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.

What passes for normal around here

As befits the start of a new academic year, the past couple of weeks have been full of highs and lows. Management have taken decisions so breathtakingly stupid that I've felt like wandering round to their secure location, necking a couple of spinach cans and POWING them through some walls.

The Lego Academics wanted a quiet word with whoever makes the decisions around here

Thankfully I have a boss with a good line in soothing humour. He recommends that we all play this satirical gem on repeat, while taking deep breaths. It might be stuck in your head for a while though…



And yet, the highs have outweighed the lows. Now I've met the students in both my departments (one subject cannot contain my powers, puny mortals) and it looks like a second year of engaged, knowledgeable people in a row. For no reason I can discern, cohorts have collective identities, despite individuals of course coming to the fore. This lot, like the last, are talkative and ready to go. I intend to keep up this conviction until the first essays come in…

"We have marked your first essays"

I've also had some really good news personally. My application for a couple of hundred hours of teaching exemption to get on the Readership track has been approved, so I'm thrilled about that. Sad too: I love all the classes I teach, and will miss those I have to drop next semester and the one after that. Still, I'll get some decent research done and come back bursting with new ideas. In theory.

The other bit of good news is that a PhD I proposed with colleagues has attracted funding, so I'll hopefully have a minion eager next-generation scholar in a year or so. If you're interested in media ethics, watch this space!

We're attempting to detect the Mail's conscience. You have three years. 

Finally, a friend has located the first episode of Scotch on the Rocks, the BBC's early-70s adaptation of Douglas Hurd's terrible Tartan Terrorism novel. It's too large to post here, but I'll try to find some way to edit it so I can share the horror. 

You poor creatures

Thoroughly demoralised by the dissertation I've just marked, I'm probably in the wrong frame of mind to brighten your day with an inspiring blog post. Sometimes you just have to accept that you can't pass on to everyone the core values of academia: honesty, respect and the simple joy of applied thought. Here's hoping that the next one in the pile will be better. (I just peeked: it is).

I was idly considering the REF exercise yesterday. In case you don't know it, the Research Excellence Framework is the mechanism by which individuals' and universities' research output is graded. It's a mechanical, easily manipulated system which is entirely rigged to funnel what little remaining funds are available to the Russell Group universities while appearing to provide a level playing field. It distorts the kind of research we do, takes over the lives of those charged with administering the process in-house, and rarely seems to benefit those who actually do the research.

It put me in mind of Kazuo Ishiguro's disturbing, elegiac 2005 novel Never Let Me Go in some ways. In NLMG, we meet a very talented group of somewhat disturbed children sequestered in Hailsham, a remote boarding school, one of a network around the country. Encouraged to develop their creative skills, they dream of a future in which they are appreciated for their achievements. Gradually, however, the reader (and eventually the characters) realise that they have no such bright horizons. We learn that they are clones, called 'donors', and that they have a very limited life-span. They are, in fact, specially bred as living organ banks, and will 'donate' their vitals one by one until they are 'complete', i.e. dead, while the lives of the recipients are extended ad infinitum.

Some of them fervently, heartbreakingly believe that deferrals will be made for any donor who can demonstrate exceptional artistic talent because it showed that they were capable of genuine love, a hope cruelly fostered by well-meaning carers. The donors' error is to believe in a bourgeois notion of individual meritocracy when in fact they are the proletariat in a medical economy. In reality, the children are considered non-human, capably merely of simulating human qualities.

If that doesn't work as a metaphor for our education system, our economic system and the REF, I don't know what would. We educate our children to paint and sing and play, then send the vast majority off to work in call centres or serve coffee at a minimum wage, the better to enrich the recipients of these donations. Closer to home, we scholars in the less-prestigious institutions persuade ourselves that participation in REF will lead to elevation to the Russell Group, or more selflessly, to recognition that world-class work is being done here too. Like the poor children of Never Let Me Go, we donate our work time after time after time in the hope that we will be spared, and time after time we 'complete': our efforts go unread, unappreciated, our research funding is diverted and cut, and time after time we're exhorted to sacrifice even more, because next time we might earn our reprieve. We argue that our work is so important, so meaningful, that we are so transformed by it simply for its innate qualities that we deserve exemption.

Kath and Tommy, in love, track down their old teachers to show them Tommy's art in the hope of persuading them to spare him. As Madame puts it:

Because of course…your art will reveal your inner selves! That's it, isn't it? Because your art will display your souls! … Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?

Madame's partner Emily chimes in with the truth:

It's something for them to dream about, a little fantasy. What harm is there?…It gives me no pleasure to disappoint you. But there it is … even back when Hailsham was considered a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things, even then, it wasn't true. A wishful rumour. That's all it ever was. 

Like the Hailsham kids, we are fooling ourselves. We're the proletarians in this system, the cannon fodder in an education class war, spared a few hours and a pot of paint to keep us on the treadmill. Yet we know that certain influential corners of academia look down on our work, a view shared and encouraged by a government which has no interest in research that doesn't turn an immediate profit, or that challenges their narrow world-view. REF is the Hailsham mirage, the white lie to give us hope.

Kath asks the pair why the children's art was collected at all.

Why did we do all of that work in the first place? Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we're just going to give donations anyway, then die, whys all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?

The question can be asked of our globalised, capitalist economy. Why, in a system which is designed to reward the rentier class and exploit the workers, should we bother educating the workers and employing their teachers? It isn't, says Emily, out of altruism: it's to make the organ recipients feel better, to disguise the mechanisation of humanity.

…it made it easy for the rest of them…they could all carry on without a care … We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all. "There, look!" we could say. "Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than human?

In Ishiguro's world, Hailsham was a response to a much crueller, harsher cloning regime, in which society hid away the children and preferred not to talk about them - but the kinder system was swept away when a man tried to produce 'enhanced' clones:

It reminded people, reminded them of a fear they'd always had. It's one thing to create students, such as yourselves, for the donation programme. But a generation of created children who'd take their place in society? Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no.

Let's not forget the Labour education secretary Charles Clarke who described historians as 'medieval seekers after truth' who are 'good to have as an adornment to society'. As postgraduate work becomes the preserve of rich kids at socially-élite universities, humanities research in particular is becoming a hobby or a superficial cultural marketing device with little social substance. Down here amongst the large, modern universities we're encouraged to spatter some paint on canvas, but deep down, we know that the game's rigged: we'll be allowed enough crayons to persuade ourselves that we matter but aside from a few handpicked exceptions who'll be plucked out, our working class students and dedicated staff will be ruthlessly exploited while the HEFCE-funded port passes round High Table as it always has.

This is the underlying fear of our rulers: that the masses will want the lives – educationally and otherwise – of the élites. REF, and the current university system is part of the mechanism of control. It looks like a nice way to enfold us all in progress, but it is in fact a thinly disguised means of reifying the status quo. Anyone who objects goes the same way as one of Hailsham's guardians, Lucy Wainwright.

…she began to have these ideas. She thought you students had to be made more aware. More aware of what lay ahead of you, who you were, what you were for. She believed you should be given as full a picture as possible. That to do anything less would be somehow to cheat you … but what she was wanting to do, it was too theoretical… Lucy Wainwright was idealistic, nothing wrong with that. But she had no grasp of practicalities.

'No grasp of practicalities': the mantra of the hard men and women of the governing classes, chanted as they make their money and pull up the ladder behind them.

And if that sounds bitter, it's meant to.

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!

That Friday feeling

Hi everybody. Apologies for the relative radio silence today.

It's been busy. The first thing I had to do today was finish shortening and cleaning up the paper I've co-written on jazz in some contemporary British novels. I've loved writing with someone else: the pressure not to disappoint or let down a friend (especially a much cleverer one) has provided the spur that I, as a congenitally lazy ass, really needed. It's been great looking at the same words and two of us coming up with different ways to understand them too. But today was about editing: we were way over the limit, so we had to cut. I was dreading this bit: how would my partner feel if I presented her with a draft in which all her bits had been radically shortened? I know I'd hate it. But gloriously, I couldn't tell which bits she'd written and which were mine for the most part. She uses more commas and I use more colons, but that was about it. So we cut and honed and hammered until we were there. Then I had to learn an entirely new referencing system (Chicago Notes and Bibliography) and change every single reference. And then wrestle with RefWorks, the referencing software. In the end though, it's done and we've agreed that we'll do it again, for which I'm profoundly grateful. I was expecting a painful session in which a red pen and a literary walk of shame would be my only reward.

After that: I've interviewed a potential MA student and now have two brand new lectures to write for delivery on Tuesday (5 hours of lecturing without a break). One is on the post-Romantic hero in contemporary fiction, and the other is Derrida for Media Studies and Cultural Studies students. Gulp. Monday's out because it's my grandmother's funeral (did I mention that her brother died a few days ago too?) so it looks like the weekend will consist of me scratching my head and breaking off hourly for a glass of freshly squeezed horse glands. I should do more tonight but all the ideas I had yesterday have magically morphed into barely-literate and gnomic scribbles. I'm too tired to transform them into coherent ideas now – instead I'll be back in the office tomorrow.

While doing all this, I've had the office mostly to myself and allowed my Twitter stream to dictate the music I listen to. So a mention of Mogwai got me listening to their early stuff, followed by Labradford, then (as it was Valentine's day), Love, then Majorstuen, a wonderful Norwegian folk group, then some John Taverner. Here's a blast of each:



This is Mogwai's 'New Paths To Helicon'. They pioneered instrumental quiet-loud-quiet post-rock, following in the footsteps of Slint and Labradford. I saw them twice: once in Stoke supporting the Manic Street Preachers in the mid-90s, and last year. I was the only one in the crowd at Stoke there primarily for Mogwai: everybody else stood there with hands over ears mouthing 'what's this shit?' because it hadn't been on Chris Evans's Breakfast Show or whatever. Then last year in a tiny, lovely Birmingham music-hall they made the most beautiful, challenging noise, but behaved like spoiled children having temper tantrums. Nobody forced you to be a band, sell tickets and have fans guys: at least pretend to enjoy it. It's better than working in an office!

Labradford were around in the 90s, but I never managed to see them sadly. Like Mogwai, they lurch from ethereal beauty to pummelling aggression and back within seconds, though the older band's purpose is that little bit more elusive. Here's a fairly late one by them:



Love were also-rans in the 60s: too many chaotic fallings-out, drugs and changes of direction meant that their seminal Forever Changes wasn't the huge success it should have been. Here's the heart-breaking 'Alone Again Or':



Majorstuen just make me happy. I think I heard them on Radio 3 and immediately bought their album. I don't know whether they're the cutting edge of Norwegian roots or retro. I don't particularly care either. But they are yet another reason to move to Norway. My favourite track starts at 17 minutes.



Finally, a sublime Taverner arrangement of the ancient Westron Wynde song used by several English Renaissance composers as the basis of mass settings. Never mind the theology, feel the beauty.



Obviously other things have caught my eye today. In case you're wondering, I'm both outraged and unsurprised by: the Sun's front page; the Tory minister who declared that gay couples are incapable of caring for children; further adulteration of meat.

More Reckons next week, when I'll also be live-tweeting two family funerals.

This certainly doesn't happen every day

Usually, I'm a modest man with (as Winston Churchill snidely said of Clement Atlee), 'much to be modest about'. But today, indulge me for a moment:



Why such levity? 

I just got a note from the editor of an international journal which has accepted a paper what I wrote. One of the readers called it 'superb' and she said:

Excellent piece, by the way. I'm proud to be publishing it.

This is not normal. I find writing very difficult. Well, not blogging, obviously, but I really do find research and academic writing stressful and expect to be laughed out of town whenever I try any. There's always more to read, everyone else is so accomplished and I always feel like an interloper. 

But not today. Though obviously the words 'they're just being nice to you because you're so useless and they didn't have enough submissions' are thundering around my cranium.  

Too dumb to live

Sometimes students come in, distraught, having missed a deadline because they got the date wrong. Some of them are liars, but most of them have made a genuine error. I'm usually sympathetic but have to tell them that the system doesn't allow for human error. We academic staff don't have control of the submission mechanism and can't give extensions. Quite often I think to myself 'the date is on the module guide and the assignment brief: sort yourself out'.

No longer. The next time someone comes in with this tale of woe I will move heaven and earth to help them. Why? Because it's happened to me. In a move of stunning stupidity, I read a submission date for my Travel in Wales journal article as January 15th rather than January 5th. Was it because I wasn't wearing my newly-acquired spectacles? Or because I have another chapter deadline on February 15th? Or because I am, in the final reckoning, a moron? Whatever the cause, I've been working steadily away confident that I'd make the deadline. Indeed I was feeling rather smug that my new academic rigour and determination was going to get me there a day or two early unlike some people (in some fields extra time is always given as part of the submission ritual).

What to do? I've sent the most grovelling and apologetic email ever written to the editors begging for extra time and apologising profusely. The heart raced and the face was red as I prostrated myself humiliatingly. It's all I can do: hope they show mercy and keep writing. This is one of those occasions on which there's no scintilla of light, nobody and nothing else can be blamed. It's just me, being a dick. I've always loved this Douglas Adams line: 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past', but it's not funny today: I've let down my academic peers and announced to them that I'm unreliable. Not good at all.

If there's any good coming out of this at all, it's that I'll be a little more understanding to students in the same position. But that doesn't make me feel one iota better this morning, I can tell you.

Update: the lovely editors have forgiven me and given me until the 15th. So relieved. Now to make it the best paper ever. I don't think I'd ever live down an extension which led to a rejected article…

A stupid question for the super-researchers

Here's a simple question for my colleagues, friends and all the academics I know who seem to churn out learned articles all the time. It's one I've never heard discussed and it's probably quite naive, but here goes anyway.

Quite simply, how do you keep up with the volume of critical work produced?

Call it citation anxiety.

I work in literary studies. There are probably a couple of hundred thousand others across the world, most of them writing books and articles. There are probably a couple of thousand writing pieces more or less relevant to my focus (masculinity, Wales, the interwar period), including those producing works of theory. If they each produce one paper a year - at a conservative estimate - which I need to read to make my own output relevant and up to date, how do I find the time?

Whenever I write anything, I worry that it's already been done, or that I've missed something really relevant that my readers all know about. I can narrow the search to particular journals, but there are also publications I'll never hear about, or have access too.

And yet my esteemed colleagues must have a solution to this. They find the time, amongst teaching, and admin and developing new research interests and sleeping, to keep abreast of their fields. How do you find the texts, then decide what not to read, then process it all?

Spill the beans!

Tune in tomorrow

Lots on tonight and tomorrow. Mostly cleaning tonight, sadly, and hoping Stoke City put the recent run of bad results behind them.

But tomorrow - after a flat inspection by the landlord and a meeting about our absurd system of fining people for allegedly not using teaching rooms - I'm on the panel for another fine Guardian Higher Education debate, this time on integrating research and teaching. Or in my case, failing to integrate the research I'd like to get round to doing into the teaching I do rather a lot of.

Post questions now, and it'll be live 12-2 tomorrow, though I'll be a little late thanks to meetings.

I apologise for the advertisement. DO NOT buy Peter Kay's DVD. It will be very poor indeed. You can while away the hours trying to work out why a reggae artist thinks that 'Lecturer' is a good stage name. Here's 'Lecturer Riddim', which I believe I've always had.

And on that note, I'm off home to gnaw on a pig's leg I prepared earlier.

Things I've learned this afternoon.

1. There is a thriving postgraduate research culture in my English department: 3 PhD students, all doing utterly fascinating things - Romanticism and Translation, Shakespeare in adaptation, and modern mythology.

2. Helen Maria Williams, the Scots-Welsh author and translator who lived in Revolutionary France, was called a 'Scribbling Trollop' by a British journalist. I presume this was a forerunner of the Daily Mail.  Apparently translation from contemporary languages was drudgery, and therefore assigned to women. The men translated the Classics. If I were a female literature/writing blogger, I'd be appropriating 'Scribbling Trollop' as a pseudonym right now. Thanks to Paul for his fascinating and enlightening presentation of his PhD research.

3. Elvis wasn't the first King to die on the toilet. George II tied today in 1760, 'in his privy closet'.

It's not all rioting and committees

One of the best day's in my institution's year is the annual Staff Research Conference held by what other universities would call the School of Humanities. But I won't get into that argument, as I'm having such a good day.

Presenters are from all over the academic shop: lawyers, economic/consumption historians, linguists in several languages, sociology, literature and all points in-between. I've presented in previous years and will again: this year I'm content to settle back and be enlightened.

So far, I've attended papers on journalists' understanding of what kind of images are or aren't too horrific for display on TV and their relations with editors; an aesthetic analysis of Colombian film The Wind Journeys; an exploration of the different understanding of psycholinguistics in Russian and British academia; a very interesting piece on the linguistic modes of online forum disagreements ('You suck'), presentations on colour in 18th-century English retail, on the material lives of singletons in the 18th-century (e.g. how spinsters, widows, almshouse inhabitants and others lived), and a fascinating exploration of changing shopping practice in the postwar Black Country: the complex interactions of the corner shop, credit, social standing, communal relations and the rise of the supermarket.

Now I'm in the Literature session. The current speaker is talking about the English Romantics' reception and use of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, as translated by Helen Maria Williams the radical poet, novelist, revolutionary and translator. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read the novel in either language, though I'm familiar with many of the Romantic texts the speaker asserts were influenced by the novel. Next up is my friend Lorna on Ellen Williams's fascinating, gender-transgressive New Woman/Journalism novel, Anna Marsden's Experiment (annoyingly not on Project Gutenberg or available in any bookshop anywhere, damn it). One of its interesting features is the newspaper our hero/ine works at: the Daily Planet!

After that, Gaby on one of my very favourite authors, Mervyn Peake, which should be a real treat.

Don't worry: I'll get back to whinging about the government shortly. In the meantime, have a look at this - my friend Ben's short, pungent and witty 10 Point Plan To Save The Country. He's a much better writer than I am.

Readers, take note!

I've just read an entertaining essay in the London Review of Books on note-taking by Keith Thomas, the eminent historian. His notation/filing method seems to involve a cavern stuffed with envelopes full of slips of paper.

Mine consists of computer files with a new section for each page, with my comments in […] and bits which seem specially important in bold. I'll read everything I need, take notes in a separate document for each text, then have them all open while I try to make sense of them in a fresh master document. My books are also full of scribbles, scraps of paper and - I discovered last year - the passport I'd reported lost several years ago.

The trouble is, writing's horrible and reading's fun. And easier.

Still, at least I'm not Lord Acton, another famous historian:

whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with pencilled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’

What's your method?

A Transcultural and Transnational Invitation

Anyone in the Black Country next Wednesday is warmly invited to the launch of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research, of which I am a lowly member.

The launch will be from 4.30-7.30 in MC001, with an inaugural lecture on Arctic Studies by the renowned scholar Jan Borm. Warm white wine will no doubt be served.


The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research (CTTR) provides a research environment for interdisciplinary investigation into the history and continuing pertinence of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and other inter-cultural configurations of consciousness and identity, including the ways in which these are manifested in micro-cosmopolitan contexts (e.g. the national, regional, or local).

The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research:

• brings together the terms ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ in recognition of the mutuality of spatial/geographical and aesthetic/cultural modes of identity;
• emphasises the importance of longitudinal study from the eighteenth-century to the present;
• is consciously multi- and inter-disciplinary, drawing its researchers from Literary Studies, Modern Languages, American Studies, European Studies, Linguistics, History, Politics, and other disciplines;
• has an established international collaborative dimension, with active international Honorary Research Fellows and International Advisors representing a world-wide community of scholars;
• provides opportunities for early career and post-doctoral research, post-graduate study, and public outreach.

The Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research hosts three sub-groups representing its principal focus areas:

Europe: Trend and Transformation (ETAT)

Global Culture and Identity (GCI)

Transnational Pedagogies (TP)

'Just imagine having a job for pleasure'

… is the inscription on the back of Moomins Book 4, the front cover of which I reproduce below.

I love my job - teaching is brilliant when it goes well. Being paid to read books is pretty much all I've every wanted from life, but the constant hostility from management (who, let's not forget, should exist to further the needs of students and teachers) is wearing and depressing. Moomins cheers me up.

It's not all work, work, work

Sometimes, I'm actually happy. Last night, Mark and I had to agree a project grade. We did so and then repaired to an hostelry and drank fine ales in the garden, while talking solely about books and possible research we could do together - two hours passed by without notice.

Meanwhile on another planet

Pro-Vice Chancellor for research at Sussex makes working there sound like paradise for staff - light workload for new staff in the first three years, no higher promotion for selfishly-behaved academics, strong defence of the higher education ethos, aims to be the employer of first choice… He even wanders about the campus inviting random colleagues for coffee, and makes sure he gets to know everybody, to the benefit of individual and and institution. If it's true, what a great place.

A little sunshine

OK, The Deer Friend left a comment asking for some sweetness and light on educational matters. Luckily, I've spent the morning in a meeting with our Dean. Although what she said doesn't entirely fit what the Vice-Chancellor said, she was upbeat and positive, and it's clear that staff research is going to be supported. So you students may hear new and exciting discoveries made by staff in the time we're going to be given. That's proper good news!

Also, I have found my niche. I am a B-grade PGCE student and therefore a B-grade teacher. Despite my 1st class degree with prizes, MA with prizes and PhD, my technology-supported learning PGCE was deemed worthy of a B. Perhaps because I was 'creative', though the feedback objected to a lack of theory (there isn't any on blogging and pedagogy) and my use of the MHRA referencing system - which I used because Harvard's rubbish and I'm damned if I'm going to learn yet another one for a one-year course after struggling for years to get MHRA right for the MA and PhD theses.

Perhaps I'll sink even lower for the other assessments.

Very timely!

One of my managerial chain of bosses, ex-bizzy Jim Waddington, has landed some funding for a serious and timely piece of research:

Professor Jim Waddington from SLS has been granted £94,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for his research project entitled “Evaluating police behaviour- using video-clips to examine evaluations of police conduct.” The research will aim to advance academic understanding of how the public perceive and assess the conduct of police. It will investigate different types of police–public encounters and identify those features of which the public approves or disapproves. The project will try and establish what it is about such experiences that leave people with an unflattering impression and equally, what the good practice is of which they approve.

I'd hope that batoning people to death (G20), telling the press a pack of porkie pies (G20), falsely imprisoning peaceful demonstrators ('this is not a riot', chanted seated demonstrators as cops waded violently in - G20), filming and identifying said legal demonstrators (G20), building a database of innocent civilians (ongoing), harassing journalists (Kingsnorth) while ensuring that friendly TV crews are on scene for dramatic armed arrests of 'terrorists' who are then released without charge, making up spurious injury lists (Kingsnorth) removing identity numbers (forever), suborning Plane Stupid protestors, and telling the press and Facebook that violence is relished ('we're up for it' / 'bash some hippies') might get a mention, though some of this doesn't take place on video unless the activists catch it.

Dr John Frink speaks…

Who'd have thought it? Students think attractive lecturers are more academically competent. They also rate literature teachers very badly indeed. Serious research, folks (with a somewhat partisan gloss - comments by a smug political scientist) here.