Girl Power?

In response to my post 'Tory Tory Tory', some brave soul accused me of being afraid of powerful women, and ended (I hope ironically), with the phrase 'girl power'. What's wrong with women? 'Girl' is a demeaning, disempowering term used to sell poor quality records written by men and sung by women controlled in every way by a shady management team.

Feminism, on the other hand, is about celebrating the achievements of women and combatting the structural and personal attempts by entrenched interests to repress them. Thatcher is certainly not on the side of the angels: did she promote individual women in her party and government? She did not. Did she promote the interests of women as a collective? Again, she did not.

Am I frightened of powerful women? Let's have a look at the list of women I revere, shall we? You may even, Anonymous, have heard of some of them!

Aphra Behn, The Wife of Bath, Mrs. Bandanaraike, Constance Markiewicz, Bernadette Devlin, the Miners' Strike wives and female supporters, Emily Davison, Margaret Atwood, Angela Davis, Ulrike Meinhof, Hermione Granger, Barbara Castle, Rose Cohen, Jane Austen, P J Harvey, Laurie Anderson, Sally Beamish, Nicola LeFanu, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Kate Roberts, Fflur Dafydd, Hannah Arendt, Gwyneth Jones, Sarah Cracknell, Polly Toynbee, Calvin's mum, Gwen John, Tove Jansson, Kate Atkinson, Laura Cantrell, Kathryn Williams, Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy, Molly Bloom, Dorothy Edwards, Mrs Doyle, Thursday Next, Granny Weatherwax, Lyra, Jessica Mitford, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Aunt Agatha, Florence, Helen Walsh, Sarah Waters, Elizabeth Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sheri S Tepper, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Storm Jameson, Jan Morris, Helen Clark, Katherine Mansfield, Tiffany Aching, Millie Jackson, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Further suggestions welcome.

Will this do?

Tory Tory Tory

I was going to rant about Thatcher today, after watching last night's BBC2 dramatisation of her last days in power. All the old boiling, screaming hatred came back like an old friend, to which was added the impotent fury caused by the fact that even the party that's meant to be on our side was comprehensively captured by her manichaean attitudes towards race, diplomacy, foreigners, the poor, the weak etc. etc. etc.

But I won't. Cynical Ben's already done it beautifully.

There was one distracting thing about this adaptation - I was sometimes so captivated by the quality of the actors and their uncanny accuracy (Ken Clarke!) that I forgot to enjoy the misery suffered by the actual politicians. Lindsey Duncan was brilliant but couldn't bring herself to be quite as evil and unsympathetic as Thatcher really was. I'm not a vindictive man, but if there's any justice, Thatcher will spend her declining years at the back of a queue for bread, unable to complain because she's lost the power of speech. For starters.

Winding down for the weekend

A quiet day today - a swim, peer-reviewing a very interesting article on The Welsh Outlook, then teaching Renaissance literature - I think I'll go with Faustus and see what the little darlings make of it.

Then tomorrow - a long, stretching walk up Carnedd Llywelyn with the Map Twats to blow out the cobwebs.

My huge piles… of books

Yet again, Santa brings me more books. If Mandelson's evil plans about the Mail slow down the flow then I'll have is head on a spike. Two more 'histories' of Britain (Layamon's Brut from about 1215 and Nennius's Historia Brittonum from c. 833) and l'Abbat's 1734 The Art of Fencing - might pick up some interesting forgotten moves.

All the misery pays off at last

I bought two jerseys yesterday. So f*cking what, you might ask - a pig wrapped in a sheep. Well, they're medium-sized, MEDIUM, I tell you. I only had the one degree last time I squeezed my flabby, pasty carcass into so little fabric. The world turned upside-down…

A healthy glow

Just to prove that greens can be (occasionally half-hearted) sexist pigs too, I give you The Environmentals: models posing outside nuclear power plants - sometimes nude but for a radiation detector…

I'm doomed…

Over on Bad Science and on Newsnight, Ben Goldacre is ripping Susan Greenfield and another 'researcher' to shreds for the ludicrous claim, as the Daily Mail puts it, that 'Facebook = Cancer'. She says 'there's no evidence for this but…' - which echoes the infamous Chris Morris paedophilia episode in which Dr Fox makes the same claim about crabs and paedophiles sharing genes (can't embed this one, but it's at 1.15).

The basic idea behind this ludicrous story is that use of Facebook etc. = loneliness = susceptibility to disease. Fair enough. In that case, holding tutorials yesterday made me very susceptible, and my daily routine (read books, teach, read books) means that I'm a high-priority case. I demand screening! Compensation! That bastard Gutenberg and his pushers Waterstones, Bangor University, Wolverhampton University, Amazon, ABE and all the other backstreet book dealers should be strung up for this. My entire life has been predicated on George Eliot's maxim: 'the world outside books is not a happy one' - and now I discover that hiding myself away with one will kill me.

We salute you…

Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger isn't just a hero for saving 155 people when he ditched his 'plane in the Hudson. He's a hero because he's spoken up for the working stiff and blamed the deregulation of transport in the 70s for eroding workers' rights. His pay has decreased 40% and he no longer has a pension thanks to the bankruptcy manoeuvres pulled by the airlines to dump their pension and pay commitments. All hail.

Dear Rupert

A couple of years ago, I was involved in a cybermetrics project which looked at blogging and news. The conclusion was that bloggers didn't really break stories, but followed them up - with some exceptions.

I notice that somebody at Sky.com has been reading my blog quite exhaustively. I have a few things to say:

1. Do some real journalism.

2. Nothing to see here, move along please.

3. You are evil (not personally - you're a worker vulnerable to the vicissitudes of capitalism). Don't even think of using anything I've written.

I don't have Sky, so if any of you see any of my best lines on screen, let me know.

Into the corridors of power

I have a hotline to government - state government that is. Of Nebraska… Welcome, Nebraskan reader. I hope you've got Dick Cheney safely in an undisclosed location again!

To another reader using a Mac at Swansea University's English Department:did you Google yourself and find yourself on my page? I hope your ears (eyes?) are burning! Actually, I loved Twenty Thousand Saints: profound, funny, beautifully structured and written. How I wish I was as fluent in my first language as you are in your second.

Jack be nimble… with the truth

Jack Straw has vetoed the Information Commissioner's order to release the minutes of the Cabinet meetings which authorised the Iraq War. His reasons are fascinating:

"Cabinet is the pinnacle of the decision-making machinery of government," Straw said. "It is the forum in which debates on the issues of greatest significance and complexity are conducted".

Now Jack's always been a bit of a slippery customer, but this is such a howling lie that it shouldn't be allowed to stand. Read the memoirs of any of the Cabinet ministers since 97 - Mowlam, Short, Mullin loads of others - and you'll realise that there's no Cabinet discussion of any substance. There's even a phrase to describe Blair's style: sofa government, which denotes the unminuted, word-in-your-shell-like way he conducted business. To listen to Jack, you'd think that every Cabinet meeting was a meeting if Titans thrashing out the moral and political ramifications of every decision. It's not true. All the big decisions, including the Iraq war, were planned by Blair and his unelected advisers, then the Cabinet were presented with them for their tame acceptance. Debates went unaired, votes weren't taken. Like the rest of the party but with more spineless desire, the Cabinet accepted this as the price of power. Jack's a liar.

Bloody Blogger - changing my fonts and won't change them back

Weird science

Two wonderful things over on Pharyngula: the fish with a transparent head and barrel shaped eyes that located completely inside said cranium, and a link to a quiz: are your morals Biblically bona-fide? Take it now!

My result:

Your morality is 0% in line with that of the bible.

 

Damn you heathen! Your book learnin' has done warped your mind. You shall not be invited next time I sacrifice a goat.

Do You Have Biblical Morals?
Take More Quizzes

Even more books

In return for spending two whole days translating some Pierre Klossowski (bonkers French philosopher, novelist and artist), William has given me a copy of Bataille's Literature and Evil. I've only read The Story of the Eye so don't quite know what to expect. Onto the pile it goes…

I also received my 'Collector's Library' three-quarter size facsimile of William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer. It's got too much gold on the outside for my taste, and the edition is completely monochrome - a huge disappointment - but it's still a beautiful edition, reflecting the height of Victorian guild-socialist thought and design from illustrations to typeface. It will certainly do until I can afford to blow a million or two on the real thing (though one of the 48 pigskin and vellum copies can be seen at Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton) and here are some images from the 425-copies first edition.

Open wide

I went to the dentist today, slightly grumpily because Chris Layne is a great, charming and kind man who is leaving the NHS system - the 5th biggest economy in the world can't organise a dental health service. However, I cheered up: my gnashers are OK (appearances can be deceptive) and Chris's wife Helen didn't recognise me because I've lost so much weight - wonderful. People have largely stopped shouting Peep Show phrases at me too…

Also, my iPod chose 3 Snowpony (they're better than the review linked to suggests) tracks from the first 4 it shuffled today. I'm a sucker for side-projects anyway (this lot are related to Stereolab and a load of other interesting bands, and it took me back to a lost age of non-Britpop indie, in which intelligent women wrote and played songs which didn't fake a commercial version of feminism, but dealt with social and political issues through the medium of ancient synths and Fender Jazz Basses (retro-futurism?) - crunchy, funky stuff.

More on e-learning/teaching

Desperate Demon points out that e-mail is a useful way to interact with staff without embarrassment. I can see the point - people seem to view e-media as a site for personal statements they wouldn't make face-to-face, but I'm not sure this is a good thing. Instead, I think it's a depressing comment on how we all relate to each other in the flesh - we're substituting symbolic exchange for simulation to avoid embarrassment - is this an English thing? We all use language as a way to distance people, so perhaps it's a logical extension to use e-mail in the same way. For others, of course, the solitary nature of typing to a screen feels intimate, leading to more emotional openness.

Natural Blues also feels alienated by the impersonality of the university system. I'm sorry to say that it comes down to money and culture. If you were at Oxford, or a smaller institution, you'd meet your personal tutor at least once a week to discuss your work between just the two of you. I wish we could do the same…

Another feature of the university system is that we're meant to treat you as independent and strong adults, even though the A-level system doesn't prepare you for the level of solitary and/or self-directed study required. We're meant to point out the potential ways to think about texts or issues and you're meant to go off happily to the library - even though it's hard to navigate your way through thousands of books contradicting each other, and do your own washing/cooking, and work because it's so expensive to be at university, and you're making (and dumping) friends, adopting a new identity, you may have children or terribly complicated lives.

You may have come from a totally structured learning environment to university, and it's hard not to think that turning up to class is your sole activity, when in actual fact this should be the smallest part of studying. At posh places, you have very few lectures and 8 week terms - but they know that most of their time will be spent studying. We can't operate like this - most of you aren't rich enough not to need jobs, you aren't from the same kind of environments, more support is needed. However, the conundrum is that support is expensive and takes a lot of time - two things in short supply. I don't know the answer - any suggestions?

However: do be assured that everything you've felt so far is what everybody else is feeling (I certainly did): lost, stupid, unprepared, directionless and often lazy. That said, things like socialising and sport and joining weird religious or political groups or just bullshitting in the bar are all important activities. Take some risks (intellectually and otherwise) - you never know what talents you'll discover.

BTW: I do at least skim through draft essays etc, but only if you send them well before the due date - 3 hours before submission isn't on!

I'm learnin', learnin', learnin', learnin'

Here we are on the PGCE and we're on to reflective learning. Only 4 of us here and it's all rather jolly - lots more exchange of ideas. Shame I'm in Walsall - I never thought I'd pine for Wolverhampton.

Enlightening the masses

I'm doing tutorials for my second-level students today - two have come from 24 so far, and they're very clear on what to do and how to do it. This is the conundrum of teaching - the motivated ones come for help and often only need reassurance, while the people I really worry about either think they don't need help or are too worried to ask for it. 

I can understand the latter - I always stressed in private when I was an undergrad - but I'm not sure how to fix this. I don't want to make tutorials compulsory because this isn't a school and compulsion doesn't help with the wider process of their educational trajectory, and I don't want to single people out. All I can do is stress to them how available I am and that I've been through the same problems they have. Any ideas, you academic readers? 

Update: two more came, one nervous but sorted, another rather lacking in preparation. What really depressed me is the surprise registered when I used their names. It's a large institution with too many packed classes. I'd love to know them all better - it would help them ask for help when struggling, they'd feel more cared-about, but it's hard when there can be 120 or more in a lecture and 20-30 in an hour-long seminar. 

Another day, another book

This time, it's Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints - partly a translation, partly a rewriting of her Welsh-language novel Atyniad. I bought it partly because I bumped into her at a conference or somewhere, while she was doing her PhD on R. S. Thomas (this book, like his Images of Bardsey) is set on Ynys Enlli, the Isle of 20,000 Saints), and partly because Welsh writing is going through another of its frequent golden ages - hip young things ripping up and remaking Cymru Cymraeg and English Wales in ever more fascinating ways, unbound by Celtic Twilightism or dour socialist realism and aided by forward-looking Eisteddfod judges.

Ju$tice

The U.S. has a strong, and largely admirable, system of elected officials at all levels of governance, including judges. We moan about our prison and justice systems, but it's not as bad as what just happened in Pennsylvania.

Once elected, Judge Conahan shut down the state juvenile detention system and used county money to fund a multimillion dollar lease for private contractor Mid Atlantic Youth Services. Then he and Judge Ciavarella started taking bribes ($2.6m between them) to send more children to prison from the operators of these private prisons. Amongst the inmates: 15yr-old Hillary Transue (sent to a wilderness camp for mocking her headteacher on a Myspace page); Phillip Swartley (9 months' boot camp for nicking change for sweets) etc. etc. etc.

It's not just the fault of an overly politicised civic structure - somehow it seemed OK to try these children without lawyers (Ohio: 90% of child defendants had no lawyer). It seemed OK to privatise one of the most serious institutions a country can run (we've done it here too - and there's not much profit in rehabilitation, training for guards etc). 

It's our fault - we've lost our moral and political values (especially on the left because we should know better). When we're looking at children and seeing profit in their imprisonment, we've lost our moral compass. The one bright note in this story is that judges are likely to have a harder time in prison than bent coppers. 

Howling Gales

My chums the Nightingales have been beatified by Stewart Lee, no less, in the Sunday Times! Available in a few good record shops, Amazon and iTunes. They'll only spend the money on drink, mind.

The Nightingales: Insult to Injury

Stewart Lee

John Peel died in October 2004. While Peel favourites the Fall and the Undertones were swiftly beatified by desperate Newsnight Review pundits, his beloved Birmingham post-punks the Nightingales somehow escaped such inappropriate appropriation. But the new album from the “Gales” is their finest for 27 years. 
The twin guitars of Alan Apperley and Matt Wood chime and coruscate; the drummer, Darren Garratt, has perfected a unique kind of flailing accuracy; and Robert Lloyd’s Black Country burr carves wry couplets into the hammer-effect, copper-top tables of the subconscious. Start here and work backwards. 
Klangbad KLANGBAD40