La Groupe Sauvage

I had the pleasure of diving back into my late teens last night, courtesy of my friend Phil, who stuck me on the guest list (consisting of, well, me) for The Primitives, another rather wonderful popular beat combo swept aside in the thuggish tide of Britpop. Here they are in their prime:





Prime slices of Byrds-ish jangle-pop, I hope you agree. It's a simple formula: thumping back line, repetitive hooks and bags of charm. If in doubt, miss out the verses and just repeat insanely catchy chorus over and over again.

To be honest, they didn't start well last night: despite their recorded output consisting of delicate pop loveliness, they seemed to have decided to whack everything up to 11 and pound us into submission, but the sound man sorted things out before long and the evening was a riot. The crowd was exactly what you'd expect for a band reforming after 20 years and led by a singer - the improbably named Tracy Tracy - promoted back in the day as Hot Indie Stuff, i.e. balding fat blokes, of which I count myself one. I should - whisper it - say that she reminded me ever so slightly of Christine Hamilton these days.

Some photos: rest here. Click these ones to enlarge.

Disreputable followers…

OK. I gather someone who was in a middle-ranking band has died. I actually had to switch off Radio 4's flagship Today programme because it seemed to consist of nothing but unchallenged tax evaders, grovelling royalism and endless encomia to Mr Gibb. How they'll cope with the death of someone genuinely important is as yet unclear.

But as it happens, I discover that a song I really like is by the Bee Gees. It's Low's 'I Started A Joke' and here it is in all its loveliness:



Meanwhile, I thought I'd share with you some of the people who've followed me on Twitter recently. If you're not on the list, it's because I think you're relatively sane and therefore too delightful to discuss.

The appearance of random and frankly unwanted followers must be connected with the nature of the medium: Twitter isn't yet an 'imagined community' in Anderson's sense, but it is a place of weak social capital. It's easy to join a group and easy to get out of one. There are few emotional or cultural ties required to follow people, and so it's abused by a range of God-botherers, political loons and purveyors of useless goods. Amongst my recent minions are this lot, none of whom must have read any of my tweets:

Fixmytax FixMyTaxTax Consultant & Compliance, Corporation Tax, Income Tax, Value Added Tax, VAT, PAYE, Capital Tax, Tax Plan, Taxes, PRSI, Levies, Taxation

Sickening. This guy's based in Ireland, a country which got rich - and then suddenly very poor again - by setting up as a tax haven and running an economy based on debt, fraud, greed and selfishness. Some people never learn.

How about this one?

AwakenToGod Susan ShumskyBest-selling author of 7 books, foremost spirituality expert, pioneer in the self-development field, highly-acclaimed professional speaker, New Thought minister

Clearly someone unfamiliar with my loud and oft-repeated rejection of any form of religion, let alone American fundamentalism and anything which smacks of narcissism, which 'spirituality' (i.e. religion without any inconvenient rules) and 'self-development' clearly indicate.

Then there's the usual tedious juju salesmen:

Darryl ‏ @buytweatsHello I enjoy helping others make money. I'm a Internet Marketer of Digital Ebooks,Software,Scripts,Articles & FREE ITEMS & Great Valuable Daily Tweets!!
Allen Torrinos ‏ @Law_MakerDaily updates for the entire legal profession. Read the latest legal industry news and insight.
Calvin Hammond ‏ @calvhammopalcommercial property. want to learn more? dm me.
Total Yacht Charters ‏ @tyachtcharters
and the eccentric:EverythingPagan ‏ @EverythingPaganSharing Pagan resources.
nafiannafinncombat ‏ @nafiannafinnOffers classes in WMA (Western Martial Arts) FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) Pencak Silat, and Bataireacht (Irish Stick Fighting)

the notorious fascist Giovanni di Stefani:

Consultant Spy,Director of MI6 LTD, THE DEVILS ADVOKAT as well as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man(once) Beggar Man,Actor, Dramatist etc

But the American nazis appear to have got bored and gone away. 

On the upside, my piece on being a good lecturer was retweeted by @LibGoddess. On closer inspection, her name was familiar. She turned out to be a former housemate from my undergraduate days at Bangor! What a small world. She has a very good blog too, mainly about her work as a research-specialist librarian at Cambridge University. 

Animaniacal

In return for the Animated Communist Manifesto, @thehumandory sends me the Mickey Mouse Midsummer Night's Dream. It's 20 minutes long because all the knob gags are missing. Here's part 1:



Obviously I'll be incorporating this into my next Shakespeare and Milton module. If only there was a Flintstones version of Paradise Lost. It writes itself.

The Communist Manifestoon

Karl Marx meets Walt Disney to explain The Communist Manifesto. If only the reader was an animated as the, well, animation. Seriously man, put some life into it: you're not reading the Highway Code.

But generally, this is genius.

Uppal lives! From the neck down

Good news, everybody! Paul Uppal - aka The Secretive Millionaire - has been found alive and well. Turns out he was merely in the cellars at Tory Party HQ, being manured and turned every few days in his vat until he was ready to ooze out some more planted questions, all on the same day.

What humdingers they are. First up:

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that the Government are taking long-term decisions and looking at the long-term interests of UK plc?

At first glance, this looks like bog-standard grovelling of the kind Paul's made his own. But looking more closely, it's the sort of rather unpleasant propaganda which reflects an anti-human, anti-citizen agenda. The context is a discussion of Labour's astonishing local election landslide. Uppal's implication is that the Great British Public, and his constituents in particular, are morons incapable of taking a long-term view. The second implication - and one which exposes him as a fourth-rate brain - is that government policy can and does operate on behalf of corporate interests: 'UK Plc' is a despicable term which implies that a state should operate like a company. Of course, companies are run solely for the shareholders, not the wider community. They sack people to save money, they overpay those at the top, they take no wider view of society and see the world as a matter of winners and losers. The UK Plc discourse is cynical, selfish, greedy and intellectually moribund. Just like Paul!

This is, of course, Conservative and Liberal Democrat policy. Nice to see it so neatly explained, however.

OK, now we've established that Paul has the mental independence of a rotting mushroom and the socialisation of an angry wasp, let's turn to the next one, part of the Queen's Speech debate:

In difficult economic times, we should not be seeking quick fixes. It is important that we continue to build the foundations that are necessary for economic recovery. The solution to a debt crisis should never be more debt.

Let's not quibble about the fact that the recession was over when Labour lost power: the Tories have managed to plunge us back in twice now. Let's just point out that Uppal has no idea what he's talking about: his contribution to solid economic foundations was making millions in property speculation through his company, Pinehurst Securities. Goods exported: nil. Employees: perhaps a secretary. Tax paid: minimal, I suspect, thanks to the lower rates of capital gains and corporation tax - I strongly suspect Uppal paid himself in this way rather than taking an income-taxable salary, though I may be wrong.

As to the idea that 'the solution to a debt crisis should never be more debt': wrong. Firstly, we're heavily indebted because his friends in the banks went spectacularly bust, then ran to us for help. Paul thinks they should be bailed out, and we should pay for it, which is why he voted to raise student tuition fees from £3000 to £9000, why he's cut housing benefit, abolished the EMA, reduced benefits for disabled children and a swathe of other attacks on the vulnerable.

On the wider point he's wrong too. J M Keynes said this: if the private sector isn't investing or lending, someone's got to, or the whole economy will collapse. So the state should do it. This is why America bailed out the auto firms, it's why 1930s America embarked on a massive program of public works: dams, roads and so on: without investment from somewhere, we're all doomed. Additionally, now is the perfect time to spend taxpayer's money. Interest rates are historically low, and government bonds and gilts are offering 100 year returns of under 2%. This means that as a country, we're such a safe bet that we can borrow at ridiculously, historically cheap rates. So it's time to raise a load of cash, employ people to build more railways, wind farms, urban eco-housing and fix this place up, providing new skills and employment while transforming the country.

But we'll never persuade Uppal of this, even though he made millions by doing what he condemns: borrowing money to bet on the future.

He knows this really, because his final contribution actually contains some good sense (and largely contradicts everything else he said.

We need to ask the difficult question “Why are these cash-rich institutions not investing domestically?”

OK. It's a good question to ask. But now it gets confusing. Or confused.

The answer begins with the boom that preceded the recession. Unlike booms preceding earlier recessions, that boom was financed by public and private debt, which has continued to depress household borrowing and spending. The IMF’s analysis of advanced economies over the past 30 years concluded that recessions preceded by an unsustainable increase in household debt tended to be more severe and protracted. That is because as long as households pay down debts and increase savings, demand will remain weak.

So the first bit means he doesn't believe in credit-based capitalism. Odd for a Tory, especially a speculator, but God welcomes the prodigal son. But then he seems to be blaming households for paying off their loans and saving money rather than spending it on more stuff. Eh? (This is a true conundrum, by the way: we've been encouraged by the Tories to borrow money for mortgages, holiday, iPads, Rampant Rabbits etc on the basis that tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow has arrived and now Uppal's telling us off for leaving our wallets at home). Anyway, onward!

A solution to the problem would be the creation of a banking system that improved lending and the supply of credit. 

You what? Paul, you just said that debt-funded expansion (think Manchesters City and United) is bad. But now you're saying we need more lending. Make up your mind, man! He does also call for the separation of retail and casino banking: a huge reversal for a Tory, especially one wedded to the tired old tropes of deregulation.

But don't worry. In case you think little Uppal's becoming a thinking member of society, the last paragraphs reinstate the self-publicising fantasist we all know and love:

I would also like to discuss how investing in the UK should involve our work force today and the work force of tomorrow. On a personal note, I recently held a jobs fair in Wolverhampton. We had more than 1,500 young people attending and more than 30 employers. One conversation I had on that day still sticks in my mind. It was with a young person from Wolverhampton who said, “I want to thank you, Mr Uppal, for organising this. You’ve given me hope.” When the Leader of the Opposition stands up and says that there is no hope in the Budget or the Queen’s Speech, the effect is deeply corrosive. I know that the situation in places such as Wolverhampton is challenging, but to dismiss people and just wipe away their dreams so quickly and flippantly is very damaging. Sometimes politicians in this House need to think carefully about the terminology they use.

Now I know what you're thinking. You cynical gits. You're thinking that this forelock-tugging constituent must be imaginary, like all the other people Uppal finds who manage to say whatever he needs them to say, and like David Cameron's '40 year-old black man' who'd done 30 years in the Navy and hated immigrants. You awful, awful doubters. Who knows, this cringing yokel might in fact be real. If you are, come forward!

1500 people attended this jobs fair. How many jobs were available? How many people got jobs? Let's forget, for now, Uppal's desperately weak defence of the Budget and Queen's Speech: legislation cutting taxes for millionaires like himself while doing nothing for the unemployed, the poor or the economy. He just seems to think that any opposition at all is somehow treasonous.

Well done Paul: well worth emerging from under your rock.

And now for something completely different

I've been stuck in this office for nearly ten hours, and I need some diversion. I had a lovely visit from a departing student, and a serious chat with a colleague I'm doing union casework for, but that's about it. The building is deserted other than a few postgrads doing the English MA, and I'm being lulled to sleep by the traffic on the dual carriageway. Or is it the carbon monoxide? Either way, I need some music to keep me awake.

I'm in the mood for some alternative classics tonight. Let's see what's in my virtual record bag (I do have real records too. Many thousands of them. One day I'll bore you with them).

First up, The Phantom Band with 'Island', one of their more relaxed tracks. They manage to jam folk, psychedelia and krautrock into every song and make it seem entirely natural. I know they got critical acclaim for their debut, Checkmate Savage, but when I'm in charge, they'll be writing the national anthem.



In a similar vein, here's a deceptively lovely bit of Portishead, 'The Rip'. I didn't really make much of them until I got free tickets to see them tour Third, and then it all made sense. Of course, the fact that everyone around me was smoking massive amounts of skunk and my esteemed colleague was drinking 2-pint buckets of Guinness helped a lot. He shouted the foulest abuse at the band for the entire evening. Next day I asked him why he'd hated it so much and he could only remember enjoying the whole thing…



I don't think I've ever played any Labradford here before. They're like an uncompromising Yo La Tengo: minimalist and atmospheric. Often quite creepy. Unlikely to appear on Saturday Kitchen or indeed In The Bungalow With Dick and Dom. Which is a shame.



Wow that brings back memories of sharing a house with stoners. Still, it's an improvement on the Ozric Tentacles they used to like. As a palate cleanser, here's some lovely lovely Quickspace with 'They Shoot Horse, Don't They?:



Anyway, as I'm back here for more marking and further tales of woe, I'll finish on Bonnie Prince Billy's 'Another Day Full of Dread': introduced by John Peel, which always makes me feel happy AND sad. One of the highlights of my life was him taking one of my requests and engaging in a little 'banter'.



Actually, no. I'm going to finish with a couple of happier tracks. First up, a lovely slice of chamber-pop from The Pale Fountains. Britpop killed this kind of thing. The bastards. Oh, and heroin. Cheers, Colombia!



Finally: a blast of utter hippy joy from Ireland's only psychedelic band, Dr. Strangely Strange. Now I know where Gorkys Zygotic Mynci (that's a lovely track) got it from. This track is 'Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal', which described life here very well indeed.

And in return…

A couple of days ago, I posted a rather rambling piece on what your average sleep-deprived bleary-eyed and dyspeptic lecturer wants to see in a decent essay (read the books; don't use Comic Sans). It seemed to go down well amongst the Twitterati, students and lecturers alike.

However, education is a polymorphous process, and the demands of students should be considered too. Although many of us are rightly resistant to the consumerist ethic which this government (and previous ones) has reduced us to, it's still fair for students to require certain things from us. I'm not alone in thinking about this either: the Guardian Higher Education network is hosting a live chat tomorrow (18th May) on this subject - join in. I don't think I'll have a chance to do so, but here's my pennyworth.

(I'm going to ignore the technical details - Powerpoint, e-learning etc: it's the human qualities  which are primarily important). But I'll say this: there's no point giving a lecture if you just read off a Powerpoint screen. You may as well have emailed it to everyone. The point of getting a lot of people in a room together is so that you can talk to - and react to - each other. Presentations make you a slave to a program, whereas paying attention to your audience tells you what's working, what's not working. Similarly, ideas and personalities can't be boiled down to a screen. Technology helps immeasurably in the right context and in the hands of an expert, but it should be an assistant, not the purpose of the event.

First off, there's the problem of the rational consumer. The government's education reforms explicitly imagine that every 18-year old knows exactly what they want and what they should be given. They're wrong. However intelligent a new student might be, university should be a new and creatively destabilising experience. This is even more important in the current climate because New Labour and the Conservatives have done their very best to destroy secondary education. Rather than fostering quirky, curious, surprising students, league-table culture has forced teachers to teach to the test. Students tell me that sometimes they don't read the whole novel on their A-level courses, and about 'essay skeletons' they're given.

So they get to university and some expect a linear transmission of facts to be copied down and regurgitated. Repeat until a degree certificate appears in the post. This leads to students only reading the bare minimum (or nothing), an unhealthy dependence on lectures, and a loss of intellectual autonomy.

For me, the good university lecturer is one who leads students into taking charge of their own education (I'm not going to shame bad lecturers, but you could check out this horrible Youtube list). A good lecturer (if we're going to carry on with lectures - that's a whole other debate) is one who does these things:

• Raises an area of debate by making it clear that an apparently obvious idea/text/situation is complicated, and therefore much more interesting than it appears;
• Guides the students through an interpretation of texts which engage with the main idea, while making it clear that other interpretations are welcome;
• Presents ideas in such a way that students feel compelled to think and talk about these ideas without feeling picked on or humiliated. We must require students to collaborate in their own education, without behaving like a dictator. 
• Challenges students intellectually, within a supportive space
• Understands that learning is difficult - and persuades a sometimes reluctant audience that the process can be enjoyable and rewarding.
• Initiates students into an academic community rather than dictates messages from the inside to supplicants on the outside. As one excellent student put it: have some humility.
• Enjoys a good argument and wants a conversation. If you stare down or humiliate a student who makes a point during your lecture, you're an insecure loser. Remember: inexperience isn't the same as being a moron: we can learn from our students. In many ways, teaching at The Dark Place is far more likely to prove this than Oxbridge. There, a massively disproportionate number of students are from the same few private schools, ethnicities and tight social groups. Here, my students are from a wider range of backgrounds, ages and experiences. They're less male, young, white and privileged, and they bring so much to the table which to me is unfamiliar. 
• If you want an uninterrupted monologue, start a blog. Ahem.
• Respects the students. 
• Doesn't just plough through the material. An orchestra conductor doesn't just read the pages: s/he reads the orchestra and responds to their dynamic: the same should be true of us. If everyone's texting (or Tweeting rude things about the lecture), you've got it wrong. 
• A decent lecturer understands that no student will get down or remember every point: have a short set of ideas/principles/points/approaches that they should take away as an absolute minimum. 

A good lecturer is an enthusiastic lecturer, and generates enthusiasm in return. It's harder than it looks: we don't always choose the texts we're discussing. Sometimes we're tired and overworked. Sometimes we know that the subject in hand doesn't appeal to students on first sight, even if they're generally well-disposed towards the wider field. It's our job to communicate the value of studying them. That doesn't mean we should become entertainers, or easy markers or (ugh) campus heroes. Nothing erodes respect quicker than an academic colluding with dumbing-down (except amongst those students present only for the certificate).

There's a problem with the academic terminology, of course: 'lecturer' doesn't really imply conversation (whereas a symposium was a drinking club), and teacher is also hierarchical, as Claire Warden puts it:

 "Academics are not really 'teachers' but (I hope) are enablers of learning. 'Teachers' (and this is not in any way derogatory towards teachers) suggests a fairly undemocratic space of someone who knows stuff, telling the stuff they know to people who don't know stuff. I'm not a big fan of this."

But there's still this: whatever you call us, we're the ones with the qualifications and the academic experience, whereas the students are (hopefully) intelligent and interested people. We do know about stuff and are always in the process of learning more: students know less, and it's our job to point them in the right direction to help them to know more. (Though as a good postmodernist, I'd point out that 'nobody knows anything': what I teach is ways to understand how and why we don't know anything in specialised ways.

Thinking back to my lecturers at university, they split into groups. Some were intellectually arrogant, and made no effort to disguise the fact that they thought teaching was beneath them. I coped with them but made no particular effort to impress my presence upon them. Some were lovely, eminent people who just couldn't teach: one would hand out closely-typed photocopies of his lecture, then read every word of it out, very slowly. They're the only lectures I ever skipped: I'd collect the script and leave, safe in the knowledge that I'd missed nothing. Then there was a large group who clearly lived for knowledge and didn't see any reason why I shouldn't either. That's what worked. They were enthusiastic, and encouraged us to feel the same way. They were clearly disappointed when some of us didn't feel the same way. Some were kindly, some were intimidating, but none of them let us hide at the back of the class, or not read the texts. They took the entirely reasonable view that not putting the effort in was a waste of our time as well as theirs'. They knew that we were a mixed-ability bunch, and took as much pleasure in the struggler who busted a gut to manage a 2.2 or 3rd amidst difficult circumstances as someone who strolled into a First.

By these standards, all of us lecturers are failures… sometimes. A good lecture is a magical thing, and while preparation and awareness makes it more likely, you can never tell whether it's going to happen. I've left lectures on a high, and I've left them feeling that I've bored myself, let alone the students.

It helps to remember that the sole responsibility for success is not yours: I've cancelled sessions after ten minutes because nobody had bothered to prepare: I felt guilty, but justified.

I have exemplary colleagues. They are intellectuals who take their profession and their students seriously. They are excellent communicators and have the gift of unpacking a seemingly impenetrable subject in such a way that they leave the students wanting more.

OK: your comments please.

Book news

The big news in my bookish life is that there is no book news! I've been so busy that I've had no time for reading, nor even for buying books! Even the administrators are teasing me now. All I've read is Saci Lloyd's Momentum, which is a cracking and massively left-wing YA eco-dystopian thriller. I've also made a start on David Crystal's The Stories of English: nothing really surprising or new to me in there, but beautifully put together. It's like all my Anglo-Saxon lectures rolled into one. I'm particularly looking forward to the Great Vowel Shift (which has literally never happened in The Dark Place). The pile of unopened London Review of Books is getting bigger - I feel guilty and slack whenever I look at it.

What I have been reading is a massive pile of essays, dissertations and online fora. So far, I've found no plagiarism, which is unprecedented (are they getting sneakier or more honest?), and the overall standard is loads better than previous years. OK, so I was informed that Shakespeare was 'limited', 'Bob Sands' was a 'hungry striker' who died during the Miners' Strike, and that Paradise Lost is 'clearly a post-modern novel', but all the others have been excellent. But my eyes hurt now and I'm going to rip off the eyelids of anyone else who uses Comic Sans. OK?

There have been compensations. My final-year students have all discovered Twitter at the same time, and alternate between moaning about missing each, having nothing to do, and teasing each other something rotten. Though I sometimes have to avert my eyes as they forget that it's a public forum. The other addictive entertainment has been the Leveson Inquiry. It's a constant source of amusement, watching the most compromised, amoral and cynical figures in public life - journalists, proprietors and politicians - pretending to be shocked! shocked! at the idea that they might have played a part in the degradation of the public sphere. I preferred it when reactionary hacks were honest, and it's sickening watching people like Straw and Campbell feign ignorance: they courted the worst elements in British public life in pursuit of votes from the most racist, thuggish elements of the population, and now profess surprise that our public culture is racist, thuggish and antithetical to anything above the lowest common denominator. The sooner these ghastly poltergeists leave the stage the better. I have high hopes of Jack Straw and David Miliband going to prison for their role in authorising torture and rendition anyway. We all know that Cameron and friends are cynical chasers after power - but at least they're honest: they rule to benefit their class. New Labour was particularly sickening because it achieved power by adopting the discourse of liberation, while looking after the interests of the political elite just as much as the Tories do.  Where's it all got us? Bankrupt and bitter.

My office and my hovel are looking utterly squalid and I feel quite ill all the time thanks to the pressure of marking, but that's just how it goes in this rather odd period (high point: watching a law student getting arrested - in a law exam - for theft. In a couple of weeks I'll be able to kick back and… start writing academic papers in a desperate struggle to get into print and remain hanging in the academic community by my sorely bitten fingernails.

All Points Bulletin: Have You Seen This MP?

I'm now becoming seriously worried about the safety and whereabouts of Paul Uppal MP.

Caption contest?

Normally he's all over the place - popping up at PMQs to make some point dictated to him by the whips; churning out idenitikit press releases; claiming credit for everything up to and including the Big Bang.

But recently he's gone under the radar. Virtually no Tweets. No self-adulatory posts on his website for almost a month. No industry-friendly pieces in speculators' journals. No - and this perplexes me most of all - explanations of why he voted to cut benefits for the blind, the young and the disabled. Not a peep from him during the election campaign during which his party did so badly. Certainly no representation of his constituents (but then that came a long way down his list of priorities ever since 2010).

Paul: if you're out there, check in. We're your friends, we worry about you. If you're snowed under counting your money, just say so. Now that Tories are an endangered species in this city, it would be terrible to lose the most prominent one. As long as we know you're safe (and not desperately casting about for a safe seat elsewhere, because let's face it, you're toast in 2015).

By popular request…

Occasionally, I get fan mail and requests. One reader, whom we'll call Bruno di Gradi because that's his online identity, suggested this:

Do you know what would make a good blog post from your good self? One where you outline your thought process for marking essays

As it happens, I'm in the office until 10 tonight, marking essays and I need a break, so I'll take this one on. Maybe it will help.

In no particular order (and apologies if some of this seems patronising, but I promise that it's all based in true-life experience).

1. Read the texts you're writing about. Read them again. Underline bits. If you're writing about news, watch some. Read some. Read some more. Reference every idea: you get credit for this.

2. Have an opinion. This is a scary one. I keep telling my students that I can find out what the critics think by reaching for a book. What I want from you is an informed opinion. Obviously you haven't the time and experience to lock horns with the Lacanians, but you can demonstrate that you've looked around the various ways to read texts, understood them, and find a particular approach more compelling. Opinion - as Martin Eve points out to me - doesn't mean a free-for-all, even if you've inhaled the entire corpus of reader-response criticism ('meanings are created in the space between the reader and the text'). 'Argument' is better.

Don't let your reading dominate your response (I struggle with this one) but draw on them for support and also to show that you know there are other options. It's NOT a matter of listing critics who agree with you: it's about using critical work to situate your argument, (in Martin's words), saying something in a shorter space, or to add originality by pointing out where previous critics have overlooked or misinterpreted something. I frequently find myself writing 'I totally disagree with you - but you make a good case. Have an A grade'.

3. Engage with the text. Don't airily state that X is an idiotic character - show me.

4. Don't be afraid to confront complexity and ambiguity. When an essay tells me that an author, character, plot, genre, event or whatever is 'obviously' anything, I sigh and shake my head and get out the extra-red red pen. Everything's complicated. If you think something's simple, you haven't been looking closely enough. If your essay recognises that the subject is more complicated - and therefore more interesting - than it first appears, then you're on the way to having an argument. There's no answer: only potential answers.

5. Bibliography. Have one. It's the first thing I look at. An honest one: just the stuff you've read and/or cited. Remember: I've read everything on the reading list and I know what's in the library (so don't distort quotations to suit your point either). If you come up with a text printed in a limited edition Mayan-language edition, I'm going to be a teensy bit suspicious. While we're on the subject, Googling key words and then citing the single page of Google Books that comes up is not research.

Ask yourself if you've done the right kind of research. If your bibliography includes school-level crammer texts, you're not taking it seriously. If you cite - as more than one student did recently - X for Dummies, ask yourself this: are you a dummy? If you got into university, the answer should be 'no, therefore I do not need books designed explicitly for dummies'.

If your bibliography looks lazy or stolen, I'm likely to be suspicious for the rest of the essay-reading experience. Don't nick stuff - you just generate ill-feeling and rip yourself off.

The point is this: we're not testing your data mining skills. We're not really testing you: we're giving academic credibility to your own process of education. If you pretend to have read an essay when really you've only nicked a sentence to make you look informed, you're ripping yourself off. On the other hand, if you've read that chapter, struggled with it and still don't feel quite sure you've understood it, I'm happy. We can talk about it and you've taken control of your own education.

6. Proof-read. Get someone else to proof-read it. Twice. Put your work away for a couple of days and go back to it with fresh eyes. Obviously this requires a degree of forethought and planning, but it really helps… or so I'm told. Don't try to copy the academic style you see in books and articles. Some of those people could make a volcano tedious (I was recently shown a piece which made penis-size the most boring subject on earth, which is some feat given the amount of email I get on the subject). Also, the good ones have been doing it for a long time. It takes practice. Aim for clarity and simplicity. Build complexity from there if you need to: don't be tempted by the idea that you become an academic by performing like one. There are enough charlatans in here already.

7. Enjoy it. This might sound silly, but if you're not interested, you'll produce a humdrum text. You don't have to like every text on which you write. You might think it's the worst thing you've ever read. But trust us: there's a point to it. Look for that point. Ask yourself (or us) why we've picked this. Enthusiasm goes a hell of a long way.

8. Avoid the broad, sweeping and unprovable assertion. I know that Shakespeare was a great writer. You don't have to prove it. What you need to do is explain the odd bits. How does a text work (or not)? Why does media ownership matter?

9. Think about your reader. Treat her/him as ignorant but intelligent: like a detective in the mansion library, guide them through the maze until they see it your way, without patronising them. Also, ask yourself whether they'd want to read it: is the structure clear and logical? Is it written literately? Would you like it passed around the office for the admiration (or scorn) of your marker's colleagues? Does your opening paragraph grab my attention, or is it a mimsy bit of cliche-ridden tedium? Right from the start, tell me what you're doing, how you're doing it and why you're doing it like that. Then do it. I mark well-written essays really quickly because I can get straight to the ideas. If I have to decode every sentence, then marking becomes a test of attrition in which there's only one loser: you.

Every teacher's inspiration - Severus Snape

Imagine having to read this piece of work out in front of me. Would you do it, or would you like to shrivel up into an atom? If the latter, rewrite it.

10. Mean it. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I'm always kinder to people who've wrestled with a topic and been defeated than those who've clearly breezed in and winged it on their wits. Talk to us well in advance, however scared or confident you are. Some of my favourite students have been people who got third-class degrees by the sweat of their brows, because they've been transformed: the eventual grade is nowhere near as important as the degree to which your understanding of and approach to the world has been changed.

11. Presentation: the academic requirements are about clarity. Use them. Think about physical things too: Comic Sans, for instance, just makes me unreasonably angry.

This isn't what I want.

12. Think about the piece of work. How are you imagining it? If it's as an imposition, a punishment, a drag, then it's going to be rubbish (unless you're very good at faking it). Imagine it as a conversation between two learned people: you're part of an academic community, not a beggar at the gates. If you have the confidence to behave like a colleague in this process, my marking will reflect this. With good essays, I never have to write 'this isn't a sentence' or 'try to spell Shakespeare's name correctly': instead, I write further questions or ideas in the margins, or 'I never thought about it like this before'. Please make me do this more often.

Conversely, the students who get first-class degrees are the ones who are passionate - analytical skills alone won't get you there. I like people who argue, in class and on paper. Awkward people who've read around the subject and trip me up in the midst of my lecture are brilliant. Pour it all out on paper and take risks: you might go astray, but that's an educational experience in itself.

In summary: enthusiasm and dedication will get you there. We're here for you. The work is designed to help you. It shouldn't even be called work. The whole discourse and marking thing seems like a punishment process but it's disciplinary in a different sense: it's meant to help you grasp the requirements of the discipline. I want you to remain passionate or acquire passion, but along the way to abandon naivety in exchange for a more purposeful excitement. My boss has a good line about the importance of joining in seminar discussions rather than lounging silently at the back relying on other people to do the work: 'you don't get fit by going down to the gym and watching someone else's workout'.

13. If it seemed easy to you, check again. Could you have done better? Maybe you are on top of the whole thing - good for you. But too often uninformed essays are the most confident ones. If you haven't stretched your brain for this one, you've missed the point of the whole exercise.

I know that a lot of this is very naive. And that I'll think of other criteria at random points over the next few days - but I'd really like to hear from you. Is this stuff fair? Unfair? Helpful?

Mapping history

Given that I'm in a walking group known as the Map Twats, I was always likely to love this animated historical map of Europe. I try to find good maps to show students as a way of explaining that nations and states are temporary, contingent and often imaginary - even though this one only starts at 1000 A.D., it's an excellent introduction.



If anyone's done one of the British Isles, let me know: 'Wales' was several countries, as were Scotland and Ireland, while 'England' was really a Heptarchy (seven kingdoms) with several smaller sub-states for quite a while in the pre-Norman period, then reduced to fewer more powerful states, then became a Danish possession (under Cnut) before eventually becoming a regional possession of Normandy.

The marking playlist

A marking playlist isn't quite as simple as you might think. Anything too catchy is distracting. Anything too soporific means you may wake up face down on a pile of essays soaked in your own drool. Anything too upbeat may find you handing out the A-grades like O'Leary scattering LSD tabs at a happening. Conversely, play one too many requiem masses or blasts of Maxwell-Davies and you'll suddenly realise that you've failed every last mofo in the room. Then there's the vexed question of what your office colleagues can stand.

I've gone for a mixed bag today - a lot of the Leveson Inquiry which, while catchy, is a bit too distracting, given that I've exploded with cries of 'You LYING BASTARD' every few minutes. Well, it was Alastair Campbell, and I couldn't take his sanctimonious claim that his professional approach was to discuss only abstract philosophy with anyone who asked, while patting journalists' puppies and giving sweets to their children. Listening to him, you'd think he was an innocent abroad in a sea of vicious, slathering media attack dogs. I'm glad he was on our side(ish), but the idea that he wasn't part of the problem is laughable. He lied and lied and lied, and his pet hacks lapped it up because the stories he fed them were good copy and they had no time or inclination for actual journalism. He didn't start it. Nor did they. Neither of them wanted to end it. No doubt they all started with good intentions, but they all ended up selling the citizens down the river in pursuit of one more vote, one good headline, one quiet word.

Anyway, back to the playlist, which is what I started writing about in the first place only two paragraphs ago. Apart from Leveson, I played the new Nightingales album, No Love Lost. Horribly, I find myself in agreement with The Sun, which reviewed it a few days ago: it's seriously good (thankfully the hipsters' touchstone The Quietus loved it too. Unlike several previous Gales albums, it's got hooks, tunes and sounds like it was recorded on something more sophisticated than a taxi's CB radio. Obviously I wouldn't say anything if I hated it, given I share an office with the guitarist and am friends with them all, but it is a brilliant album and they're on tour now (in the words of Modern Toss: 'Alan, you bastard' - we're all marking essays). Is it any good for marking too? No. Too skronky, too many catchy hooks and arresting lyrical lines - it demanded my attention far too much.

The same goes for the new Richard Hawley album, Standing At The Sky's Edge. It's a departure from his previous alternative-crooner albums: louder, odder, darker but also folkier - everyone in pop has dusted down their Pentangle and Giltrap albums. Utterly brilliant, but won't fade into the background. This, I guess, is the mark of good music.



My default position for marking is the more contemplative end of classical: medieval and Renaissance choral music, or modern classical stuff. The same problem holds: you'd have thought that the abstract nature of Ligeti's 'The Viola In My Life' and similar pieces would be ideal, but with so few notes per minute, I find myself waiting eagerly for the next one, wondering what it's going to be - it too refuses to fade into the background.



Some stuff is now too familiar to surprise me though - all the Glass, Reich, Riley, Andriessen and Adams I've mainlined over the past twenty years no longer feels shocking, more warm and welcoming as the motorik grooves of the repetition beckon me in - very good for marking but it's sad to think that I'll never feel that thrill of a genre that felt so transgressive compared with the pretty stuff I grew up around.



I saw this performed live last year - one of the most sublime experiences of my life.

The older choral works are better: even if they're works of utter sublimity like the Gesualdo madrigals I bought the other day (actually, his music and his life were weirder than you might think), or Tallis at his best, the limpid, flowing lines and the language helps: I can follow the Latin if I try hard, but it's easy not to.



The other album I've been listening to today is Richard James's new one, Pictures in the Morning. I know this makes me sound old, but I remember when his first band, Gorkys Zygotic Mynci were teenage psychedelic punks, and now they're all making baroque folk-country loveliness. Only they could persuade me down the country route. Richard's new album isn't on Youtube, but here's one from his first album:



So now I've had a break from marking to write this, what shall I play until I get out of the office in a couple of hours? Easy: Slowdive.

One more thing…

OK, I posted an awful lot about the School Games last week, and I enjoyed the event hugely. But I have one more thing to say.

While I was spending the last day angrily chasing all the fencers' equipment (it had been piled up in the rain at some distant car park), the Closing Ceremony included an appearance by a special guest and a little announcement. Fitted between chart-toppers Cover Drive (pop groups are named after cricket strokes now?) and Britain's Got Talent winners Spellbound (a bit cheeky seeing as the thousands of kids in the crowd were they ones who'd demonstrated that they were the ones with talent), up popped Prince bloody Harry:

Prince Harry has become President of the Sainsbury’s School Games, the Government announced today as the finals of the inaugural competition drew to a close.
The Prince will use his support to highlight the role that competitive sport can play in the development of young people, regardless of their background.

Apart from the naked exercise of power ('the Government announced': so much for the Games' autonomy), does it not strike anyone else as massively ironic, if not totally inappropriate? Every single young athlete got to the games by working incredibly hard to improve him or herself. Constant practice, often overcoming incredible odds: all things to which the young prince is a total stranger.

Yet the Government decides that the public face of the School Games should be someone who had the great fortune to be born into untold riches, privilege and rank. What does he know of struggle, hard work and dedication to achieving goals through sheer effort? Were there no actual athletes available? Presumably the 'regardless of their background' is a reference to the prince's own background: as far as I know, the only 'sports' in which he engaged were the Eton Wall Game and blasting as many overfed pheasants from the sky as possible.

Still, perhaps competitive sport will enable him to 'develop' in some way… and not just through the public relations boost this appointment is designed to achieve.

Advice to students

I'm deep into the marking - one dissertation left to do, then it's the forty-odd English Renaissance pile, then further mountains of various others. One of the things that have hugely annoyed me this year has been the erroneous use of quotation: either simply badly typed, or deliberately distorted so that an innocent academic is misused to support something s/he never wrote.

Here's a little advice from Ælfric, a West Saxon monkish scribe and author from the turn of the first millennium:

Now I desire and beseech, in God's name, if anyone will transcribe this book, that he carefully correct it by the copy, lest we be blamed through careless writers. He does great evil who writes carelessly, unless he correct it. It is as though he turn true doctrine into false error. Therefore everyone should make straight that which he before bent crooked, if he will be guiltless at God's doom.

Sadly I don't have eternal damnation in the fires of hell as a sanction for lazy or dishonest students… though it's certainly deserved in the case of the one who told me that 'Paradise Lost is a post-modern novel'.

And finally…

It's my blog, I can post whatever I want!

Rest of the School Games fencing photos here. Click these ones for larger versions.

A Scottish fencer tastes defeat

Acrobatics to land the hit

Monk avoids Hendrie, men's team foil

Watson claims the hit from Brosnan

Russell contorts himself to make the hit. I've never managed to get this move right.

Jack Watson suffers an injury

Welsh foilists overjoyed that stupid Tory MP Therese Coffey awards them gold instead of bronze!

Olympic regeneration still very much a work in progress

The Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park

A happy Go Fence fighter

Katie Dolan, my boss. Not a happy goblin in the rain at the Olympic Park

And there's more

Yet more photos from the 2012 School Games fencing event.

Emily Ruaux means business

Calm down, calm down

Jessica Corby, about to go out for the next fight

Denise Lewis, deliberately over-exposed. I actually prefer this one to the 'properly' exposed version I took next.

Despondent Wales fan

Welsh women's epeeists celebrate

Jack Watson of Scotland celebrates a fine hit

Watson still celebrating a point against Ethan Ridsdale, Wales.

Elinor Robinson, Wales women's foil

Welsh fencer on her knees before Ayesha Fihosy, England

Simpson (NIR) appeals to the referee

Even more photos from the School Games

Even more fencing photos from the School Games. Rest here, click these to enlarge. Only 30-40 more to come! Don't worry, I'll get back to ranting about Paul Uppal soon. 

I love the way the blade's curved round the mask here. 

Ellie Cormack kneels before Elisabeth Powell

Wheelchair fencers: it's much harder than ambulatory fencing because the chairs are fixed in place - there's no possibility of retreating for a breather and a think.

The School Games fencing medals

Chloe Dickson, fired up