Dead Cats and Good Books

Good afternoon all. I'm sitting in the office wondering if anything's happened this week and realising that actually, quite a lot has been going on.

The best bit was a trip to London: two days in Gilbert Scott's resurrected, excessive and amazing St. Pancras Hotel where the Victorian Gothic splendour comes with cocktails containing croissants (yes, really and by the way the Spice Girls' 'Wannabe' video was filmed there too, pop-pickers).

This was to go to the ornate, plush Edwardian Noel Coward theatre to see, incongruously, Martin McDonagh's scabrous Irish terrorism comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore starring one Aidan Turner, whose pectorals you may recall from Poldark (or indeed the dreadful Hobbit films). Never having seen Poldark I wasn't that bothered about his thorax but the play was wonderful – really tightly scripted, packed with the darkest of jokes and ending with a feline and human bloodbath.



One or two of the specific historical references weren't quite as offensive as they would have been when the play was first performed 20 years ago, but there was still plenty to make the audience gasp. There was also a distinct difference between the English and Irish audience members' reactions to some of the darker gags, which reminded me of seeing Hunger a few years ago.

Otherwise this week I've been seeing students as they prepare for the next academic year, trying and failing to get the right access to our VLE so I can set up the courses I'm teaching, catching up with some colleagues and saying goodbye to those being shelled out of the place by the vicious know-nothings who run it, reviewing a book proposal for a university press, writing up my video games conference paper for a magazine, failing to find out how many – if any – students we've recruited this year and generally just getting into the swing of things once more. I've found yet another politician novelist and poet: the 3rd Baron Gorell. Is is stuff any good? No idea…yet. Talking of which, I got hold of the new British Library Crime Classic edition of Ellen Wilkinson's The Division Bell Mystery: she was the crusading Labour MP famous for her part in the Jarrow Hunger March, and who died in sad and mysterious circumstances. She wrote two novels, Clash and this one: Clash is seriously good, while The Division Bell Mystery is hugely interesting for its even-handed politics and its use of the detective genre to explore the political social structure. The British Library have done a lovely job with the reprint, and the introductions by Rachel Reeves MP and Martin Edwards are very good indeed. I'm just annoyed I paid £90 for my slightly tatty first edition because I didn't know a new one was coming!

I've been reading a few things for pleasure too - I whipped through Hugh Howey's feted but actually quite hackneyed Shift the other day. It's the second in his post-apocalyptic Silo trilogy (the City of Ember kids' series does a similar concept more entertainingly). Decent idea, written in a very pedestrian style: mildly diverting, and hampered by an inability to write women at all. I enjoyed Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley an awful lot more – it's a novel about the social and political condition of the English countryside in the interwar period, narrated retrospectively by a teenage girl undergoing a psychotic episode. I did wonder whether interweaving the adolescent mental health and puberty issues with ominous political developments and a family saga, plus a huge amount of farming and nature material was a bit too much to do justice to each aspect. There's a considerable amount of purple prose and a profusion of strands meant that the ending felt a bit facile, but it's a meaty, intelligent and thoughtful book that will definitely withstand re-reading. Now I'm back to Muriel Spark's slight but entertaining Territorial Rights which I temporarily mislaid when I started it last month, and Gillian Darley's Villages of Vision. A couple of years ago we sponsored her relaunch of this overlooked classic at Birmingham Literature Festival, and I bought it then. It's essentially a gazetteer of the 400+ model, utopian, company, communal and experimental villages scattered across the UK, some of which maintain some vestiges of their founders' purposes. I'm really keen on fostering some awareness of Britain's radical and contested history, partly because my students have been so badly failed by an education system that teaches only English aristocratic triumphalism. Two who came to see me this morning were stunned to discover that Ireland, Scotland and Wales have their own languages, and were shocked by my revelation that they were suppressed by the British state. Peterloo, Toldpuddle, the General Strike, Suffrage, Invergordon, the Civil Wars, 1916… if mentioned at all, they're presented as uncouth ingratitude on the part of the oiks. I'd like to persuade them that the peoples of Britain have a proud history of resistance, independence and progressiveness that can be unearthed without too much effort, and Villages of Vision is a dream for that purpose.

And with that, I'm off. Setting up the Shropshire Open fencing competition tonight, and offering myself up as easy pickings to the youngsters who've entered the foil event tomorrow. I know I'm going to regret this…

I think I can feel the skull beneath the skin

Too busy working to have opinions this week, which I'm sure is devastating news to you all. Come to think of it, between exhaustion and a hefty dose of the traditional Freshers' Flu, I can barely think what I've been doing all week.

I did see Bladerunner 2049: a visual and sonic feast, wonderful performances and a decent storyline, though not as philosophically groundbreaking as the original film. There were even a couple of jokes. I did wonder about the nipple count: in this dystopian future only women get naked, and the core of the plot is maternity. Still, about a thousand times more intelligent than everything else on at the moment.

Teaching: this week we've done The Tempest, Gerrard Winstanley's Digger Manifesto The True Levellers Standard Advanced, and Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem.



They're all on different modules but they all seem to have shared interests if I think about them long enough. Away from work a Renaissance theme emerged too: I just read Nicholas Blake's 30s detective thriller Thou Shell of Death (Blake was the pen-name of poet laureate C. Day-Lewis: he claimed to churn out the detective novels for cash but he's very good at it). If you know where the title's from, you know who the murderer was and how it was achieved. I also read, on a Twitter friend's recommendation, Reginald Hill's An Advancement of Learning, a title (and chapter epigrams) lifted from Francis Bacon's Renaissance work of the same name. It's a campus murder mystery: efficient, witty, well-plotted and with a real sense of HE in 1971, but astonishingly and authorially sexist (women are always and only characterised by the size and shape of their breasts - in one case, 'hive-shaped', which beats me). A shame: I enjoyed his Austen pastiche, The Price of Butcher's Meat. Next week's classes aren't quite so coordinated: Ballard's short stories, Gwyn Thomas's All Things Betray Thee, Jilly Cooper's Riders and another session on The Tempest. 



I'm also reading a PhD on masculinity in Welsh twentieth-century fiction, MA dissertations on drugs in dystopian SF and on reason in Winstanley and Milton's works, and racing through a collection of essays on working-class fiction for the event I'm chairing tomorrow at Birmingham Literature Festival. An ironic cheer to the publisher for getting the book to me…today. I did manage to get along to the Cheltenham Literature Festival for an hour, for research purposes: Vince Cable and Stanley Johnson were plugging their books. It was very low-calorie entertainment and mostly covered Brexit in various depressing ways, but I got some useful material by listening to the audience and observing the authors' throwaway comments on being a politician novelist. Johnson went for the full sprezzatura effect, claiming never to have been a serious politician or writer, while Cable saw his novel as a way of exploring the effect of political life on the soul – closer to the didactic tradition. Johnson's latest is a cut-and-paste job ramming together the Trump and Brexit stories as products of a Russian plot. At the event he announced that he thinks Angela Merkel is a Russian spy (echoing one of the mouth-breathers who shouted out the same theory on Question Time recently), and that having been a Remainer, he now thinks Britain will leave the EU with no problems at all ('I wake up every morning and wonder why you're all so worried: what's the problem?'). Sigh.

I also staffed an Open Day on Saturday. Having sent a snottogram to our highly-paid, bonus-culture directors about the mean-spiritedness of withdrawing the limp cheese sandwich traditionally provided to staff and students who gave up their Saturday, I was cynically fascinated by the queue of managers lining up to claim that it was nothing to do with them, out of their hands and something they disagreed with. Sustenance apart, there was an uptick in visitor numbers, though I confess to being shocked that families are checking universities out while their children are still doing GCSEs. Given that my taster class contrasted Jilly Cooper's sex-and-showjumping novels with BS Johnson's book-in-a-box I was a  touch worried about innocent youngsters' being debauched, but it seemed to work OK.

But all this is mere hackwork compared to the Magnum Opus of the week: writing the Course Academic Enhancement Report, the annual masterplan that will transform NSS lead into TEF gold, or something. And on that note, I'd better get back to it.

Bullshit and the End Times.

Back in the late 18th and 19th centuries, there was a minor craze for contemplating The End, through the medium of vast, thought-provoking canvases of familiar landscapes. Europe's ruling élites were familiar with the ruins of Rome, aware of the parallels between that empire and the various ones they were constructing, and a small proportion of these chaps wondered if sic transit gloria applied to them too. 

One of these was Sir John Soane, who not only commissioned the enormous, Classical, Bank of England complex, but also commissioned Joseph Gandy to paint his new gaff utterly destroyed in some unspecified future.

Joseph Gandy, A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin (1789)

Not that this taste for thrilling contemplation of destruction has gone: there's a rather distasteful aestheticisation of industrial decay known as 'ruin porn' in photographic circles, from Chernobyl to guided tours of Detroit. Then there's Ballard's Tales of the Near Future. 

Why am I thinking about this stuff now? Well, it's been a weird week. On Monday and Tuesday I went to Swansea to examine a PhD and ransack the bookshops of what Dylan Thomas called an 'ugly, lovely town'. Barely a new infrastructural development lacked an EU plaque, yet like all of Wales outside Y Fro Cymraeg voted to leave. I returned to lengthy emails and texts from colleagues and friends from all points on the political spectrum expressing feelings of devastation. One of my friends – a banker – has joined the Conservative Party to vote for the most ludicrous leadership candidate possibly to ensure that they become unelectable. Though looking back on this week, I'm not sure the Tories need the help. 

The Labour Party is ripping itself apart as the right and left wings, the MPs and the members, the pragmatists and the idealists, the capitalists and the socialists engage in a blood bath. Personally I'm stuck in the middle. I happen to agree with pretty much everything Corbyn believes, but I think it's true to say that he hasn't managed to engage in the day-to-day political trench warfare required in this appalling polity. His opponents, however, are awful: most of them are right-wingers whose own constituents defied them to vote Out, a lot of them have blood on their hands from Iraq, and they're precisely the kind of polished, remote, managerialists the public now hates utterly. 

Yesterday I went to London for a British Academy lecture on Writing Political Leaders, which turned out to be a chat with Michael Dobbs of House of Cards fame. I read the newspaper on the train. Stirling had plummeted. Investment had crashed. Farage had insulted his fellow MEPs to applause from Marine Le Pen, a halal butcher's shop was burned down in Walsall, a Polish cultural centre had been vandalised, and several people had been racially abused in the street. The Governor of the Bank of England had announced that billions would have to be magicked up to save the British economy following the vote. The Leavers were explaining that they never really promised to spend £350m a week extra on the NHS:

Actually, I agree: people are quite naturally reading the bus slogan as a continuous sentence rather than as separate sentences. Remember The Simpsons: 

Bart sees an advert for Itchy & Scratchy cells:
Commercial: Each one is absolutely, one hundred percent guaranteed to increase in value.
Voiceover: Not a guarantee.

As I entrained, Boris Johnson's rag doll Michael Gove announced he was standing for the leadership of the Conservative Party. As I detrained, I heard that Boris Johnson wasn't standing, the night after Mrs Gove the Daily Mail columnist accidentally sent a weird strategy email to a member of the public, which advised her husband on negotiating with Johnson. To her, the approval of Rupert Murdoch and the Mail's editor was of paramount importance: the actual citizens weren't mentioned. So we have a Tory lineup (this morning, anyway) of Sajid Javid, a Ferengi who believes only in the Rules of Acquisition and whose favourite book is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and whose favourite film is the adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Liam Fox who is essentially Major Corkoran from Le Carré's The Night Manager, Big Brother's keener protege Theresa May, Stephen Crabb the (he says former) homophobic bigot who is backed by his associates Malfoy and Goyle, Andrea Leadsom who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of various hedge funds and who likes to send her money away on holiday to some very discreet islands in the sun, and Michael Gove who looks like Pob, sold schools to his rapacious weirdo friends in business and assorted sects, and insisted to a Parliamentary committee that all schools could and should be 'above average':

Q98 Chair: One is: if "good" requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?
Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.

Q99 Chair: So it is possible, is it?
Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.
Q100 Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?
Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

The Remainers thought everything would be fine because chaps will do the decent thing. The Leavers never thought they'd win so didn't bother thinking about what might happen if they did. The financial sector is in meltdown (but will recover just fine even if it means stepping over heaps of our skulls). Labour is engaged in a protracted and cynical war and the government of the country is staggering from crisis to crisis like someone stuck in a wasp's nest who has forgotten where the entrance is. One of my friends pointed me to Harry Frankfurt's short book On Bullshit, in which he explains that there's a difference between liars, who at least know what truth is and orient themselves around it, and bullshitters, who speak according to the pressing demands of the moment without having even the regard for truth required to be a successful liar. As an analysis of our post-truth politics, it really works.

However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline.  

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit. 

Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires…It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.

The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction… He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. 

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a personís obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. 

No wonder I'm thinking apocalyptic thoughts.

So yes, I went off to London for this Writing Politicians Event. Before that my cool and clever young cousin took me to a glamorous restaurant: we were the only customers who lacked a limo and chauffeur outside, and couldn't discuss our yachts. You could tell it was a great restaurant because despite being a decent cook myself I had absolutely no idea how the various dishes were made. Then we headed off to take in a matinee to cheer ourselves up. It was called The Truth, a French farce in which an incompetent adulterer discovers that his wife, lover and her husband (the protagonist's best friend, who is sleeping with his wife) are slightly more competent adulterers than him. Sparkling, well-constructed and feather light, it promised to be a grand distraction. Only it gradually dawned on me that it was a comical allegory of the British Ruling Classes. There's Boris, betraying his friend Dave. Here's Michael, betraying Boris… et cetera ad infinitum.

Then off I went to the British Academy, the only branch of academia outside Oxbridge that had hundreds of millions of pounds to spare, judging by its accommodation round the corner from Buckingham Palace. It was billed as 'Writing Political Leaders' and featured Dobbs talking to an Oxford Professor of Chinese History. I went because I'm researching politicians' writing at the moment and I had Dobbs on my panel at the Cheltenham Festival. I was hoping to meet other people researching the same thing, and also a tiny bit annoyed that I hadn't been asked to be part of the panel.

Turns out that it wasn't an analytical or academic event at all: it was a mutual love-in for old and young Tories, and my God the larval Tories were terrifying: 18-22 year-olds dressed as their great-grandfathers keen to learn how they too could be Francis Urquhart or Frank Underwood. Certainly a future Tory leader was in the crowd – probably one or two of them have joined the race this morning. It was also rather creepy that not a single female said a word throughout the 90 minutes. Margaret Thatcher was reverentially discussed (Dobbs candidly and admiringly said that she dispensed with his services ruthlessly a week before the 1987 election and Edwina Currie's books got a passing mention), but this was an event for, by and about the patriarchy. Still, on such a dramatic day it was interesting to be surrounded by Tories: they had nothing interesting to say on the subject (Dobbs: 'I don't know whether Boris and Michael are acting out of principle or for personal reason, it's usually the latter') but their very demeanour was instructive. Dobbs wheeled out the same anecdotes he had at Cheltenham and there were no interesting questions. Not exactly up to the level I expected from the British Academy but I suppose they're interested in maintaining links to power. And at least I learned that the field is still free for my amazing revelations…

Who knows what fresh horrors this afternoon will bring?

Vaginas. And Gyles Brandreth.

Good morning all. This is dissertation week so I've spent my time reassuring students, then tearing my hair out as the bureaucracy loses a significant number. You'd have thought that insisting on a stupid submission date, they'd then expect large numbers of people to be queuing and have systems in place to deal with it… rather than closing early and losing track of so many important pieces of work. Thankfully they've all now turned up and the process of marking can begin. Right now, 40 dissertations are spread out on my floor awaiting distribution and attention.

Thankfully, it's not all chores. Yesterday Emma Rees came to talk about her book The Vagina: a Literary and Cultural History, which she originally wanted to call Vulvanomics because it covers the economic ecosystem of female genitalia too. She didn't want to use 'vagina' in the title because that's only a part of the general area, and some of her talk was about the etymological history of the various words used in science and the vernacular to describe it, from Grose's "c**t: a nasty word for a nasty thing' (1788) to Woman's Hour's reluctance to even allow the phrase 'the c word'. We saw some appalling adverts (click to enlarge):

read some 14th-century French fabliaux, talked about the Kilpeck Sheela and discussed vagina dentatae in films and popular culture. Lots of students turned up (some of them sober) as well as staff colleagues and the discussion was lively (and funny). I was really pleased that quite a few male students turned up: though there should definitely be space for women-only discussion, I think it's important that everybody engages with these ideas, particularly as men are responsible for many of the discourses surrounding women's bodies.

Lots of us bought copies of Emma's excellent book and then we went to the pub, and later for curry with Emma and her lovely husband - one of the best nights out I've had for ages.

What else has happened this week? Well, I've added to my pile of novels by politicians considerably. I'm planning to write a paper on the aesthetics of the politician's novel, because amazingly, it doesn't seem to have been done (write in to prove me wrong). Here's my original list of candidates: I've added a lot more to my spreadsheet since then. I'm not convinced the process of reading these novels will be entirely enjoyable, judging by the reviews of many but I think there's at least a paper in the phenomenon, the notion of politician as 'brand', the media context and most importantly, the link between being a politician and the kind of fiction they write – mostly political thrillers.

At the moment, I'm trying to decide how to sub-divide the works. I'm going to exclude professional authors who became politicians (goodbye PD James (author of the worst novel I've read in years, Death Comes To Pemberley), Ruth Rendell and John Buchan, but perhaps also Douglas Hurd) but I may include non-elected people in the fuzzy halo of politics: spy chief Stella Rimington, Michael Dobbs (his House of Cards trilogy is awful, though the UK and recent US adaptations are much better), Alastair Campbell and a few others.





I think I'll give a pre-history of writing by politicians but declare an official start with the professionalisation of politics: perhaps from the date of salaried MPs (1911), or from universal suffrage (1928). I haven't yet decided whether to exclude novels written before the author was elected or appointed (doing so would reduce my Louise Mensch reading list considerably).

This week, I got copies of Brian Sedgemore's Power Failure (sounds like a prog-rock band) and Mr Secretary of State, Chris Mullin's The Year of the Fire Monkey and Gyles Brandreth's Who Is Nick Saint? (suspiciously absent from his bibliography: he's currently flogging a series called The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries. The Labour novels are usually suspicious about the 'deep state', which is always opposed to Labour and to socialism, whereas Tory ones are about individuals behaving heroically or awfully - matching the parties' supposed ideologies. I've got about 65 novels (at a minimum) and a few collections of poetry so far: more suggestions gratefully received. In particular: does anyone know of fiction or poetry by SNP and Plaid Cymru MPs and assembly members? I'd be astonished if there isn't any, given the intellectual nature of Welsh-language culture and its entwinement with politics, but I can't find any. (Also shocking: there has never been a female Plaid MP, though the current leader is the brilliant Leanne Wood). There are plenty of Sinn Féin authors, from Gerry Adams in the present day to several of the 1918 Dail Éireann representatives, like Piaras Béaslaí.

Anyway, that's all just thinking aloud. Now it's time to go and put on my bow tie for the student-organised Teaching Awards! I've been nominated as 'Outstanding' and 'Inspirational'. Which just goes to show what a sophisticated sense of humour my students have. Toodle-pip!