Basking in academic sunshine

Two great classes today. One was on journalism and ethics: I managed to restrain myself and not recount recent personal experience, but we usefully explored Nick Davies idea of 'churnalism' and the  difference between the ideal journalist as scrutineer of power on our behalf and the reality. Slightly hampered by the fact that very few of the students ever watch or read news broadcasts, but they're quick on the uptake when it comes to ideas.

The other class was my English Renaissance seminar. The subject was Ben Jonson's Volpone, in which a rich old Venetian man pretends to have a terminal illness in order to received splendid gifts from three other greedy old men, in the hope that they'll be named sole heir. There's a cast of freaks, a wily servant, the legacy-hunters, a bland young man who saves a bland young woman from rape by the eponymous anti-hero, and for comic relief, a naive English couple abroad, agog at the city's conspiratorial nature: they want in.

Volpone 'seducing' Celia in the 1941 French adaptation

I decided that we should look at the play as a performance, because that would require the students to consider all the other questions about how it works. So I asked them to prepare the scenes in which Corvino orders his wife Celia to sleep with Volpone, and the one in which Volpone attempts to rape her. They had to explain their casting choices, costumes, tone of voice, movement, set design, whether to keep the action in Renaissance Venice or move it to some other time and place, what to do about the language and a host of other things. Finally, they'd have to consider genre: how does a rape scene play in a comedy? In doing so, they'd have to make choices: about attitudes to sex, gender and ageing, whether virtuous Celia is a heroine or a prig, whether retaining the original setting and language distances a 2013 audience from Jonson's social critique, and how to portray the animal symbolism which structures the play: do we want to produce a piece of symbolic art or an intervention into a discrete cultural situation?

A more stylised production of Volpone

The idea was to get them to do a reading of the play in the seminar, once we'd discussed their ideas. They chickened out of that (though a few were enthusiastic), which I can understand completely (though it's going to happen soon, now I know how good they are), but otherwise the exercise was hugely successful. They enjoyed it, they drew on all parts of the play to justify their choices. One group went for the original setting but a farce-like staging, while the other chose a modern setting in a scrapyard, perhaps drawing on Steptoe to emphasis Volpone's purposeless acquisitiveness. One group decided that Celia is a figure of fun because she's so uptight and dull, so they proposed casting Sheryl Cole to avoid the audience sympathising with her: their Volpone was to be Alan Rickman thanks to his depiction of evil in Harry Potter. The other group went for a Benny Hill-style romp: lots of chasing each other round the furniture. 

I was so impressed by the sophistication of their thought. Just goes to show that breaking away from the standard seminar format can produce really rich results: we talked about all the same issues but the challenge of performance really added something. One of those occasions which makes this job so brilliant.

'Turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues'

It's been a long and tiring day, teaching several things which required extra energy to get students engaged. This isn't a moan by the way: it's what gets me up in the morning. We had a seminar on Ben Jonson's Volpone, a witty, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny play which casts a baleful, misanthropic eye on a world cheapened by greed, commerce and corruption. Can't think what led me to put it on a course in this day and age. Here's Volpone disguised as Scoto the Mountebank, flogging quack cures to the gullible



Other mountebanks are fraudulent, of course, or as Volpone calls them, 'turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogues'

Quite neatly, I went straight into the Ethics and Media class, which is largely actually populated by students from Religious Studies courses. After several weeks exploring Bentham, Mill and Kant, we're at the stage of doing case studies. Today was advertising: can it be ethical at all? How does it work? We looked at Kerry Katona's banned loan shark advert,



a furniture ad, one for shampoo (replete with dodgy statistics and misleading claims) and discussed whether the onus is on the advertiser to be truthful (if such a thing is possible) or on the buyer to be aware. More than a few decided that it's OK for corporations to lie because they need to make a profit.

Conversation turned to pseudo-science and surveys as they're used in ads. The cohort choice is never presented, neither are the questions or contexts. The numbers are laughably low: none of this would every stand up to scrutiny. This of course gave me the chance to show them one of my favourite comedy scenes, from Yes, Prime Minister. It's funny because it's still true, in politics as in commerce:



It still raised a laugh from the students, who have never heard of the show before, so respect is due to the authors. Sadly I didn't have time to show them another of my favourite exchanges, on newspaper readerships:



I used to think this was comedy:



until the banking crash, and in particular the sight of a line of bank CEOs admitting to Parliament that they didn't have any financial qualifications and didn't actually understand how the financial instruments they sold actually worked (or failed to work). Can't find a clip, but here's the exchange:

Q779 Nick Ainger: Let us start with you, Sir Tom: what banking qualifications have you got?
Sir Tom McKillop: I do not have any formal banking qualifications. I was five years in (?).
Sir Fred Goodwin: Whether you would call them banking qualifications or not, but I have a degree in law; I qualified as a chartered accountant; I was in public practice, including auditing banks for a number of years; I was involved in winding-up banks and then looking at providing advice for banks; I was Chief Executive of Clydesdale Bank; and I was a Chief Executive of Yorkshire Bank before I joined the Royal Bank of Scotland group in 1998 as Deputy Chief Executive.
Mr Hornby: I do not have any formal banking qualifications. I have an MBA from Harvard where I specialised in all the finance courses, including financial services; and before I took over as Chief Executive two years ago I was a Director of HBOS for seven years.
Lord Stevenson of Coddenham: Like Andy, I have no formal banking qualifications. I have of course been Chairman of the Bank for ten years; and before that I was initially, for about 20 years, an entrepreneurial businessman and I have run large businesses since then.

And now I'm going fencing. I haven't hit anyone all day and I feel the need.

Round and about

Spotted in The Dark Place over the last few days. Taken on my phone, hence the execrable quality of the pictures.

I would avoid the bacon in this pub. 

This week's Private Eye. I assume that Dominic Lawson is reassessing his view of the Right's behaviour given his own paper's attack on Ed Miliband's dead dad, or as I'm putting it in tabloidese: 'The Belgian Who Battled For Britain and the Paper that Batted For Berlin'.

Interesting bit of left-wing agitation posted at various sites around the city. The use of the West Midlands Police logo is quite cunning: people do tend to stop and read them. 

Rather lovely letter and newspaper box on the Central Library. A bit Deco, a bit Nouveau, and the luxury of separate slots for papers and letters!

I've had an interesting, if expensive morning already. The daily hate of the Today programme riled me up good and proper. It finished with a reading of a Dylan Thomas poem. Brilliant. Read by… Prince Charles. Because when you need a voice which really expresses the joys of a dissolute, cultured, Welsh thinker, you automatically think of a billionaire monarch-in-waiting with a plummy English accent and a courtesy title to remind Wales of its subjection. Next week he's back to read The Road to Wigan Pier, followed by a preview of his new album, This Land Is My Land: Prince Charles Sings the Hits of Woody Guthrie. 

After that, it was off to the bike shop with both my bikes. The 1967 Moulton Classic needs a full service, and the Forme is getting its 3-month once-over. I don't think the guys in the shop had ever seen a Moulton, and needed persuading that it isn't a shopper or Bike-Shaped Object. Then they started to notice the weird and interesting bits and got quite interested. Needless to say, the simple servicing visit was a trap: I walked out with a pair of Specialized cycling shoes and the associated pedal clips, and significantly financially lighter. Despite my politics, I have a terrible weakness for techy stuff: it's my capitalist Achilles heel. It's the same with my photography and fencing: there's always an essential extra bit of kit with my name on it…

OK, time for some work. Got a friend's book chapters on 30s Welsh literature to read, and a lecture on Volpone to write. I did one last year but it didn't quite work, so this is attempt No. 2.