Miniature Golf: the way to any woman's heart.

After the exertions of yesterday's Faculty Away-Day (the exertion being mostly of the trying-not-to-scream variety), today's my last day in the office until next week, because I'm off to the UK School Games for my annual opportunity to a) wear polyester from head to toe and b) remind myself why I am childless. They're mostly lovely kids but the emotional roller coaster, mental vigilance required and constant state of flux means that waving them goodbye is sweetest moment of all.

The Games themselves are always fun: 12 sports in an environment designed to replicate the Olympics or World Championships. Many of the current fencing senior squad have competed at the Games, so it's a great place to spot talent and see some top quality action, and it's very photographer friendly, so I'll see what I can do.

Last year we were in the Olympic Park as a test event before the real thing. This time we're in Sheffield for the second time. I visited that city once in the late 90s for a PhD interview and thought the place looked derelict. Now I really look forward to it - the city is beautiful and exciting. Whether I think that as I patrol the halls of residence at 2 a.m. clad from head to toe in mustard yellow (or whatever this year's colour is) is a different matter. I end the week drained but happy. And it can't be any worse than the Cardiff year, which saw me finding alternative accommodation for 100 netball players who'd evacuated their building - long past midnight - due to an infestation of silverfish, while their coach offered to punch the site manager.

So in between doing lots of administration (such as synchronising the Module Guides and the Learning and Teaching Guides), what have I been up to? Well, partly perusing today's book post. In particular, I've had Gissing's Demos, in which he identifies Democracy, Socialism and Lesbianism as the evils currently threatening humanity ( he was a little odd, and it was published in 1886), and best of all, this racy little number:

In my defence, I would say that it's all the fault of Yankee Clipper Books of the United States. What I actually ordered was The Mind and Body Shop, a satirical novel set in a university facing a corporate takeover. Those of you who follow my tales of woe from The Hegemon will understand what led to this choice of reading matter.

However, A Match For Celia has its charms, and I may recommend it to my colleagues teaching the Policing, Uniformed Studies (yes, it's a degree) and War Studies courses. 'Men In Uniform' is a sub-section of the Harlequin Silhouette romance series: other options include 'Desire' (more boffage apparently), Super-Romance (more words), Intrigue (suspense-romance), American ('he didn't just drop bombs…he also dropped his pants') and plain Romance ('Cosmopolitan international settings'). Sadly the range of uniformed gentlemen is limited to 'heroes': traffic wardens, lollipop-ladies and environmental health inspectors are denied their chance to sweep a woman off her feet. Although the cover doesn't really depict a man in uniform, more a man wearing an ID card. Either there's a Derridean 'play' ripe for deconstruction here or the jacket designer was not feeling particularly inspired.

These novels are strictly heterosexual and deeply conservative. Men in uniforms are heroes. Women fall in love with them for their strength. The men have to be caring and considerate, but understand that all the woman wants to do is place herself in his power, to be sheltered by him, safe in the knowledge that he means well. These macho men have to be slightly tamed because they feel desire strongly, but the love of a good woman is all they need to socialise them - sometimes against the woman's wishes. It's a neat trick: the women are independent to some extent, but utterly conventional and non-feminist, reinforcing hegemonic sexual and social roles.

Here's a taste of the novel:

He pulled her effortlessly back into his arms. And then he kissed her until she went limp against him, until she wouldn't have been surprised if smoke had come out of her ears.
     'Don't even suggest', he said in a low growl, 'that I don't want you. I want you so much it's eating me alive. I've wanted you from the first minute I saw you, damn it. So much that I almost…almost lost my head,' he finished, sounding as though he'd started to say something else and had changed his mind at the last minute.
     'Would it really be so bad to lose your head just once?' she asked wistfully, her cheek against his pounding heart. 

That said, A Match for Celia suggests that there are surprising ways to a woman's heart. Letting the book fall open naturally (a sure-fire way to find the saucy bits without wasting time on exposition, plot, characterisation etc) leads to the discovery that virginal Celia isn't only enthralled by FBI man (disguised as a tax accountant) Reed's 'unexpectedly sexy growl', but the mean way he plays golf:

He'd slaughtered her at the game, even though it had been his first time. 

Oh, sorry. Not golf. Miniature golf. Or as we say in Europe, pitch-and-putt or crazy golf. That's a tip, gents. Write it down and your love-life will be smoother than the final green at St. Andrews. Don't listen to mockery of The Simpsons:



If I recall correctly, Homer and Marge end up having sex in one of the obstacles. So maybe A Match for Celia gets something right. Perhaps the 'match' in the title is a subtle play on words, meaning both 'marriage' and a miniature golf rivalry after which they all live happily ever after. I'll never know. Though for all my mockery (and this is a terrible book, as hackneyed as any cheap porn or war thriller), work like this is important in some ways. Through it, we glimpse a readership using such material in specific ways: to project their hopes and dreams, to escape from a mundane reality, to enunciate sexual, economic and social ambitions. The uniformed aspect of it suggests that there's a deeply conservative political economy underpinning the social structures of these fantasies - which makes it fascinating, albeit unreadable.

On Not Being A Team Player

You can tell I'm Not A Team Player because, quite literally, I'm not wearing the t-shirt. What t-shirt? 

Paunch model's own. 

Perhaps I should start at the beginning. This morning at 0830 I sloped along to catch a coach from outside the football ground to the other main campus to miles away for the inaugural meeting of the new Faculty of Arts. Yes, we have pointed out the inevitable abbreviation and management are Not Amused. Shame they couldn't call it the Faculty of Humanities and Arts, which would scotch the sniggers.

The coach, of course, didn't turn up because it hadn't been booked. One hour later, one of the campus shuttles turned up and I had the pleasure of standing up all the way to Walsall. Once there, we were all presented with a colour-coded t-shirt denoting up departments. I'm in two departments so I got to choose. However, I've worked in fast food production, data entry and any number of other jobs where the word 'team' was bandied around as a cheap way to disguise the true nature of the relationships involved. I am not, therefore, wearing the shirt. It brings to mind two situations: the Star Trek security officer who wore red shirts, never got named and died in the first act, unmourned. I worry that the Orange Shirt academics will be jettisoned from an airlock before the first semester is over. The other gag springing to mind is this: 'I went to the Faculty of Arts and all I got was this lousy t-shirt'.

The Dean's just posted a slide reading

BE CREATIVE, GROW THE BUSINESS, MAKE MONEY

And now I want to die. I am creative. I don't work for a business. I don't want to make money. I want to teach students new ways to think about literature and culture. This is the slogan of the estate agency or the boiler room, not a seat of learning. As I was saying, Not A Team Player.  Although quite frankly, why should I be when my own employers can't even spell my name correctly on the bloody name badges?

The agenda today includes several sessions of 'speed-dating' and only one (the last of the day), devoted to the actual structures and operations of the Faculty. (Having now undergone the 'speed-dating', I can say that my new colleagues are lovely, interesting people, but I'm not sure what collaborations will arise between my English department and the chaps who design suicide-proof furniture for prisons). So here we are, many in their t-shirts, having had a lecture about positivity, emotional intelligence and we're being asked to enunciate our hopes and dreams. What HASN'T been mentioned is academic integrity.

A little later, we're being dragooned into a Scratch Choir. There are two songs listed, one of which is 'Come Again Sweet Love' set to music by renowned madrigalist John Dowland.



Being a literary critic, I'm now wondering whether the Dean is playing a sophisticated joke or sky hasn't read them, because it's a classic tale of unrequited love and the sufferings imposed on the gentleman involved:

Come again! sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

Come again! that I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.

All the day the sun that lends me shine
By frowns do cause me pine
And feeds me with delay;
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joy to grow,
Her frowns the Winters of my woe.

All the night my sleeps are full of dreams,
My eyes are full of streams.
My heart takes no delight
To see the fruits and joys that some do find
And mark the storms are me assign'd.

Out alas, my faith is ever true,
Yet will she never rue
Nor yield me any grace;
Her eyes of fire, her heart of flint is made,
Whom tears nor truth may once invade.

Gentle Love, draw forth thy wounding dart,
Thou canst not pierce her heart;
For I, that do approve
By sighs and tears more hot than are thy shafts
Did tempt while she for triumph laughs.

As a metaphor of our relationship between staff and management, this really can't be bettered. 

Improving Books for Busy People

I've received something rather lovely in the post today, from Barry MacKay Rare Books (specialising in print history, culture, bibliography, typography, book making and other exciting things: and he has a sale on).

For the princely sum of £5, I got this elegant volume published in 1891, A Guide Book To Books, edited by Sargant and Whishaw:

The contributors feature 12 women (6 Mrs, 5 Miss and a Mademoiselle Souvestre) and 169 men (116 riff-raff Misters: Consul Generals and the like; 1 Captain, 1 Rear-Admiral, 2 Colonels and a Lt. Colonel; 2 Professors, 3 Right Reverends, 13 Very Reverends, 8 Reverends, one Venerable, 2 Doctors, 6 Honourables and 13 assorted Knights and Baronets). 

The book itself is a fascinating example of a genre that hasn't gone away: a guide to what's good for you. The invention of the printing press led to a flood of books, some of which were not exactly Improving or Moral. Many readers wanted to educate themselves or – which isn't the same thing – appear well-read and socially advanced. So up popped a flood of instructional guides for everyone from Gentlemen and Ladies to pushy proletarians. X for Dummies wasn't the first and won't be the last because insecurity will always abound. 

This particular example is fascinating. Obviously it's weighted towards polite, Establishment opinion, and authority is key: they can tell you what's good and what isn't, with no shilly-shallying around postmodern concepts such as 'regimes of truth' or 'knowledges', as the extract below tells you. 

Its authors know that the reader is pushed for time and ill-equipped for differentiating between good, bad and indifferent, and so provides this shortcut. Perhaps they have in mind, too, the landed gentleman or Captain of Industry who understands that his mansion must have a library but reads little beyond Country Life, Punch and the form-guide. 

It's a quixotic little volume. Take 'T' for example. There are only 6 subjects worth knowing about under that letter of the alphabet (and 'tea' isn't one of them):

Clearly the Victorian Gent is meant to have some sporting prowess, a little technical knowledge, some awareness of Foreigners with whom one is likely to be at war before long, particularly the Turkish Mussulman, and a good deal of theology (with which to biff the aforesaid Mussulman, Catholics etc. etc.). Sports are indicators of class of course: many more books are recommended on the subjects of Falconry and Fencing than Football, which in any case refers to rugby more than the 'Association Game' played by the plebs. 

When it comes to Culture, the Guide Book is surprisingly for it… as long as the Classics and English (the nation) literature is what you mean by the term. There are entries for Historical Novels, poetry and plays, a separate entry for Shakespeare, a long entry on Sermons and an interesting canon of 'Novels, English', divided into 'Pre-Victorian' and 'Victorian', as though all of literary history was merely a prelude to the Golden Age. Of the Pre-Victorians, Austen and Edgeworth are heartily recommended, but there's room too for racy material by Beckford, Fielding, Sterne and Smollett. Aphra Behn's there, which is quite impressive. Mary Shelley and Wollstonecraft are excluded, though Byron and the male Shelley are listed under 'Literature, English', which is divided into Ages of great authors. The Gothic playwrights, Rochester and similar racy types are very much not present in the Ages of Shakespeare and Bacon, nor of Milton. Dryden's Age is notably boring, although Richardson's racy work is admitted. Slightly disreputable works by Swift, Defoe, Fielding and co. are carefully left unenumerated: the Works are recommended rather than individual texts. I'm quite tempted to get hold of Miss Ferrier's trilogy, Destiny, Inheritance and Marriage: it sounds like a 6 volume guide for ambitious WAGs. Of the Dastardly Foreigner, the German Romantics are by far the most popular, particularly Goethe. 

Pre-Victorian poetry is largely the people you'd expect. There's a special entry for 'Poetry: Victorian' though, rather interestingly categorised:

1. SERIOUS:
Arnold, the Brownings, Clough, Longfellow, Macaulay, Morris ('The Earthly Paradise'), Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Whitman, Stedman's Victorian Poets. 2. HUMOUR, DIALECT, VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ, ETC.
Austin, Barham, Bret Harte, Calverley, Courthope, Dobson, Hood, Lang, Leland, Locker, Lowell, Lyra, Martin and Aytoun, Praed, the Smith Brothers and Traill. 

Because the Victorian Age is the high point of humanity's achievements, it's only right that the novels recommended extend over many more pages than all the other Ages put together. Of the Brontës, Charlotte is listed under 'Literature, English', though all three are present in 'Novels', a subtle distinction. Dickens, Eliot and the Brownings are in, as are Dante Rossetti, Newman and Arnold: Trollope is barely mentioned. Only Gissing's Demos (socialism, bigamy, bisexuality and betrayal) is worthy of inclusion of all his work: a surprising choice given the content, though featured perhaps because of its hatred of democracy, industrialism and the proletariat. Vampiric bisexual Stella is said to be based on Jane Morris, wife of William, though I'm not aware of any same-sex gossip attached to her. Wilkie Collins, however, is respectable enough by this stage. 

The vast majority, however, are not currently in vogue: it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in your own age. Thus what we now consider 'classic' novels are undifferentiated from, for example, Anonymous's An Australian Girl, Walter Besant's romances (his dystopian The Revolt of Man is a blast against women's suffrage), Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp, Francis Marion Crawford's A Cigarette Maker's Romance, conservative, evangelical, prolific, split infinitive-hater Jean Ingelow's Off The Skelligs (in which a girl is forbidden to play-act Shakespeare, on pain of joining her sisters in the graveyard), Meredith's Arabian fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat which flopped with the public despite George Eliot's enthusiastic support, Charles Reade's moralistic love triangle It's Never Too Late To Mend, and Mrs. Henry Wood's sensational East Lynne. Thankfully, there's a lot of Thackeray, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is there and some adventure to balance out the education: Stevenson, Haggard et al. On the whole though, it's a pretty dull selection of safe, trite and unchallenging pablum. Nothing to scare the horses, let alone one's wife, children or servants.  

Interestingly, evolution is considered respectable: the works of Darwin, Wallace and various others are listed, although Haeckel's History of Creation is 'popular and somewhat exaggerated'). Sexuality, the lives of women and similar subjects are discreetly left out, though The Descent of Man ('devoted to the doctrine of sexual selection') and Geddes and Thompson's Evolution of Sex ('excellent summaries of recent work on the reproduction of the lower animals') might hint at a little pleasure for the reader too polite to purchase the books listed under 'Anatomy, artistic'. 

All this is a particularly open version of what we here in Ivory Towers calls 'canonisation': the process of carefully separating Proper Literature (in fiction) from Trashy Rubbish. In some ways, it's inevitable: on a Literature degree there just isn't time to cover everything. But every selection is simultaneously a rejection, on ideological, cultural, racial and other grounds. These chaps (and a very few women) probably thought they were choosing The Best. Nowadays we professionals are fairly careful about value judgements, knowing that such terms are heavily loaded. The Guide Book To Books avoids a lot of work associated with the poor, the foreign, sexual material, and a whole lot else besides, because its contributors' values reflected mainstream conservative opinion. It's not their fault, but it's there. No doubt my successors will look at what we taught and what people bought and expose the unexamined biases inherent in our choices too. 

Perhaps it's just me, but this list of books has provided me with hours of entertainment and not a little enlightenment… which is probably why I'm in this job and not left free to roam the streets buttonholing people with this stuff. So if you want to know what to read, get A Guide Book To Books, or any of its many successors. Just bear in mind one thing: even a list is never neutral. 

A dish of hot lobby

Here's a good video on why the proposed Lobbying Bill will silence public interest groups, but won't actually regulate 99% of lobbyists (that's an actual figure, not one designed to shock you). Please email your MP. Mine will vote for it because he votes for everything the Government wants.

Even rightwing loonies like Guido Fawkes and the Taxpayers' Alliance oppose this Bill, that's how bad it is.

A Moron Writes

Now, I have had occasion to take Mr Peter Rhodes to task before (and here). He is, you'll remember, the thin-skinned local columnist whose work reads like something Jeremy Clarkson would produce if he'd sustained massive brain injuries in a particularly horrendous car crash. Reactionary, deluded, ill-informed and lazy.

Yesterday, Mr Rhodes turned his attention to the cultural sphere, not his natural stamping ground. In particular, he decided to mark the passing of Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney in his own inimitable way.

Kipling was a great poet. So were Tennyson, Byron, Wordsworth and Yeats. People queued to buy their latest works and learned to recite them by heart.
 But when Seamus Heaney, who died last week, is hailed as a great poet, it assumes that poetry is still a significant force in society.
 It is not. Poetry is no longer great.
 The days are gone when a poet like Yeats could declare of the 1916 Easter Rising “a terrible beauty is born” and shake the foundations of the Empire.
 Most of us can recite a few lines from the great poets but how many of us know a single couplet by Heaney?”

This of course bears all the hallmarks of the big fish in a small pool. Mr Rhodes cannot recite 'a single couplet by Heaney'. Therefore Heaney can't be a good or important poem. Case closed. OR, Mr Rhodes is a cultural vacuum. OR, to be more charitable, the general public has many competing demands on its attention and doesn't have the same relationship with poetry that it did before. It's certainly true that schoolchildren aren't forced to memorise huge screeds of poetry these days (though Mr Gove intends to change that).

I recently spoke to someone who did learn massive chunks of 'great' poets' work in school. He can still reel it out, but as he said, all they did was memorise: they never learned why these poems were meant to be great, how they worked and what they meant. It was just empty data.

This, I suspect, is where Mr Rhodes' thesis falls apart. He can't define 'great' because he can't get beyond memory. I suspect that he merely means 'famous', i.e. what he learned in school. Those other poets he cites are Georgians and Victorians whose gentler work infested the anthologies without close examination: if Rhodes was around in their day he'd be screaming blue murder about their political and sexual subversion, particularly Byron. His casual list simply betrays his superficial understanding of their work. Even Kipling, supposedly a Pillar of Imperialism, actually questions and undermines the racial and social underpinnings of that Empire.

Did Yeats' poem 'shake the foundations of Empire'? I doubt it: though about 1916, it wasn't published until 1921, and expresses terrible doubts about the consequences of this specific Rising, which he generally supported. What shook the foundations of Empire was the Rising, not the poem. By 1921, Ireland's exit loomed (Civil War and Independence arrived in 1922, and neither the UK Government nor Michael Collins ascribed it to poetry's effects). 

How many people know a single couplet by Heaney? In Ireland, several million. In the UK, many, many more than poor Peter knows.

(PS: he's not even original. The Telegraph already ran a piece by a man who won the Bad Sex in Literature Award claiming that Heaney is 'no good', mostly because he wasn't a right-wing British imperialist).

Bad Cover Version

Students: here's a clue. If you come in to university two weeks before the academic year begins because you're worried that you haven't done enough preparation for your dissertation, then you'll probably be OK. It's your colleagues who do exactly the same thing two weeks before the dissertation deadline who should be worried!

But it's lovely to see students like this. We had coffee, I saw their holiday photos, they fed me cake and I showed them a pile of (anonymised) previous dissertations and we talked about structure, and argument and most importantly of all, making the dissertation their own work, rather than a list of what other critics think about the primary text.

I said all the necessary stuff about time management and having something distinctive to say, but I have to confess that I've only ever had a marker's perspective on undergraduate dissertations: my own degree was assessed only by examinations. That suited me, being the kind of person who worked well under short-term pressure and afflicted by habitual lassitude when it came to sustained work over a period of time. It did mean that the MA and PhD dissertations were rather a struggle, however. I'd add one thing that sometimes gets overlooked: for your own sanity pick texts and lines of arguments you'll enjoy, because you'll be spending a whole year with them. Nothing will spoil a major piece of work more easily than boiling resentment. I know it's not always possible (every cohort contains some students who really don't care one way or another), but it definitely helps. I've recently marked dissertations of Foucault and Country House Mysteries (it was a blast), Milton and Pullman, Dystopian Visions, and (too many) World War 1 Poetry pieces.

Everything's worth writing about, providing you think about them carefully enough – the bane of any marker's life is the Fan's Dissertation. In English, that's usually about Tolkien, with the major Brontë novels not far behind. Here's a hint: 'Why Lord of the Rings Is Brilliant' doesn't cut it. However this year I am supervising a dissertation on Tolkien's notions of heroism, and it's looking good because it's analytical and located in JRR's cultural context.

The other thing that caught my eye today is this new line of 'classic' novels (i.e. famous ones that are out of copyright) published with pulp covers by Pulp The Classics.

Aesthetically, I like them a lot. One of my friends collects pulp novels just for the covers – I don't have the room to start another collection, but I can understand the attraction. I'm not entirely convinced by this range though: pulp is a very 50s thing, and I'm not sure a contemporary audience is being invited to re-assess the texts or pulp itself. Certainly there are plenty of 'classic' texts which would justify the pulp treatment, such as the 'penny dreadfuls' and 'yellow press' works of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Varney the Vampire would do very well.

However, I do like the pastiche art and the wit evinced by this new line: check out the cover text on The Hound of the Baskervilles:

I do rather worry about this quote prominently carried on the publisher's website though:

'It is so great that you are doing this kind of publishing. Turning classics into fun.' - John Bird, founder of The Big Issue

'Classics' is a dubious category, and I particularly resent the idea that they aren't enjoyable per se. Do new covers affect one's reading? I guess they do because they set up a reader's expectations, but I'm not sure the cover would stay in my consciousness as much as the experience of reading the actual words contained in the text. Though on the whole I'm keen on attracting new readers to texts which might otherwise seem forbidding, which is why I'm a huge fan of Clueless, the greatest Austen adaptation (of Emma) in cinema history (oh yes it is).



Original pulp novels are fascinating, and not only for the art-work. They introduced to the reading public subjects unfit for 'polite' society: particularly anything sexual. For instance, lesbian pulp fiction was sold as shocking exposes of the perversion hidden within the midst of normality, yet isolated lesbians in 50s America read them for solace and solidarity, discarding the thin veneer of moralising. The freedom from the scrutiny of cultural gatekeepers was liberating (and perhaps lucrative). Hence The Price of Salt, a 1952 lesbian thriller by 'Claire Morgan', later unmasked as respected author Patricia Highsmith.

 They were often exploitative, badly-written and shoddily produced, but they acted as a social subconscious: while people liked to be seen with the 'classics', sales figures tell you a lot more about we really liked to read. Little-read current Nobel Literature Prize winners will give future readers a rich sense of our culture, but Fifty Shades of Grey's popularity tells us what everyone else was interested in.

Pulp publishers had an eye on the money, rather than literary quality. Sensation sold, hence the emphasis on eye-catching artwork. Always keen to save money, some of the original pulp houses had the same idea as Pulp The Classics. Elek's 'Bestseller Library' imprint, for instance, started publishing out-of-copyright 'classics' with often very misleading covers and straplines. They knew that to English-language readers, anything French or Italian was assumed to be Utter Filth (thanks partly to censorious Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks). As the customs officer at Dover remarks to the hero while confiscating his books,

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

The rule for buyers, of course, is caveat emptor: once the book is purchased, readers are very unlikely to return it complaining that there wasn't enough sauce, and the publishers knew that very well. No hassle from the police, no comeback from the reader who has accidentally bought some Literature. Even by the tamer standards of the period, The Decameron, the naturalism of Zola and Stendhal, and the stylised desperation of de Maupassant et al. aren't particularly racy: Fanny Hill is far more explicit.

Of course publishers aren't only after the Pervert Pound: they repackage all sorts of work for marketing purposes. I pick up Jane Austen reprints whenever I spot them. Because publishers think women and young people are scared of 'serious' work (and perhaps because they don't think women capable of producing it either, she's being sold as 'chick-lit', which sickens me. The notion of 'chick-lit' is patronising and thin enough, while Austen's work has to be read very much against the grain to force it into the conservative paradigms of stereotypical chick-lit. So the publishers take the lazy way out: pastel covers, handwriting-fonts, superficial blurbs.

Very much a 'classic' - but at least it doesn't trade on the author's sex

Still serious, but now trading on Austen's sex rather than the novel's content

Finally! A non-threatening 'girly' edition. Consider yourself marginalised, Ms. Austen.

Your Tuesday reckon

Afternoon everybody! How are you all? We're in the funny period of the year between holidays and the academic year properly starting. Our graduation ceremonies fill the last three days of the week (some students have decided that this is the ideal time to phone up and question grades or mention that there's a problem with a module they took a year ago), dreaded meetings are starting and we're getting to grips with all the administration that goes with teaching these days. Not helped, of course, by myriad forms, all of which change yearly even when the information on them doesn't.

So between filling in said forms, we pop in and out of each other's offices to sympathise, compare workloads, catch up on our holiday tales, speculate, plan hospital visits (my boss has recovered enough to be moved to the intensive unit at the local hospital and can now speak short sentences) and gossip. Core subjects this time include the pointless new card entry system for getting into the offices (see Voles passim), placing bets on how long this year's restructure will last, the sore subject of admissions, comparing teaching workloads, and how old everybody is. After many years, I'm not the youngest person (at 38 or as my family would put it, 38-and-still-no-proper-job) in the English department. There's life here after all!

We also compare summer reading. WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn were mentioned: a non-fiction rambling account of a long-distance, er, ramble around Suffolk which is spoken of in hushed tones as a new form of writing. I must confess that I haven't successfully come to grips with it, which probably says more about me than it does about Sebald. But I know that if I want to read about the East, I'd go for Graham Swift's superb, disturbing, meditative Waterland any time.

What am I doing? I've got so many small bits of admin to do that I'm defeated even trying to work out where to start. The desk is an appalling mess mostly due to the books that have arrived recently (today: Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason in a beautiful propagandistic pulp cover, Atwood's MaddAdam and Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, primarily for the Bright Young Thing aspect – I'm not really a crime fan though Gaudy Night was interesting). Foucault on Literature is glowering at me: it's been on the desk ready to read for a few days now but I keep getting distracted.

I'm keeping an eye on the proposed Lobbying Bill, which the government published on the last day of the previous Parliament and is trying to rush through on the first day of the new one. As you might expect from this lot, it does exactly the opposite of what it says on the tin. It doesn't regulate, control or open up lobbying to oversight. It regulates less than 1% of lobbyists while making political campaigning effectively illegal for everybody from trades unions to donkey sanctuaries to cottage hospital campaigners to your local youth club. It does so by massively widening the definition of 'political campaigning' to mean pretty much anything, and sharply reducing the amount of money organisations are allowed to spend. There's even a special section in the Bill dedicated to trades unions' memberships. Why? Not because there's a problem, but because Cameron and Clegg don't like trades unions.

Why? Because the Tories want to smash the trades unions and the Lib Dems are terrified that the National Union of Students will remind voters that many of their MPs 'signed in blood' as one of them put it, to reject £9000 student fees.

Will it stop lobbying such as that conducted by Lynton Crosby and Co, who advises the Prime Minister while taking money from tobacco firms? Or the very shadowy organisations who fund Tory campaigns, such as the Midlands Industrial Council? It is in fact so awful that Conservative MPs and lobbyists are queuing up to denounce it as a load of rubbish. Hard-right Tory Douglas Carswell calls it less well-thought out than a dog's breakfast, and never before have those liars at the Taxpayers' Alliance and 38 Degrees been united, until now.

Er… no.

Still, at least there's cricket on today: Ireland v England in a one-day international. Ireland have welcomed back Ed Joyce, who played for Ireland, then played for England, and has now decided he's Irish again. England, on the other hand, are playing Boyd Rankin, who used to play for Ireland, and Eoin Morgan, who also used to play for Ireland. Which just goes to show that the post-modernists are right. Identity isn't fixed and is largely a matter of performance. Especially when there's money and glory in the offing. So far, Ireland appear to be winning.

I'm also loving Vinnie Jones the mediocre footballer turned awful Shakespearian actor, who has announced that 'England' is far too European for his taste, because of immigration. His wisdom is delivered from, er, Los Angeles where he has lived for many years. I'm firmly convinced that celebrity culture will destroy itself thanks to the stupidity of the celebrities involved.

Seamus Heaney - an appreciation

Work asked me to write a piece for its website on Seamus Heaney for people unfamiliar with his poetry: longer than the one I posted earlier, but you might like it:

Seamus Heaney, who died last week, is perhaps the only poet for whom a minute's silence will ever be held at a major sporting event: 80,000 Gaelic football fans paid their tribute to him before the Kerry-Dublin semi-final in Croke Park. Their response marks Heaney as a special cultural figure, in Ireland but also elsewhere. Before him, poets were often English and upper class: after him, most of them seemed to be from Northern Ireland. 

Heaney's poetry derived directly from the confluence of his rural upbringing in a mixed community of Catholics and Protestants in Bellaghy, Co. Derry and his education. Catholic and Nationalist himself, he repeatedly addressed the politics and emotions of the Troubles with sensitivity and emotion, whilst insisting on the longer, enduring rhythms of life in the bogs and on the farms of Ireland, and the literature in Irish which had never quite gone away. However, Heaney also had the advantages of a humanist education, first at grammar school and later at Queen's University: throughout his career, the influence of classic English and Latin poetry could be identified. 1975's collection North addresses the Six Counties' struggles, while death is never far away from his thoughts, having lost a brother while still a schoolboy. 

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At ten o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying -
He had always taken funerals in his stride -
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'
Whispers informed strangers that I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple.
He lay in a four foot box, as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Heaney returned to his brother's death much later in 'The Blackbird of Glanmore' (2006), this time inflected with intimations of his own mortality, which he reads here:

Heaney will be buried next to his brother, after a separation of seven decades. 

The secret of Heaney's success was that while the learning was always present, it was lightly worn. His poetic persona was gentle, thoughtful, though it could be sharp and dogged too. He never lectured or laboured a point. Instead, simple words with few rhetorical flourishes were allowed to sink slowly in until (perhaps much later) their effect was felt. His poetic importance is as a nexus of multiple cultures drawn together to make something new. Without him, Anglophone readers would never have encountered the poetry of Irish names, places and lives; without him, Irish readers might not have welcomed the 'great' English poets so readily. Without him, there would have been no room for the generations of poets he nurtured, personally and professionally. 

Heaney became an icon in Ireland and round the world: the ease with which he mixed with Bill Clinton, U2 and other celebrities, and the glib way they adopted his lines when they needed to sound profound led to accusations that 'Famous Seamus' liked the high life too much. These accusations were wrong. Reading the poetry, which however much it grew in scope, never wavered from his personal preoccupations, reading his superb writing on literature, and listening to the hundreds of people to whom he gave his time, care and attention, it's clear that though the courtiers were legion, he never allowed himself to be reduced to a caricature of the Famous Irish Poet. His Nobel Prize and the multitude of awards that came his way were fully deserved, and changed him not one jot: his gently ironic sense of humour allowed him to accept them without taking them too seriously. 

I would recommend that new readers start with North, which takes in Heaney's roots, the war in Northern Ireland and the complications of love. To appreciate his strengths as a translator of other cultures, his version of Beowulf is essential reading. 

Ireland has had an awful century or so: war, corruption, the sexual and social depredations of a decaying faith depopulation and greed all stalked a country which should have been able to celebrate political independence and cultural strength. With the exception of the Celtic tiger and its collapse, Heaney made us think carefully about the State, its history, its ways of life and its virtues in new ways and new words, without ever becoming a prisoner of fixed perspective and simple nostrums. His lilting rhythms and quiet stanzas should not be mistaken for cultural or political conservatism: he was a poet of the experience, of the journey, not of the answer nor of the arrival. 

Punch drunk?

Like many of you, I've been following the political class's anguish over the defeated Syria vote with some amazement. Here's David Cameron accusing Miliband of 'letting America down', as though the UK's solemn duty is to do whatever the United States wants, rather than taking a particular view on specific events. There's Michael Gove calling his own party members a disgrace. And here's Michael Gove calling a Labour MP a 'National Socialist', a.k.a. a Nazi.

But one phrase keeps coming back, particularly in the broadsheet commentary. Over and over again, they ask whether Britain is no longer 'punching above its weight'. They're at it in Al-Jazeera, the Financial Times and all over the press and TV.

It's post-imperial angst. To these people, moral and political authority is acquired by being on the trigger end of the barrel of a gun. Those countries horrified by Syria's use of chemical weapons are, of course, all nuclear-armed and some of them have used chemical weapons in war (the UK in Russia, the Americans in Vietnam). They are morally and politically bankrupt.

To me, the repeated use of the phrase 'punching above its weight' is indicative of their failure. Their preferred metaphor is a violent one. They forget that large swathes of the world - and as an Irish citizen I include my sainted ancestors - have been repeatedly and bloodily punched by the UK in its quest to demonstrate its continued global relevance.

So here's a novel idea. How about not punching anyone for a while? Retire the metaphor and try to think of new ways to relate to your global neighbours? Other countries have managed it. The Germans, obviously. Belgium had a particularly vile Empire and seems to have moved on without too much post-imperial angst. The Danes, Dutch and Swedes withdrew from their overseas conquests and cope quite well without needing to sally forth and punch anyone.

The British can do the same. Instead of behaving like a belligerent drunk outside a pub at closing time, offering to take on anyone who stared at his bird, how about attempting a little diplomacy (and get rid of the nuclear weapons, the last resort of the bully)? Last night I watched an old episode of Dr Who, in which Harriet Jones, newly installed as the Prime Minister, said this:



Sadly Harriet then nuked a retreating alien spacecraft (shades of the Belgrano) and the Doctor brought her down: even Harriet was infected by the desire for Britain to 'punch above its weight'. It's time for our real-life politicians to accept that the UK is a small country which has better things to do than reach for the red button – and the tired old clichés – every time American calls or an adviser recommends a spot of voter-friendly foreigner-biffing.

Seamus Heaney

I have nothing to add to the outpouring of sadness at Seamus Heaney's death. He can speak for himself:

It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
(from Heaney's translation of Beowulf)

All I know is a door into the dark.
('The Forge')







Before Heaney, poets came from everywhere. Since Heaney, they've all been Northern Irish, or so it seems. The curious confluence of Irishness and English, of borders, of faiths, of bogs and bombs, of old learning and new institutions, of the slow rhythms and swift history seem to breed them there.

Of Treason, Subversives, Propaganda, Anti-Communism and Anti-anti-communism…

Some of you may wish to skip today's entry: those of you who read me in search of thrills and spills, because I'm just going to drone on about yesterday's conference. I thought it very exciting indeed, but apparently not everybody is shaken to the marrow by discussions about forgotten literary periodicals and the like. I know, hard to believe, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

So, I'm back from a couple of days in London, visiting the British Library's Propaganda exhibition and attending a conference on Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda in the rather wonderful Deco Senate House at the University of London. After working on Clearing – important but frankly not exciting – it was great to spend a couple of days listening to thinkers I respect showing me how little I know even about my own field!

The British Library exhibition was fascinating, though flawed. It took the line that propaganda is a neutral concept, and presented material from a range of cultures, organisations and historical periods. I did think that it treated the British Empire with kid gloves and was therefore ironically propagandist itself, and that the range of texts should have included a lot more literature and film (no Casablanca?), but what they did have was fascinating.

The first item was this 'educational' film from 1949: it makes some important points but it has, to put it kindly, some ideological flaws. An interesting curio, nonetheless:



I also liked the prescience of this (rather hypocritical) Soviet poster entitled 'Freedom, American-style', accusing the United States of being a surveillance state, by Prokorov:

Frank Capra's Why We Fight is also a fascinating piece of Allied propaganda:

I also loved the propagandist fashions: lovely silk Jaqmar scarves from WW2 decorated with posters such as 'loose lips sink ships', Fougasse cartoons, and of London maps marked with bombed historic buildings. 

Rather wittily, the exhibition was liberally sprinkled with video clips of Alastair Campbell discoursing on propaganda without the slightest acknowledgement that he might be viewed as a (rather obvious, dishonest) propagandist in any way. The other good thing was the total absence of that monstrous cliché, the Keep Calm And Carry On poster, originally produced for the event of a German invasion of the UK. Well done, British Library. 

So that was the entrée to the conference. Anti-communism is a huge cultural field in the post-war period. The CIA was all over the cultural scene, funding arts festivals, artists' tours, concerts, cultural magazines, scholarships and symposia (see Stonor Saunders and Wilford), though not much has been written about the UK security services' interventions into culture, though James Smith, who was at yesterday's conference, has recently published a book on MI5 surveillance of poets and other artistic types. My kneejerk suspicion is that the British security services were too Philistine to devote much energy to Bloomsbury and Co. Drawn from the aristocracy and military, British spooks were at best indifferent to culture as praxis and pursuit: in an earlier age, Arnold despaired of the aristocracy as a bunch of wasters squandering their cultural privileges. In contrast, the US State Department (dealing with foreign affairs) and security services prided themselves on being highly cultured. Hence their keen interest in, for example, abstract expressionism, which they covertly promoted as proof that Western freedom produced great, cerebral art in opposition to the moralising Socialist Realism of the USSR. 

So that's the background to yesterday's symposium, which explored specific currents and examples in the anti-communist movement. David Ayers, for example, discussed the battle between the USSR's supposed universalism (overwhelming ethnic, national and religious difference) and TS Eliot's defence of 'European' values and human individualism. Two academics (Thomas Karshan and Adam Piette) discussed Nabokov's leading role as a literary anti-communist: his father was a liberal minister in the Kerensky government. According to Karshan, Nabokov's literary techniques and subjects, particularly play, self-division, contempt and indifference in his early Russian-language novels counterpoint the programmatic political engagement required by Soviet literary authorities. However, Karshan feels, Nabokov's 'crude, childish determinism' in books like Bend Sinister and Pale Fire demonstrate that he was locked into the forms and concerns of his Communist opponents: he never really managed indifference. 

Matthew Taunton of UEA discussed Brecht's Die Massnahme (in which a young comrade accepts that the revolution requires his own execution) as a way to examine Soviet notions of law and justice, which gradually drove away British fellow travellers such as Stephen Spender (poet and editor of Encounter, scandalously revealed to be a CIA front, which Spender probably knew) and Arthur Koestler (a central cultural figure at the time, later revealed to be a rapist). Those of you following the SWP's appalling treatment of serious rape accusations against a leading cadre might find Taunton's work instructive. 

The second session featured the highly-esteemed Ben Harker (soon to join Manchester University's English department), who discussed the cultural ramifications of the 'Soviet Literary Controversy' (the Party's victimisation of Akhmatova et al) in British intellectual life, taking in Raymond Williams, the Leavisites, Cyril Connolly's prediction of a repressive socialist Britain producing homegrown Socialist Realism and the relationship between art and political engagement, leading eventually to Cultural Studies and the New Left. Some background on British Communist literary culture here. 

Harker was followed by Nick Hubble's exploration of work by Orwell, Spender, Cornford, Cornforth and Sommerfield, particularly about Spain, as the 30s came to be re-evaluated in the post-45 period. Spender, in particular, scrambled to associate himself with the elitist High Modernists who had refused to explicitly discuss politics in their work, rather unconvincingly. 

After lunch came Debra Rae Cohen from the University of South Carolina. Horrifyingly, she recognised me from a 1930s conference I presented at in Arkansas, 2001. It was my first conference paper and I was frankly awful. But her presentation was utterly fascinating. She spoke about ex-socialist and talented author Rebecca West's journalism and writing on treason, the Atomic Spies trials, her letters, her vocal support for HUAC and McCarthy, and her ongoing conviction that everything that went wrong in her life – including her estranged son's bitter autobiographical novel – were part of a Communist plot to ruin her. She also, fascinatingly, saw celebrity culture as part of a communist media plot to divert the reading public's attention away from the dangers of subversion and brainwashing. 

I didn't think that paper could be rivalled, but Marina MacKay of Durham University was equally fascinating. Speaking on 'Religious Fantasy and Anti-State Allegory in the 1940s', she introduced C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength and Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (which may well have influenced Orwell's 1984) to discuss conservative fears of technocratic British Sovietism turning the country into a conformist dictatorship. I've read The Aerodrome (it's fascinating) but had never even heard of That Hideous Strength. After this paper, I have to read it: it sounds completely bonkers. It's essentially a campus novel in which a sociologist is seduced with promises of 'impact' (a current academic buzzword) into allowing an oppressive UK government to use her ideas to institute a police state. Women, lesbians and sociologists don't come out of it very well, unsurprisingly if you know anything about Lewis. 

Finally in that session came Benjamin Kohlmann from Columbia and Freiburg Universities, who gave a very different case of anti-communism. We'd already discussed plenty of conservative anti-communists, as you'd expect. But Edward Upward, an interesting communist figure though not, it has to be said, a novelist of any talent whatsoever, was what Kohlmann described as Communist Anti-Communist. Despairing of the CPGB's early turn away from serious revolutionary politics, he eventually left the Party for points further left. He became convinced that the real anti-communists were in fact the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. From this point, the discussion turned to whether the CP's sole source of unity was resistance to anti-communism rather than any serious and positive programme of communism itself. An interesting point, though a long way down the rabbit hole for most of us!

Following Kohlmann, the final session saw Tyrus Miller exploring e. e. cumming's long-standing anti-communism. Having visited the USSR as a socialist, he came back convinced that authoritarian regimes crushed individual spirit, exhaustively explored in Eimi, his experimental travelogue. Oddly, it was one of the few texts mentioned in the course of the day that I didn't order on the spot. He was followed by Adam Piette on Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Petra Rau's examination of travel writing about the USSR, especially Eric Newby's The Big Red Train. 

As is usual when I attend conferences, I came away inspired, awed, despondent and poorer. Poorer because conference wi-fi + online bookshops + great speakers = rapidly depleting bank account. I dread to think how many books I ordered during the course of the day. Despondent and inspired because hearing all these people speak so brilliantly simultaneously recharges my enthusiasm for my field while making me wonder what I could possibly contribute. 

And so here I am, back at work, refreshed, enthused and with a lot more books to read.

Sport: a game of two political halves

Hi everyone. Not much from me for the next couple of days. I'm off to London in an hour, ready for tomorrow's conference: Anti-Communism: Literature, Culture, Propaganda at the Senate House. Having worked on Communist literature and culture for so long, I'm getting interested in the right's cultural activities… something else to add to the list of Putative Papers.

This morning I've been thinking about some research my colleague Mike is doing into the political and historical origins of the Youth Hostel Association in Britain (all contributions gratefully received). He has access to their archives and the various publications the produced, but there's very little on the motivations for the YHA's foundation. So it's a matter of tracing the interests of the founders and any public debate on the subject. One potential impetus is the widespread fear of urban youths becoming a squalid, unfit underclass: WW1's conscription revealed widespread malnutrition, TB, polio and general unhealthiness associated with poverty. Another inspiration may have been the various German cults of Youth and the outdoors, from both the left and the right. Green's Children of the Sun records that Parliament sent a delegation to investigate the Strength Through Joy movement, and came back to pass a Physical Training and Recreation Act, and to found a Festival of Youth. Here's a little footage, with some very interesting commentary:

KING AND QUEEN AT FESTIVAL OF YOUTH

Note that the commentator carefully disassociates these well-drilled youths from the Hitler Youth and other fascist organisations: there's a degree of wishful thinking there. As well as fitness, the formation of organised groups of strapping young people was always going to be political. The Scouts, for example, were explicitly formed to bind young people to God, King (or Queen) and Country, and to produce the next generation's military. Other organisations worried that the urban proletariat were prey to 'cosmopolitan' (i.e. Jewish and/or Communist) subversion and, following the German 'Blood and Soil' ideology, believed that getting them out into the country would reconnect them to the 'real' England, which was held to be the countryside. Physical exercise was better than sitting around, either doing nothing or reading subversive books. The Festival of Youth commentary reminds me of a visit to the Bonn Museum of German History (1946-onwards, rather evasively). One on side, pictures of depressed East German teenagers with information boards explaining that they were 'forced' to join the Pioneers and were little more than slaves. On the other side, photos of cheery West German teens happily marching in Western youth organisation out of patriotic fervour. Truly, the victors write history.

And it's certainly true that all the leftwing people with whom I associate would prefer to read books than play rugby. However, there was a thriving leftwing sporting world. Cycling was always a stronghold of the left, affording cheap transport to pleasant places in the company of like-minded people: the Clarion Clubs formed in Birmingham and Stoke before spreading through the nation (still just about going) merged socialism with cycling.



Hiking was the ultimate leftwing sport: socialists organised the campaign for footpaths and open access, including the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, led by communist Benny Rothman.



Athletics was also a popular working-class sport, particularly the disciplines which required little equipment, such as long-distance running: events were held under the auspices of the British Workers' Sports Federation (largely Communist-inspired) and the British Workers' Sports Association, a centre-left splinter body after the CPGB's authoritarianism got a little too much. The BWSF was a leading light in the Mass Trespass.

As for my sport: very disappointing. Although Karl Marx was an enthusiastic fencer (epée, sadly), so were Mussolini and Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.

He was a leading member of the British teams, based his shock troops' uniform on the fencing jacket (in black, of course) and used to put on fundraising fencing galas for his Nazi party, with the connivance of other senior fencers and – I suspect – the Amateur Fencing Association. Certainly Charles de Beaumont, after whom the previous national HQ was named, aided Mosley's exhibition matches at the unsavoury Gargoyle Club. Unfortunately, the archives have long since disappeared and there was no newsletter, so tracing the story requires a trawl through the sporting and aristocratic press. One day, perhaps.

Sports' political characteristics tend to divide between team/individual, and be influenced by their social backgrounds. Fencing, mountaineering motor sport and aeroplanes in the 1930s were associated with Fascism: the Übermensch proving his worth as an individual by solo achievement by going higher to look down on us vermin, faster or further (and they were expensive). Rugby League was the preserve of Northern working men. Rugby union split between posh privately-schooled English people and Welsh or Scottish miners looking for a chance to duff up the English without getting arrested. Football tended to be grass-roots and socialist, though many clubs were founded by companies or churches to improve their parishioners' fitness or simply to get them to behave. Tennis was utterly suburban and middle-class: see Sorrow For Thy Sons' damning indictment of social-climbing Herbert who joins the tennis club in his Welsh valley because that's where the (English) managerial class go to escape the grime of the mining village.

Anyway, enough of this: I'm off to That London. More anon.

How to lose (Irish) friends and alienate people

Doing Clearing today. It's quiet. Too damn quiet. Though I have made some offers to some lovely people. If they sound downcast I point out that I got to university through Clearing, thanks to an entirely expected massive failure on the Latin A-level I was forced to do against my will. I should, at this point, say a big thank you to Bangor University for taking a chance on an unknown kid. 4 degrees later, I can confidently say that the system works!

Anyway, that's not the point of today's post. I'm going to review a book instead, John Niven's Single White Male. I read and enjoyed his previous novel about the 1990s indie music scene, Kill Your Friends. That novel was a kind of American Psycho with added Shed Seven. It was amusingly vile and a good diversion.

Single White Male applies the same formula to creative writing and academia. Kennedy Marr is a bloated arrogant, burned out, sold out Irish writer, a man who has sold out his talent to Hollywood. Having become a careless, greedy, oversexed monster, his creative, personal and fiscal lives are in meltdown and he's forced to accept a lucrative fellowship at a Midlands university which coincidentally enough also employs one of his former wives. Cue the usual rather reactionary set piece lampoons of Hollywood and trendy critical theory teachers. Not original but mildly amusing with some genuinely funny bits. My own university is recruiting a professor of writing at the moment so the novel's cynical enunciation of institutional motivation is particularly interesting.

However, the novel's representation of Irishness is such a huge stumbling block that it's impairing my enjoyment of the whole thing. Niven clearly knows Hollywood well, and invests considerable effort in the minutiae of its lifestyles: food, cars, clothes, speech patterns and so on. But when it comes to the protagonist's background, his family's dialogue and lives, it's embarrassingly close to a 19th century Begorrah stage Irish routine. Kennedy and his family are differentiated from other speakers of English in only two ways: they either start sentences with 'sure' or end them with 'so you are'. There's also a smattering of 'eejits' and 'fecks', and Kennedy sometimes tells people to 'stick it up in your hole'. The 'in' is entirely superfluous of course.

This is funny because if you turn to page 220 we find our hero reading a pile of student novels and screenplays, all of which he finds lacking:

If you don't buy the tone of the thing, you're dead. And reading some of the dialogue... he wondered if some of the authors had ever had a conversation with another human being in their lives.

Ad then he quotes some Wordsworth to prove that there's Proper Book Learning going on here.
 It is, in fact the Mrs Doyle characterisation except without the smart, affectionate insider's wit of that show:



Other than speaking like Shakespeare's MacMorris, the Irish characters split between saintly Mammies, decent sons who love their Mammies, Behan-style tear-aways like Kennedy and troubled Limerick heroin losers. It's always raining and emotionally repressive.

The problem, other than authorial laziness, is I suspect, old-fashioned British imperialism. Hollywood is distant and glamorous. No doubt Niven enjoyed his research trips to LA. But Ireland's cold, wet, local and (he thinks) familiar. No research needed. He knows what the Paddies and Bog-trotters are like. Their characters write themselves. So we end up with these tissue of clichés masquerading as characterisation and dialogue. And it makes my toes curl. 

Still, Caitlin Moran likes it, so who am I to complain?

Update: right, I've finished Single White Male now and there are plenty more reasons to dislike it. I'll just pick one.

It's a novel about masculinity, starring a hyper-macho stereotypical Irish author: he drinks too much, is too attached to his dying Mammy who preferred him to his siblings, can't live up to his father's role as a stable, quiet provider etc etc etc. So far, so tedious. It's a very knowing book: Kennedy Marr keeps remarking that there's nothing more clichéd than a book at middle-aged male authors coming to terms with responsibilities and with their own mortality. But being knowing isn't an excuse: Single White Male falls into exactly the same traps as its hero. Kennedy shags and boozes his way to notoriety and then a suicide attempt. Then the author bottles it: Kennedy survives, reconnects with his ex-wife and daughter and becomes a reformed character. Niven is too chicken to let the suicide succeed.

And so we get to a deeply conservative resolution. Having been encouraged to admire Kennedy's Irish-by-way-of-Hemingway nonconformity, it turns out that uxoriousness, familial duty and the literature of emotional commitment are what Niven implicitly promotes. Nowhere is this more clear than in the book's sexual politics. Kennedy Marr is a misogynist bastard, and we're expected to understand that the way he treats women is disgraceful. Men like him are socially destructive, as he realises when he understands that he treats women in ways he'd hate people to treat his own daughter. So far, so progressive. And yet… part of his epiphany is tied up in a sense of ownership of his daughter's sexuality (she's sixteen: children are only interesting in these kinds of novels when they're sexually maturing, which bothers me). From this, you realise that the women in the novel are completely present solely to reflect the male protagonist's 'journey'. They have no inner lives or agency of their own. They're in the book for Kennedy Marr to damage or to love. They speak only about Kennedy or other men. While Kennedy's realisation that he should properly love his daughter and ex-wife seems progressive, a structural examination of the novel reveals that they are merely Helpers and Objects in the boring old Bildungsroman male quest. It's a novel by an 'outrageous' male writer in which another 'outrageous' male writer very much has his cake and eats it.

Conservative values, artistically, politically and socially. You can't have a writer (or any artist) as your central protagonist without inviting your readers to apply the text's concepts and structures to the book and its author – that's how literature interacts with the 'real' world. Niven's vicious satire is revealed to be – like most satire – deeply conservative. Kennedy's socially destructive behaviour isn't the product of cultural ills (he could have picked Ireland, Catholicism, the relationship between the arts and capitalism), but the result of his failure to adopt the Daily Mail's programme of neat heterosexual nuclear families and 'decency'.

It was a fun read, but a few moment's thought reveals a swearier update of Waugh and Amis.

Pointless round-up of reckons

Good afternoon from the Midlands! The sun's shining, enough colleagues are back for the first collective moan of the new academic year, I've been for a swim and I'm not doing Clearing until tomorrow. Some books have arrived and I'm now in possession of an iPad, for which I'll find a use at some point: it'll be easier to carry round for lectures than toting the MacBook at the very least.

This week's books are the Broken Homes, the latest in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London police procedural-fantasy series which was very enjoyable; Peter Heller's interesting-looking post-apocalypse novel The Dog Stars (acclaimed by Oprah, Playboy and the Wall Street Journal, so I'm more interested than convinced), John Niven's Straight White Male which will no doubt be scabrously satirical (and this one features a burned-out writer consigned to a Midlands university); B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates which as you know comes as a series of bundles in a box to be read in any order,

B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates

and finally Ceri Jones's Dweud eich Dweud, which is a guide to colloquial and idiomatic Welsh. Basically, it'll help me curse convincingly in yr hen iaith. Though if you're from Caernarfon, all you need is 'Shw mae, gont?' anyway. As Caliban says in The Tempest,
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.

So all in all, a good day. I will get back to Serious Academic Texts shortly, but there's no rush. I can't do anything substantial in the Clearing call centre anyway. Yesterday we chatted about all sorts of interesting research they're doing in between gossiping, and I came away with a whole other list of books to read, particularly Northern Irish Troubles novels.

The other excitement of the day was my colleague Alan doing an interview about a forthcoming TV series, Peaky Blinders, which picks up on Birmingham's gang history to present a local and richly-accented version of Gangs of New York.



Meanwhile, here's a comedic version of Michael Gove's vision of history, courtesy of Fry and Laurie:



and a bit of academic humour for you Foucauldians: