And so to bed…

Well, I feel like going to bed. It's been a long day. I will say though that I really enjoyed my seminar with the 3rd-years. We did Munday's conservative, poor-but-interesting The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington from 1599 (crudely hacked into two not very good plays) in which Robin is a thoroughly good aristocratic chap and never poses any sort of threat to feudal society, and Geoffrey Trease's 1930 socialist propagandist take on Robin, Bows Against The Barons.

The class really enjoyed the Trease: he's pretty realistic and writes characters and plots with considerable facility. And of course, he's completely right. It's a fascinating negotiation of 1930s debates about socialism: the relationship of vanguard parties to the proletariat, the dangers of Strong Leaders, the need to reject racial division, monarchy, religion and hierarchies. Highly recommended.

Next week it's a pair of plays on the thorny subjects of class and money: Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts and Carryl Churchill's Serious Money.

Time for a meeting

Brilliant class on Piers Plowman, Poly-Olbion and Robin Hood today - I really like my students at the moment, and some of them even read the texts… Piers is brilliant - the narrator makes it very clear that the Big Society is canting, hypocritical bullshit that won't get you to heaven - try the Prologue and Passae 1 and 4. Don't read Poly-Olbion: it's deadly.

Now I'm off to Birmingham for a three hour meeting about West Midlands fencing. See you at 8 tomorrow morning so I can write tomorrow morning's lecture on Britishness. What an exciting life!

Nets full of books

Some excellent publications reach me today.

The new issue of the London Review of Books (it's not just book reviews, but it is from London).

Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons: a reprint (can't afford the original) of a 1934 Communist-ish version of the Robin Hood story. I intend to put it up with various aristocratic versions in one of my modules to trace the class tension in this legend.

Alfred Fairbank's A Book of Scripts - a stunning 1955 hardcover illustrated reprint of a book about handwriting and the evolution of scripts. Yes, I know nobody writes anything by hand anymore, but it's still interesting and beautiful. There are all sorts of interesting things about our ascent to literacy: did you know that we still have no firm idea about whether people ever read silently until the 18th century?

Sharon O'Dair's Class, Critics and Shakespeare: Bottom Lines on the Culture Wars. Why did Shakespeare become the property of the toffs?

John Le Carré's new one, Our Kind of Traitor. His Cold War spy novels worked on the basis that you couldn't trust your side or their's, and that morality, loyalty, patriotism and ideology were all mutable and untrustworthy - the end of the Cold War didn't kill this stuff off - he's become more relevant (and even more passionate).

Finally, and mostly to drive my office colleagues out of the room, Stockhausen's Mantra. Does anyone else think he looks like Andrew Marr?

This is what real academics are like

The Guardian has a piece on Robin Hood today, a fascinating examination of the mythos. My old PhD examiner, Prof. Stephen Knight is quoted:

Stephen Knight, professor of English literature at Cardiff University and one of the world's leading authorities on the literary evolution of Robin Hood, calls the search for the real outlaw "vulgar empiricism". Who cares if there was a real Robin Hood? There's a real myth which is living and breathing."

"Most historians think my work is shit, real shit," says Knight with disarming honesty.

His book on Robin Hood is the business: a cultural history rather than a desperate attempt to nail the name onto some bloke.

Brown paper parcels tied up with string…

Happy Bastille Day - how I love sharing a birthday with a purge of the idle rich.

I went straight to work from my parents today, and was greeted by two wondrous things. The first was a massive pile of parcels: seemingly all the books I've ordered recently have come in the same delivery. OK, it looks like I've bought myself a load of birthday presents, but I'm still childishly excited by opening parcels and smelling new paper.

One of the books was To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century Literature edited by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, the latter of whom was one of my PhD external examiners. Funny that to buy the book at its cheapest (£25 second hand), it had to go from Wales to India and then be sent to me… Coincidentally, Knight wrote the definitive 'biography' of Robin Hood, and another of the books which arrived today was Adam Thorpe's revisionist Hodd. The others were the massive pile of OUP sale books (on medieval literature, modernism and the Victorians), Kiberd's new book on Joyce's Ulysses, and most wonderfully, the fourth volume of the Moomins strip cartoons. Just as a physical object, Drawn and Quarterly (PDF sample on that page) have produced a thing of beauty.

The other weird and wondrous thing this morning was receiving an email from Hilary Wright. It took me a few minutes to work out that this was my sister, returned from honeymoon and starting a new life with a new name. Regardless of your views on marriage and surnames, it felt like a significant moment even to those around her: I have a sister but after 26 years, her new position in the world and new relationship to us all are aurally and visibly announced.