It has been an…interesting week. I've been marking essays (some astonishingly brilliant, others 'requiring improvement'), teaching my first-year drama module hilariously entitled – in my view alone – 'Making a Scene', and we took all the students to see the National Theatre's touring production of Hedda Gabler. I'm finding it really hard not to pronounce Hedda with the 'th' sound of Welsh 'dd'. Some of the students had never been to the theatre before, so I'm looking forward to their views on it. Mine are certainly mixed: the contemporary setting rather obscured the play's examination of Scandinavian late-19th century social mores, but some of the acting was impressive, and the set was very striking.
I read Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars at the start of the week too: I'm already a huge admirer of his work, and this one was rather wonderful: like one of Ballard's mid-period surrealist novels with added character depth. It's about a Britain whose inhabitants are made ill by data and sensory overload: pictures, words, broadcasts, signs, colours and sounds become oppressive and unbearable. The narrative is bitty and contradictory, broken up to fit the scenario. I liked it a lot. Now I'm onto Keith Thomas's medieval-to-Renaissance cultural history Religion and the Decline of Magic: it's enormous but wonderful, and I'm learning in detail about a lot of things I knew in outline.
Against my better judgement, I went to see The Post last night. I'm a sucker for newspaper movies, from The Front Page to the Guardian bits in one of the Bourne films. Balanced against that: Hanks and Spielberg. In the end, I liked it a lot. Meryl Streep is wonderful, Spielberg basically reproduced the newsroom/printing press scenes from All The President's Men, and every line dripped with Trump resonance. And it has the awful Chad from In The Loop, playing another WASP git. Try not to dwell on the irony of a defence of press freedom in the face of dishonest, oppressive politicians being made by Twentieth Century Fox.
However, the absolute highlight of the week has been my surprisingly magnified role in the city's Literature Festival: a panel discussion examining Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech 50 years on has suffered some unfortunate panel changes, some considerably heightened language, attracted an SWP demonstration objecting to the presence of a local MEP (who is despicable) and some frenzied politicking. I've found myself in the Editor's office, on the receiving end of rather aggressive phone calls, and talking to the police. It's brought up familiar issues about freedom of speech, no-platforming, the boundaries of fair comment, and a not inconsiderable degree of disapproval from people who just want a quiet life and would like to blame me for an event I didn't propose, organise or want and won't be at. I think it's fair to say that promotions and teaching awards will not be forthcoming in the near future. Or the far future. Just like the past, now I come to think of it…
Enjoy your weekend. Next week, unless things go badly, I can get back to reading and talking about books.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Friday, 26 January 2018
Friday, 23 September 2016
Compendium
The week has had two or three main themes: toothache, work and culture. The toothache is self-explanatory. My wonderful dentist, who had an MA in English and (I hope) dentistry qualifications retired due to ill-health three years ago and I haven't dared go back. The resulting misery is therefore self-inflicted and therefore deserves no sympathy. And the piercing nature of the pain is a useful counterpoint to the dull throbbing gloom of the more objectionable aspects of being at work – basically anything involving Powerpoint, acronyms graphs and spreadsheets. I'm a literature specialist, not an actuary! (There's also the self-harm pain of being a member of the Labour Party but my thoughts are too incoherent even for this medium and I don't like being abused on Twitter so I'll keep my opinions on that one to myself.
The culture bit is the bright spot. Last night I went to a cinema for a live-stream of the National Theatre's production of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Weill's exploration of the effects of poverty and exploitation on those at the bottom of society.
It was an English-language production, with plenty of editing and alteration to suit a contemporary audience, though still set in a stylised version of 1928. It is an opera but it verges on being a dark musical – I'd have coped happily with fewer songs, but the music is astonishing: rough jazzy classical matching the text's determination to confront the classic opera audience with a cold, sharp slice of reality. It's a morality tale which denies morality: the message is that morality is a disguise worn by the bourgeoisie. The poor don't have that luxury and the rich don't care for it. People do dreadful things in dreadful circumstances, and there's no reward for doing good and moo punishment for doing evil: it's a nihilistic, amoral universe in which survival is all that matters…a timely revival.
If I get all my induction speeches written in time (can you tell I'm on sabbatical?), I'm off to see The Gloaming on Sunday: they're an Irish-language experimental, often melancholy folk group, currently on their second album.
The culture bit is the bright spot. Last night I went to a cinema for a live-stream of the National Theatre's production of The Threepenny Opera, Brecht and Weill's exploration of the effects of poverty and exploitation on those at the bottom of society.
It was an English-language production, with plenty of editing and alteration to suit a contemporary audience, though still set in a stylised version of 1928. It is an opera but it verges on being a dark musical – I'd have coped happily with fewer songs, but the music is astonishing: rough jazzy classical matching the text's determination to confront the classic opera audience with a cold, sharp slice of reality. It's a morality tale which denies morality: the message is that morality is a disguise worn by the bourgeoisie. The poor don't have that luxury and the rich don't care for it. People do dreadful things in dreadful circumstances, and there's no reward for doing good and moo punishment for doing evil: it's a nihilistic, amoral universe in which survival is all that matters…a timely revival.
If I get all my induction speeches written in time (can you tell I'm on sabbatical?), I'm off to see The Gloaming on Sunday: they're an Irish-language experimental, often melancholy folk group, currently on their second album.
Tuesday, 5 April 2016
This and that
A brief one today: it's been a hard few days and it's getting busier. Since I last blogged I finished reading a PhD dissertation, which I'm examining on Monday, and ploughed through the validation documents of a Greek university I'm visiting for 36 hours later this week (no time for tourism).
I've been to the annual conference of the Welsh Writing in English Association, which was as always wonderful, exhausting and simultaneously refreshing (illicit flasks of espresso martinis furnished by esteemed delegates really help those evening sessions fly past). I was co-organiser last time, so this year I relaxed: chaired a keynote and took the minutes at the AGM but didn't present anything. I'll do a proper write-up of AWWE16 once next week is out of the way. This week so far has been meetings (yay, Estates Sub-Committee) and lectures. I did my Rousseau/Werther/Precepts/Romanticism/Subjectivism/ lecture this afternoon which felt good from where I was standing but who knows what anyone else thought. Opinion was strongly divided over whether Werther was a) an idiot emo stalker whose death was good riddance or b) a satirical creation designed to mock the Romantics. Option c) a heroic representative of principled idealism and manly sensibility who was part of the great wave of liberation movements received precisely zero votes. But it was great playing Mozart ('not as bad as Young Werther' was one opinion), Beethoven and Massenet, discussing the Enlightenment and the Romantic turn, showing pictures of Strawberry Hill and Sir John Soane's Museum, and comparing the prefaces of Werther and Clarissa to examine the designs texts have on readers, then talking about Northanger Abbey, the Augustans and all sorts of things. One of the most enjoyable sessions I've had in ages.
Tomorrow it's a lecture on the Sonnet mastery of which I promote as the equivalent of the footballer's Baby Bentley: Renaissance Alpha males' must have accessory, though we then discuss women's takes by looking at Edna St Vincent Millay and Wendy Cope.
What's had to give amongst all this is my uncle Brendan's funeral on Monday, which is just awful. He had a hard life and died too young. If I was teaching a class I'd ask a colleague to cover it, but a PhD viva can't be rearranged: it wouldn't be fair to the candidate or the external examiner.
In the meantime: a few pictures (click to enlarge) from Gregynog, where my conference was held. The rest are mostly of ridiculously hot academics and sheep.
I've been to the annual conference of the Welsh Writing in English Association, which was as always wonderful, exhausting and simultaneously refreshing (illicit flasks of espresso martinis furnished by esteemed delegates really help those evening sessions fly past). I was co-organiser last time, so this year I relaxed: chaired a keynote and took the minutes at the AGM but didn't present anything. I'll do a proper write-up of AWWE16 once next week is out of the way. This week so far has been meetings (yay, Estates Sub-Committee) and lectures. I did my Rousseau/Werther/Precepts/Romanticism/Subjectivism/ lecture this afternoon which felt good from where I was standing but who knows what anyone else thought. Opinion was strongly divided over whether Werther was a) an idiot emo stalker whose death was good riddance or b) a satirical creation designed to mock the Romantics. Option c) a heroic representative of principled idealism and manly sensibility who was part of the great wave of liberation movements received precisely zero votes. But it was great playing Mozart ('not as bad as Young Werther' was one opinion), Beethoven and Massenet, discussing the Enlightenment and the Romantic turn, showing pictures of Strawberry Hill and Sir John Soane's Museum, and comparing the prefaces of Werther and Clarissa to examine the designs texts have on readers, then talking about Northanger Abbey, the Augustans and all sorts of things. One of the most enjoyable sessions I've had in ages.
Tomorrow it's a lecture on the Sonnet mastery of which I promote as the equivalent of the footballer's Baby Bentley: Renaissance Alpha males' must have accessory, though we then discuss women's takes by looking at Edna St Vincent Millay and Wendy Cope.
What's had to give amongst all this is my uncle Brendan's funeral on Monday, which is just awful. He had a hard life and died too young. If I was teaching a class I'd ask a colleague to cover it, but a PhD viva can't be rearranged: it wouldn't be fair to the candidate or the external examiner.
In the meantime: a few pictures (click to enlarge) from Gregynog, where my conference was held. The rest are mostly of ridiculously hot academics and sheep.
 |
| Guest speaker Niall Griffiths and Petri, a Finnish Phd student who spoke about Niall's work. They're watching a bat circling us. |
 |
| A diving thrush |
Friday, 11 March 2016
To do… or Workers' Playtime, Academic Edition
Today's duties:
1. Write next week's lecture on The Duchess of Malfi, along with a seminar task and a forum discussion theme.
2. Individual tutorials with the first-year students who are writing about A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and About a Boy (did you see what I did there?).
3. Read another chapter of the PhD on Romanticism and Translation I'm examining next month.
4. Read the validation documents for a Greek university I'm external at.
5. Design two new modules.
6. Read my young cousin's A-level extended essay
7. Read my sister's best friend's MA essay because he's disputing the grade awarded.
8. Hold a budget meeting for this region's fencing committee. At least we have the unexpected luxury of too much money!
9. Come up with some funding applications for my (unsurprisingly stalled) research.
10. See one of my final-year dissertation students who is writing a fascinating piece on Queering Shakespeare in performance.
11. Find some way to gently encourage students to complete the NSS even though they're sick of being asked, don't see the point and most of us think it wouldn't pass muster on an undergraduate Research Methods module.
As you can see, all of these are interesting and many of them are important, but after yesterday's 13 hours at work – fast becoming normal – you might understand why I read Liz Morrish's latest with an appreciative eye. She and Kate Bowles should be put in charge of everything.
I'm going to need a soundtrack. On days like these, I go for minimalism, metronomic repetition or ethereality: Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup, some Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can, Cluster, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Canto Ostinato, Allegri, Esenvalds, Tallis, and so on. You'll notice that the vocals are in French, German and Latin: I can understand them if I pay attention but they're not so insistent that I'm distracted from work (Radio 4 had to go I'm afraid: either too interesting or too infuriating).
(I often put this on when I do a session on the turbo trainer).
I also have new music in by Julian Anderson with the London Philharmonic, The Gloaming and some Aphex Twin but I want to listen to them properly rather than have them on in the background.
See you on Monday.
1. Write next week's lecture on The Duchess of Malfi, along with a seminar task and a forum discussion theme.
2. Individual tutorials with the first-year students who are writing about A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and About a Boy (did you see what I did there?).
3. Read another chapter of the PhD on Romanticism and Translation I'm examining next month.
4. Read the validation documents for a Greek university I'm external at.
5. Design two new modules.
6. Read my young cousin's A-level extended essay
7. Read my sister's best friend's MA essay because he's disputing the grade awarded.
8. Hold a budget meeting for this region's fencing committee. At least we have the unexpected luxury of too much money!
9. Come up with some funding applications for my (unsurprisingly stalled) research.
10. See one of my final-year dissertation students who is writing a fascinating piece on Queering Shakespeare in performance.
11. Find some way to gently encourage students to complete the NSS even though they're sick of being asked, don't see the point and most of us think it wouldn't pass muster on an undergraduate Research Methods module.
As you can see, all of these are interesting and many of them are important, but after yesterday's 13 hours at work – fast becoming normal – you might understand why I read Liz Morrish's latest with an appreciative eye. She and Kate Bowles should be put in charge of everything.
I'm going to need a soundtrack. On days like these, I go for minimalism, metronomic repetition or ethereality: Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup, some Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can, Cluster, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Canto Ostinato, Allegri, Esenvalds, Tallis, and so on. You'll notice that the vocals are in French, German and Latin: I can understand them if I pay attention but they're not so insistent that I'm distracted from work (Radio 4 had to go I'm afraid: either too interesting or too infuriating).
(I often put this on when I do a session on the turbo trainer).
I also have new music in by Julian Anderson with the London Philharmonic, The Gloaming and some Aphex Twin but I want to listen to them properly rather than have them on in the background.
See you on Monday.
Thursday, 21 January 2016
Spring Intermission
I have no opinions this week.
Instead I have a pile of marking, a new nephew in New Zealand, lots of Module Specification Templates to write, new lectures to contract (The Duchess of Malfi, The Tempest, The Sorrows of Young Werther and many more) two chapters to get into publishable shape and more to start on, some external examining work to read and a PhD to examine. Oh, and 7 meetings in the next few days. I also have this terrible pain down all the diodes on my left side.
While I get on with all that, some incidental music from recent purchases.
Séan O'Sé's still going - I saw him singing An Poc Ar Buile at Puck Fair only last year.
Instead I have a pile of marking, a new nephew in New Zealand, lots of Module Specification Templates to write, new lectures to contract (The Duchess of Malfi, The Tempest, The Sorrows of Young Werther and many more) two chapters to get into publishable shape and more to start on, some external examining work to read and a PhD to examine. Oh, and 7 meetings in the next few days. I also have this terrible pain down all the diodes on my left side.
While I get on with all that, some incidental music from recent purchases.
Séan O'Sé's still going - I saw him singing An Poc Ar Buile at Puck Fair only last year.
Thursday, 30 April 2015
Just stuff going round my head
It's been an interesting week, for me at least. Varied, anyway. The election campaign rumbles away in the background and I'm getting nervous that the Tories will somehow scrape back in. All these 'shy Tories' as the pollsters call them, too ashamed to admit that they're selfish racists. Though who knows, maybe they're shy UKIPpers these days…
I'm not sure why everyone's calling it the dullest election campaign in generations. It's not the first coalition government to be tested at the polls but it is the first election in a while since the outcome is virtually certain to be another coalition, formal or informal. Boring? No. Cynical? Absolutely. The parade of faked public meetings is deeply depressing, as is the signposting of speeches through the media. I don't think the media have been particularly good or interesting this time either. Sure, the papers have fallen in line with their favoured parties, but there's been a distinct lack of incisive analysis and critique.
The Telegraph has been particularly disgraceful. Having sold its editorial integrity to HSBC, I suppose it's easier to sell it to the next bidder. In particular, making Tory 'open letters' front page news was spectacularly craven. Even worse, the 'small business' letter turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco. If the Telegraph couldn't even be bothered to count the number of real names, check the solvency and trading status of these companies or even whether the companies were aware their names had been put to the letter (one was signed by a waiter on behalf of his company: he happened to be a Tory candidate too), it doesn't deserve the name 'newspaper'.
TV and radio have also been largely poor. Cameron sabotaged the debates by refusing to appear which is cowardly but a standard response by incumbents. It seemed bad then but I don't know if there's been any long-lasting damage. There's rumbling from his own side about disengagement of course (his 'pumped up' speech reminded me of a slightly drunk squire cheering on his nag at a point-to-point) but this campaign seems to consist of a series of tea-cup storms which last no more than a day.
My own broadcast media choices have been disappointing. The Today show is its usual blustering, hectoring but ignorant self only more so, Newsnight is desperate to appear alternative but ultimately comes across as gimmicky, while the pair of them seem to be wholly dependent on the talking points – and weltanschauang – of Conservative Central Office. Certain presenters are openly rightwing (Humphrys, Evan Davies) and the media pool is culturally disposed towards an elitist status quo, having attended the same (private) schools and universities as those they're meant to be reporting upon, but there's also a deeper structural condition which renders the media an essential part of hegemonic control. The discourse used is instructive: not on the election but indicative of the mindset is what I heard on Moneybox recently: 'Is your cleaner stealing from you?'. Heaven forfend that a cleaner might listen to Radio Four rather than be employed by listeners…
Is it, as an email I just received claims, 'the Digital Election'? It's not clear. Certainly billboards seem a bit passé now we can all circulate them on Twitter or photoshop them then circulate them. And yet… most social media are closed circles. We choose our contacts who tend to be just like us, then reinforce our cohesion by passing around links, photos, jokes and so on. It gives us, I suspect, an inflated sense of our importance. My Twitter feed looks like the vanguard of the socialist revolution but I rather suspect that my contacts are not representative of the proletariat.
What is useful though is the swift debunking and circulation of stories. When the Sun supported the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland the first time (1992) virtually nobody would have noticed because the mass media wouldn't have paid much attention. Now the pictures can be put together and circulated in seconds to expose the pretensions of a print media which hasn't quite realised the extent of its decline. But the more powerless it is, the more vicious it gets. Compare the Sun's announcement with the vitriol applied to Miliband talking to Russell Brand.
Now I'm fairly allergic to Brand for all the obvious reasons plus several others, but this was a master-stroke by Miliband. Brand's followers outweigh almost all of the tabloids, and Miliband avoided the obvious trap of becoming the magician's assistant as Brand went off on one of his conspiracist rants. Instead, Ed took Brand seriously enough to challenge his arguments where necessary. Like many of his recent appearances on unorthodox or apparently lightweight outlets, Miliband has successfully countered the (allegedly negative) perception of him an an unworldly wonk. Personally I'd like the individual with his finger on the nuclear button to be nerdy rather obsessed with his haircut or GQ ranking, but that's just me…
Cameron's campaign hasn't been disastrous, just deeply tedious: another day, another even more cynical and hackneyed device from the toolkit. National security, perfidious Scots, the Red Menace, the Appeal to the Pocketbook. Tired, tired tired.
In my area it's been a bit of a phoney war. The sitting Tory MP in this marginal has been invisible. Extremely well-funded by various shady outfits, it's unlikely that he's doing nothing at all, but his core vote strategy seems to rely on appearing on Sikh media (a racist strategy that assumes there's a Sikh bloc vote whereas my assumption is that Sikhs vote on a range of issues just like everyone else) and concentrating on the rich white, ageing suburbs where 'his' voters may be tempted to go UKIP. I've been leafleting for the Labour party and have seen almost no evidence of a Tory ground campaign and absolutely no indication of a Liberal presence. UKIP too have been pretty invisible - I guess they're relying on Farage's media omnipresence.
Away from politics (thankfully?) I've had a funny week. On Tuesday I went to London for the relaunch of our School of Art, at the House of Lords. I went down early to spend the afternoon lunching with my aunt, visiting various book shops and strolling round bits of London I don't know well. I enjoyed the complex ironies of the Ministry of Justice being on the site of Jeremy Bentham's house. He'd have approved of their electronic Panopticon but very much not approved of their erosion of human rights.
The event was kind of interesting. It was on the Terrace overlooking the Thames, which was personally thrilling. Only because I'm working on politicians' novels and in Mary Hamilton's 1931 Murder in the House of Commons two MPs find the body of a blackmailing prostitute on that very terrace. Thinking their party leader murdered her, they tip the body over the wall into the river and set about covering it up. You are, it transpires, meant to approve of their actions. The other joy was meeting the editor of the Express and Star, the local newspaper whose columnist variously reproduced my work without acknowledgement and tried to get me sacked. A nice chap, the editor expressed (ironic?) bafflement at my suggestion that the paper – which employed Enoch Powell for years and only employs hard-right commentators – could be perceived as rightwing. We got along very well and even had a photo taken as a memento of our detente.
What else is going on? Difficult, draining union casework, though I contributed to one victory this week: maternity leave for students is no longer considered Leave of Absence. It sounds dull, but there's a limit to LoA in terms of length and number of times you can have it, so mothers were being discriminated against and leaving without completing their degrees. I don't know why it wasn't sorted earlier but I have to say that management really took this seriously and moved very fast once we raised the issue.
Apart from all that, we had the launch of our inaugural Arts Festival yesterday, and I'm doing some interesting reading. I'm currently stuck into Andrea Wulff's The Founding Gardeners which is a fascinating exploration of the way the Founding Fathers expressed their American and Republican values through horticultural symbolism, though I'm a bit shocked by the casual references (so far) to the slaves who did the actual work. I'm reading Daniel G Williams's Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century which follows his Black Skin, Blue Books: African-Americans and Wales 1845-1945: Daniel's really cornered the market in widening perceptions of Welsh cultural experience. Also for review (in Planet this time) and doing the same thing in a sense, I've just got Jasmine Donahaye's The Greatest Need, her biography of Lily Tobias, 'a Welsh Jew in Palestine'. Jasmine's a force of nature, so I'm looking forward to this.
What I should be doing, of course, is my own research. The politicians' writing project continues and I need to present something next month. I'm working on a conference paper comparing Caradoc Evans's My People to Brinsley McNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows and a couple of other things are in progress too. But they'll all have to fit round the Positive Environment Working Group, the Digital Campus 2020 Academic Reference Group, the Faculty Reward Committee, the Media Review Committee and so on… we played with post-it notes today. Which was nice.
Anyway: I'm off to see The Ladykillers tonight: Graham Linehan's stage version, though not this original production:
I'm not sure why everyone's calling it the dullest election campaign in generations. It's not the first coalition government to be tested at the polls but it is the first election in a while since the outcome is virtually certain to be another coalition, formal or informal. Boring? No. Cynical? Absolutely. The parade of faked public meetings is deeply depressing, as is the signposting of speeches through the media. I don't think the media have been particularly good or interesting this time either. Sure, the papers have fallen in line with their favoured parties, but there's been a distinct lack of incisive analysis and critique.
The Telegraph has been particularly disgraceful. Having sold its editorial integrity to HSBC, I suppose it's easier to sell it to the next bidder. In particular, making Tory 'open letters' front page news was spectacularly craven. Even worse, the 'small business' letter turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco. If the Telegraph couldn't even be bothered to count the number of real names, check the solvency and trading status of these companies or even whether the companies were aware their names had been put to the letter (one was signed by a waiter on behalf of his company: he happened to be a Tory candidate too), it doesn't deserve the name 'newspaper'.
TV and radio have also been largely poor. Cameron sabotaged the debates by refusing to appear which is cowardly but a standard response by incumbents. It seemed bad then but I don't know if there's been any long-lasting damage. There's rumbling from his own side about disengagement of course (his 'pumped up' speech reminded me of a slightly drunk squire cheering on his nag at a point-to-point) but this campaign seems to consist of a series of tea-cup storms which last no more than a day.
My own broadcast media choices have been disappointing. The Today show is its usual blustering, hectoring but ignorant self only more so, Newsnight is desperate to appear alternative but ultimately comes across as gimmicky, while the pair of them seem to be wholly dependent on the talking points – and weltanschauang – of Conservative Central Office. Certain presenters are openly rightwing (Humphrys, Evan Davies) and the media pool is culturally disposed towards an elitist status quo, having attended the same (private) schools and universities as those they're meant to be reporting upon, but there's also a deeper structural condition which renders the media an essential part of hegemonic control. The discourse used is instructive: not on the election but indicative of the mindset is what I heard on Moneybox recently: 'Is your cleaner stealing from you?'. Heaven forfend that a cleaner might listen to Radio Four rather than be employed by listeners…
Is it, as an email I just received claims, 'the Digital Election'? It's not clear. Certainly billboards seem a bit passé now we can all circulate them on Twitter or photoshop them then circulate them. And yet… most social media are closed circles. We choose our contacts who tend to be just like us, then reinforce our cohesion by passing around links, photos, jokes and so on. It gives us, I suspect, an inflated sense of our importance. My Twitter feed looks like the vanguard of the socialist revolution but I rather suspect that my contacts are not representative of the proletariat.
What is useful though is the swift debunking and circulation of stories. When the Sun supported the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland the first time (1992) virtually nobody would have noticed because the mass media wouldn't have paid much attention. Now the pictures can be put together and circulated in seconds to expose the pretensions of a print media which hasn't quite realised the extent of its decline. But the more powerless it is, the more vicious it gets. Compare the Sun's announcement with the vitriol applied to Miliband talking to Russell Brand.
Now I'm fairly allergic to Brand for all the obvious reasons plus several others, but this was a master-stroke by Miliband. Brand's followers outweigh almost all of the tabloids, and Miliband avoided the obvious trap of becoming the magician's assistant as Brand went off on one of his conspiracist rants. Instead, Ed took Brand seriously enough to challenge his arguments where necessary. Like many of his recent appearances on unorthodox or apparently lightweight outlets, Miliband has successfully countered the (allegedly negative) perception of him an an unworldly wonk. Personally I'd like the individual with his finger on the nuclear button to be nerdy rather obsessed with his haircut or GQ ranking, but that's just me…
Cameron's campaign hasn't been disastrous, just deeply tedious: another day, another even more cynical and hackneyed device from the toolkit. National security, perfidious Scots, the Red Menace, the Appeal to the Pocketbook. Tired, tired tired.
In my area it's been a bit of a phoney war. The sitting Tory MP in this marginal has been invisible. Extremely well-funded by various shady outfits, it's unlikely that he's doing nothing at all, but his core vote strategy seems to rely on appearing on Sikh media (a racist strategy that assumes there's a Sikh bloc vote whereas my assumption is that Sikhs vote on a range of issues just like everyone else) and concentrating on the rich white, ageing suburbs where 'his' voters may be tempted to go UKIP. I've been leafleting for the Labour party and have seen almost no evidence of a Tory ground campaign and absolutely no indication of a Liberal presence. UKIP too have been pretty invisible - I guess they're relying on Farage's media omnipresence.
Away from politics (thankfully?) I've had a funny week. On Tuesday I went to London for the relaunch of our School of Art, at the House of Lords. I went down early to spend the afternoon lunching with my aunt, visiting various book shops and strolling round bits of London I don't know well. I enjoyed the complex ironies of the Ministry of Justice being on the site of Jeremy Bentham's house. He'd have approved of their electronic Panopticon but very much not approved of their erosion of human rights.
The event was kind of interesting. It was on the Terrace overlooking the Thames, which was personally thrilling. Only because I'm working on politicians' novels and in Mary Hamilton's 1931 Murder in the House of Commons two MPs find the body of a blackmailing prostitute on that very terrace. Thinking their party leader murdered her, they tip the body over the wall into the river and set about covering it up. You are, it transpires, meant to approve of their actions. The other joy was meeting the editor of the Express and Star, the local newspaper whose columnist variously reproduced my work without acknowledgement and tried to get me sacked. A nice chap, the editor expressed (ironic?) bafflement at my suggestion that the paper – which employed Enoch Powell for years and only employs hard-right commentators – could be perceived as rightwing. We got along very well and even had a photo taken as a memento of our detente.
What else is going on? Difficult, draining union casework, though I contributed to one victory this week: maternity leave for students is no longer considered Leave of Absence. It sounds dull, but there's a limit to LoA in terms of length and number of times you can have it, so mothers were being discriminated against and leaving without completing their degrees. I don't know why it wasn't sorted earlier but I have to say that management really took this seriously and moved very fast once we raised the issue.
Apart from all that, we had the launch of our inaugural Arts Festival yesterday, and I'm doing some interesting reading. I'm currently stuck into Andrea Wulff's The Founding Gardeners which is a fascinating exploration of the way the Founding Fathers expressed their American and Republican values through horticultural symbolism, though I'm a bit shocked by the casual references (so far) to the slaves who did the actual work. I'm reading Daniel G Williams's Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century which follows his Black Skin, Blue Books: African-Americans and Wales 1845-1945: Daniel's really cornered the market in widening perceptions of Welsh cultural experience. Also for review (in Planet this time) and doing the same thing in a sense, I've just got Jasmine Donahaye's The Greatest Need, her biography of Lily Tobias, 'a Welsh Jew in Palestine'. Jasmine's a force of nature, so I'm looking forward to this.
What I should be doing, of course, is my own research. The politicians' writing project continues and I need to present something next month. I'm working on a conference paper comparing Caradoc Evans's My People to Brinsley McNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows and a couple of other things are in progress too. But they'll all have to fit round the Positive Environment Working Group, the Digital Campus 2020 Academic Reference Group, the Faculty Reward Committee, the Media Review Committee and so on… we played with post-it notes today. Which was nice.
Anyway: I'm off to see The Ladykillers tonight: Graham Linehan's stage version, though not this original production:
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
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.
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…
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 aminion eager next-generation scholar in a year or so. If you're interested in media ethics, watch this space!
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.
 |
| 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
 |
| We're attempting to detect the Mail's conscience. You have three years. |
Friday, 18 July 2014
Come into the garden Maud
Life in the new Faculty is less than halcyon. It feels more like this.
And yet somehow you just know that management thinks everything in the rose garden is lovely. Apart from their philistine, arrogant and ignorant attacks on everything they do, they compound the insults by not even bothering to spell our names or get our sexes right on the insulting material they send us.
I know there's a critical management studies field of 'workplace resistance'. They'd get a career's worth of material from this place. Me? I refer you to the sublime Office Space:
And yet somehow you just know that management thinks everything in the rose garden is lovely. Apart from their philistine, arrogant and ignorant attacks on everything they do, they compound the insults by not even bothering to spell our names or get our sexes right on the insulting material they send us.
I know there's a critical management studies field of 'workplace resistance'. They'd get a career's worth of material from this place. Me? I refer you to the sublime Office Space:
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
Your Tuesday reckon
Afternoon everybody! How are you all? We're in the funny period of the year between holidays and the academic year properly starting. Our graduation ceremonies fill the last three days of the week (some students have decided that this is the ideal time to phone up and question grades or mention that there's a problem with a module they took a year ago), dreaded meetings are starting and we're getting to grips with all the administration that goes with teaching these days. Not helped, of course, by myriad forms, all of which change yearly even when the information on them doesn't.
So between filling in said forms, we pop in and out of each other's offices to sympathise, compare workloads, catch up on our holiday tales, speculate, plan hospital visits (my boss has recovered enough to be moved to the intensive unit at the local hospital and can now speak short sentences) and gossip. Core subjects this time include the pointless new card entry system for getting into the offices (see Voles passim), placing bets on how long this year's restructure will last, the sore subject of admissions, comparing teaching workloads, and how old everybody is. After many years, I'm not the youngest person (at 38 or as my family would put it, 38-and-still-no-proper-job) in the English department. There's life here after all!
We also compare summer reading. WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were mentioned: a non-fiction rambling account of a long-distance, er, ramble around Suffolk which is spoken of in hushed tones as a new form of writing. I must confess that I haven't successfully come to grips with it, which probably says more about me than it does about Sebald. But I know that if I want to read about the East, I'd go for Graham Swift's superb, disturbing, meditative Waterland any time.
What am I doing? I've got so many small bits of admin to do that I'm defeated even trying to work out where to start. The desk is an appalling mess mostly due to the books that have arrived recently (today: Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason in a beautiful propagandistic pulp cover, Atwood's MaddAdam and Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, primarily for the Bright Young Thing aspect – I'm not really a crime fan though Gaudy Night was interesting). Foucault on Literature is glowering at me: it's been on the desk ready to read for a few days now but I keep getting distracted.
I'm keeping an eye on the proposed Lobbying Bill, which the government published on the last day of the previous Parliament and is trying to rush through on the first day of the new one. As you might expect from this lot, it does exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin. It doesn't regulate, control or open up lobbying to oversight. It regulates less than 1% of lobbyists while making political campaigning effectively illegal for everybody from trades unions to donkey sanctuaries to cottage hospital campaigners to your local youth club. It does so by massively widening the definition of 'political campaigning' to mean pretty much anything, and sharply reducing the amount of money organisations are allowed to spend. There's even a special section in the Bill dedicated to trades unions' memberships. Why? Not because there's a problem, but because Cameron and Clegg don't like trades unions.
Why? Because the Tories want to smash the trades unions and the Lib Dems are terrified that the National Union of Students will remind voters that many of their MPs 'signed in blood' as one of them put it, to reject £9000 student fees.
Will it stop lobbying such as that conducted by Lynton Crosby and Co, who advises the Prime Minister while taking money from tobacco firms? Or the very shadowy organisations who fund Tory campaigns, such as the Midlands Industrial Council? It is in fact so awful that Conservative MPs and lobbyists are queuing up to denounce it as a load of rubbish. Hard-right Tory Douglas Carswell calls it less well-thought out than a dog's breakfast, and never before have those liars at the Taxpayers' Alliance and 38 Degrees been united, until now.
Er… no.
Still, at least there's cricket on today: Ireland v England in a one-day international. Ireland have welcomed back Ed Joyce, who played for Ireland, then played for England, and has now decided he's Irish again. England, on the other hand, are playing Boyd Rankin, who used to play for Ireland, and Eoin Morgan, who also used to play for Ireland. Which just goes to show that the post-modernists are right. Identity isn't fixed and is largely a matter of performance. Especially when there's money and glory in the offing. So far, Ireland appear to be winning.
I'm also loving Vinnie Jones the mediocre footballer turned awful Shakespearian actor, who has announced that 'England' is far too European for his taste, because of immigration. His wisdom is delivered from, er, Los Angeles where he has lived for many years. I'm firmly convinced that celebrity culture will destroy itself thanks to the stupidity of the celebrities involved.
So between filling in said forms, we pop in and out of each other's offices to sympathise, compare workloads, catch up on our holiday tales, speculate, plan hospital visits (my boss has recovered enough to be moved to the intensive unit at the local hospital and can now speak short sentences) and gossip. Core subjects this time include the pointless new card entry system for getting into the offices (see Voles passim), placing bets on how long this year's restructure will last, the sore subject of admissions, comparing teaching workloads, and how old everybody is. After many years, I'm not the youngest person (at 38 or as my family would put it, 38-and-still-no-proper-job) in the English department. There's life here after all!
We also compare summer reading. WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were mentioned: a non-fiction rambling account of a long-distance, er, ramble around Suffolk which is spoken of in hushed tones as a new form of writing. I must confess that I haven't successfully come to grips with it, which probably says more about me than it does about Sebald. But I know that if I want to read about the East, I'd go for Graham Swift's superb, disturbing, meditative Waterland any time.
What am I doing? I've got so many small bits of admin to do that I'm defeated even trying to work out where to start. The desk is an appalling mess mostly due to the books that have arrived recently (today: Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason in a beautiful propagandistic pulp cover, Atwood's MaddAdam and Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, primarily for the Bright Young Thing aspect – I'm not really a crime fan though Gaudy Night was interesting). Foucault on Literature is glowering at me: it's been on the desk ready to read for a few days now but I keep getting distracted.
I'm keeping an eye on the proposed Lobbying Bill, which the government published on the last day of the previous Parliament and is trying to rush through on the first day of the new one. As you might expect from this lot, it does exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin. It doesn't regulate, control or open up lobbying to oversight. It regulates less than 1% of lobbyists while making political campaigning effectively illegal for everybody from trades unions to donkey sanctuaries to cottage hospital campaigners to your local youth club. It does so by massively widening the definition of 'political campaigning' to mean pretty much anything, and sharply reducing the amount of money organisations are allowed to spend. There's even a special section in the Bill dedicated to trades unions' memberships. Why? Not because there's a problem, but because Cameron and Clegg don't like trades unions.
Why? Because the Tories want to smash the trades unions and the Lib Dems are terrified that the National Union of Students will remind voters that many of their MPs 'signed in blood' as one of them put it, to reject £9000 student fees.
Will it stop lobbying such as that conducted by Lynton Crosby and Co, who advises the Prime Minister while taking money from tobacco firms? Or the very shadowy organisations who fund Tory campaigns, such as the Midlands Industrial Council? It is in fact so awful that Conservative MPs and lobbyists are queuing up to denounce it as a load of rubbish. Hard-right Tory Douglas Carswell calls it less well-thought out than a dog's breakfast, and never before have those liars at the Taxpayers' Alliance and 38 Degrees been united, until now.
Er… no.
Still, at least there's cricket on today: Ireland v England in a one-day international. Ireland have welcomed back Ed Joyce, who played for Ireland, then played for England, and has now decided he's Irish again. England, on the other hand, are playing Boyd Rankin, who used to play for Ireland, and Eoin Morgan, who also used to play for Ireland. Which just goes to show that the post-modernists are right. Identity isn't fixed and is largely a matter of performance. Especially when there's money and glory in the offing. So far, Ireland appear to be winning.
I'm also loving Vinnie Jones the mediocre footballer turned awful Shakespearian actor, who has announced that 'England' is far too European for his taste, because of immigration. His wisdom is delivered from, er, Los Angeles where he has lived for many years. I'm firmly convinced that celebrity culture will destroy itself thanks to the stupidity of the celebrities involved.
Thursday, 18 July 2013
A day in the life…
Another sticky, but only partly frustrating day. Lots and lots of marking, plus toweringly angry emails from students who tell me that their grades are 'wrong' and 'unfair', despite not collecting their work to find out why the grades have been awarded. I've done my best to explain that we can only mark the work, not the effort that's gone into it, and that doing a re-sit doesn't guarantee a better grade. Being kind, I didn't employ the first analogy that came to mind: that Hitler worked hard to establish the Third Reich but that didn't mean he deserved praise. (The less offensive version of this analogy is to point at Channel 4's output).
I've also tried to work out how to extraordinarily render a student to the United States as quickly as possible. (He wants to go, just didn't get round to it early enough and now it's a bit difficult). Having despatched him to High Chaparral U or wherever, I'm still hopeful of getting an exchange semester for me with the University of the Faroe Islands, or perhaps Greenland U. Anywhere cold and Scandinavian, basically.
I did have a very enjoyable morning though. One of my MA students came in for a tutorial. I'm getting a bit twitchy about time running out, but she's writing some really interesting things about country houses in late-1920s/early-30s middlebrow and popular novels: Waugh, Green, Wodehouse, Christie and various others. We talked about readers, women, characterisation, why mothers are almost entirely absent and a host of very interesting things. It's always good to talk about ideas and books to motivated students (a big cheer here too for those dissertation students I've already talked to ahead of their final academic year), but I particularly enjoyed today because her interests are close to mine. We don't work on the same material, but her stuff is close enough for me simply to enjoy and learn from what she's doing.
So despite the pitiless scorching heat and the sheer misery of marking, I'm feeling rather serene. Amazing what a bit of an old chat will do. That, and sneakily following both the Ashes and the Tour de France on the Guardian's minute-by-minute coverage. The regular habitués are like old friends, and the discussions are often more interesting than the regular commentary, where available - and perhaps more exciting than the action in places. The idea of watching a TV feed with Boycott, Gower or any of those pompous buffoons droning on now seems unbearable compared with the wit generated by one hack watching a TV in the newspaper office and the other learned, enthusiastic readers. If the dreaded New Media kills off the cult of Fat Matey Former Players Complacently Talking Bollocks In The Studio For Massive Cheques (as I gather the format is known), it can't come too soon for me.
OK, here's a little treat for you: the funny, erudite and humane Stewart Lee talking to students about 'Not Writing'. And lots of other things.
I've also tried to work out how to extraordinarily render a student to the United States as quickly as possible. (He wants to go, just didn't get round to it early enough and now it's a bit difficult). Having despatched him to High Chaparral U or wherever, I'm still hopeful of getting an exchange semester for me with the University of the Faroe Islands, or perhaps Greenland U. Anywhere cold and Scandinavian, basically.
I did have a very enjoyable morning though. One of my MA students came in for a tutorial. I'm getting a bit twitchy about time running out, but she's writing some really interesting things about country houses in late-1920s/early-30s middlebrow and popular novels: Waugh, Green, Wodehouse, Christie and various others. We talked about readers, women, characterisation, why mothers are almost entirely absent and a host of very interesting things. It's always good to talk about ideas and books to motivated students (a big cheer here too for those dissertation students I've already talked to ahead of their final academic year), but I particularly enjoyed today because her interests are close to mine. We don't work on the same material, but her stuff is close enough for me simply to enjoy and learn from what she's doing.
So despite the pitiless scorching heat and the sheer misery of marking, I'm feeling rather serene. Amazing what a bit of an old chat will do. That, and sneakily following both the Ashes and the Tour de France on the Guardian's minute-by-minute coverage. The regular habitués are like old friends, and the discussions are often more interesting than the regular commentary, where available - and perhaps more exciting than the action in places. The idea of watching a TV feed with Boycott, Gower or any of those pompous buffoons droning on now seems unbearable compared with the wit generated by one hack watching a TV in the newspaper office and the other learned, enthusiastic readers. If the dreaded New Media kills off the cult of Fat Matey Former Players Complacently Talking Bollocks In The Studio For Massive Cheques (as I gather the format is known), it can't come too soon for me.
OK, here's a little treat for you: the funny, erudite and humane Stewart Lee talking to students about 'Not Writing'. And lots of other things.
Friday, 28 June 2013
A day of random delights
Morning all. I feel like a broken man. Went for a swim before work. Got in to meet a student to talk about his work. He didn't turn up. Complained to the Press Complaints Commission about this Mail on Sunday article. The scum.
Now I'm going to read a friend's PhD chapter and another friend's MA dissertation: both fascinating. One's on Lewis Jones, the Communist miner, activist and novelist on whom I wrote my PhD. The other is about America's initial involvement in the Pacific rim in the late nineteenth-century.
The soundtrack of the day is beautiful Welsh-language indie and electronica: I bought the lovely coloured double 10" releases Y Record Goch and Y Record Las (The Red Record and the Blue Record) and they are corkers.
Here's the lovely Kraftwerk-influenced 'Bish Bash Bosh' by Dau Cefn.
Now I'm going to read a friend's PhD chapter and another friend's MA dissertation: both fascinating. One's on Lewis Jones, the Communist miner, activist and novelist on whom I wrote my PhD. The other is about America's initial involvement in the Pacific rim in the late nineteenth-century.
The soundtrack of the day is beautiful Welsh-language indie and electronica: I bought the lovely coloured double 10" releases Y Record Goch and Y Record Las (The Red Record and the Blue Record) and they are corkers.
Here's the lovely Kraftwerk-influenced 'Bish Bash Bosh' by Dau Cefn.
Monday, 20 May 2013
My library / was Dukedom large enough
As you can tell from the title of this post, I saw The Tempest this weekend, at the Globe Theatre in London. The seating was hard and open to the air, props were minimal and the actors unaided by microphones. All very authentic, except for the distressing absence of jades, cutpurses, typhoid and the fragrance of Southwark in 1611.
Actually, the performance was rather wonderful. Prospero was wryly played by Roger Allam (Peter Mannion in The Thick of It), Miranda by Irish newcomer Jessie Buckley, Caliban by James Garnon and Ariel by the star of Merlin, Colin Morgan. They were superb, as were the supporting cast. Having taught The Tempest for several years, this production really demonstrated its dramatic qualities in surprising ways. In particular, the jokes worked, which is hard to pull off given the cultural gulf between then and now. Lots of physical humour (especially with codpieces), and a lusty version of Miranda. I hope the students on the trip enjoyed it - they seemed in high spirits anyway. I also got to meet one of my Twitter contacts in the flesh, which was lovely!
I did wonder about the Globe as a theatrical experience. Like going to performances of music on 'authentic' period instruments, I was wary of the possibility of experiencing it solely as a touristic curiosity - like going to a Sealed Knot Civil War re-enactment. You know - thrill to the rain and the smells and the backache and audience in the pit being sprayed by the actors - rather than experiencing the play for its intrinsic worth. And for the first few minutes I did watch the audience and admire the architecture and all that stuff, but the characteristics of this particular production soon took over and the experience rapidly became 'real' rather than an exercise in retro nostalgia.
I paid for the day's pleasure by spending yesterday marking dissertations. I seem to have hit a bad patch: a few unresearched, semi-literate, speculative ones. I now intend to automatically ban any thesis which claims to know what 'everyone' knows or does. As we keep telling the little darlings, 'the more sweeping the statement, the less likely it is to be true'. Statements like 'everybody knows' should be but into the same box as those starting with 'I'm not racist but…', which as we all know, actually means 'I AM a racist and…'.
I'm also sick of seeing 'would/could of', assertions that The Sun is a peer-reviewed journal, and dissertations which claim to analyse things using every single tool in the critical box. I've just read a thesis which claims to give a semiotic, Baudrillardian, Jamesonian and Bauman-influenced reading of 'the retro industry' (which 'everyone' is obsessed with, apparently). You wouldn't think they'd had an entire module on Research Methods…
Anyway, only 4 more dissertations. Then an MA thesis to read and 90 essays. All fitted round meetings. Wednesday: meetings at 10, 11, 12 and 2. And people wonder why I'm a grumpy red-faced blustering bully.
(And by the way, my library is languishing. Down to 2 additional books per week. Trips to the post room aren't nearly so much fun as heretofore).
Actually, the performance was rather wonderful. Prospero was wryly played by Roger Allam (Peter Mannion in The Thick of It), Miranda by Irish newcomer Jessie Buckley, Caliban by James Garnon and Ariel by the star of Merlin, Colin Morgan. They were superb, as were the supporting cast. Having taught The Tempest for several years, this production really demonstrated its dramatic qualities in surprising ways. In particular, the jokes worked, which is hard to pull off given the cultural gulf between then and now. Lots of physical humour (especially with codpieces), and a lusty version of Miranda. I hope the students on the trip enjoyed it - they seemed in high spirits anyway. I also got to meet one of my Twitter contacts in the flesh, which was lovely!
I did wonder about the Globe as a theatrical experience. Like going to performances of music on 'authentic' period instruments, I was wary of the possibility of experiencing it solely as a touristic curiosity - like going to a Sealed Knot Civil War re-enactment. You know - thrill to the rain and the smells and the backache and audience in the pit being sprayed by the actors - rather than experiencing the play for its intrinsic worth. And for the first few minutes I did watch the audience and admire the architecture and all that stuff, but the characteristics of this particular production soon took over and the experience rapidly became 'real' rather than an exercise in retro nostalgia.
I paid for the day's pleasure by spending yesterday marking dissertations. I seem to have hit a bad patch: a few unresearched, semi-literate, speculative ones. I now intend to automatically ban any thesis which claims to know what 'everyone' knows or does. As we keep telling the little darlings, 'the more sweeping the statement, the less likely it is to be true'. Statements like 'everybody knows' should be but into the same box as those starting with 'I'm not racist but…', which as we all know, actually means 'I AM a racist and…'.
I'm also sick of seeing 'would/could of', assertions that The Sun is a peer-reviewed journal, and dissertations which claim to analyse things using every single tool in the critical box. I've just read a thesis which claims to give a semiotic, Baudrillardian, Jamesonian and Bauman-influenced reading of 'the retro industry' (which 'everyone' is obsessed with, apparently). You wouldn't think they'd had an entire module on Research Methods…
Anyway, only 4 more dissertations. Then an MA thesis to read and 90 essays. All fitted round meetings. Wednesday: meetings at 10, 11, 12 and 2. And people wonder why I'm a grumpy red-faced blustering bully.
(And by the way, my library is languishing. Down to 2 additional books per week. Trips to the post room aren't nearly so much fun as heretofore).
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
The glamorous life of the academic
Hi everybody. It's late afternoon and I'm only just posting something here. I must have an outrage gland deficiency or something.
The truth is that I've been suffering academic overload. Literally everything I deal with has come up today. There's the marking of course - dissertations first, particularly the discussions with the other marker to agree a grade. Then there's consoling distraught students – postgrads this time, trying to solve completely understandable dilemmas without causing offence or treading on people's toes. I've had several calls for union help, and I've received the readers' reports on two papers I wrote. Oh, and arranging visiting speakers for next year's research sessions. Plus the usual routine of gossip and meetings: last night the deputy head of the Quality Assurance Agency gave a very enlightening lecture. Amongst other things, he said that the posh universities tried to claim that inspection is really only for proletarian hellholes like The Hegemon, and that the Tories are pushing through their education-wrecking plans through quangos rather than face the scrutiny which comes from passing Higher Education legislation. I paraphrase, of course, but it's pretty clear that not having any mandate won't stop them behaving like North Korean Dear Leaders.
If you don't know how the system works, it's like this. You write a paper and submit it to the editors. They send an anonymised copy out to two readers who recommend whether or not to publish it, and if so, whether any revisions need making. Then you do the necessary and send it back, alongside a response detailing whether you ignored or accepted the recommendations.
Luckily, my papers were very well-received, but there's still work to do. The readers made some really useful observations about factual stuff, emphasis and structure: it's exactly how peer review is meant to work. But of course a lot of the alterations are time-consuming. For instance: I thought I'd got the right referencing system. Turns out I haven't. So I've got to go through every quote, footnote and endnote changing them. The guidance is 39 pages long. My eyes are bleeding… and the marking is staring at me balefully.
The soundtrack for the day has been Low - all 14 albums in reverse chronological order. Restful, beautiful but also deeply melancholy. Ideal for grading dissertations and theoretically dictating the course of students' lives. Tomorrow it's an early meeting supporting a colleague through a disciplinary hearing (let's face it: I'll be facing one myself if I keep blogging the way I am, so I need the practice), then more marking and in the evening, at long last, I'll go fencing again. I always find that the antidote to a big pile of marking is to spend an evening viciously attacking people with bladed weapons. Don't you?
Here are some of Low's songs.
and for melancholic fun, Galaxie 500's cover of the Rutles' Beatles parody 'Cheese and Onions'.
The truth is that I've been suffering academic overload. Literally everything I deal with has come up today. There's the marking of course - dissertations first, particularly the discussions with the other marker to agree a grade. Then there's consoling distraught students – postgrads this time, trying to solve completely understandable dilemmas without causing offence or treading on people's toes. I've had several calls for union help, and I've received the readers' reports on two papers I wrote. Oh, and arranging visiting speakers for next year's research sessions. Plus the usual routine of gossip and meetings: last night the deputy head of the Quality Assurance Agency gave a very enlightening lecture. Amongst other things, he said that the posh universities tried to claim that inspection is really only for proletarian hellholes like The Hegemon, and that the Tories are pushing through their education-wrecking plans through quangos rather than face the scrutiny which comes from passing Higher Education legislation. I paraphrase, of course, but it's pretty clear that not having any mandate won't stop them behaving like North Korean Dear Leaders.
If you don't know how the system works, it's like this. You write a paper and submit it to the editors. They send an anonymised copy out to two readers who recommend whether or not to publish it, and if so, whether any revisions need making. Then you do the necessary and send it back, alongside a response detailing whether you ignored or accepted the recommendations.
Luckily, my papers were very well-received, but there's still work to do. The readers made some really useful observations about factual stuff, emphasis and structure: it's exactly how peer review is meant to work. But of course a lot of the alterations are time-consuming. For instance: I thought I'd got the right referencing system. Turns out I haven't. So I've got to go through every quote, footnote and endnote changing them. The guidance is 39 pages long. My eyes are bleeding… and the marking is staring at me balefully.
The soundtrack for the day has been Low - all 14 albums in reverse chronological order. Restful, beautiful but also deeply melancholy. Ideal for grading dissertations and theoretically dictating the course of students' lives. Tomorrow it's an early meeting supporting a colleague through a disciplinary hearing (let's face it: I'll be facing one myself if I keep blogging the way I am, so I need the practice), then more marking and in the evening, at long last, I'll go fencing again. I always find that the antidote to a big pile of marking is to spend an evening viciously attacking people with bladed weapons. Don't you?
Here are some of Low's songs.
and for melancholic fun, Galaxie 500's cover of the Rutles' Beatles parody 'Cheese and Onions'.
Friday, 15 February 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
It's not all work, work, work
Well, actually it is. But the very best thing about being (or appearing to be) an academic is that sometimes you get paid for having the very same conversations with people that I would have for free, at length, in any situation.
Take today. I came in and did some incredibly tedious administration, the details of which I'll save for the day I contract writers' block and/or want to get rid of large numbers of you, dear reader. But as a reward, I had a tutorial lined up for one of my MA students. Not the one whose thesis is 'all popular culture is contemptible', another one. She's doing a dissertation on the Country House in 1930s literature. She's looking at Nancy Mitford's Highland Fling and perhaps one or two more or her novellas, Henry Green's Living, Loving, Party-Going trilogy, Waugh's Vile Bodies, Wodehouse's Summer Lightning and Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, and perhaps Michael Arlen's work.
Now that might at first glance sound like Downton Abbey Studies, but it's really, really interesting, especially for someone like me who thinks that the interwar period is the most interesting one in centuries. Once you've picked the country house as a setting – for comic capers, murders, political discussion, love affairs, dancing or whatever – you've got a focus for social, cultural and literary change. Why, for instance, is the country house a great place for a murder mystery? Partly because non-aristocratic readers would never have got in the doors of these places, and like to imagine toffs either bashed on the noggin or dragged down to the cells. They're on the front-line of economic and social change too: servants eyeballing their feudal masters while spitting in the soup. You've got the landed gentry gradually getting poorer as capitalism takes over, leading to the race for American heiresses, the generational slaughter of WW1, the battle to preserve 'heritage' and older modes of life while the kids indulge in suspicious 'cosmopolitan' pleasures (jazz, cocktails, motor-cars), and the ambiguous love-hate relationship between city and country. Politics rears its ugly head as bone-headed patriotism meets the harder-edge of Nazism (the British aristocracy was very open to ideas about blood and soil, and to the weirder mystical fringes of European fascism). And of course the end of Empire and the causes/effects of two world wars are played out over the snooker and bridge tables of the country house.
So there's a lot to say and I'm really looking forward to reading my student's take on it… and to getting back the books I've loaned her. I always feel nervous watching them leave the office. I've been burned too many times! But it's great to just talk about books and ideas, wandering round the office picking up 'just one more' to add to the pile, realising not only that someone else shares your particular enthusiasms, but that they'll have a different, interesting take on it. Though it's slightly embarrassing to realise that I actually own every single book that might be useful, like some kind of bookish magpie.
For all my moaning, this kind of thing happens much more than you might imagine. OK, it's true that one high-achieving student didn't know who the prime minister is and what party he's from, and that she thought Russell Whateverhisnameis's Good News and the bloody Mail Online is sufficient to keep her informed. And it's true that another good student from this city had never heard of Wales (which can just about be seen from the top floor of Vole Towers), but neither of them are stupid… just er highly-specialised. There are plenty of students around who are much brighter than I am, whether they know it or not. I've read more than they have because I've been using up precious oxygen for longer, but before long they'll be streets ahead.
That's why I like teaching. You can't relax or fake it. It's also why I like teaching here, where snobs wouldn't expect to find intellectual ferment. I'm really looking forward to teaching Ben Masters' Noughties in a couple of weeks. It's a campus novel which isn't nearly as clever as the author thinks, nor as progressive. In particular, I'm looking forward to my students reacting to these bits:
And so, endlessly on: a narrator who professes not to be a snob while obsessively dividing the world into sensitive, troubled Oxonians and animalistic Others who spend their time having meaningless sex and studying for meaningless degrees in laughable places without (unlike our hero) dramatising their experiences with set-reading references, analogies, quotations and obsessive alliteration. The kids are going to love getting their teeth into this one.
I wonder if Masters would like to visit us for a talk…
Take today. I came in and did some incredibly tedious administration, the details of which I'll save for the day I contract writers' block and/or want to get rid of large numbers of you, dear reader. But as a reward, I had a tutorial lined up for one of my MA students. Not the one whose thesis is 'all popular culture is contemptible', another one. She's doing a dissertation on the Country House in 1930s literature. She's looking at Nancy Mitford's Highland Fling and perhaps one or two more or her novellas, Henry Green's Living, Loving, Party-Going trilogy, Waugh's Vile Bodies, Wodehouse's Summer Lightning and Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, and perhaps Michael Arlen's work.
Now that might at first glance sound like Downton Abbey Studies, but it's really, really interesting, especially for someone like me who thinks that the interwar period is the most interesting one in centuries. Once you've picked the country house as a setting – for comic capers, murders, political discussion, love affairs, dancing or whatever – you've got a focus for social, cultural and literary change. Why, for instance, is the country house a great place for a murder mystery? Partly because non-aristocratic readers would never have got in the doors of these places, and like to imagine toffs either bashed on the noggin or dragged down to the cells. They're on the front-line of economic and social change too: servants eyeballing their feudal masters while spitting in the soup. You've got the landed gentry gradually getting poorer as capitalism takes over, leading to the race for American heiresses, the generational slaughter of WW1, the battle to preserve 'heritage' and older modes of life while the kids indulge in suspicious 'cosmopolitan' pleasures (jazz, cocktails, motor-cars), and the ambiguous love-hate relationship between city and country. Politics rears its ugly head as bone-headed patriotism meets the harder-edge of Nazism (the British aristocracy was very open to ideas about blood and soil, and to the weirder mystical fringes of European fascism). And of course the end of Empire and the causes/effects of two world wars are played out over the snooker and bridge tables of the country house.
So there's a lot to say and I'm really looking forward to reading my student's take on it… and to getting back the books I've loaned her. I always feel nervous watching them leave the office. I've been burned too many times! But it's great to just talk about books and ideas, wandering round the office picking up 'just one more' to add to the pile, realising not only that someone else shares your particular enthusiasms, but that they'll have a different, interesting take on it. Though it's slightly embarrassing to realise that I actually own every single book that might be useful, like some kind of bookish magpie.
For all my moaning, this kind of thing happens much more than you might imagine. OK, it's true that one high-achieving student didn't know who the prime minister is and what party he's from, and that she thought Russell Whateverhisnameis's Good News and the bloody Mail Online is sufficient to keep her informed. And it's true that another good student from this city had never heard of Wales (which can just about be seen from the top floor of Vole Towers), but neither of them are stupid… just er highly-specialised. There are plenty of students around who are much brighter than I am, whether they know it or not. I've read more than they have because I've been using up precious oxygen for longer, but before long they'll be streets ahead.
That's why I like teaching. You can't relax or fake it. It's also why I like teaching here, where snobs wouldn't expect to find intellectual ferment. I'm really looking forward to teaching Ben Masters' Noughties in a couple of weeks. It's a campus novel which isn't nearly as clever as the author thinks, nor as progressive. In particular, I'm looking forward to my students reacting to these bits:
She doesn't go here – Oxford, that is – not being academic … Lucy had been accepted into the University of Northampton… to study Travel and Tourism.
In our epoch… curiosity and aptitude are irrelevant (not at Oxford, mind…). [Academic work outside Oxford is] one colouring-in exercise per semester supplemented by extracurricular binge-drinking and blowjobs
Anne, now studying Socio-Bio-Dance Studies with History at some uni up north.
John (a blond pretty boy studying applied Agriculture with Media Studies at some university down south)
Natalie (huge girl studying Golf Course Management and Experimental PE at some university out east).
Holly (tiny girl studying Fuck Knows at some university near Wales)
Rob (I've no idea what Rob studies: perhaps a BA in Throwing Up, or a short course on The Reception of STIs…)
And so, endlessly on: a narrator who professes not to be a snob while obsessively dividing the world into sensitive, troubled Oxonians and animalistic Others who spend their time having meaningless sex and studying for meaningless degrees in laughable places without (unlike our hero) dramatising their experiences with set-reading references, analogies, quotations and obsessive alliteration. The kids are going to love getting their teeth into this one.
I wonder if Masters would like to visit us for a talk…
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Something rotten in the state of Denmark?
Afternoon everybody! I haven't just got up, I've been marking essays all day, having sent off my Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (otherwise known as a journal article comparing George Borrow's Wild Wales and O. M. Edwards's Cartrefi Cymru).
This particular pile of essays is on a range of concepts presented to first-year Media and Culture students. They're asked to define one concept and apply it. The quality has been… mixed. Some have looked the term up in a couple of first-year textbooks, quoted them, applied them to an example and done a decent job. Some have done the same thing, then thought about the problems related to the concept, and done and excellent job. A few have cut-and-pasted essays from the internet or Wikipedia entries and failed. And one has submitted 2000 words on how John Terry is a nice bloke and the newspapers should stop being so nasty about him. In short, a pretty normal range of submissions.
This is pretty much the extent of my cultural horizon at the moment. The high point of the week so far has been watching Borgen, the Danish drama (if that's not pushing it a little) set in the Prime Minister's office. Think The Thick of It without any jokes at all, or The Killing without any vulgar killing (or knitwear). But with subtitles. As you might imagine, I am utterly enthralled, although I may be the only person on the entire planet who watched this season's episodes so far and thought 'Hmmm… it's getting a bit too exciting'. It's true, too.
The point of Season 1 is that however high the stakes (and we can all agree that they're pretty high: this is the Danish Government we're talking about), the day to day grind of office relationships and work rivalries drives events. The photography is calm, the lighting low, the dialogue often Pinteresque. It's a show which makes a virtue of slowness. Interesting, the first episode of the show implies that Danish politics has been poisoned by British practices: Hesselboe has to go to London to find a spin doctor, but it's not long before even the 'good' guys (Brigitte's 'Moderate Party') has an amoral spin doctor of its own. In other ways, Danish politics as it's represented here is rather delightful: even the PM lives in a normal house and there's a calmness about public affairs that's certainly absent here.
The other notable aspect of the show is it's twin presentation of politics and the political media: it's often hard to tell who (if anyone) is in charge. The credits (around six minutes in) make the mediatisation of public affairs even more explicit, framing the major players on TV monitors in an editing suite as if to emphasise the dominance of representation over principle.
And yet Season 2 betrays signs that the makers are a little too aware of their cultural cachet. Suddenly characters are behaving oddly. There's too much excitement. A suicide here, a coup there, a drunken prime ministerial shag, a tabloid rent-boy honey-trap - it's getting a little soapy for my taste: as though they've been reading too many British political columnists. That said, there's still an awful lot to savour. My favourite moment was the deposed Labour leader's mournful, hangdog final words 'I'm the last worker in the Labour Party'. That line was crossed here years ago…
So come on: let's put the Bore back into Borgen! It's still the best thing on global TV since The Wire.
This particular pile of essays is on a range of concepts presented to first-year Media and Culture students. They're asked to define one concept and apply it. The quality has been… mixed. Some have looked the term up in a couple of first-year textbooks, quoted them, applied them to an example and done a decent job. Some have done the same thing, then thought about the problems related to the concept, and done and excellent job. A few have cut-and-pasted essays from the internet or Wikipedia entries and failed. And one has submitted 2000 words on how John Terry is a nice bloke and the newspapers should stop being so nasty about him. In short, a pretty normal range of submissions.
This is pretty much the extent of my cultural horizon at the moment. The high point of the week so far has been watching Borgen, the Danish drama (if that's not pushing it a little) set in the Prime Minister's office. Think The Thick of It without any jokes at all, or The Killing without any vulgar killing (or knitwear). But with subtitles. As you might imagine, I am utterly enthralled, although I may be the only person on the entire planet who watched this season's episodes so far and thought 'Hmmm… it's getting a bit too exciting'. It's true, too.
The point of Season 1 is that however high the stakes (and we can all agree that they're pretty high: this is the Danish Government we're talking about), the day to day grind of office relationships and work rivalries drives events. The photography is calm, the lighting low, the dialogue often Pinteresque. It's a show which makes a virtue of slowness. Interesting, the first episode of the show implies that Danish politics has been poisoned by British practices: Hesselboe has to go to London to find a spin doctor, but it's not long before even the 'good' guys (Brigitte's 'Moderate Party') has an amoral spin doctor of its own. In other ways, Danish politics as it's represented here is rather delightful: even the PM lives in a normal house and there's a calmness about public affairs that's certainly absent here.
The other notable aspect of the show is it's twin presentation of politics and the political media: it's often hard to tell who (if anyone) is in charge. The credits (around six minutes in) make the mediatisation of public affairs even more explicit, framing the major players on TV monitors in an editing suite as if to emphasise the dominance of representation over principle.
And yet Season 2 betrays signs that the makers are a little too aware of their cultural cachet. Suddenly characters are behaving oddly. There's too much excitement. A suicide here, a coup there, a drunken prime ministerial shag, a tabloid rent-boy honey-trap - it's getting a little soapy for my taste: as though they've been reading too many British political columnists. That said, there's still an awful lot to savour. My favourite moment was the deposed Labour leader's mournful, hangdog final words 'I'm the last worker in the Labour Party'. That line was crossed here years ago…
So come on: let's put the Bore back into Borgen! It's still the best thing on global TV since The Wire.
Tuesday, 6 November 2012
Contagion…
Good afternoon, pop-pickers. Apologies for the sporadic and slightly grumpy nature of my blogging at the moment - the Dreaded Manflu continues. I'm rarely ill and usually work through any minor ailments, but mortality is making itself felt. I've obviously got cholera or consumption or pleurisy: the only way to stop coughing last night was to sit in bed bolt upright. Obviously that meant no sleep, so I had an uninterrupted night of listening to the town's legion of drunks beat up each other and kick in windows in the disused restaurant underneath Vole Towers. Living in The Dark Place is enough to turn one into a misanthrope: being ill and witnessing the nocturnal cavortings of its denizens is enough to drive even a shy and retiring rodent to Bickle-esque fantasies.
However, I resisted emptying the contents of my kettle, bladder or chip pan over their monstrous heads, contenting myself with cursing them, their parents and their parents' parents. Then I came to work and tried to persuade the five students who attended my guest lecture on a colleague's module that de Certeau, Lefebvre, the psychogeographers, Anna Minton and Augé are fascinating even if their insights into urbanisation are modulated through the strangled tones of yours truly. Still, it gave me the opportunity to thoroughly humiliate Paul Uppal MP in an academic arena: we examined a speech he gave in which the terms 'shopper' and 'consumer' entirely replaced 'citizen' in his narrow-minded, reductive and socially-reductive mental landscape. It made me feel better, anyway.
As for the rest of the day, I need to finish my lecture on Ben Jonson's Volpone (there's a nice segue: from a selfish, deluded Tory to a play about grasping, deluded plutocrats) before staggering back to my hovel. I'd love to stay up all night watching the American election but I'm not up to it. However, I'll give you a sneak preview of the result: militarised hyper-capitalism wins.
However, I resisted emptying the contents of my kettle, bladder or chip pan over their monstrous heads, contenting myself with cursing them, their parents and their parents' parents. Then I came to work and tried to persuade the five students who attended my guest lecture on a colleague's module that de Certeau, Lefebvre, the psychogeographers, Anna Minton and Augé are fascinating even if their insights into urbanisation are modulated through the strangled tones of yours truly. Still, it gave me the opportunity to thoroughly humiliate Paul Uppal MP in an academic arena: we examined a speech he gave in which the terms 'shopper' and 'consumer' entirely replaced 'citizen' in his narrow-minded, reductive and socially-reductive mental landscape. It made me feel better, anyway.
As for the rest of the day, I need to finish my lecture on Ben Jonson's Volpone (there's a nice segue: from a selfish, deluded Tory to a play about grasping, deluded plutocrats) before staggering back to my hovel. I'd love to stay up all night watching the American election but I'm not up to it. However, I'll give you a sneak preview of the result: militarised hyper-capitalism wins.
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
Morning has thoroughly broken
Crawled into work late today, thanks to staying in the office until 8.45 last night. Though I should admit that 45 minutes of that was usefully employed watching Saturday's Doctor Who - very satisfying. I'm glad Rory's dead, by the way. Acting requires more than the ability to look left, then right, quite quickly.
So, on to today's tasks. I'm about to see another final year dissertation student. I have no idea what she wants to write about, and fervently hope she does. Yesterday's wants to do a piece on Milton, CS Lewis and Pullman: familiar but should yield something decent. I've also acquired three MA dissertation supervisions. One is looking at classical music in popular culture, which could be very interesting. Another is writing about satirical versions of the interwar country house novel, which is exciting, and a third has just sent me a huge list of approaches to the later work of JG Ballard - so quite a variety.
Also on the agenda today - further research for my Welsh travel paper - the clock's ticking. More lecture-writing, and hopefully a swim. I'll also keep an eye on Ed Miliband's speech. I'll tell you a secret: I voted for Ed Miliband in the Labour leadership election. I wanted to vote for John McDonnell because he's a socialist, but he didn't get enough nominations to be on the ballot paper. I saw David Miliband as mini-Blair: he's got blood on his hands through his time in the Cabinet, and his subsequent life which involves him making principled speeches to political groups while taking fees from a range of repressive governments confirms me in my opinion that he's just another apparatchik of real-politik and neoliberal business as usual. Electable, perhaps, but what's the point of that if the result is continued injustice, political cowardice and intellectual limitation.
I don't see Ed Miliband as some kind of leftwing hero either, but I do think he's fundamentally decent, understands what the challenging issues are, and generally tends towards the right thing. I've met him too. He's a bit goofy but he's refreshingly uninterested in being slick. It's not caring about stuff like that which will make him immune to the ridicule. I'm actually looking forward to a geeky Prime Minister. Those who set themselves up as globe-trotting Maximum Leaders find themselves invading places just to maintain the image of decisiveness and masculinity. It might not suit the news agenda, but I'd quite like a PM who'll openly say that issues are complicated, need thought and might not lead to clear outcomes. Government's difficult and complex: distrust those who would reduce it to simple choices. If you haven't noticed, this is the Age of the Geek: Dawkins, Goldacre, Cox and Co.
No doubt Ed will tack with the wind from the Daily Mail and the pollsters when the time comes. He'll disappoint - of course. But I still think I voted the right way.
So, on to today's tasks. I'm about to see another final year dissertation student. I have no idea what she wants to write about, and fervently hope she does. Yesterday's wants to do a piece on Milton, CS Lewis and Pullman: familiar but should yield something decent. I've also acquired three MA dissertation supervisions. One is looking at classical music in popular culture, which could be very interesting. Another is writing about satirical versions of the interwar country house novel, which is exciting, and a third has just sent me a huge list of approaches to the later work of JG Ballard - so quite a variety.
Also on the agenda today - further research for my Welsh travel paper - the clock's ticking. More lecture-writing, and hopefully a swim. I'll also keep an eye on Ed Miliband's speech. I'll tell you a secret: I voted for Ed Miliband in the Labour leadership election. I wanted to vote for John McDonnell because he's a socialist, but he didn't get enough nominations to be on the ballot paper. I saw David Miliband as mini-Blair: he's got blood on his hands through his time in the Cabinet, and his subsequent life which involves him making principled speeches to political groups while taking fees from a range of repressive governments confirms me in my opinion that he's just another apparatchik of real-politik and neoliberal business as usual. Electable, perhaps, but what's the point of that if the result is continued injustice, political cowardice and intellectual limitation.
I don't see Ed Miliband as some kind of leftwing hero either, but I do think he's fundamentally decent, understands what the challenging issues are, and generally tends towards the right thing. I've met him too. He's a bit goofy but he's refreshingly uninterested in being slick. It's not caring about stuff like that which will make him immune to the ridicule. I'm actually looking forward to a geeky Prime Minister. Those who set themselves up as globe-trotting Maximum Leaders find themselves invading places just to maintain the image of decisiveness and masculinity. It might not suit the news agenda, but I'd quite like a PM who'll openly say that issues are complicated, need thought and might not lead to clear outcomes. Government's difficult and complex: distrust those who would reduce it to simple choices. If you haven't noticed, this is the Age of the Geek: Dawkins, Goldacre, Cox and Co.
No doubt Ed will tack with the wind from the Daily Mail and the pollsters when the time comes. He'll disappoint - of course. But I still think I voted the right way.
Thursday, 27 September 2012
Smilin' Sid has something to say
Morning everybody (well, it's morning here and how I wish it wasn't). You may have noticed that my blogging has declined from last year's high of about four posts a day to one or two. Is he losing his touch, commentators are asking? Perhaps I am. Or perhaps this course of compulsory psychiatric therapy has soothed my inner demons, resulting in less rage to go round. It might, of course, be that I have so much work to do and so little time. Or a combination of all three. But hopefully I'll find an equilibrium of fewer, higher quality posts (note the importance of that comma).
On today's agenda: actually do some research; see some new students; write some lectures; go to another high level meeting as part of my union casework to be told that The Hegemon's senior staff can behave as viciously as they like. Bullying isn't minuted. Anything un-minuted hasn't happened. Therefore bullying doesn't happen. At least, that's the result of the last investigation I instigated. Then my member gets frustrated at the union's impotence and another bit of hope dies. This kind of misery is what gets the Tories up in the morning, but it's no fun for me seeing grown men and women weep.
Anyway, what else is going on? Well, I read a rather wonderful book yesterday, Shogan's The Battle of Blair Mountain. It's the story of the West Virginia miners and their union in the 1919-1921 period. Many of them fought in the First World War and came back demanding union recognition and fair wages. What they got was state corruption, Federal hostility and martial law. Highlights include gun massacres by private detectives, assassinations, 10,000 shots exchanged between miners and mine guard in a single day, the US Army Air Corps bombing miners from the skies, armoured trains raking tent cities with machine gun fire, imprisonment without trial for reading particular newspapers, bribery of judges, the suspension of habeas corpus, treason trials, and in the end, a state civil war.
The miners lost, as did working-class politics and the left in general, making the United States a safe place for vicious exploitation, as it is now. West Virginia is still a mining state, and a poisonous one. The favoured technique is 'mountain top removal', which employs massive amounts of explosives to do exactly that. The environment is fouled by the mining and the coal-burning, but the companies still own the state and its politicians, while the miners have been persuaded that any mitigation is an attack on their jobs: from revolutionaries then are descended reactionaries now.
We tend to forget that the American Dream's individualism isn't eternal: there have been mass movements and class movements throughout that great country's history, from the Farm Labor parties to Chicago's socialists and anarchists - massacred on May Day, the General Motors rebellion, the Jewish socialists of New York, the Socialists and Communists of Minnesota, the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania and Mother Jones (from Cork!) across the country, Chavez's United Farm Workers, to say nothing of the abolitionist and African-American movements and parties.
Here's a key scene from John Sayles's film of the Blair Mountain story, Matewan. The Sheriff is Smilin' Sid Hatfield, who defended the miners from the company goons - he was eventually assassinated on the steps of the courthouse by private detectives who then planted a gun on him and escaped conviction. The United Mine Workers also made a silent movie called Smilin' Sid, which was pretty advanced PR< but the only copy was apparently stolen from the National Archives.
I wouldn't claim that my union work is quite as heroic as these men and women - but it reminds me of what our political enemies would like to see: workers' solidarity smashed, workers' protection abolished, individualism reigning.
On today's agenda: actually do some research; see some new students; write some lectures; go to another high level meeting as part of my union casework to be told that The Hegemon's senior staff can behave as viciously as they like. Bullying isn't minuted. Anything un-minuted hasn't happened. Therefore bullying doesn't happen. At least, that's the result of the last investigation I instigated. Then my member gets frustrated at the union's impotence and another bit of hope dies. This kind of misery is what gets the Tories up in the morning, but it's no fun for me seeing grown men and women weep.
Anyway, what else is going on? Well, I read a rather wonderful book yesterday, Shogan's The Battle of Blair Mountain. It's the story of the West Virginia miners and their union in the 1919-1921 period. Many of them fought in the First World War and came back demanding union recognition and fair wages. What they got was state corruption, Federal hostility and martial law. Highlights include gun massacres by private detectives, assassinations, 10,000 shots exchanged between miners and mine guard in a single day, the US Army Air Corps bombing miners from the skies, armoured trains raking tent cities with machine gun fire, imprisonment without trial for reading particular newspapers, bribery of judges, the suspension of habeas corpus, treason trials, and in the end, a state civil war.
The miners lost, as did working-class politics and the left in general, making the United States a safe place for vicious exploitation, as it is now. West Virginia is still a mining state, and a poisonous one. The favoured technique is 'mountain top removal', which employs massive amounts of explosives to do exactly that. The environment is fouled by the mining and the coal-burning, but the companies still own the state and its politicians, while the miners have been persuaded that any mitigation is an attack on their jobs: from revolutionaries then are descended reactionaries now.
We tend to forget that the American Dream's individualism isn't eternal: there have been mass movements and class movements throughout that great country's history, from the Farm Labor parties to Chicago's socialists and anarchists - massacred on May Day, the General Motors rebellion, the Jewish socialists of New York, the Socialists and Communists of Minnesota, the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania and Mother Jones (from Cork!) across the country, Chavez's United Farm Workers, to say nothing of the abolitionist and African-American movements and parties.
Smilin' Sid Hatfield
Here's a key scene from John Sayles's film of the Blair Mountain story, Matewan. The Sheriff is Smilin' Sid Hatfield, who defended the miners from the company goons - he was eventually assassinated on the steps of the courthouse by private detectives who then planted a gun on him and escaped conviction. The United Mine Workers also made a silent movie called Smilin' Sid, which was pretty advanced PR< but the only copy was apparently stolen from the National Archives.
I wouldn't claim that my union work is quite as heroic as these men and women - but it reminds me of what our political enemies would like to see: workers' solidarity smashed, workers' protection abolished, individualism reigning.
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Pleased to meet you pleased to meet you pleased to meet you
Lots of goodies to pronounce on today - my 'personal' letter from the Prime Minister, Mitt Romney's attack on 47% of the American population and many other things, but you'll have to wait. I'm meeting students from 9-11. Then meeting more students from 11-1. Then meeting my boss from 1-2. Then meeting more students - or someone, the details escape me - from 2-4. After that, my diary has me curled up foetally in a cupboard repeating the phrase 'my name's Vole. Any problems, my office is 217' until my shrivelled husk is found some years hence.
Until then, enjoy your day.
Until then, enjoy your day.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)