirical short stories about the vanishing aristocracy aren't your thing, this might be: Fflur Dafydd's Y Llyfrgell has won the Daniel Owen Prize at the Eisteddfod. This is seriously prestigious.

The plot and setting are utterly up my street so I'll be breaking out the dictionary for this one:

a controversial novel that takes a peep into one of the major institutions of Wales, the National Library. Set in the year 2020, the novel follows a cast of characters during one dramatic day when two armed lady librarians occupy the Library.

This is a satirical novel, with a large dose of black humour, which lampoons librarians, academicians, civil servants, politicians and janitors, and throws them mercilessly together in a sinister and bizarre crisis. The novel also deals with a number of topical themes – digitisation, post-feminism, literary criticism and, most importantly, a nation’s memory and identity. The novel is an alternative view of the nation’s future, a future where women will govern; politicians overly influence the arts, and the book – and the author – are things that have been forgotten as the new technology takes their place. This is undoubtedly a challenging novel that will upset many a reader – particularly the male critic – and is certain to stimulate debate.

Like Fflur Dafydd’s other works, such as her novel about Bardsey, the novel is an amusing analysis of one of the icons of Wales, with the location itself turning into a major character during the course of the novel, as the reader sees this institution in a new and thrilling light.

Halcyon days of summer

Morning everybody. It's a good day. I've done 56 lengths again, it's a little gloomy, and the rain's beating on the window like a locked-out girlfriend. I'm expecting Daniel for a day's work under my watchful eye, and I'm planning to settle down with a copy of Almanac, the yearbook of the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Other than that, I've a couple of meetings with management as I'm on duty for the union this week and an early manuscript of my colleague Steve's manuscript on Hinduism to look through. Today's soundtrack is Slint (to whom I introduced Neal yesterday) and perhaps some Thomas Tallis.

All in all, it's going to be a perfect day.

Gissa job. Go on, gissa job.

Sweet - my new phone's here, and my Dublin sister has jacked in her unfulfilling job, a week after my brother quit his for a new life as (cough) a lawyer, once he's done his conversion course. Add my newly unemployed New Zealand lawyer sister to the list and half my siblings are now scrounging dole scum, in the words of The League of Gentlemen. I, of course, am loving this. Having suffered the slings and arrows of these career-minded chaps and chapesses while I did an English degree, an MA in Welsh writing and then a PhD (Masculinity in four 1930s political Welsh novels), now I'm the one with a career(ish)! The worm's turned, the world's turned upside down etc. etc. etc. The family are going to hear about this for a long time to come.

Having laboured over Mark's collection of journals for hours (Sewanee Review 1966-1977 anyone), I've been rewarded with some fine books: The Trial of Lady Chatterley, Doctorow's Ragtime and Ballard's The Day of Creation. Good job I'm not being thrown out of my office.

In my absence the cricket has turned from the habitual England mediocrity into a brave stand by Collingwood and Pietersen. At least Pietersen went in his standard way - trying to be too clever. My least favourite player.

(Post title is from The Boys from the Blackstuff)