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.

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

Irony in action

Sometimes, classes don't go so well. There may not be a critical mass of enthusiasts in the room. The material may be too far without the familiar. They may not (whisper it) have even read the book. Their tutors may have failed to convey enough passion (hold on to that word, I'll be coming back to it later) about the text in question, or enough detail to load the students' metaphorical guns.

That's how my The Sorrows of Young Werther class felt today. We had a lecture by my colleague which to my mind was superb. The various origins and strands of European romanticism were clearly delineated. Art, music, politics and literature were introduced and brought together, origins were unearthed and popular responses indicated. Questions were posed to the students and answered. Everything, I felt, was going well.

We even conducted an anonymous poll of how many people had read the 110 page novel by this stage (this is the third week of the module). 6 ticked 'Fair cop guv! I've not read it at all'. 18 ticked 'I've read some of it', 'some' = '2 pages' or 0.72% for at least one student. Only 10 had read the whole short novel. Novella really. Which is when I started to worry. This is a novel which extols the cultural and philosophical necessity for passion, albeit backhandedly: young Werther has so much of the stuff that he would rather 'burn out' than fade away, and eventually kills himself. He is an adolescent idealist, a man high on life, one who proclaims the superiority of Nature over the Rules. Obey the Rules, he says, and you get a conformist, boring society which never produces anything interesting, innovative or beautiful. Break the Rules and you may encounter disaster but you'll also get excitement, originality and adventure.

I read out this passage, giving it all the histrionic verve a shy and retiring fat bloke can muster. 'What did he mean'? I asked. Utter, utter blankness. And so it went on. We looked at the passage in which drawing a rural scene led him to consider Nature v the Rules. What was he doing? Nothing. This, readers, is the definition of irony: utter indifference to a work which attacks those capable only of dull indifference.

And so, interminably on, broken only by the very few students who dared speak and on whom I didn't want to lay the burden of the whole two hour experience. It soon became clear that the reading poll was not entirely accurate, should we say. More depressingly, though I don't want the students to follow Werther all the way, passion was almost entirely lacking. If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I understand the pressures of modern student life. Nobody likes being the only one to break the silence. Nobody wants to look like a suck-up or a swot. Studied disdain is the order of the day. And yet, and yet: surely to sign up for and to pay for and to attend a class on literature requires a little more commitment? Whatever the complications of your life, being asked to read 110 pages in three weeks isn't an outrageous imposition. Nor is it oppressive to answer factual questions about a short text.

I tried, readers, I tried. Into the silence, I introduced the Art v Nature debate. Tasks were given, exercises set. I read them Thackeray's sardonic summary of Young Werther (see previous post). We talked about the philosophy of gardens, of the Sublime, of the Picturesque, of the Cult of Youth, of Rationality versus Feeling, or Rousseau and Montaigne and experience versus reason, of Goethe's ambiguous representation of his younger alter ego. Or should I say, I talked about these things, delivering what amounted to an extra lecture despite promising myself and them that this was their chance to be heard.

Ho hum. It's early days. Everything is more complicated than it seems. No doubt I'm expecting too much. I am utterly drained. But as Beckett said, 'Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Enough'.

Today's trials

Morning everybody. I treated myself to a lie-in today until 9.15 (!) on account of being bereaved, but the schedule is once again packed. The main event is a lecture and two-hour seminar on The Sorrows of Young Werther with my first year students. I picked Werther because it's a very early example of youth cults and adolescent angst: the young man has no emotional brakes, falls in love and kills himself. All this is communicated (until the end, of course) in overflowing letters explaining the brat's isolation, alienation and sensibility. It is, basically, 110 pages of a German teenager screaming 'you just don't understand me' at the world - although there's a clear sense that the author uses the novel to distance himself from the torments of his own youth.

The Death of Werther

It's also one of the key texts for European Romanticism: the idea that truth is internal and emotional rather than public and rational reached a wide readership here, and it popularised the concept of adolescence as distinct period of one's life. It set off a wave of imitators and fans: people bought 'Werther' clothes and trinkets: some even supposedly killed themselves in homage to their hero. If the Daily Mail had been around at the time, it would undoubtedly have tried to spark a moral panic about this SICK FILTH. Just like this one. So I'm hoping that this novel strikes a chord with the students.

The learned Professor Ben Knights (whom I quoted extensively in my PhD and with whom I'm Twitter friends) directed me to this sharp-tongued response to Werther by the English novelist Thackeray:

WERTHER had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,	5
And a moral man was Werther,
And for all the wealth of Indies
Would do nothing for to hurt her.
So he sigh’d and pin’d and ogled,
And his passion boil’d and bubbled,	10
Till he blew his silly brains out,
And no more was by it troubled.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,	15
Went on cutting bread and butter.

Teaching's going really well at the moment. Yesterday's second class on Trollope's The Way We Live Now was great. At least, I thought it went really well, whether the class thought so too is a different matter. But they'd all finished or nearly finished this 900 page novel and really knew what they were talking about: comparisons with previous generations' fiction, cultural context, close analysis: they were all there. Next week we start Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, which in many ways inherits more than you'd think from staid old Trollope. They've already started reading it and seem to be enjoying it. After that, I hit them with some 1930s proletarian stuff in total contrast. If they can get copies, then it's Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow for thy Sons. If not, then Lewis Jones's Cwmardy. Having written my PhD about them (and Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley), I should be able to drone on for two weeks about either of them.

The Thursday Afternoon Vole

Maybe I'll institute a regime of single daily posts rather than a stream of random Reckons. What do you think? 

Here's a moody, wintery little shot I took on my phone the other day. 

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." (James Joyce, 'The Dead').

I've been quiet today because a) I stayed in bed longer than I should have and b) I've been doing astonishingly boring tasks. Administration Hell is very different from Marking Hell. Marking Hell is at least exciting. There's a fresh torture coming along any second: a bigoted comment, a stolen paragraph, a missed apostrophe or a misplaced preposition, all finely tuned to press my particular buttons. But Marking Hell also has its pleasures: there are – despite my sardonic whinging – informed, passionate and fluent students who turn in elegantly stylish essays. 

Administration Hell lacks both the stimulation of the Diabolical Essay and the snatched moments of relief afforded by a good piece of work. For instance, today I was updating the electronic module guide for a single-semester module (remind me to tell you one day about our four – or is it five? – timetables. We have two electronic systems, because an integrated one would abolish Administration Hell. There's Evision, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Then there's WOLF, which holds Module Guides, student details, submission details and the like. Did you see what they did there? They don't talk to each other very well either. And Evision carries stern warnings like PRESS SAVE BEFORE EXITING OR ALL YOUR HARD WORK WILL BE SACRIFICED TO THE ADMINISTRATION GODS AND THEY ARE VENGEFUL, MOCKING DEITIES WHO SCORN YOUR PUNY SACRIFICE except that on many pages there isn't a Save button. Instead, there's a Store And Exit button. But I don't want to Exit and I don't trust this programme's grasp of synonyms and therefore don't believe that Save and Store are the same thing at all and besides I haven't finished working out what the difference between Assessment Criteria and Assessment Requirements are yet and oh gods what if this is all some kind of horrible test and if I get it right they make me an Associate Dean in one of the Lower Circles of Administration Hell?

But it's OK because we're all going to be moving to Moodle and percentage marking schemes whether we like it or not and once in the sunny uplands everyone will get first class degrees (seriously, that's the justification for changing schemes). 

Anyway, I've just nobly ceded my The Sorrows of Young Werther lectures to my Romanticist colleague for a first-year module. I'm really looking forward to teaching it: it's central to the Romantic notion of individualism and the individual's relation to knowledge and reality. When it first came out, rumours spread that it caused multiple suicides. I've already been ticked off on Twitter for being flippant about this, but obviously I'm rather more thoughtful and sensitive in class than my online persona might indicate. I'll be teaching the legend and reception of the novel, but won't be cracking any more jokes about assignments, student retention etc. But I can't help looking forward to giving the students a novel about a self-dramatising, self-regarding young man…

In other news: good books in the post. David Williams' A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow (just too late to add to my Borrow/Edwards paper, but I was already up to the word limit), and two books on the decline of British Communism: Geoff Andrews' Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991 (by which he rather presumptuously means the CPGB) and Francis Beckett's Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. I went to a conference in 2004 called Reds! The Story of the CPGB. It was fascinating. All the major players from the Party's previous decades were there, acrimoniously blaming each other for minor doctrinal deviations which had destroyed the coming Revolution. It didn't seem to have occurred to them that spending 60 years following every twist and turn of the CPSU's policy and never seriously trying to build a mass movement based on the UK population's needs just might have been a strategic error. Still, it was fun while it lasted.