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.

The Afternoon Vole

Welcome, friends, to Marking Hell, In Marking Hell, academics are condemned to face the consequences of their teaching. Those little jokes, the examples that seemed clear enough at the time, the quotes that you thought you could bear seeing repeated back to you over and over again with added mis-spellings. In Marking Hell, we're made to realise how little of what we say actually goes in. For instance, when I say (and put up on screen in massive texts) things like YOU CANNOT CLAIM THAT VIDEO GAMES CAUSES VIOLENCE BECAUSE MEDIA EFFECTS RESEARCH IS TENUOUS AT BEST, I assume it means that the students are inured to Daily Mail claims about video games and violence. I even ask them to estimate how many 'people' they've killed on screen, then how many people they've killed in real life. They all laugh. Then they write things like 'Many mass murderers are associated with video games'.

While we're on the subject, we also ask 'do you believe everything you see on TV?'. They all say no. Then they write things like 'TV manipulates viewers into thinking x, y and z'. Oh, it's just other people who are stupid passive fleshbags is it? (This is another favourite Daily Mail line).

Today I've also had someone criticise EastEnders for featuring Muslim homosexuals, because 'the ethics of Islam forbid homosexuality'. Unfortunately, the Qu'ran must not forbid plagiarism because that particular essay is virtually completely downloaded from the web. I've also read a female student explaining that pornography is feminist because it allows women to exploit men from the safety and comfort of a TV studio. OK, it's a more sophisticated way of being wrong than simply asserting a load of inaccurate 'facts' or relying on the Ayn Rand Lexicon for definitions (seriously), but Marking Hell is one of those regular occasions when my hope that each generation becomes more liberal is dashed. If I had a pound for every time a female told me that feminism was 'boring' or 'pointless', I'd have a fully funded pension and would currently be putting on my snow-shoes for a Norwegian mountaineering trip.

I'm not normally this downcast by marking. There are always some excellent essays and it's rare that I don't learn something: one student turned in a ridiculously interesting analysis of Tumblr that was clearly all her own work and drew on most of the theory we'd mentioned and some more we hadn't. But I marked 15 essays today and failed 9 of them. I'm not going to generalise about a generation, and certainly not going to claim it was better in my day. Although it was harder to plagiarise: essays were handwritten, so you had to read every word you were copying out, which must have made people think about what they were writing, once they'd been to the library to find something worth copying out! Now it's all Wikipedia, freeessays.com or (I kid you not, it was in the bibliography) AS Level Media Studies: The Essentials.

I had a ridiculously easy time at university. Lectures, with a single tutorial each week, and tutors who wanted one essay a term. My students have a seminar with each lecture and two pieces of work per module – loads more than me. A lot more is expected of them, but they get a lot more support, attention and advice, not least on how to research and write essays.

Clearly with this failure level – and my colleagues report similar grades – something has gone wrong either with the teaching or how we train students to produce academic work. We'll have an inquest and talk to the students to get their point of view. Perhaps the concept of academic writing is problematic at first-year level, perhaps they take a mistaken instrumentalist approach that doesn't work, perhaps the sparkiness we see in class masks doubt and confusion. With some of them, there's a clear causal link between non-attendance and failure. We don't give them the answers in class, but we show them where to look for good leads!

Perhaps it's a subject thing: my English literature classes aren't as bad at the moment, though I have more leeway there to choose obscure texts that have no presence on the internet! One thing that really bothers me about the first-year media group at the moment though is the lack of curiosity. They're content to say 'everyone' does, watches, believes or uses x, y or z. Many of them tell us they have a strict diet of very limited media consumption and don't really care about anything else: channels they don't watch, ownership, regulation. Things just are – there's no political or cultural context worth examining for some of them.

One essay today told me that the media behaves badly because it doesn't let people carry on believing what they're taught but tries to make them think differently. Oddly enough, that's what I hope my lectures do!

So anyway, it's back to the drawing board…

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.

Boulot metro dodo

Doonesbury's got it in one today - on the subject of blogging. Poor Rick Redfern was a respected newspaper journalist until social media's tsunami of Reckons obliterated his career (click to enlarge).

You may have noticed that I'm blogging a lot less recently. Partly it's post-holiday, partly the ridiculous workload I have on at the moment, but a lot of it is because I have less to say. Or rather, I've said it all already. This government's been in power for 30 months and they're as predictably evil as I said they would be on Day 1. I'm still outraged, but also weary and depressed by them. On other subjects, I'm reading pretty much the same or similar stuff, so there's not a lot that's new there, and there's an awful lot of great material that I'd love to share with you but can't – like the hilarious things people say in disciplinary hearings when I'm trying to defend them, for instance.

So anyway, today's post includes:
Willie Thompson's history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, The Good Old Cause, which will be quite a contrast to my current reading, a compendium of PG Wodehouse's Psmith novels. Also Daniel Williams' Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845-1945. There's a good quote on the back from Henry Louis Gates basically saying 'who knew?'. I'd have thought that there's plenty of scope for a post-1945 sequel too. I also received Sing-Sing's second album (they're the remains of the long-lamented Lush) and a Mambo Taxi album, out of sheer curiosity.

I've bought quite a few books over the Christmas break, virtually all work-related. Collie and Fraser's George Borrow: A Bibliographical Study, Collie's George Borrow: Eccentric (annoying know-all git-wizard, more like) and Hugh Olliff's On Borrow's Trail - a beautifully ambiguous title. I also got Peter Watts' Béhémoth, a great big SF novel. I didn't mean to buy it in French - not paying attention - but I'll get through it.

Anyway, back to work. I'm about to send off my George Borrow and O. M. Edwards article. My colleague Steve has read it and apart from objecting to my overuse of colons, reckons it's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is good enough for me.

Hackademia's first martyr?

While you lot have been truffling in new media's celebrity trough, distributing Stephen Fry's latest aperçus and OMGing over Justin Bieber's latest calculated transgression, there's been a torrid debate about what social media will do to academia.

Like most fields, there's a sense that the ease with which material is distributed will overturn the dominant forces and vested interests which restrict the free flow of information. And of course there's a determined fightback from those vested interests. I'm not talking about the generators of knowledge, by the way. We're like pre-capitalist cottage weavers: not alienated from our work like industrial factory labourers, but exploited just the same. We take tax-payers' money in the form of research grants and cash from students' loans (thanks, kids - appreciate it) and turn some of it into academic literature: books, journal articles, conference papers and the like. I say we, I mean 'they'. I turn in a research paper roughly on the schedule Jesus turns up in Missouri, which unless you're a Mormon, isn't very often.

What happens to these papers? We give them to publishers for free. In some cases, especially prestigious journals, we actually pay them to get our work in print. Then they charge £50-100 for a book, and several thousand £s per year for journal access. It's largely profit: we hand in our work in ready-to-print condition, and the editors are usually academics working for free career progression too. It's not like the music industry, where the musician eventually gets paid something if you pay for a record rather than downloading it. All the publishers do is print and post things – and in the internet age, I'm not sure that's quite enough to justify their business model.

So in short: you pay for it, we write it, publishers profit handsomely from it – and nobody reads it. Especially you people who pay for the research. It stinks.

Enter Aaron Swartz, a nice young man who decided that information the public paid to generate should be free to read. In a quixotic personal gesture, he hid a laptop in a server cupboard and downloaded every article on JSTOR (an academic publication repository) he could cram onto his hard drive, planning to dump them on the internet where you could all see what you'd paid for. And perhaps use it to write a new generation of enlightening texts unhampered by not being able to afford to pay for them again.

With the connivance of MIT, his employer, Aaron was arrested and charged with multiple counts of theft – we all know that the United States hates copyright breaches more than juvenile gun massacres – and legislates accordingly. He faced decades in prison. True to form, he even posted his court documents for free, evading the US Government's pay-per-view system (?!) until they shut him down.

A few days he killed himself. I wish he hadn't: this argument needs to be had on intellectual and political grounds rather than individualised tragedy, but I'm horrified and saddened by the burden he took on, and the effect it had on him. Swartz is a hero, but he's also emblematic of a generation which lacks political skills in the widest sense. The new media age has made us all radically individualist. All the virtues of mass political action have been discarded as slow and cumbersome but having dumped collective action, the individual is left horribly exposed when a solo mission goes wrong.

That's why I disapprove of Aaron Swartz's action. He was right to download and circulate all these articles - but doing so on his own, without building a movement, didn't advance the cause and didn't help him. We don't need martyrs, we need a critical mass to overwhelm the vested interests. This poor man acted in the best of interests, but lacked the ideological resources to turn a private conviction into something more than a personal crusade. Yes, there's a network of supporters that turned out for Swartz and there's a lot of buzz on the internet about copyright and academic freedom, but these loose, temporary alliances don't build the structures we need to achieve our goals. Aaron loaded millions of papers onto a little laptop: cool in a Goonies sort of way, but a gesture rather than a grown-up strategy of subversion.

t's a general problem: we've grabbed all the advantages of net activism and dumped the skills of the analogue generation. We're decentralised, but we're also alone. Without solidarity, we're exposed, and often reduced to headline-grabbing stunts which bring the wrath of states and corporation down on the heads of indidividuals like poor Mr Swartz. I know this sounds both old-fashioned and cold, but one of the joys of Old Politics is that you're never alone. In my work as a union officer, I know that I'll never be left to face management alone. An attack on one is an attack on all, and there are real-world consequences for anyone who crosses us. For Aaron, the real-world consequences fell entirely on him, because he'd failed to patiently build the networks, alliances and structures required for real-world action.

For all that, Aaron Swartz is a hero. But he didn't need to die.

Work is postponed for the day

Damn the Guardian. I was all set for a massive amount of work, when it linked to this rather wonderful site, tailor-made for people like me, i.e. massive music snobs. Obscurometer uses Last.fm data to show you how obscure your favourite bands and albums are. If, like me, you spent your teens in the dusty back rooms of remote records shops looking for that elusive limited-edition-of-three-one-sided-clear-vinyl-7" by a Faroese band that lasted a week, you'll love it. Or perhaps hate it when you discover that actually, your tastes aren't quite as rarefied as you thought

Let's give it a go. How about my favourite Welsh nationalist hip-hop act, Tystion?

tystion's overall obscurity level is...95.5%. None of the users indexed by the Obscurometer have tystion in their top 50 artists lists.

Not a bad start. What about Ectogram - North Wales's finest krautrock-psych band?

ectogram's overall obscurity level is...94.7% 

Bah. Populists. Let's try David Wrench - Welsh electro-pop maestro and producer:

david wrench's overall obscurity level is...94.1%. None of the users indexed by the Obscurometer have david wrench in their top 50 artists lists 

Beautiful Aussie dream-poppers Hydroplane? 

Hydroplane's overall obscurity level is...91.7%

How about C-Pij, about whom I know nothing?

C-Pij's overall obscurity level is...97.9%

But I can do better. How about bassoon-and-violin rock/jazz/classical duo Architeuthis Walks On Land?

Architeuthis Walks On Land's overall obscurity level is...98.7%

And here they are:




Not bad, but I can do better. How about Epitaff, the previous band of Welsh brother duo Brigyn?

epitaff's overall obscurity level is...99.0% 

And finally shouty teenagers from the 90s The Period Pains:

The Period Pains's overall obscurity level is...99.2% 

Here's their gleefully spiteful track 'Spice Girls':




Bingo! Loads of my albums hover around the 97% range, which is all very satisfying if you think that being there first or at all is a mark of your taste. I used to, but now I'm just sad that these talented artists will never be heard by the people out there, because they're so good. 

Anyway, there's a massive flaw in Obscurometer's system. Quite a lot of the music I have was only released on vinyl, and therefore can't ever show up on their database. Stick that in your CD player, populists!

And now, back to work…

Osborne's warning from history

Back when he was young and didn't have so many media advisors, George Osborne said what he thought. In particular, he encouraged people to avoid paying tax.

Warning: contains creepy and sinister facial expressions.

You that grind our faces

Right, I need a little break from the writing (it's going quite well, thanks, though I suspect the editing will be a nightmare), so I'll have a little rant.

Yesterday, I had the House of Commons debate about social security payments on in the background. The Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks have decided that increases will only go up 1% rather than in line with inflation. Essentially, it's a cut, because inflation is the cost of living. If bread goes up 4% and your unemployment payment goes up 1%, you won't be able to afford bread.

The Tories think this is a brilliant wheeze. They didn't need to have a parliamentary vote to make it happen, but Osborne and their Australian strategist Lynton Crosby thought that it would make Labour look like softies, supporting those who, in the Chancellor's words 'sleep off a life on benefits' while you and I go to work. So they released this poster:

Is this poster's charge true? I hope so. My pay rises for the past four years have been below inflation, so I've got slightly poorer each year. But that's OK, because 'slightly poorer' for me means less caviar on my toast, not 'shall I eat today or have hot water?'. When Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, unemployment benefits were equivalent to 22% of the average wage: not exactly generous. Now, it's 11% and declining. 

I have a postcard of this old Labour poster on my wall - the same one David Miliband referred to in his speech yesterday:

It's exactly right. A 1% cut from my salary is a flea-bite. A cut from the £40 or so a young unemployed worker gets is enough to send her over the edge. 

Some of this Tory  poster is – of course – purest bollocks as we say in the trade. The Conservatives don't support 'hardworking people': they're bankrolled by corporate interests, and directors' pay increased by 50% over the past year or so. More importantly, the vast majority of people claiming state benefits are in work: ignore the crap about lives on the dole –virtually nobody does that. Instead we're a nation of underpaid workers. Thanks to New Labour and the Conservatives, low wages are subsidised by benefits paid for by taxpayers. We're not feather-bedding lazy skivers: we're feather-bedding shareholders and HR departments. 

It's also true that the unemployed benefit claimants aren't an alien race of parasites. 400,000 civil servants lost their jobs since 2010. Teachers, nurses, police officers, health inspectors and a whole range of ordinary people. You might be one of them. You'll certainly know one. They're us, and they've paid their taxes: social security isn't a hand-out to be withdrawn on a whim: it's an entitlement awarded on the basis that we all have or will contribute to the exchequer. To claim otherwise is a vicious lie. 

I've been reading a biography of John Lilburne recently, the Civil War-era leader of the Levellers, who were too leftwing and radical even for Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The Levellers published a manifesto called The Agreement of the People, debated by the Army council and others in Putney. For the Levellers, Colonel Rainsborough made a beautifully simple point about how a country should be run:

I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee

We're in the midst of a campaign to demonise those who are without work. There are 500,000 vacancies and 2.5m unemployed people. They can't all be demons. Yet the Conservative campaign to paint them all as 'shirkers' directly denies Rainsborough's call for respect for 'the poorest hee'. The mega-rich have had tax cuts. The companies they run don't bother paying taxes at all. They are the 'greatest hee', and they're nakedly in control. The 'poorest hee' is going to pay for the damaged caused by bailing out 'the greatest hee'.

What are our Parliamentary representatives going to do about it? The Leveller pamphlet Vox Populi (sorry, can't find a full text for this one) was pretty clear on this - addressing MPs who make even the most leftwing socialist now look lily-livered:

O you Members of Parliament, and rich men in the City, that are at ease, and drink Wine in Bowls, and stretch your selves upon Beds of Down, you that grind our faces, and flay off our skins, Will no man amongst you regard, will no man behold our faces black with Sorrow and Famine? What then are your russling Silks and Velvets, and your glittering Gold and Silver Laces? are they not the sweat of our brows, and the wants of our backs and bellies?

The Levellers failed: land, privilege and human rights were retained by the moderate gentlemen of Cromwell's party, though the King was decapitated thankfully. What will be get? A few expressions of dismay from Ed Miliband, a scowl from Nick Clegg and a smirk from Cameron and Osborne.

Update: This has just been picked up by The Guardian as if to prove my point:

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has said that MPs believe their pay should rise by 32% hike to £86,250. As the Press Association reports, a survey carried out by Ipsa also found more than a third believe they should keep generous final salary pensions. The findings emerged as Ipsa published a report on its initial consultation into pay and pensions, which ended last month. The research, which politicians completed anonymously, found that 69% thought they were underpaid on £65,738. The average level suggested for the salary was £86,250.

Too dumb to live

Sometimes students come in, distraught, having missed a deadline because they got the date wrong. Some of them are liars, but most of them have made a genuine error. I'm usually sympathetic but have to tell them that the system doesn't allow for human error. We academic staff don't have control of the submission mechanism and can't give extensions. Quite often I think to myself 'the date is on the module guide and the assignment brief: sort yourself out'.

No longer. The next time someone comes in with this tale of woe I will move heaven and earth to help them. Why? Because it's happened to me. In a move of stunning stupidity, I read a submission date for my Travel in Wales journal article as January 15th rather than January 5th. Was it because I wasn't wearing my newly-acquired spectacles? Or because I have another chapter deadline on February 15th? Or because I am, in the final reckoning, a moron? Whatever the cause, I've been working steadily away confident that I'd make the deadline. Indeed I was feeling rather smug that my new academic rigour and determination was going to get me there a day or two early unlike some people (in some fields extra time is always given as part of the submission ritual).

What to do? I've sent the most grovelling and apologetic email ever written to the editors begging for extra time and apologising profusely. The heart raced and the face was red as I prostrated myself humiliatingly. It's all I can do: hope they show mercy and keep writing. This is one of those occasions on which there's no scintilla of light, nobody and nothing else can be blamed. It's just me, being a dick. I've always loved this Douglas Adams line: 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly past', but it's not funny today: I've let down my academic peers and announced to them that I'm unreliable. Not good at all.

If there's any good coming out of this at all, it's that I'll be a little more understanding to students in the same position. But that doesn't make me feel one iota better this morning, I can tell you.

Update: the lovely editors have forgiven me and given me until the 15th. So relieved. Now to make it the best paper ever. I don't think I'd ever live down an extension which led to a rejected article…

2013 commences in earnest

Hi everyone. Here I am, back at my desk and what a joy it is merely to be able to type that sentence. As I'm sure you can all imagine. It's going to be – I hope – a quiet sort of year. Last year I sent so many weekends training for the Olympics and then there was the excitement of actually being right there. Plus the Grant Shapps-baiting, which was highly gratifying. He called me 'politically-motivated', which seems a bit rich from a Chairman of the Conservative Party!

This week, I've got an entire book chapter to write by next Monday, so you won't be hearing much from me unless I'm really stuck and need a good rant to get the creative juices flowing. I've written my half of the chapter on jazz in contemporary fiction, though things I should have put in make me wake up in the night. I've done all the reading for this Welsh travel chapter, but I'm dreading the writing process.

In the meantime, have some pretty pictures from this weekend's walking in Church Stretton and on the Long Mynd. Click on them to enlarge, and see the whole set here. This year I'm going to upgrade my equipment. I've just bought a second-hand 18-200 VR lens to replace my 18-55 and 70-200 lenses. After that, I'll be getting a Tokiina 11-16 landscape lens, then an f/2.8 300mm one for wildlife, and finally f2.8 105mm lens for portraits. All this depends on inheriting massive amounts of cash or finding a suitcase of used notes down a rabbit hole, of course. Or you could send me all your money.

A wild pony foal on the Long Mynd

Looking south-south-west from Ragleth Hill

A sheep at sunset

Prehistoric enclosure on the Long Mynd

The sun comes up over Ashes Hollow, the Long Mynd

Sun shine over the edge of Ashes Hollow, Long Mynd

Sunset over the Long Mynd

Sunset over the Long Mynd and Caer Caradoc

Monchrome sunset over Caer Caradoc and Cardington Hill

Sunset over Caer Caradoc and The Lawley

While we're on the subject of photography, I've discovered a whole pornographic sub-culture whose existence I'd never suspected. When I was working at the European Fencing Championships, I took lots of pictures of the Wheelchair EFC competitors (it's a much harder sport than ambulatory fencing, by the way). One photo is my most-viewed shot of all - coming up to 1000 views. Several people have 'favorited' (not a word) it or other shots of these fencers. Curious, I clicked on the profiles of some of them, only to discover that there's a whole fetish scene of amputee porn… and plenty of models willing to provide the necessary material (very much NSFW). Is this exploitation? Liberation? Something in between? Being a prudish old lefty rather than a libertarian, I tend to see porn as exploitative and commodifying but that's just me. 

So, I think we've all learned something today. Something you may not wish to have learned, but now you're stuck with it. 

Back. By popular demand?

Hello everybody. How were your Christmases (those of you who mark Christmas at all)? I've had a long break from blogging by my standards - over ten days, and I'm not going to resume normal service until next week probably. It's not that I've weaned myself off getting angry and opinionated over the holiday: more that I've had the computer switched off. I've quite enjoyed being almost entirely unsociable too. I've virtually no friends in the area (or indeed anywhere else, I hear you cry) so there's little pressure to engage in social bonding rituals.

Instead, I've been working on a couple of book chapters every day, though possibly not quite hard enough. We shall find out in a week or so on the deadline.

One of the books I'm writing about is George Borrow's 1862 Wild Wales, an account of his 1854 journey round that country, mostly on foot. He can sometimes be quite funny and he's interested in other people's quirks, but on the whole I think he'd be a massive pain in the arse. The purpose of the journey seems to be to demonstrate to everybody in Wales exactly how much more he knows – about everything, but particularly the Welsh language – than everyone in Wales. He doesn't like English people unless they are (as he fondly imagines he is) 'Saxons': he reckons it all went wrong for England when the Normans turned up. He likes the Welsh for still speaking their language, but every meeting he has with anyone is an opportunity to demonstrate his superiority. It gets very wearing. Other obsessions are religious sectarianism: he hates Methodists, Baptists, Independents, Calvinists, Lutherans and anybody who isn't C of E. But he hates Catholics and the Pope more than anybody. Irish Catholics are the lowest of the low – Borrow takes every opportunity to mock and trick the 'wild' Irish. Particularly tasteful episodes are those in which he tells freed slaves that they'd be better off in chains, the time he blackmails an Irish fiddler into playing the offensive supremacist song 'Croppies Lie Down', and the occasion on which he poses as a priest and makes some devout Irish travellers grovel to him.

Still, he's very learned and he knows exactly what people from The Dark Place are like:

'He is what they call a Wolverhampton gent... a person of little or no literature'.

A sentiment with which I find it hard to disagree. Have I missed the Black Country this Christmas? In a word, no. I've barely left the house, but have eaten eggs from my mum's hens (two of whom were murdered by my sister's cat, also here for a holiday, a safari in its case), read Goethe, Arthur Ransome and Alastair Gray's astonishingly brilliant 1982, Janine. I'll be posting some gloriously bilious quotes from that book sometime next week.

About the only time I left the house, I took some decent sunset photos from Mow Cop, the folly castle on a crag which famously became the birthplace of Primitive Methodism. Some pictures here. I've been on Twitter quite a lot thanks to my mother's wi-fi but kept the laptop off until tonight.

So it's been a great holiday. Lots of reading, no exercise, good food, no sirens, gunshots or murders under my window. As you can imagine, I'm really looking forward to work next week. Especially as I'm wholly unprepared…

Hello? Helloooo?

It's like the Marie Celeste round here. Just me and some underemployed catering staff whiling away their time trying to chisel through the gravy crust. They really need safety goggles for that kind of work.  I just sent round our end of term Union newsletter and got several hundred out-of-office replies. Slackers! It's not even Friday evening!

Anyway, enough about them. Time to talk about me. I'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic, which is weird considering a colleague was killed here yesterday. Perhaps it's the contemplation of mortality which makes me value even the mundanity of daily existence.

It's also because I've done a big chunk of  writing. I'm writing a piece about jazz in contemporary fiction with a colleague who has published loads of stuff. We're covering Jim Crace's All That Follows, Alan Plater's The Beiderbecke Trilogy and Jackie Kay's Trumpet, which is one of the best novels I've read all year. I'm meant to be doing the section on masculinity and jazz. Basically, I'm claiming that in Plater's novel, jazz creates an 'imagined community' of New Men freed by their secret hobby from the deforming oppression of established gender roles. Which is ironic because only men understand jazz in these novels. They like jazz and historical football facts, and the women look on with amused disdain. On the other hand, it's jazz which gives the men empathy and other supposedly 'feminine' traits. Oh, and it's all played for laughs. For the Crace and Kay novels, I'm arguing that jazz structures the texts and the readers' experiences because it washes away essentialist gender structures. The musicians and those they relate to have to improvise their lives and their understanding of identity under the influence of jazz. In All That Follows, Lennie is 'unmanned' because he can't play jazz any more, nor engage in political activism, or make love to his wife: once the jazz comes back, so do all the other things. Trumpet is different: it's structured like a jazz performance complete with central solo, and the plot is driven by everybody else's reaction to the discovery that dead Joss Moody, married with a son, was actually biologically female. Without jazz, Kay seems to be saying, we are trapped in pre-formed concepts of sex, gender and race, but jazz's natural antipathy to formality enables us to reassess our preconceptions.

1300 words. Unfortunately (for my colleague) it's currently 3500 words. Unfortunately, because as the experienced author, she gets to decide what stays in (if any) and what goes. Being a humble sort of chap, I shall accept the axe without demur. I'm just pleased I got something substantial written.

In the meantime, I have to write an entire 8000 word book chapter on Welsh travel writing by January 15th. So that's the Christmas break spoken for. But at least I have some nice music to soothe me: I've just received Freedom Is A Hammer: Conservative Folk Revolutionaries of the Sixties. I used to teach a course on 1960s US culture, and played the students a lot of rightwing music to demonstrate that much as we might wish it, the majority of Americans at the time were pretty rightwing. I haven't come across the stars of this new CD (Janet Greene, Tony Dolan and Vera Vanderlaan), but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy  it in an infuriating sort of way. They are in many ways the grandparents of the Tea Party movement: stridently conservative yet using the tools of the leftwing 60s counterculture (folk music, protest) to argue their case.

Here's Janet Greene's truly appalling 'Commie Lies': sorry about the visuals - it's been posted by a true believer sadly.



I've also broken the book drought in a small way: Bent Flyvjerg's Megaprojects and Risk about the way construction and engineering companies lie and cheat self-deceiving politicians to get their hands on our cash; and Alasdair Gray's postmodernist Scottish classic 1982, Janine. His Lanark is one of the best books I've ever read, so it was about time I read this one.

Right, back to the writing.

Looking on the bright side…

In total contrast to the life-affirming dedication which made Nick Musgrove a pivot of my university's community until his untimely death (see previous blog entry), you could adopt the Philip Larkin Self-Help Mantra. It works for me!

The only good life 

is to live in some sodding seedy city 

and work 

and keep yr gob shut 

and be unhappy

I shall post it on my office door. Preferably in Comic Sans so that nobody ever knocks.

Nick Musgrove RIP

I got up this morning and trudged to work through the drizzle and barely noticed the sirens and police tape sealing off the ring road outside my office, and the Tweets from locals trying to find alternative routes round the blockage. I was tired, it was dark and my head was full of footnotes. We don't notice these things any more, do we? Not in any direct way. Sirens and accidents have become the wallpaper of urban life. Someone's always being hit or committing a crime or having a heart attack. You can't live in a mass society and feel deeply every time you hear a siren. We cope by alienating ourselves from the stranger in the back of the ambulance or the hearse. The closed-off street becomes a nuisance, an impediment or – for some – a second-order echo of low-rent TV dramas and documentaries.

Until it's someone you know. First the reports referred to a death in the crash, and I felt momentarily sad before returning to my notes (sorry for the 'I', but thinking about someone else's death is always refracted through the consciousness of one's own mortality). Later on, the university confirmed that the victim was one of our own beloved colleagues, Nick Musgrove. So I'd like to turn from the general to the particular, because Nick, though I didn't know him very well, was a very particular kind of guy.

Nick pretty much embodied the spirit of this university. He was a scrap man for years before he bullied his way on to an Access course at an FE college without having anything near the right qualifications – and he passed with Distinctions in almost everything, leaving everybody else behind. Then he came to us and took first a BSc before working here as a specialist in adaptive technologies for students with disabilities.

One of the great things about this institution is that it's open (despite government) for those who've missed, struggled with or been excluded from other educational opportunities. Nick benefited from our refusal to let people slip through the cracks, and he applied that to his job. Utterly devoted to the students he looked after, he would fight for their right to equal educational opportunities – but he expected them to grasp their chances in the same way he had. But what the students never saw of Nick was the ferocity with which he pursued their rights against anyone he saw as impediments to their progress. He was (as all good union members should be) remorseless when it came to holding management's feet to the fire. He had the confidence of a man who'd had a hard-won life outside the rarefied atmosphere of a university and must have been the terror of management from the associate dean who described him as 'calling a spade a fucking shovel' to the Vice-Chancellor who knew Nick well despite being a relative newcomer. He was that kind of guy: he stamped his personality on his surroundings and colleagues and you were always grateful he was on your side rather than coming for you.

This university – and most universities – is defined by its ability to find room for the quirky, the awkward and those for whom the ruthless corporate world has no use. Nick was one of them: principled, cussed and hugely intelligent, and a huge asset to students and colleagues alike. But he wasn't just a toiler: his sense of public duty was apparent in the research which led to his PhD. His passions were conservation and bird-watching and ringing: one of the swifts he ringed was recently discovered to have flown to Africa and back 21 times over the past couple of decades. His PhD on uplands management may have been severely delayed when the Long Mynd was closed during the Foot and Mouth epidemic, but it made a serious – and often very plain-spoken – contribution to National Trust policy. I certainly see an emotional and intellectual analogy between the terrain of the Long Mynd and his working life, and between the swifts and the students he shepherded through their time here with such infinite care.

I've just come back from a short gathering of colleagues to mark Nick's death. The strength of his personality came through so powerfully in colleagues' accounts of their interactions with him. There were tears, certainly, but also long, loud laughs despite his death being only a few hours ago. Is there a general lesson in Nick's life and death? I suppose there are several. That death is arbitrary and unpredictable. That immortality is achieved through the effect you have on others. For me, it came when I sat in the canteen afterwards looking out on the scene of his accident. The tape is gone, the traffic is flowing and nobody would know that 6 hours ago a vibrant, charismatic man breathed his last. But as an ambulance hurried through the lights, I thought to myself that on board was somebody else's Nick. Not a stranger from whom I was emotionally insulated but a weird, quirky, loved individual. No doubt this feeling will fade again under the relentless 'next-ness' of quotidian existence, but for now, the fragility, the temporariness and thus the value of life is brought to the forefront of my thoughts.

Nick Musgrove, ladies and gentlemen. A man who did nothing but good.

Local journalism at its finest.

One of my agents in Shropshire (I have agents everywhere) sent me a classic piece of local opinion journalism, by a chap called Peter Rhodes. He's like a toxic mix of Peter Hitchens and Jeremy Clarkson, only more embittered because he's never made it on the national reactionary stage. He has columns in the Express and Star (popularly known as the Express and Swastika for obvious reasons) and its sister paper The Shropshire Star.

That's right! Even though he calls you Blackshirts (that's the treasonous British Union of Fascists, by the way: Hitler's Jew-hating UK wing), you're the one who doesn't believe in 'reasoned debate' and uses the 'vilest terms' while trying to establish a 'tyranny' through the… er… fascist tactics of standing for office and expressing opinions in public.

I can't link you to Peter's article because his employers don't think it's worth wasting pixels and bandwidth on, but it's a classic of the Reactionary Paranoid White Man kind. Hence a short letter from yours truly to that paper. I'm guessing they won't print it.

Sir,Peter Rhodes' latest lazy effort ('scratch a liberal, find a fascist') omits to mention that liberals have not as yet resorted to gas chambers. They were built and operated by a group which did hate immigrants, ethnic and sexual minorities. Peter Hitchens and Mr Rhodes invent liberal bogeymen to hide the fact that what they fear is difference of any kind. If it's any consolation, the world still appears to be run by angry heterosexual white men like themselves. They aren't (sadly) a persecuted minority. 

Much as the Peters might like to think otherwise, angry white heterosexual conservatives are still quite powerful – from the press to politics to business. I'd been inclined to guess that they form the majority of reporting and editorial staff at the Shropshire Star. The 'freedom' they tend to espouse is usually the freedom to silence people who aren't like them. That's the difference between Peter and us liberals and lefties.

Much as I fantasise about putting Mr Rhodes in a prison camp and subjecting him to twenty four hours of Julian Clary, Malcolm X and Shami Chakrabarti's greatest hits, we tend to shake our heads and hope that reasoned argument will change their minds. Rhodes and his friends spend their time muttering darkly about 'them'. They promote Section 28 and dream of the days of Empire when black people contentedly cut sugar cane for white people's tea and didn't moan about having their countries invaded by the Bwana. Rhodes and his friends see every effort to treat subaltern groups equally as some kind of Stalinist plot to make them contract gay marriage and salute the North Korean flag every day. And they get paid very well to stoke these fears too. I wonder if he's descended from famous imperialist conqueror Cecil Rhodes?

It must be tiring to be so bitter and paranoid all the time.

As luck would have it, I'm reading some academic papers today which would make Peter's head explode. They're about Jackie Kay's wonderful novel Trumpet, which features a black! Scottish! trans-sexual! jazz! trumpeter and celebrates the claim that racial, national and sexual identities are unstable and all the richer for it!

I am available to give Peter and his friends remedial classes in Coping With Post-Medieval Life. Give me a call.

Update! Peter has indeed contacted me (via email rather than in the comments like the hoi polloi:

You are quite sure about this?
Regards, Peter Rhodes (former winner of the Commission for Racial Equality "Race in the Media" Awards)

So I'm happy to offer a clarification. Peter is definitely a reactionary who doesn't know his political arse from his historical elbow. And his newspaper is racist. But he is clearly not a racist. He just doesn't understand the irony of British people opposing immigration while celebrating an Empire built on over-running everybody else's countries. Nor does he see equating advocates for equal marriage with the Blackshirts who wanted Britain to put Jews, homosexuals, trades unionists, communists, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses and assorted others in gas chambers just like their Nazi masters as at all inaccurate or offensive.

Peter: 'liberals' are for things. Fascists are against things. You're against gay people marrying and people immigrating into Britain (except for the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norwegians, Normans, Huguenots and Dutch, I presume). You may not be a racist but it's clear which side you're on.

What time do you call this?

Hi everybody. I know it's almost time to go home, but I've been working really hard today and tried to stay off the computer for as long as possible, thus knowingly foregoing the kind of outrage that fuels my incessant blogging.

Specifically, I've been reading two fascinating books. The first, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is a classic of ethnography and history. It locates nationalism, especially linguistic nationalism, in the context of developed industrial capitalism rather than in some distant culturally 'pure' past. Without printing presses churning out material in your local language (rather than Latin, English, Dutch or whatever), he says, it's hard to 'imagine' that you're part of an invisible nation. Amongst other fascinating insights, he also suggests that it's the clerical class which generates nationalism: educated to serve the wider empire-state but banned from serving away from one's native community, the functionary starts to see himself as the natural leader of a discrete cultural unit, which becomes a nation. Once a concept has a material culture and a leadership, it starts to legitimise itself through an imagined continuity with the deep past, mostly through linguistic continuity.

This is all very helpful: I'm frantically working on a paper which suggests that O. M. Edwards, a Welsh journalist, Oxford historian and government education functionary essentially invented Wales as a nation in the 1880s-1890s by producing histories, magazines, newspapers and travel writing in Welsh on a massive scale. In particular, I'm looking at Cartrefi Cymru, in which he travels around (often by train - an infrastructure deeply implicated in the colonial construction of Wales) visiting significant houses occupied by famous Welsh people. You get the historical continuity by asserting their – and the readers' – proficiency in Welsh, in constructing a network of inhabited homes (these are not ruins) and by concentrating on certain types of person: mostly post-Reformation clerics, poets and hymn writers. Apart from St David, Edwards stays clear of pre-Reformation people, because they were a) Catholic and b) there never was a sovereign political entity of Wales: it was a series of fluid kingdoms not necessarily united by a common tongue.

So as far as I see it, OM invents a Wales which is only possible after or during colonialism. The Reformation was English. Welshness as a religious and linguistic identity is generated by English administrations' assumptions that the Welsh are a discrete culture, and Edwards uses the tools of capitalism – notably the train and the press – to (paradoxically?) call into being a Welsh nation defined by their language and their religious practice. This, of course, excludes the huge number of Anglophone monoglot Welsh.

For some reason, I proposed to make this chapter a joint analysis of Cartrefi Cymru with George Borrow's Wild Wales, something I now regret. I can juxtapose the titles of the books and get something out of that, and the structures are similar: both men travel from England via railway to discover some kind of 'essential' Wales which will salve their psychological wounds (Borrow always wanted to belong in some way to the groups he studied, while Morris was an exile) but that's as far as I've got. Any ideas?

The other book I read today was Ted Gioia's The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. It's a bracing read and very judgemental, though I do find it a tad reactionary. It's amazing how sex and gender seemingly don't deserve a mention. Female performers are mentioned twice, but there's no discussion of gender and performance or gender and culture. I'm reading it because there's another paper I need to have written by early January on jazz in three modern novels, Alan Plater's Beiderbecke Trilogy, Jim Crace's All That Follows and Jackie Kay's Trumpet. I'm thinking of incorporating some of Imagined Communities into this one too: Plater's novel uses jazz to build a non-threatening homosocial network of new man jazz fans again dependent on the exchange of capitalist goods (records) as an alternative to various other gender formations: political women, violent men, state-functionary men, bullies etc. Anyone who listens to jazz in these novels is likely to be sensitive or at least morally sound. Women might be decent, attractive, deferred to on any number of levels: but none of them understand jazz, which is partly depicted as the central experience of this 'imagined community' and partly as a male displacement activity: our hero switches easily between jazz facts and football statistics. It's just collecting.

The other two novels are about jazz players. In Crace's novel, Leonard Lessing (see the diminutive implied in the name) is physically, psychically, socially and phallically wounded by his damaged arm. He can't play, can't keep his marriage on the tracks, can't find his daughter and can't have any political effect on the world: when the jazz comes back, everything else recovers too. In Kay's Trumpet (one of the best novels I've read in a very long time) the dead jazz man is revealed to be an interloper: a woman masquerading as a man in jazz and in his marriage. The novel's structured as an improvised solo but also as the sections of a newspaper. The characters are all improvising their lives, musically, sexually, socially. Trumpet is also about race: Joss Moody is Scottish and mixed-race: origins are in the mix here too. So with these texts I'll use Anderson's ideas to some extent, but also Judith Butler's concepts of sex and gender as performative. Not sure how it'll go: the central section of the novel is the only one which really deals with the psychical experience of playing jazz and I'm not entirely clear whether it's esssentialist or anti-essentialist. Does jazz allow Joss to express his masculinity and blackness, or does it take him beyond such labels?

So that's what I've been doing today, and will be doing non-stop until January 15th when both papers are due. Gulp.

Dead children, great TV.

Hopefully like me, you'll have been sickened by the murder of 20 children and six adults in Newtown Connecticut. Sickened, but not remotely surprised: one more in a chain of 'isolated incidents' which will shortly fade away in the public consciousness thanks to inertia, arrogance and the concerted lobbying of the National Rifle Association and their friends, who clearly have an acceptable number of deaths in mind in exchange for the right to bear arms.

I've also been sickened by the media coverage. Over the last two days, I've seen excerpts from interviews with surviving children from the school. These are kids whose friends were killed in front of them, kids who narrowly escaped with their own lives. They'll be hurt emotionally and psychologically. Is it in their interests to put them on camera and make them recount their experiences? Shame on the TV networks, shame on the journalists, shame on the parents and local authorities.

The UK media coverage is equally reprehensible. Covering this stuff like it's an episode of Die Hard, the UK media (TV and press) revel in the kind of pictures and text you just don't get in the UK: architectural plans, sobbing parents, SWAT teams toting massive weapons, lingering shots of the murder weapons. It's pornographic in the most literal sense. These massacres are quite simply great TV, especially in a country which doesn't get the chance to clear the schedules for days of horror. The media love it. You can almost sense their regret that there isn't any of this stuff homegrown. Imagine the pictures and stories the Mail or BBC24 could get out of regular massacres in Coventry or Taunton or Llandrindod Wells. Though at least because it's in America, British journalists get to convey the smug undertones of cultural superiority ('look at these fat brutes: it's all "have a nice day" until a burger-chomping Goth kid has an argument with his mom and goes on the rampage').

This is why it's pornographic: we're all encouraged to share the horror but also revel in the knowledge that it's not going to happen here, or at least not to the same extent: it's just a media event from a place which we don't understand, though we do have strong opinions generated by the erroneous sense that we have a shared culture. The media coverage is a framing device to make ourselves feel better. We can decide that America's gun laws are at fault. Or we can blame the killer for being 'evil', or ill. We settle in to the familiar framing effects of our chosen channel: crying parents - check. Sombre President - check. Banal religious discourse - check. Photos of smiling children, now dead - check. Talking heads  - check. And now for the sport.

Here's Roger Ebert's eminently sane perspective after Columbine:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Here's Charlie Brooker's acerbic take on it from 2009, after another 'isolated incident':



It makes these events comprehensible and limited. We shouldn't accept it. Motive is a meaningless term beloved of those who cling to the belief that individuals and societies are rational. That's what America is for - especially if you read Baudrillard and Ballard. It's the anti-Europe, or the future-Europe, the brash, often admirable but also brutal and individualistic dystopia beloved of Tories and feared by liberals. We need it to feel good about ourselves. At least we're not America, we say. And I include myself in this, as I'm about to demonstrate.

The UK doesn't have a gun culture. They're available with some considerable effort, but they're not part of the culture. When I see Americans claiming that the real issue is mental health rather than gun ownership (and we'll leave the deconstruction of this offensively broad term for another day), I want to point out that the UK has the same proportion of mentally-ill people as the US: it's just that unarmed mentally-ill people will find it a lot harder to kill than heavily-armed mentally-ill people who acquired military assault weapons perfectly legally.

Which brings me to another point: the NRA and its friends are hugely rightwing. They hate government (their major argument for gun ownership is that government is automatically oppressive, like it's still 1791 and the British have only recently been sent packing). One of the things the right hates most is the Obama administration's pathetically weak version of a National Health Service. Of all the healthcare sectors, mental health is the least profitable and most urgent, even in the UK. Nobody wants it, no area gets it right. Perhaps if the US had a decent, tax-payer funded health service (and education system) which picked up people like Lanza, a massacre might have been averted. But no: healthcare is socialist-fascist Big Government. Better to accept that dead children are the price of liberty.

A day in the life of an academic

No, not me: a proper academic. My English department went out for a Christmas meal on Friday and my boss regaled us with his tales of life in the paper mines in the days before his waking hours were filled with Course Journals, SQEC meetings and MSTs.

As a young academic he fell under the spell of the institution's premier Old School Scholar, a man who decided that the students would prefer a lecture on 'Press Variants of the Novum Organum' rather than the scheduled Hamlet lecture… on the day the Education Department inspectors were in. So he found himself in the Bodleian Library, surrounded by multiple early of Delarivière Manley's 1709 The New Atalantis, which was banned and led to its author's arrest for scandal and political transgression.

What my poor boss had to do - at considerable expense - was to feed these extremely rare books into a Hinman Collator:

Surrounded by severe, serious literary scholars working away at the library desks, He had to crack open the spines of every copy, weighting them down with heavy glass bars, so that the Collator could superimpose images of pages from each copy using only optics (no computers or scanners), thus hopefully revealing textual variants. Every single page of every single copy available had to be compared. It took the poor man 9 days, a lot of money, a considerable amount of physical pain and the undying hatred of the book-loving witnesses who came to the library every day to see a man crushing ultra-rare volumes in a brutal (and apparently CIA-developed) machine.

Eventually, the Stakhanovite labour was done. Every page had been laboriously compared with its counterparts in every other edition. The textual variants unearthed would provide and insight into the changing cultural, political and intellectual climate of the early sixteenth-century. A career would be born.

The result? A single, solitary semi-colon's difference. He could have wept.

Which is why if I'm anything, I'm a literary critic rather than a textual scholar, but I admire the dedication of such individuals: in such tiny elements worlds are made and re-made. I recently read Claudia Johnson's wonderful Jane Austen's Cults and Cultures, which starts with the author agonising over where a comma should go in one of Austen's sentences: the first and second editions of the novel varied, and it was Johnson's task to decide whether the re-sited comma was an error, an editorial decision or an authorial change, and which version was more 'authentically' Austenian. That's an admirable academic career, despite the mockery of the greedy and superficial people who moan to us about the 'real world'. The hunt for the stray semi-colon is literary criticism's equivalent of the Higgs Boson or the quark: apparently quixotic, elusive and abstruse, but also demanding, revealing and crucial for us all.

So to Johnson, my boss and all the others currently engaging in textual intercourse: happy Christmas. More power to you all.

Compare and contrast

Here's what loyalists did for 8 days following the democratically-elected Belfast City Council decision to fly the Union Flag only on certain days of the year rather than every day:

And here's what happened when the British Government admitted that its secret services, the Army and the police organised the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane by gunmen in their employ, then covered it up afterwards.

OK, this is an illustrative picture rather than reportage, because it's hard to find a picture of people not rioting but remaining dignified in response to state-sanctioned murder. But the difference between the two groups' actions is instructive. I don't think the individuals involved are any more or less civilised for coming from one or the other communities in the six counties: but clearly a subgroup of one is prepared to meet democratic change with violence whereas the other has committed to peace in the face of the most outrageous provocation.

What was really disappointing was the Progressive Unionist Party's approach. They're the political wing of a loyalist armed organisation but – like the Official IRA in the 1970s – seemed to be developing a socialist class analysis of the situation. But over the past few days they've been calling for 'Protestant unity': further entrenching the sectarian divide at the expense of proper progressive politics.