The Long Goodbye

OK, it's not as long as its author envisaged, but I am going away – first to a conference and then for a holiday on the ould sod. The conference is Naaswch - the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History. It moves between Wales and the US or Canada each year. I didn't manage anything for the Harvard gig last time, but I have the pleasure of going back to Bangor this time, the institution that took a chance on an unknown kid during the Clearing process and gave me two of my degrees.

My last Welsh-related paper looked at the signifying role of food in a selection of literary texts (which I must write up and publish). This one draws on the long history of colonial and postcolonial literary theory and applies it to something new in the field: the ways in which the Welsh, Scots and Irish have been represented in video games. The TL;DR version is that there's basically a mashed up version of all 'Celts' (the concept is a 19th-century confection) dragged out when modern, technologically advanced societies feel the need for a bit of spiritually-informed violence. Arthur, tartan and blue face-paint feature a lot. There's quite a bit of smiting, plenty of castles, grottoes and caves, and some impractical and frankly a-historical ladies' clothing. Not the kind of thing that will keep the midges off as you plod across the bog. For a little light relief, there's also Welsh-as-comic-sidekick, as seen in some Japanese games.

Brennos - a Celtic Barbarian. All you have to do is wipe out his villages

Castles (1992): you play the oppressive Saxon invader

A typical Arthurian MMORPG

Dún Darach (1985)

A still from Grand Theft Auto V

Korean MMORPG Mabinogi. Not a scene I recognise from the Four Branches

Basically, the Celts are usually The Past: too wild or effeminate to cope with modernity, with the possible exception of DJ Dai (who plays sheep noises and has a terminal illness. I'm suggesting that the Romantic and Victorian struggles over how to define Celtic identities have been carried over wholesale into video art.

Here are a few of the games I'll talk about.

Comic relief: Ni-no-kuni: Wrath of the White Witch



Hot Warrior Maiden (though she does speak a formal approximation of modern Welsh): Civilization V:



Celtic spirituality as close to mental ill-health and self-help: Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice





and finally an interesting comparison: the Shropshire-set Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, which looks forward rather than to the mythical past while addressing key questions about life, consciousness, progress, science and the future in a way that even the best Celtic-based games just won't do.



So that's my paper. After that it's over to Ireland for (hopefully) some rain, reading and relaxation before returning to find out how many and which of my excellent colleagues have been fired in pursuit – according to my VC in the local paper – a 'Renaissance' of artistic activity in the area. No, really. He actually said that closing courses (he didn't have the space to mention the redundancies) and diverting the cash to STEM and nursing courses would magically stimulate the arts. Mind you, I'm doodling some pretty graphic images of him right now while a friend has sent me a bespoke tie which beautifully encapsulates my feelings towards management, so perhaps he's right.

Try not to miss me too much.

Just another week in Paradise

I know I'm getting old, bitter and tired when I try to remember what I've done in the increasing periods between blog posts. Sometimes the witness statements fill in the blanks in my memory, and CCTV is a great help, but for the most part, life is a series of fleeting impressions: the hard edge of the desk meeting the relentless spread of my flabberguts; a never-ending series of tweets, likes and replies to emails; cycling shoes by the bed because I get home and realise there's little point getting changed before slipping into the waters of Lethe. Marking - endless marking.

Reviewing my diary though, I realise that good things are happening all the time. I've seen old friends, been to gigs, held a conference and had some fantastic times in class recently. Twice this week I've lectured on texts and then had students make observations that have made me re-think my understanding of them (the students and the texts!): on Paradise Lost and on Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I don't teach the first-years until next semester but the 2nd, 3rd and MA students are all a delight to teach and I'm learning a lot from them, which is how it should be. Next week is the last one  - the MA students are getting Ballard's late works (Millennium People and Kingdom Come) while the 2nd years are having Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Pahlaniuk's Fight Club. I will confess now that late Ballard is intriguing without feeling as formally adventurous as mid-period Ballard, Little Brother is politically radically while being a very bad novel indeed – download it for free here: Doctorow is a staunch foe of copyright – and I thought Fight Club was interesting until the twist, which I worked out very early and decided was a cop-out. I should further confess that Fight Club is on my list of Very Popular Films People Bored On About That I've Resisted Seeing. The same goes for Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction. I'm exactly the right age for every one of my fellow students to have had the poster on their walls as though it made them edgy and radical. Having endured one wide-eyed, evangelical, stoned exposition of their genius too many, I vowed never to see them even if they're every bit as good as my bohemian friends insist. I doubt they're as good as South American George anyway.



So anyway, the other thing that happened this week was a conference on the theme of Unshared Futures: Four Nations Literary Studies in a post-Brexit age. My view is that the English academy picks the occasional Scottish, Welsh and Irish author and treats them honorary English authors rather than as products of specific cultural moments and spaces. Despite the rapidly growing cultural and political splits between the nations of these islands, England has had no interest in the interior lives of its neighbours and victims – or in the subaltern lives of its own citizens. Perhaps if it had paid attention, events would have been very different. The Four Nations approach tries to address the cultural consonances and dissonances across the archipelago, identifying commonalities and disagreements in the way their literatures address events, experiences and philosophies, in English and in the Celtic languages. It's partly a matter of promoting the study of each others' literatures in the literary canon, partly a matter of examining the English canon for its overt and covert references to Celtic cultures and peoples, and finally a question of asking whether the nation is a useful category for the current moment. What will Brexit literature look like? Will we see the rise of Remainer and Leaver cultural texts? How will the English view the Irish, or how will leaver Wales represent European Scotland?

These questions being on my mind, and the university having some cash left over from the cakes-and-limos fund for senior management, I put together a day long event. It's actually a really easy thing to do: my colleagues in the Association for Welsh Writing in English provided the names of good speakers and travel bursaries for PG students and unwaged scholars, our excellent administrators did the tricky work, and one of my excellent PhD students kept the day – and me – going.

Before I tell you all about the excellent discussions we had, I'll just say that my perception that hegemonic literary gatekeepers and scholars aren't interested in their neighbours was entirely borne out by the attendance. Despite efforts to widely promote the event via mailing lists and direct invitations to personal contacts, the only delegates from English universities were Welsh literature scholars. No Scots or Gaelic specialists attended, nor any UK-based Irish literature experts.

It was, quite frankly, their loss. Our keynote speakers were wonderful. Prof Katie Gramich from Cardiff University talked about the changing status and meaning of 'British' in mid-twentieth century literature, and encouraged us all to read Ulster Protestant author Janet McNeill – her lecture really set the tone for a searching discussion of literary representations of identity.

J Staniforth, Western Mail, 1915

We then had a round table discussion chaired by Swansea's Prof Kirsti Bohata about Four Nations Literature and the curriculum, featuring Dr Hywel Dix from Bournemouth University who wrote Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (e-book now reduced in price), and Romanticist Dr Elizabeth Edwards who traced the development of a Four Nations consciousness in the work of worker-poet Richard Llwyd - from there the discussion turned to how Four Nations approaches (familiar in the history world) could be used to widen and reassess the Canon, and how it intersected with the general awareness of the need to diversify the traditional canon. Finally we talked about the importance of representing students' own cultures in the classroom, and the difficulties of persuading Celtic, working-class, queer and minority ethnic students brought up within the English 'universalist' Hegemony that literatures of their own exist and deserve serious attention.

Our second keynote speaker, Prof Eve Patten from Trinity College Dublin, traced the covert presence of Ireland as a sign of impending degeneration in key modernist authors such as Woolf and Ford Madox Ford, starting with a really striking quotation from Wyndham Lewis on watching the body of Terence MacSwiney being removed from Southwark Cathedral after his Brixton prison hunger strike. From there she built a network of associations and references from which emerged a picture of Ireland as a persistently troublesome and troubling harbinger: many of the English Modernists had little sympathy for Irish nationalism, being too bound up in prevalent ethnic and cultural hierarchies to consider Ireland on its own terms. Marriage plots, she said, often stood in for the relationship between English-Britain and Ireland, such as in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Just like now, she said, Celtic nationalism was reflected by a 'virulent English nationalism', disguised as normalcy.

After Eve's tour d'horizon, we had a postgraduate panel with a difference chaired by Dr Sarah Morse of the Learned Society of Wales. The three presenters – Catriona Coutts and Amber-Rose Hancock from Bangor and Syd Morgan from Swansea – circulated their papers a couple of weeks in advance so instead of having them read them out then take questions, the chair and the audience could get involved in discussing the ideas arising from the work, contributing new knowledge and making links between their research: Catriona looked at the construction of borders in novels by Raymond Williams (the revival is ON!) and Margiad Evans, Amber-Rose compared Welsh literature to Catalan literary culture, while Syd examined the fascinating – and forgotten – life and work of Ascendancy Irish intellectual, poet, educationalist and Welsh nationalist policy adviser Noelle Ffrench-Davies. The session worked because the delegates had read the papers: if they hadn't, an embarrassing silence might have ensued. I'd definitely try this again, and not just on postgrad guinea pigs.

Finally, we had a creative keynote speaker, to make the point that Four Nations literature isn't retrospective, historic label. Thomas Morris came over from Dublin to read from his award-winning short story collection We Don't Know What We're Doing, and conversed with Matt Jarvis, the perceptive and very skilled critic. Tom read from a couple of stories including one about a Welsh stag do in Temple Bar, which veered from scabrous to moving and back again very quickly. In conversation all his mother issues came pouring out, and he spoke seriously and generously about his methods and experiences of being a Welsh-speaking young writer and editor in Ireland – he has a long involvement with hip magazine/publisher The Stinging Fly. I just wish even a single Creative Writing student had come to a free reading at the university by an acclaimed young writer. I do wonder whether if they achieved success themselves, they'd resent similar absences…

By the end I was elated and exhausted. Having an iPad meant I could buy an awful lot of books while people were talking about them, so I also ended the day considerably poorer. I owe the success of the day to the generous support of my Faculty, my research centre, to the Association for Welsh Writing in English; to the presence and generosity of so many great minds in the room, to the enthusiasm of the speakers, chairs and delegates and my departmental colleagues and to Jaime, my PhD student, who appears to be somewhat clairvoyant when it comes to finding things that need doing.

Meanwhile, back in Stuckeyville

Actually, Stuckeyville wasn't so bad. It had a bowling alley and warm quirky people with good teeth who helped you re-evaluate your priorities after the world kicked you in the face. But it has been an interesting, nay exhausting, week here in Stuckeyville's dentally-challenged twin city. 

Last Saturday we took a school trip to see The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theatre. It was definitely the biggest trip the English department has ever done - there were even several generations of ex-students as well as colleagues, ex-colleagues and a passel of our current undergraduates. Some had never been to London before, let alone the Globe.

This was a very odd staging of Taming. It's a difficult play anyway: a comedy (with lots of good gags and some technically-good-but-now-rather-uncomfortable ones) about how sarcastic/independent/disobedient women should be beaten into acquiescence by starvation, cruelty and the like. The usual way to get round the happy ending (Kate admits that she needs to do what she's told) rather than look like a bunch of misogynistic bigots is to play it like she's only kidding and she'll get her own back in some unspecified extra-textual future.

This production didn't really do that. It did something very odd indeed. It removed the Sly framing which makes the action a play-within-a-play, replacing it with an Ireland 1916 setting, complete with tuneless 'Irish' music and hammer-heavy didactic lyrics. The intention was to imagine that Shrew was being put on in Ireland on or around the time of the Rising to make us understand that just as the play is misogynistic, so was the Ireland that resulted from the Rising.

OK. But there are some historical and dramatic problems with this. Dramatically, it just didn't work: the only people who knew about this Irish framing were those who'd bought the programme like me – everybody else just liked the Irish music and thought it was nice to have an Irish cast. Historically: well, the Rising itself wasn't a misogynistic enterprise. There were radical feminists, socialists, communists, Catholic reactionaries and all sorts involved, and the Proclamation of the Republic, though expressed in the masculinist terms of the period and signed only by men, was pretty progressive, especially in comparison with the Constitution and state that eventually appeared:

The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past. 

Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.

British women didn't get the vote until 1928 of course. The problem with the Rising is that the British shot everyone they could find, including the progressive men. By the time Independence came round, previously minor and very reactionary types like Eamon de Valera had seized the reins (and handed them back to the Church): a Republic didn't exist until 1949 legally and one could easily argue that the ideals embodied in classical republicanism (let's leave Irish Republicanism to one side today) haven never been instituted. Ireland's women were betrayed, but not by the Rising.

Also: yes this is the centenary of the Rising, but I'm not sure why a British Shakespearean Theatre with a British and tourist audience felt the need to tell everyone that Ireland was a sexist hellhole. It's not as if the UK to date or colonial Ireland were ever paragons of liberation. I'm just not sure, in the end, what light the Rising throws upon Shrew, or what the Shrew throws upon Irish history. The acting was superb, the set design excellent, but it felt like such a half-baked idea, and I was actually quite glad that lots of people around me could enjoy the performance without sitting there fretting – as I did – about what it all meant. I believe this is what Caroline Magennis meant when she remarked 'this is why academics can't have nice things'. Still, at least lightning wasn't hitting the building next door this time, as it did when we saw Antony and Cleopatra.

The rest of the week descended into the banal hell of the post-teaching academic: endless piles of marking and moderation, putting together module packs for the external examiners, all interrupted at the most crucial moments by interminable meetings: negotiating committee, estates committee, board of governors and casework. Also – because I'm a complete idiot – I agreed to give a conference paper yesterday and was therefore trying to write that while juggling all the other things.

It was a lovely conference, on Communism and Commitment, basically talking about the emotional and quotidian lives of British communist members, activists, officers and apostates, and what happened at times of stress. Jane Bernal, daughter of Margot Heinemann and JD Bernal talked about her parents on a panel that looked at devoted activists who eventually left the Party, such as Douglas Hyde, who was converted from Methodism to Communism by his time as a preacher in North Wales and his experience in the South Wales valleys, particularly meeting Lewis Jones. After years as a journalist and energetic activist, reading the Catholic Weekly Review caused him to have Doubts, and he eventually became a deeply Catholic Cold Warrior: his confession I Believed was an enormous hit. I learned that the Daily Worker was basically like a Communist Tindr and that the Most Dangerous Man In Britain, Harry Pollitt, would give child visitors to CP HQ jars of his home-made fudge (hopefully called Moscow Gold).

I was on a panel talking about writers and the CP: the others were Glyn Salter-Cox whose paper was a tender, funny and revelatory examination of novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland's open, proud blend of Communist lesbianism at a time when the party was very conservative socially, and Matthew Taunton from UEA who used the recently available letters between Doris Lessing and her novels to explore the dialogic nature of her political beliefs and her literary work. My paper was on Lewis Jones, the communist hero and novels: I argued that far from being the propagandist his allies, publishers and enemies believed, he wrote Cwmardy and We Live as attacks on authoritarianism whether in the state or the party. It's all in there: even the hero's death in the Spanish Civil War is a form of suicide occasioned by his coldly ambitious wife, rather than the sacrifice of a true comrade. I think I got away with it: one Japanese scholar said he'd come specifically for my paper which was a bit scary, and another said that I'd 'set the tone for the conference'. At the time I took that as a compliment but now I'm wondering whether the subtext was 'you bastard' or if it was meant to be the equivalent of what actors say to friends in terrible productions ('well, you've done it again').

What I loved about this conference was that it wasn't just academics: a lot of people there were independent researchers, old comrades, trades' unionists and enthusiasts for Britain's radical past. While there were some recriminations about where it went wrong and how we should understand it (David Aaronovitch and Alexei Sayle got some stick for their accounts of growing up Communist) the wide spread of people and perspective meant that there was an awful lot to learn. Oh, and I met a Japanese PhD student who has translated CLR James's work, inventing an awful lot of Japanese cricket terms along the way. How do you translate 'googly' and 'chinaman'?

If you don't know the People's History Museum, it's a wonderful, welcoming place with an awful lot of material that British kids don't get told about in school. The first time I went there it was so interesting that I lost track of time and got locked in…

Three Days In Wales: a conference report

After the rock'n'roll excesses of seeing The Nightingales live (two beers! out until 11!), I was in the mood for more disorienting, mind-expanding experience. So I hopped on a train to Newtown, Powys for the annual conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (Twitter was used extensively: see Bethan Jenkins's Storify collection).

Last year it was held a couple of weeks earlier, which meant blizzards and deep snow - wonderful for me, as these pictures show. This year, AWWE14 was held in beautiful late spring sunshine. The mansion house is beautiful, the surrounding landscape wonderful, and the incredibly distant traffic was thoroughly drowned out by lambs bleating, woodpeckers knocking, owl hooting and pheasants making the sounds that pheasants make. Calling. That'll do.

In short: Paradise. Great surroundings, a library, a bookshop (neither of which stopped me from bringing several books along), mountains of food and several days of learned conversation with a big bunch of ridiculously clever people. Oh, and no phone reception, which was bliss. The only fly in the ointment was having to give a paper, which I find terrifying at the best of times, let alone in such august company. I loathed the young ones most of all: clever, charming, hugely well-read and still with their own teeth. Serene bastards. See some pictures of them here.

Anyway. I turned up early on the first day, which was a schoolboy error. Rather than strolling round the grounds or thieving rare books, I went along to the annual meeting of the association. A simple offer to take the minutes suddenly turned into being given the secretaryship of the organisation, co-organising 2015 conference and judging next year's M Wynn Thomas Prize. All because I can touch-type. Thankfully, I'm not being left to do any of this on my own, which is a relief to all concerned. I feel like this:



or this:

So there it is: my third Secretaryship (union branch, regional fencing committee).

Life improved immensely after that. The conference started with a tribute to Nigel Jenkins, the scholar, poet, satirist, political activist 'and hunk', apparently. Tears and laughter. We then awarded the M Wynn Thomas Prize to two ridiculously talented scholars, Lisa Sheppard and Matt Jarvis. Here they are, recreating a C&A catalogue pose with sponsors Richard Davies and M Wynn Thomas himself:

Wynn's the polymath who essentially invented the academic field of Welsh writing in English, while writing himself in Welsh and English on a huge range of topics. He also knew everyone in academia and literature. At breakfast, he mentioned dining with FR Leavis in that very room. 'And along came a very clever Cockney academic, who leaned over and took the sausages right off FR's plate!'. We discovered this weekend that the water at Neuadd Gregynog is not fit for drinking due to the lead pipes. Poor Wynn: he's been coming here since 1967. Imagine the work he could have produced were it not for the annual intake of poison…

After that, we had the launch of the latest Library of Wales books, the 2-volumes of short stories selected by Dai Smith. Now, I have a bit of a problem with Dai. I wrote my PhD on Lewis Jones's novels, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, and Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow For Thy Sons. Dai edited and arranged for reprints of Jones's novels, and is the literary executor for Thomas, and produced the only edition of Sorrow ever published. He defined Jones's as first and foremost an orthodox Communist writer, which my thesis spends several hundred pages (it feels like) debunking, and the latest edition of Cwmardy and We Live silently made multiple questionable editorial changes. However many times I wrote, he never responded to my request to see the manuscript of Sorrow so while we know he shortened it massively, nobody except him knows what the original novel Thomas wrote is like. 

However, I also respect Smith as a stalwart of the Old Left. He's never caught up with the 60s New Left let alone the new Welsh Left, which has room for feminism, the Welsh language movement and for Plaid Cymru, but there's still something fairly admirable about his consistency. I knew that his launch would be feisty: his view of Welsh writing in English as largely male and starting in the 1920s is pretty outdated, and his Old Left approach meets lots of Plaid/Welsh Left opposition. That, and the choice of scantily-clad drunk women on the cover of Volume 2. And so it proved: a good knockabout session with plenty of points aired though there was a whiff of rutting elk locking horns…

Dai Smith

Round 2 came after dinner with the first keynote speaker. The Scottish independence referendum will obviously affect Wales. Nationalists in both countries are allied, and their will be political and cultural impacts whatever the result. A lot of Welsh people are quite nervous of being left alone with England, while wishing Scotland well. So the invited guest was Murray Pittock, literature professor and leading intellectual advisor to Scottish Nationalism. 

Murray Pittock

In a barnstorming and entertaining presentation, he touched on the failure of bodies like the BBC to understand devolution, examined the changing (fading?) nature of Britishness, and touched on relations between Wales and Scotland. 

The audience was pretty riled by some of this, not least Dai Smith, who quoted Lenin and then talked of 'false consciousness': the charge being the standard Classic Left one which accuses nationalism of drawing pernicious lines between working classes who should be united against those who oppress them. I've got some sympathy for this, but also see the logic of some nationalisms. Ireland was occupied by the British: should people like my great-uncle Thomas have accepted the crushing of his language and confiscation of Irish land rather than fight in 1916? Should the Welsh have meekly accepted the ban on Welsh and the despoliation of huge areas of the country for English water supplies and commodities? Answers on a post-card please, but I tend to feel that colonised and invaded nations should be nationalist, then develop a socialist state once self-rule is achieved. English nationalism, on the other hand, is sheer cant. 

Anyway, Pittock's presentation caused a good barney as Smith called him 'patronising' and Pittock demonstrated that popular definitions of 'Britishness' are not simply English, but London-centric and reductive. The debate continued in the bar until the early hours, though I was relatively sensible. Can't keep up with the young folk any more. 

The next morning, I opted for the Queering The Nation panel: Huw Osborne from Canada on the relationship between Jan Morris's transsexuality and her version of Wales, Kirsti Bohata's fascinating history of literary lesbianism in Wales which provided me with a long reading list and determination to re-read some older novels in the light of her analysis, and Daniel Williams' hilarious, Freudian reading of Glyn Jones's classic The Island of Apples, in which he claimed that the whole thing is an account of living in a mental asylum (a surprise to everyone in the audience) and comprehensively demolishing the assertion that the book is entirely devoid of both sex and politics. Some of the passages he chose would have made Kinsey blush. Jones's public image and the work he produced in his mature years made him appear sober, devout and respectable, but the early stories suggest a wilder and less normative interior which was repressed. Wynn, who knew him, said that he was a 'a lifelong chapel man, but a wild man underneath', and it looks like critical readings are revealing this wildness at long last. 

One of the problems with AWWE is that the quality of papers is so high that choosing between the panels automatically means missing great work: I was sad to miss out on Jane Aaron, Stephen Colclough and Malcolm Ballin on 19th-Century constructions of Wales, especially as my own paper could really have fitted into that session. However, putting my disappointment behind me, I toddled off to the next session, which was a corker. Simona Janecekova compared Welsh and Slovak modernisms, Clare Davies talked about Dorothy Edwards and Nella Larsen as examples of women negotiating the networks of patronage within different literary and social contexts ('Dai Smith isn't here so I can say what I want'), and Aleksandra Jones gave a paper on literary representations of disability in coalfield literature, funded by the Leverhulme. I wrote my MA partly on Dorothy Edwards, so was naturally interested, while my PhD was on coalfield novels and I knew some of my texts would re-appear with new readings by Jones. I was stunned that these three were new to academia - there's no way I was anywhere near their standard at the same stage (or now). 

After lunch, there was a special panel on a fascinating project by Kathryn Gray, Peter Barry, Bronwen Williams and Matt Jarvis which interviews Welsh poets who've emerged since devolution, to establish how they feel political change as affected their process, context and careers. 

Given that getting a straight answer out of a poet is like asking a tree for directions, we got a fascinating insight into this (unfinished) project. Some poets are indifferent to devolution, at least professionally. Others felt that the establishment of political institutions like the Assembly takes the pressure off poets to 'represent' or define the nation. The project also looked at the presence of these young Welsh poets in magazines inside and outside Wales. For me, I got a distinct whiff of Romantic withdrawal from some of them: like Wordsworth busying himself with daffodils after his support for the French Revolution made him unpopular for a while, I wondered if English Romantic interiority was replacing the older Welsh tradition of poetry being a public duty. Early days, but an excellent project. 

Infuriatingly, my own paper was scheduled alongside a panel I desperately wanted to attend: Jessica George talking about The Meat Tree which I've taught here and as a guest at Gloucestershire University; and Diana Wallace on John Cowper Powys's Owen Glendower and Chris Meredith's Shifts. I've loved Cowper Powys since my hippy French teacher gave me some of his work in school, and I wrote about Shifts in my MA. Very annoying! My own bit went OK, but Andy Webb's paper proposing a new critical approach by considering 'residual cultures' presence in texts was a barnstormer and will, I think, inspire some really interesting and original work. 

Following that and oceans of coffee, I went along to the great Katie Gramich's keynote, which covered Welsh War Writing and representations of women. There were some fascinating propaganda images, some 'depressingly awful doggerel' which Katie recited with considerable glee and discussion of a women's column in Y Darian which became sharply and wittily feminist, leading Katie to conclude that their author may well have been Kate Roberts, whom I think is one of the very greatest writers of the last hundred years. Roberts turned up in discussion frequently this weekend, as a modernist and as a possible lesbian writer. 

After this, I confess I skipped a session, exhausted and still shaking from my own paper. I intended to go for a walk in the grounds but instead dozed and followed the Stoke City match (another victory). After yet another massive dinner, Mike Parker gave the day's keynote. Author of the Rough Guide To Wales ('anything you can do in Rhyl, you can do elsewhere') and presiding genius of the Real series of psychogeographical works, he gave a funny, heartfelt, thoughtful and informative take on Welsh publishing, travel and tourism, fuelled by beer (him) and wine (the Swansea postgrad women on the back row). Being generally too dumb to live, it hadn't occurred to me to bring booze to the session but Parker's piece was glorious even to those few of us who remained sober. Amongst the delights: pictures of a Dalek in Welsh costume and an account of the day he and Niall Griffiths decided to call on BNP leader and immigrant to Wales Nick Griffin for a bit of fascist-bashing. Luckily either for him or them, he wasn't in. 

The final day saw another difficult choice. In one panel, Emma Schofield, prize-winning essayist Lisa Sheppard and Hywel Dix talked about national identity post-devolution, taking in Charlotte Williams' Sugar and Slate (Lisa) and Imtiaz Dhaker (Hywel), but I went for the either one, in which Daniel Hughes talked about the amazing and scandalously overlooked modernist poet Lynette Roberts and Jamie Harris analysed the Real series including Mike Parker's Real Powys while the author sat on the front row (mostly nodding and smiling, thankfully). 

Finally, the conference ended with a special panel in which John Goodby, Jane Aaron and Tony Brown discussed the relationship between Dylan Thomas, Welsh writing in English and the critical establishment. 

John Goodby, Jane Aaron

Goodby, an eminent author who isn't seen as part of the WWIE movement, caused controversy by suggesting that DT hasn't been welcomed in the anglophone or Welsh-speaking movement yet is seen as too excessive and existentialist to be contained in the English tradition (he says literary history skips from Auden to Larkin which is a shame because 'the 1940s were the Welsh decade'). 

Goodby then added to the tension by asserting that Welsh writing in English has been blind to experimental and modernist work, which really got everybody going. Brown asserted that modernism has been integral to Welsh writing in English despite claims that there's no such thing as Welsh modernism. Saunders Lewis's famous statement ('there is no Anglo-Welsh literature…[Thomas] belongs to the English) was countered heatedly by Wynn, who pointed out that Lewis recanted gracefully after DT's death. One of the recurring themes of the weekend was the strength of Welsh Modernism as a distinct literary practice and genre, often manifesting itself as a predilection for the grotesque or Gothic. I'm certainly convinced by this - even in the supposedly stodgy coalfield novels I know well, there are hugely disturbing events and manifestations undercutting the surface realism. 

Jane Aaron's contribution was to present the difficult birth of WWIE as an academic subject: plenty of universities then and most Welsh schools now have no interest at all in it. She then called for a Dylan Thomas day on October 27th to match Bloom's Day or Burns Night. The conference cheered and voted for that…until M Wynn Thomas, in combative mood, opposed the idea. He 'set the facts straight' on relations between Dylan Thomas and the Welsh-language literary scene and listed a whole lot of critics he felt Goodby had ignored while claiming that experimentalism was marginalised in Welsh literary criticism…and some Welsh-language modernist poets to boot, such as T. H. Parry Williams. While Aaron asserted that celebrations of DT would boost Welsh-language culture, Wynn called Dylan Thomas Day 'naive', bearing in mind the divisive nature of Thomas, Saunders Lewis and others. I can see his point: Bloom's Day barely has anything to do with James Joyce any more, while the authorities' promotion of it as a tourist trap conceals a long history of censorship, suppression and suspicion of Joyce's work. 

Aside from all the formal stuff, AWWE14 was joyous because I got to wander around chatting to the most amazing people, from postgrads to professionals. Conversations ranged from the hilarious (one bunch decided over breakfast to design a game: Angry Bards) to the profound, and I've come away with enormous reading lists and several ideas for modules stolen from my counterparts. I learned about the great lost philosopher JR Jones, that Sylvia Plath dumped a boyfriend because he didn't appreciate Dylan Thomas. Oh, and I finally got to see the infamous RS Thomas Packet Of Crisps, a sought-after object for any archive. 

I left exhilarated, yet exhausted, sad to go, and yet glad not to have to speak to anyone for a day or two. 

And next year I'm co-organizer. No pressure…

Of Treason, Subversives, Propaganda, Anti-Communism and Anti-anti-communism…

Some of you may wish to skip today's entry: those of you who read me in search of thrills and spills, because I'm just going to drone on about yesterday's conference. I thought it very exciting indeed, but apparently not everybody is shaken to the marrow by discussions about forgotten literary periodicals and the like. I know, hard to believe, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

So, I'm back from a couple of days in London, visiting the British Library's Propaganda exhibition and attending a conference on Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda in the rather wonderful Deco Senate House at the University of London. After working on Clearing – important but frankly not exciting – it was great to spend a couple of days listening to thinkers I respect showing me how little I know even about my own field!

The British Library exhibition was fascinating, though flawed. It took the line that propaganda is a neutral concept, and presented material from a range of cultures, organisations and historical periods. I did think that it treated the British Empire with kid gloves and was therefore ironically propagandist itself, and that the range of texts should have included a lot more literature and film (no Casablanca?), but what they did have was fascinating.

The first item was this 'educational' film from 1949: it makes some important points but it has, to put it kindly, some ideological flaws. An interesting curio, nonetheless:



I also liked the prescience of this (rather hypocritical) Soviet poster entitled 'Freedom, American-style', accusing the United States of being a surveillance state, by Prokorov:

Frank Capra's Why We Fight is also a fascinating piece of Allied propaganda:

I also loved the propagandist fashions: lovely silk Jaqmar scarves from WW2 decorated with posters such as 'loose lips sink ships', Fougasse cartoons, and of London maps marked with bombed historic buildings. 

Rather wittily, the exhibition was liberally sprinkled with video clips of Alastair Campbell discoursing on propaganda without the slightest acknowledgement that he might be viewed as a (rather obvious, dishonest) propagandist in any way. The other good thing was the total absence of that monstrous cliché, the Keep Calm And Carry On poster, originally produced for the event of a German invasion of the UK. Well done, British Library. 

So that was the entrée to the conference. Anti-communism is a huge cultural field in the post-war period. The CIA was all over the cultural scene, funding arts festivals, artists' tours, concerts, cultural magazines, scholarships and symposia (see Stonor Saunders and Wilford), though not much has been written about the UK security services' interventions into culture, though James Smith, who was at yesterday's conference, has recently published a book on MI5 surveillance of poets and other artistic types. My kneejerk suspicion is that the British security services were too Philistine to devote much energy to Bloomsbury and Co. Drawn from the aristocracy and military, British spooks were at best indifferent to culture as praxis and pursuit: in an earlier age, Arnold despaired of the aristocracy as a bunch of wasters squandering their cultural privileges. In contrast, the US State Department (dealing with foreign affairs) and security services prided themselves on being highly cultured. Hence their keen interest in, for example, abstract expressionism, which they covertly promoted as proof that Western freedom produced great, cerebral art in opposition to the moralising Socialist Realism of the USSR. 

So that's the background to yesterday's symposium, which explored specific currents and examples in the anti-communist movement. David Ayers, for example, discussed the battle between the USSR's supposed universalism (overwhelming ethnic, national and religious difference) and TS Eliot's defence of 'European' values and human individualism. Two academics (Thomas Karshan and Adam Piette) discussed Nabokov's leading role as a literary anti-communist: his father was a liberal minister in the Kerensky government. According to Karshan, Nabokov's literary techniques and subjects, particularly play, self-division, contempt and indifference in his early Russian-language novels counterpoint the programmatic political engagement required by Soviet literary authorities. However, Karshan feels, Nabokov's 'crude, childish determinism' in books like Bend Sinister and Pale Fire demonstrate that he was locked into the forms and concerns of his Communist opponents: he never really managed indifference. 

Matthew Taunton of UEA discussed Brecht's Die Massnahme (in which a young comrade accepts that the revolution requires his own execution) as a way to examine Soviet notions of law and justice, which gradually drove away British fellow travellers such as Stephen Spender (poet and editor of Encounter, scandalously revealed to be a CIA front, which Spender probably knew) and Arthur Koestler (a central cultural figure at the time, later revealed to be a rapist). Those of you following the SWP's appalling treatment of serious rape accusations against a leading cadre might find Taunton's work instructive. 

The second session featured the highly-esteemed Ben Harker (soon to join Manchester University's English department), who discussed the cultural ramifications of the 'Soviet Literary Controversy' (the Party's victimisation of Akhmatova et al) in British intellectual life, taking in Raymond Williams, the Leavisites, Cyril Connolly's prediction of a repressive socialist Britain producing homegrown Socialist Realism and the relationship between art and political engagement, leading eventually to Cultural Studies and the New Left. Some background on British Communist literary culture here. 

Harker was followed by Nick Hubble's exploration of work by Orwell, Spender, Cornford, Cornforth and Sommerfield, particularly about Spain, as the 30s came to be re-evaluated in the post-45 period. Spender, in particular, scrambled to associate himself with the elitist High Modernists who had refused to explicitly discuss politics in their work, rather unconvincingly. 

After lunch came Debra Rae Cohen from the University of South Carolina. Horrifyingly, she recognised me from a 1930s conference I presented at in Arkansas, 2001. It was my first conference paper and I was frankly awful. But her presentation was utterly fascinating. She spoke about ex-socialist and talented author Rebecca West's journalism and writing on treason, the Atomic Spies trials, her letters, her vocal support for HUAC and McCarthy, and her ongoing conviction that everything that went wrong in her life – including her estranged son's bitter autobiographical novel – were part of a Communist plot to ruin her. She also, fascinatingly, saw celebrity culture as part of a communist media plot to divert the reading public's attention away from the dangers of subversion and brainwashing. 

I didn't think that paper could be rivalled, but Marina MacKay of Durham University was equally fascinating. Speaking on 'Religious Fantasy and Anti-State Allegory in the 1940s', she introduced C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (which may well have influenced Orwell's 1984) to discuss conservative fears of technocratic British Sovietism turning the country into a conformist dictatorship. I've read The Aerodrome (it's fascinating) but had never even heard of That Hideous Strength. After this paper, I have to read it: it sounds completely bonkers. It's essentially a campus novel in which a sociologist is seduced with promises of 'impact' (a current academic buzzword) into allowing an oppressive UK government to use her ideas to institute a police state. Women, lesbians and sociologists don't come out of it very well, unsurprisingly if you know anything about Lewis. 

Finally in that session came Benjamin Kohlmann from Columbia and Freiburg Universities, who gave a very different case of anti-communism. We'd already discussed plenty of conservative anti-communists, as you'd expect. But Edward Upward, an interesting communist figure though not, it has to be said, a novelist of any talent whatsoever, was what Kohlmann described as Communist Anti-Communist. Despairing of the CPGB's early turn away from serious revolutionary politics, he eventually left the Party for points further left. He became convinced that the real anti-communists were in fact the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. From this point, the discussion turned to whether the CP's sole source of unity was resistance to anti-communism rather than any serious and positive programme of communism itself. An interesting point, though a long way down the rabbit hole for most of us!

Following Kohlmann, the final session saw Tyrus Miller exploring e. e. cumming's long-standing anti-communism. Having visited the USSR as a socialist, he came back convinced that authoritarian regimes crushed individual spirit, exhaustively explored in Eimi, his experimental travelogue. Oddly, it was one of the few texts mentioned in the course of the day that I didn't order on the spot. He was followed by Adam Piette on Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Petra Rau's examination of travel writing about the USSR, especially Eric Newby's The Big Red Train. 

As is usual when I attend conferences, I came away inspired, awed, despondent and poorer. Poorer because conference wi-fi + online bookshops + great speakers = rapidly depleting bank account. I dread to think how many books I ordered during the course of the day. Despondent and inspired because hearing all these people speak so brilliantly simultaneously recharges my enthusiasm for my field while making me wonder what I could possibly contribute. 

And so here I am, back at work, refreshed, enthused and with a lot more books to read.

And now for something completely different

After all the lectures, seminars, marking and other activities of this week, I'm off for a day's intellectual stimulation: a conference on Politics and the Power of Print in Manchester. I'm really looking forward to it. Not sure if I'll have web access, but I'll live blog it if possible.

It's at Chetham's Library, the oldest public library in the UK, and one of the most beautiful.

Chetham's Library from gareth taylor on Vimeo.

Why did you choose academia?

I get asked why I went into academia quite frequently. Sometimes by colleagues. Half of them say it in an all-in-it-together tone of voice, half of them in a 'why the hell are you in academia, you thick gimp?' tone of voice.

The simplest answer is that one degree led to another and the more you do, the more unemployable you are elsewhere. No other occupation lets you read books, talk about them, and ignore the accepted standards of discourse, appearance and - let's face it - hygiene (perhaps IT) to the extent that we do.

The last two days have reminded me why I'm in academia. Apart from the teaching, of course, which I adore. Yesterday I attended a set of papers on the origins of self-help and pedagogy: they took in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pelmanism, Dianetics, Foucault and a host of other exciting ideas. Today I attended On the Wane, an exploration of the history and cultures of cultural decay. Rousseau came up again, as did Shelley, Tacitus, Conrad, George Bush, Thomas Nashe, Alexander Pope, theories of Palingenesis (not Sarah or Michael) and finally 30 academics sat in a hot, sticky room discussing the difference between masturbation and Onanism (in short: Onanism was the term for masturbation when the religious paradigm was dominant: masturbation took over when legal and scientific frameworks appeared in the nineteenth century). Honestly, when a stern German academic starts talking about S&M, you start understanding Max Mosley just a little bit more.

Talking of Nashe, he had something prescient to say about going to conferences:

"I know not how it comes to pass, but many are so delighted to hear themselves that they are a cumber to the ears of all other, pleasing their auditors in nothing more than in the pause of a full point."

Oh, and we had Rioja at lunch. And soon we're going for a slap-up feed in the Crooked House. The what? Ah, what an excuse to play you some Jonathan Meades: he starts there.

The Jacobins are coming

For the purposes of search engine optimisation, I'd like to say that the first plenary lecture of the 'Wales and Revolution' conference was about sex and delivered by Justin Bieber.

In reality, it was by the very distinguished Romanticist Caroline Franklin and it was much better than sex with Justin Bieber (if you don't know who he is, you're in the right place). She spoke of 'Wales as Nowhere: the tabula rasa of the "Jacobin" imagination'. Basically, she looked at novels and romances by the leading radical creative writers of the day: an early William Godwin novel called Imogen: A Pastoral Romance from the Ancient British (1784), Tamworth progressive industrialist Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1782), Catherine Parry's Eden Vale (1784), Anna Maria Bennett's Anna; or, Memoirs of a Welch Heiress (I love these rolling titles: there should be more of them: Shameless; Or, A Tale of Mancunian Urchins, or The X-Factor: being a Wondrous and Scarcely Credible Account Of Nincompoopery, Macaronis and Dandies perhaps) and several others which use the pre-industrial, romantically-Other Celtic Wales as the site for critiquing the reactionary capitalism destroying England, and for fantasising an industrial communist or guild-style utopia.

Often closely connected to the Dissenter Industrialists like the Midlands' Lunar Society, they weren't opposed to industry, but saw in it the potential for an equal and harmonious society: Ken McLeod would be impressed, I think. They'd applauded the American Revolution (lots of people in Britain did) and at least the initial phases of the French one, but mainstream opinion was turning against them, and so romance was a safe place in which to propound their political alternatives.

Right - off to the bar to moan about management and talk about books.

Bah

I went to Southampton this weekend, to enlighten people about the neo-Nazi themes in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley. Here's a bit of pop-culture trivia: the film adaptation won 5 Oscars in 1941, including Best Film. Thus beating Citizen Kane!

I came back with typhoid. I knew there was a reason to avoid the pestilential antipodean end of this island.

I croaked my way through about three pages of my paper, before noticing a '2 minutes to go' sign being waved in my face. It felt like I'd hardly started, but my points were made and a really lively question and answer session followed. I attended a range of other peoples' papers including one on Lucha Libre, but my favourite was Sarha Moore's 'Metal, Machismo and Musical Mode: How the 'Feminine' Phrygian second has been appropriated and transformed'.

Basically, with the aid of some clips and a melodica (keyboard thing you blow into), she demonstrated how the flat second (sing the Jaws theme to yourself: it's when the second note of a sequence is flat rather than a whole tone higher) went from being a suspiciously feminine technique used in madrigals to being a macho 'diabolic' sound used only in heavy metal.

After the conference, I tried to find somewhere to eat and got repeatedly turned away for being on my own on a Saturday night. Does wonders for one's sense of self-worth.

They think it's all over… and it is.

Well, that's over. I managed to get through about 3 of my points and six of my pages in the allotted half hour - it's really hard trying to say what's exciting about something when the audience haven't even heard of the field, let alone the individual. Plus my signer (poor woman) had to cope with Welsh names and references without prior knowledge - she did magnificently, but I had to slow down hugely.

Still, I think it went OK, and one audience member clearly knew about post-1918 Welsh culture and asked some interesting questions. It's always a relief to get a question, especially the first one, because it suggests one hasn't completely wasted one's time.

The next presenter gave a historical overview of deaf artists, and he was followed by a fascinating paper on Diana Wynne Jones's The Game, which I'm now about to order.

I'm skipping the next session - I need a break. I should probably move though - the air conditioning's dripping on my computer.

I don't think we're in Wolverhampton any more, Toto

I promised photos of Bridgnorth, where the Map Twats descended on Christine and James, ate their Stinking Bishop (a phrase their ecclesiastical neighbours might misinterpret), drank their Pimms and left. I've added a couple of the conference I was at today. Please note that we borrowed the beer cans to add comedy value when I sent the photo to my boss. More pictures here, or click on the images for larger versions.

Yet more Stilton

Things are looking up - interesting colleagues, excellent cheeses for lunch. Simultaneously battling the dark forces of IT services, who've managed to do something debilitating to my e-mail access. The gits.

Carry On Up the Greasy Pole

You're in for a real treat today. I'm live-blogging from Aston University's lakeside conference centre, attending a conference on how to keep my job. I mean of course, how to plan an academic career. I'm with three other Wolverhampton teachers, so of course we're sitting at the back being sarcastic and munching pork scratchings. Our leaders here are virtually all white men, so the institutional conservatism of academia is clearly on my side!

I'll be counting clichés ('on the runway' has already appeared) and 'networking' - a term which makes me nauseous. Oh well, perhaps I'll meet glamorous single academics…

Bald men fighting over a comb

That was fun. At a UN conference on racism, the racist president of Iran made a speech calling Israel racist - which seems fine to me, given Israel's treatment of the Palestinians within Gaza, the Occupied Territories and within its own borders. Then the racist countries of Germany (Holocaust, Turks), Britain (Empire, slavery, 'institutionally racist' police, mass ethnic minority unemployment), the United States (slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, 80% of black men with criminal records) walked out.

This is a matter of representation - does being vocally upset about particularly poisonous racism make up for structural, ongoing, silent racism? Are we meant to think that speeches are more important than the discrimination which ensures that our black boys leave school less qualified, less likely to find employment and more likely to go to prison with conviction for which white people don't? (It's the same for women, by the way: they are disproportionately imprisoned for crimes such as non-payment of TV licences and fines, for which men tend to receive non-custodial sentences). Naomi Klein makes the point in No Logo that worrying about representation of race has diverted the left from the clear real racial problems - the Ahmedinejad case demonstrates the effect of this kind of tokenism.

(Rumours and) Curses

There are few bright spots in my mundane existence, so it's sod's law that two of them are on the same day - my Polish fencing trip and the Annual Conference of those fun-lovin' academics, the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Put 50 genuinely interesting teachers, researchers and authors in a stately home with one of the best bars anywhere (plus a lot of very special books on sale) and the results are fascinating. I shall genuinely miss it this year.