Self-loathing, the Rory McGrath way

No, not hating Will Self, although plenty of people do.

Rory McGrath is some kind of comedian, though I've only ever seen snatches of him being witty and informed on panel shows. He's published a memoir which seems to revolve around his difficult separation from his childhood Catholicism and the rift this caused with his parents. As an ex-Catholic myself, I can understand: there's a tacit silence on the matter around my parents, though I used to really enjoy baiting them when younger ('Hey, did you know the cross is simply the latest manifestation of sun symbols?' 'Does the collection pay for the priest's legal fees?').

I probably won't buy McGrath's books because I'm not particularly interested in him, but this imaginary confession struck me as personally applicable:

In short, I'm a lazy, selfish, drunken, overweight waste of space, with a gaping emptiness in my soul that I try to fill with self-indulgence and cheap thrills.

Not a bad life. At least, I get by.

The turtle's head(s)

(Look it up on the Profanisaurus).

Clearly two heads are better than one:

I'm not the only boring old moaner

One of the things that most depresses me about teaching English literature is the very frequent refrain 'I don't like reading' and 'I don't read for pleasure'. I hear it often now, and not from dunderheads: often it's bright, likeable students who just have this blind spot. The problem is that they're studying literature.

I did an English degree because I liked reading and wanted to spend three years talking about books and ideas. I had no plan for employment in mind. It didn't feel like I did any work at all for those years because I just read books all the time - exactly what I'd have done if I'd been on the dole, with the added bonus of conversations and a wider range of texts.

So I just don't understand the motivation of anyone doing a literature degree without being enthusiastic. Of course, some texts are boring/incomprehensible/unengaging: I struggled with plenty as a student - but you do need some curiosity. I can understand people saying that work and children and so on mean that the time to read is curtailed, but at least people should want to read. Monday's Winstanley class featured several students who hadn't bothered to do the reading. However, the diligent students also showed me their workload and asked for a variation on their assignment to enable them to use texts we'd studied in class rather than only ones we hadn't looked at. I didn't realise how much they had to do, and agreed.

Tara Brabazon (read her books) has had the same experience and writes about it much more elegantly:

A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: “I don’t like reading.” This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence.

Reading is a selfish act. For three years, students have an opportunity to focus on themselves, discipline their minds, ponder the greatest words ever written and find ideas to anchor their lives. So many men and women would give anything to have the time to explore the world of books. 

A colleague in Creative Writing made a similar point to potential students at an open day recently. When they said they weren't readers, she told them they couldn't be writers: the only writers who apparently don't read are Jeffrey Archer and Dan Brown - you can tell because they can't write a good sentence or subvert one's expectations in any way.

What's the solution?

If a student does not wish to read, then they should not enrol at university. Give the place to someone else. During my first degree, when an academic realised that a student had not completed the required preparation, the recalcitrant undergraduate would be asked to leave the tutorial.

Years later, I asked this dedicated teacher why he so ruthlessly embarrassed the non-readers. He stated that if he had let them stay, the intellectual level would have fallen too low, making it necessary to explain ideas that should have been understood before entering the tutorial. With the non-readers gone, he could teach at the required standard.

I've never done this. I've weakly asked why people don't have their texts, or mailed people to remind them to do the reading, but never got a reply, and never thrown people out. I've a suspicion that some would refuse to go. So I get used to people staring blankly at the walls or (most often) texting/updating their Facebook pages. What a waste of their time and mine.

Brabazon knows that in this day and age, we can't just chuck people out of the room. She suggests using online activities such as goodreads.com, shelfari and scribd so that students can enter reading communities and even contact authors. What's slightly lacking in her account is what the students and teachers actually do on these sites. Is it swopping enthusiasms or having in-depth discussion? The (theoretical) joy of seminars is not just exchanging ideas, but examining them. Sometimes students come up with angles I haven't thought about, and (hopefully often) I propose strategies and ideas they haven't come across but can deal with. If teaching becomes the equivalent of a LIKE button, we're losing the critical aspect.

I can see advantages though: formal teaching does carry a sense of judgement about it which is often unhelpful. I kept my mouth shut during my first year at university because I'd rather be presumed stupid than open my mouth and confirm the suspicion. Then I realised that everyone else was feeling the same way, and made the effort to break through my shyness, and gained a lot from it. I'd like to teach as though it was a more searching book group: perhaps a comfortable space, cups of coffee, witty banter, but it's an ideal which I suspect would fall short for various reasons: a lack of enthusiasm on the part of some, the barely concealed power structure of the teaching experience, the cognitive dissonance of the method (which could be creative).

Despite this, I love teaching: I like the vast majority of my students and I'm enthusiastic about the subject - but it's the lost sheep I worry about. Your thoughts?

PS. It's worth having a look at the comments section - very interesting post from Ewar, and I've replied.

It's PC Gone Mad!

Oh dear. The Tories have made rather a serious tactical error. They've told the average bobby on the beat that s/he's either going to be sacked or get quite a large pay cut. The police are threatening protest, which is very interesting indeed.

Now you and I may have opinions on the police forces, and whether they're over or underpaid, but it's political insanity to mess with their terms and conditions. Why? Because the cops have always been the state's working-class enforcers: not liked by their employers and distrusted by the people (which is why Victorian Metropolitan plods wore an anti-garotting collar as part of the uniform).*

Governments have always paid officers well because during times of tension, they're required to put aside their opinions and class allegiances and defend the status quo. Take the Miners' Strike, for example: most of the police were working-class lads who chose to enforce the Thatcher government's diktats in return for employment and fat bonuses. This is why they're still hated in ex-mining areas, despite the growth of community policing. One theory holds that Raoul Moat became a folk-hero in the north-east because he shot policemen: if this is true, it's unforgivable but it has a context.

So what are the Tories up to? The police did what they were told during the Miners' Strike. They weren't so keen on the Poll Tax and lo and behold, the big riots were allowed to rage. If the cops are feeling victimised in this recession, I don't think we can expect them to try very hard to counter the protests that are surely going to escalate in the next year or so. Perhaps they'll even join in. It's no coincidence that one of the student demonstration chants to the police was 'your job next'.

How do I feel about this? Very optimistic. Just because the police is the armed wing of hegemony doesn't mean it always has to be. We need a police force: rapists and murderers aren't proletarian heroes, whatever Moat's supporters think. But it is time the police stopped being treated like - and thinking of themselves as - a special category. The sooner they join the people, the better.

What I really don't understand is how the Tories think this will come good for them. A demoralised cop struggling with a mortgage and two jobs isn't going to take a brick in the face for the government. Why should s/he? We need the police, but the government will need them even more when the true horror of what they have in store for us becomes apparent - and they seem to have forgotten this fact.

(If the police do stage a demonstration, I suggest that we all go along as stewards, 'evidence gatherers and security guards. We can then estimate their numbers to the news media and talk about their determination to cause trouble: 'There was a hardcore minority in para boots and black clothing with protective gear, yes, but there were only about 250 people on the march in total, not the 50,000 they claimed, and we've got the names and pictures of the known troublemakers' - they do it to us).

*Jennifer Davis, "The London Garrotting Panic of 1862", in VAC Gatrell, B. Lenman, G. Parker, Crime and Law (1980) 

Whackjob question time

Carrying on with the Harun Yahya extremist propaganda by Oktar Babuna and Cihat Gundogdu: do remember that mainstream Islam doesn't have a problem with evolution: something else not mentioned by the speakers or the organisers. 


Probably 80 people here.


Question 1: you don't see natural selection as beneficial and there's no beneficial example. How about the Gypsy Moth, over the past 100 years? It was bark-coloured. With the industrial revolution, it changed colour to match the polluted environment to remain safe, and is now reverting to the original colour. His father is a dairy farmer - has selectively bred for more milk production rather than beef.


Answer: even evolutionists don't use the gypsy moth example any more because it's a fake. As to cows: variations isn't evolution. The genes don't change, so there's no evolution.


Q3: Are you saying that if evolution's true, there should be plenty of transition fossils.
A: Trillions.
Q: And you say all species spontaneously appeared - in complex forms - with the Cambrian explosion?
A: Yes. 3 phyla before the Cambrian, millions in the Cambrian, 35 now.
Q: So millions of species decline to 35 phyla. So are humans and rabbits there in the fossil record if they all existed in the Cambrian period?
A: We never said they appeared at the same time. There's an order of creation. The Phyla tree is false.
Q: So did we start with simple and get more complex life-forms?
A: No. We start with complex forms. There's no progress.
Q: So where are the Cambrian humans?
A: Photosynthesis existed a long time ago and we can't do it in the lab: so no evolution.
Q: But no rabbits or humans?
A: Trilobites have the most complex eyes ever and they're extinct. So complexity was there from the start.
Q: Bones survive: fewer remains of soft-bodied organisms. How can you find the fossil of a bacteria as often as that of a dinosaur? How do you tell the difference between designed gradual complex appearance and evolution?
A: God wanted it this way.
Q: DNA insertion experiments prove the addition.
A: long rambling claim that God invented DNA and everything started in one go.


(Unfortunately a lot of the students are just laughing at the speakers' little jokes at the expense of the questioners and are clearly uninterested in referencing, peer review and experiment: just in the religious credentials of the speaker). Biology lecturer walks out because his questions are being silenced: students mock him. 'What have you evolved from?', jeers one. Moderator is clearly losing it.


Q. What's the name of the Pharaoh you referenced?
A. I don't know. One of the Pharaohs.
Q. What do you mean by pagan?
A. Belied based on nothing. DNA means there's an infinite wisdom far superior to human intelligence. Humans can't create life so there must be a god.
Q. A famous scientist (can't catch the name) traces hominids back to Kenya. Where did man come from?
A: Only the revelation of God can tell us. Qu'ran tells us we're the same as the first man. Science tells us that new DNA information can't arise so we're the same as the origin. 350 million fossils show there are no intermediates or transitions and Darwin, Gould and Dawkins agree.
Q. Dawkins says every fossil is intermediate.
A. Dawkins says they are planted in the pre-Cambrian.
Q. No he doesn't. He says 'appeared' and then explains why.
A. No transitions. No evidence. Evolution never happened. The Qu'ran says so.
(More students leave, clearly not impressed).
Q. (Me) how is it that blind trilobites appeared later than the ones with the eyes? How many peer-reviewed publication do you have? After all, I have to submit my work to the scrutiny of my colleagues to achieve credibility amongst them and my students: why hasn't he?
A. Trilobites existed in the Cambrian and not before. Eyes can't emerge step by step. Missing elements mean it wouldn't work (me: isn't this a design flaw?).


I ask again:
"Darwinism controls scientific journals'.
'Complexity to simplicity denies evolution', he says. Which is a total lie and he should know better. Darwinism says that species evolve to fit niches. If a simple model works better, that will emerge. This is the case with eyeless trilobites: they emerged (I point out to him) where trilobites lived in lightless places: why expend energy on an unnecessary eye? He again mocks this and ends the session.


Session closed: very hastily. There were no questions from anti-evolutionists - probably because they don't have the scientific background to make serious points: the event was an exercise of authority. Afterwards, quite a few attendees ask questions of myself and the biologist sitting next to me - they're not convinced but at least they're curious.


What a simultaneously enjoyable and annoying experience. I haven't seen such blatant lies, distortion and misdirection since I went to Catholic school. I hope I didn't come across as a humourless naysayer - I also hope that the speakers' ranting, use of spiteful jokes and repeated evasion of specific questions were noticed by the students.


PS. He keeps going on about proteins and the impossibility of them evolving: try this paper in Nature, the most rigorous science journal in the world.

Anti-science live!

Oktar Babuna and Cihat Gundogdu of extremist group Harun Yahya claim that they're credible because they've studied at Imperial, NYU and California University medical schools. Not in biology, I notice. I wonder if their MDs are from these institutions. Anyone know how to find out?

Here are some transitional fossils for you:

Adnan Oktar's already been stated as the reason they're here. First speaker attacks Darwinism as communist, racist, capitalist, atheist and fascist (busy man, if slightly confused). 

On to Dawkins immediately and Gould: Darwin attacked as the origin of modern atheism. So we're not here for evolution at all: we're here for religious propaganda (surprise). Materialism = ancient Greek = atheism. Claims that scientific findings will prove that nature is created. 'Outdate materialist dogmas' will have to give way. 

Moves straight to Social Darwinism and claims it's rooted in Darwin: totally untrue. 'Survival of the fittest' isn't - as the speaker claimed - 'the law of the jungle'. It's about adaptation to niches. 

Onto communism. Quotes Marx's approval of Darwin. Now claims that Darwinism is about conflict and so is Marxism. Again - wrong on the Darwin. Wonder when the supposed science is going to turn up?

Now we're on to Lenin. Claims communism collapses without Darwinism, which 'inevitably leads to communism, which inevitably leads to Leninism, which inevitably leads to terrorism'. Quotes Lenin's plan for revolution, as though revolutionary situations are somehow permanent. 

Now it's Stalin. There's still no mention of evolutionary science. But Darwinism was taught in the USSR (er… Lysenko actually took over, terribly) and millions were killed 'because of the ideas of Darwinism'.

But it's not just the communists: fascists are Darwinists too. Apparently Hitler's 'My Struggle' is completely Darwinist. Charles Darwin was a racist too, apparently. (By our standards - by his time's standards, he was actually quite progressive). Darwin, I accept, was limited by his context - but that doesn't make the evolutionary model untrue. It shows that the scientist who discovered it was flawed. 

'Because of Darwinism… more than 350 million people were killed in the twentieth century'. The fundamental concept is… fighting those who were not one of us… religions are about compassion, mercy, love, justice and tolerance… killing innocent people is forbidden'. 

Funny: I was under the impression that genocide was rather older than religion. 

'Every terrorist is a Darwinist'. 

Now he claims to be on to the science: raises intelligent design immediately. BINGO. And fully-formed fossils. That didn't take very long. 

Claim 1: 'Chance is Darwin's false god… which literally works miracles'. No scientific counterargument, just condemnation.

Claim 2: How did the first cell form. Begins with proteins. So complex that it is impossible. Therefore God did it. DNA and proteins must co-exist. One can't predate the other - so God had to put them both there. "That defeats Darwinism very fundamentally" because single proteins can't emerge by chance, in isolation. 'Evolution collapses at the very beginnings of life'. (Here's recent research on protein evolution).

Next analogy: cities are complex. Cells are more complex. DNA is the 'databank' and mitochondria are power sources more complex than nuclear power stations. One failure and the whole cell dies. Natural selection doesn't let a cell survive through mutation, so the cell had to be created complete.' We have the fossil of the first cell created on earth (cyanobactiera?)' - I find it very hard to believe that this is provably the oldest cell on earth. Especially as cell fossils are rather fragile. (Hawaii university seems to believe - the fools - that there are range of these cells or varying complexity, which seems like evolution to me). 

Claim 3. Natural selection can't change DNA. So fast gazelles may produce faster gazelles but not horses. So? This is a total distortion of Darwin. Here we go with the human eye - that took longer than I expected: almost 20 minutes. An unconscious process can't produce a working eye, the guy claims. Oh yeah? Then he just claims that Allah creates nature, and that's an end to it. 

Next claim: DNA is too complex to have evolved by chance. 99% of mutations are harmful or non-beneficial. The speaker quotes Ranganathan as 'a Darwinist' who supports the speaker's science: but a quick search reveals that he's just another creationist. 

Now says no fruit fly experiments have ever shown beneficial mutations. So? Yet again, the Qu'ran is cited as scientific experiment. He seems to be claiming that the rarity of beneficial mutations proves that mutation isn't evolutionary. But this is utter balls: developmental biology asserts that over the billions of years of life we've had, the rare beneficial ones will survive precisely because they are beneficial.

Calls a Darwinist a 'pagan priest preaching a pagan religion' he knows is false. Then we move  on to Dawkins. They claim he can't provide an example of a genetic mutation which 'increases information in the genome'. Then they show Dawkins muttering - audience point out the clip is fake. I'm no biologist - but is increased information the same as beneficial mutation? I suspect not. Now Dawkins is claimed as the inheritor of Pharaonic religion. 

Apparently mutation can't reproduce the Golden Ratio of harmony, which he claims is present in all of creation, such as the shape of peoples' faces. It's 'the secret signature of Allah'. But mutations generate 'pathology and asymmetry'.

Claims there's no evolutionary mechanism - but he hasn't done this at all. 

Next claim: no fossil evidence - new speaker: 

Claims there's 'concrete' palaeological evidence that all species 'arrive fully-formed' and 'complete'. They may go extinct but don't change. Fossil evidence is very rich so Darwinists can't claim the record is incomplete. 350 million fossils prove there's no change of species. All images are 'imaginary' and 'have no scientific value at all'. Silly picture up of starfish turning into finned fish: not a claim evolutionists have ever claimed. Starfish and fish evolved along the same timescale - no-one has ever claimed that a modern starfish is the ancestor of the modern goldfish. But this guy claims that because there's no 50% starfish and 50% fish fossil in the record, evolution is denied. Starfish started as they are now. 

Quotes Darwin as asking where the transitional fossils are and saying they are everywhere. Then he claims there are only 2 million species in existence, which is a massive underestimate. In fact, science has only got round to classifying 2 million (which I think is quite impressive actually). And let's face it: Darwin had a hammer and a sailing ship: not electron microscopes and exploration gear. 

This moron claims that there are no primitive fossils and that life arose abruptly, not gradually. There are 'no ancestors' to the Cambrian lifeforms (no, I don't mean the Welsh). They're complex without ancestors. I just don't buy the idea that we have a complete fossil record: over billions of years, some are going to be physically inaccessible, perhaps most. 

Back to Dawkins and his 'confession' that it appears that 'most of the major invertebrate groups… were planted' in the Cambrian: so apparently he's a Creationist too (this is of course one of the many partial quotations which form their 'intellectual' method: Dawkins actually goes on to explain why it might appear like this but isn't actually the case - but the speakers aren't interested in telling their audience that: I presume this kind of misinformation applies to all the other quotes they use. They quote Gould as well as saying that the Cambrian distressed Darwin and his followers because 'they know' that the Cambrian explosion = creation. And then it's back to the Qu'ran. 

He then quotes Darwin's assertion that if they could find a complex organism which couldn't have evolved gradually, he'd be discredited, and claims that he is going to show us such and organism: the trilobite. Apparently because it had a lot of eyes which were more complex than the ones we have, it's proof of God. But trilobites had several different types of eye: which implies that there isn't a 'perfect' version which appeared immediately. 

Fish tales: he claims that evolutionists belief that 'fish stepped onto the earth and became reptiles'. Untrue. Then claims that fish could never have evolved into land-dwelling creatures: and yet there are fish which do leave the water. The Mangrove Rivulus hides in logs for long periods, for example. There are many types of amphibious fish, such as periopthalmus gracilis.

This fish doesn't exist, according to the speakers

Now attacks evolutionists for claiming that birds are descended from 'giant dinosaurs'. Which is bollocks. Birds are supposedly descended from dinosaurs - but there were lots and lots of dinosaurs of varying sizes, many of them tiny. This is such distorted lies. It's so lazy!

Now we're picking on the dolphins (Douglas Adams is turning in his grave): pictures of bears gradually turning into dolphins with a big cross on them, which is a very distorted version of Darwin's speculation. Even he has to admit that Darwin reassessed this idea. But we don't get any history of dolphins from our esteemed speaker. (Here's the real evolution of dolphins: from land mammals, 50 million years ago).

But here's the absolute proof that evolutionists are mad: some species, such as the gingko tree, are the same as they were 150m years ago. 

Er… isn't that what a Darwinist would say? That some species have found their niches and don't need to exist. 

Here we go: the evolution of humanity, or rather the 'word game' of the myth of human evolution. It's all faked. Because that popular image of small ape to big human isn't very accurate, all of evolution is false. Apparently humans and apes have always existed at the same time - which is utter rubbish: the fossil record clearly shows apes emerging before the human sub-varieties. He claims that 'races' exist (modern biology says not) and uses the magic word 'negroes'. Oh dear. Evolution is a 'fairy tale'. 'Science' must respond to such lies and imagination. Piltdown Man was a fake (true) so other protohumans are also fakes. 

I'm so depressed. Now he's showing pictures of orang-utans with human eyes photoshopped in (no source given) to claim that evolutionists have faked the entirety of human origins. Palaeological reconstruction is apparently a big fake too. Apparently bad drawings of primitive humans disprove evolution as a theory too. No soft tissue survives so reconstructions are unreliable: said the man who just told us that we have fossilised cells. So to recap: because there have been some fakes, and some mistakes, all evolution is a big lie.

Now he's claiming that australopithecus is officially scientifically an ape, after being thought of as a protohuman. Untrue - it's a claim originating with the Jehovah Witnesses, who as far as I know tend not to conduct much palaeological research. A. africanus and and robustus are more humanlike than apelike: afarensis is halfway between and ramidus is more apelike. Looks like evolution to me!

And back to religious texts.

I'm getting quite angry now. The lecture has consisted of lies and deliberate distortions, while the speakers accuse their opponents and deliberate liars. 

Questions next: this should be fun.

Live-blogging the whackos

Very depressingly, quite a large number of students have turned up to listen to two unqualified whackos from a very dubious organisation (which appears to think that evolution is a Communist-Jewish-Atheist-Masonic plot) explain why evolution is lies, rather than turn up to an introductory biology class. The lecture is 'The collapse of the theory of evolution and the fact of creation'.

Without even waiting for them to open their propagandist mouths, I guarantee you that two arguments will be raised:

1. Irreducible complexity: some aspects of biological structures, such as the eye, are so amazing and complex that there was no chance that they evolved. There had to be a creator.
2. There are no transitional fossils showing us that species evolved. Fossils show 'modern' bears, seals and so on from millions of years ago. They'll show pictures of fossils and pictures of existing animals. As if that proved anything.

I know these arguments will turn up (with an Islamic spin) because they're the same arguments used by anti-evolutionists since Darwin.

The problem is, they're both entirely untrue. Here's a handy and comprehensible argument against irreducible complexity. As to the transitional fossils: here's a list. It's quite long. It includes the various hominids: they're so transitional that there's no consensus on which of our ancestors are humans and which aren't.

What really annoys me about these guys is that they're here in a university without going through any of the systems which provide a degree of intellectual rigour. They haven't done PhDs in developmental biology. They haven't submitted their claims to the examination of their peers through the publication system: they're just making random claims and using neat suits and medical degrees to perform academic status without actually testing any of their claims.

I'm ashamed by the university's connivance in this charade: it demeans us and weakens our credibility.

Back in a moment when they start talking.

Happy International Women's Day

I hope you do something relevant to celebrate IWD and mourn the continuing need for it. In my mind today are the women of Saudi Arabia - basically highly-educated prisoners - and my students. Being a humanities lecturer, most of my English literature classes are overwhelmingly female, though my media/cultural studies classes are more balanced.

Despite the demographics of English courses, relatively few women become lecturers - though the proportion is higher in The Hegemon, I think. Is this to do with the economics and working lives of men and women? Or is it connected to the performative aspects of lecturing and researching? Are women conditioned against this kind of intellectual leadership? Certainly 100 years ago the theory was that women were creatures of biology while men were the intellectuals and strivers - an idea achieved by strenuously ignoring the work of a huge range of female authors, composers and scientists.

So here's my hero of the day: Ada Lovelace (1815-1852): the daughter of Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke. Ada was the world's first computer programmer, writing the software for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Unfortunately, the machine was never built.

Happily though, Ada and Charles became geek crimefighting steampunk heroes. At least, in this version…

The new university fees regime

The announcement has been made: any university wishing to raise fees above £6000 will have to spend £900 on 'outreach' and recruitment of disadvantaged students, and set a realistic number to reach.

So what happens to places like The Hegemon?

Director of the Office of Fair Access

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

thank you for your letter requesting permission to raise fees to £9000. Reviewing your university's intake, it appears that 97% of your students are state-educated and 48% working-class, the highest proportion in the UK. 

It therefore seems unlikely that your institution can afford to spend £900 per head on attracting more disadvantaged students. 

However, should your institution undertake a radical outreach programme to sectors of the student population you currently fail to serve, we will authorise higher fees. You will be required to initiate an urgent and radical programme of subsidies, visits, roadshows, mentoring and tuition of students at private schools. As a matter of urgency, we suggest that you set up links with Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Ampleforth and Downside to explore methods of solving the clear institutional discrimination against the moneyed community practised by your establishment.

Any suggestion that these new rules will make no difference to Russell Group universities' minimal intake of disadvantaged students is a disgraceful and cynical slur.

Yours,

Offa

Book news

Rather a large haul today. I've just finished three books read for light relief: the latest Thursday Next novel (patchy) and two Paul McAuley SF books (both rather good), so I'm in the mood for something more serious.

Luckily, my friend Steve gave me Perec's Species of Spaces and Other Places and James Stephens' The Crock of Gold, which he swears is genius piece of Irish comic writing. I also got John Stubbs' new book on the Cavaliers, Reprobates, which looks excellent. Hope it's not overly sympathetic to them. I also received Alex Butterworth's history of the 19th-century anarchist and terrorist underground, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents, and Gwyneth Jones's short story anthology, The Universe of Things (with a personal inscription from the author, which is very kind of her).

Am I going to read these things  - or go home to prepare for tomorrow's lectures? No. I also received Dougal and the Blue Cat and some CDs: some choral music from Rome by The Cardinal's Musick, the Kids soundtrack, Scritti Politti's Absolute (yay, songs about Derrida) and Richard James's We Went Riding. A night lounging under the duvet beckons.

Love your lectures?

Having done a class today in which more than a few people in the class hadn't bothered to turn up with a copy of the play or texts being studied (again), this Doonesbury strip caught my eye. Today's texts were a selection from Gerrard Winstanley's writings and Caryl Churchill's play about the Diggers, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

I don't expect everyone to like every text - quite often, hating a text produces a great discussion - but the feeling that some of the class actively resent being there is very dispiriting. It's university. You don't have to a) sign up or b) turn up. I actively don't care if you'd rather not come - you're adults. But if you do come, at least read the bloody books and talk about them.

Thanks - as always - to the students who do talk. I do realise that you can't be enthusiastic about every text and I appreciate your effort. If I haven't conveyed my enthusiasm, then I've failed to some extent too.

Add another tyrant to the list

Stephen Harper is the only man on the planet who thinks George W. Bush is a role model, and that the United States' approaches to capitalism (let 'er rip) and the environment (who needs it?) are admirable.

Unfortunately, he's the Prime Minister of Canada. He's the fellow who found a loophole in Canada's political system and just suspended parliamentary democracy for months on end whenever it was in danger of outvoting him.

He's done something rather Gadaffiesque now: announced that all official communications will no longer refer to 'the Government of Canada' or 'Gouvernement du Canada', but instead talk about 'The Harper Government'.

George Orwell would be proud. I think this is what the Canucks have to look forward to.

Enlightenment at last

We can close down our biology department. Why? Because the Islamic Society here have invited Oktar Babuna and Cihat Gundogdu to give a lecture on 'Evolution: Fact or Fiction?' at the university - in a teaching room, with the university's logo plastered over the flyer.

Their answer, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is that evolution is a fiction.

Taner Edis has said "there is nothing new in the Yahya material: scientifically negligible arguments and outright distortions often copied from Christian anti-evolution literature, presented with a conservative Muslim emphasis" concluding it "has no scholarly standing whatsoever". According to Richard Dawkins, Oktar "doesn't know anything about zoology, doesn't know anything about biology. He knows nothing about what he is attempting to refute".

The Council of Europe's Committee on Culture, Science and Education wrote in its report on this book that "None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific refutation of the theory of evolution." 

Who are these characters? They're disciples of Adnan Oktar - a leading Turkish Holocaust denier, antisemite and anti-science quack. Babuna and Gundogdu employ a range of sciencish to make a large number of false claims which ultimately boil down to insistence on the literal truth of their chosen sacred texts. Pretty quickly, their examination of evolution leads into an exposition of the End Times (Christians don't have a monopoly on Rapture nonsense). Oktar also got Richard Dawkins' site banned in Turkey.

They assert that evolution denies the existence of God, abolishes moral values, and promotes materialism and communism. Oktar argues that Darwinism, by stressing the "survival of the fittest", has inspired racism, Nazism, communism and terrorism. A claim not unexpected in Turkey when during the political turmoil before a 1980 military coup, communist bookshops touted Darwin's works as a complement to Karl Marx.

BAV spearheaded an effort to confront Turkish academics who taught evolutionary biology. A number of faculty members were harassed, threatened and slandered in fliers, leading to legal action against BAV. 

This really bothers me: universities shouldn't be hosting non-scientific charlatans. If students want to explore evolution, they should take a biology course in which they can experiment to their hearts' content, rather than attend pseudo-scientific events hosted by religious groups. Freedom of speech demands that all loons have their chance: but they shouldn't be given the credibility of a university as cover for divisive and dangerous nonsense.

In intend to go to this lecture - I may well blog it. I hope some of my biologist colleagues attend too. Come along: MC418, 1-3

Hello sailor!

Final few from my weekend down south (rest here):

It's that kind of place

Bliss!

Not very polite actually

Wyndham Court, Southampton. Great brutalist naval architecture in a town seemingly rebuilt by misanthropists otherwise.

A life on the ocean wave

A few more pictures - rest here. Click to embiggen.

Off to Libya with some incompetent spies…

Buoys, buoys, buoys

Waking up in a dull hotel on Sunday feeling ill and with 7 hours to go before I could get the train, I decided to take the ferry over to the Isle of Wight. It's very pretty: cute mansions, lots of yachts and gulls. It was also damn cold.

I took a lot of pictures, all of which can be seen here. Here are a few samples - click on them to enlarge. There were lots of blokes with cameras there: suspicious-looking individualists with more camera equipment than anyone can surely carry and CB radios: it dawned on me eventually that they were twitchers, or birders as they call themselves. They looked down on me with my puny 70-200 lens and non-birding pictures…

I really needed a tripod - so I bought one the next day

The scale of these things is immense

Bah

I went to Southampton this weekend, to enlighten people about the neo-Nazi themes in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley. Here's a bit of pop-culture trivia: the film adaptation won 5 Oscars in 1941, including Best Film. Thus beating Citizen Kane!

I came back with typhoid. I knew there was a reason to avoid the pestilential antipodean end of this island.

I croaked my way through about three pages of my paper, before noticing a '2 minutes to go' sign being waved in my face. It felt like I'd hardly started, but my points were made and a really lively question and answer session followed. I attended a range of other peoples' papers including one on Lucha Libre, but my favourite was Sarha Moore's 'Metal, Machismo and Musical Mode: How the 'Feminine' Phrygian second has been appropriated and transformed'.

Basically, with the aid of some clips and a melodica (keyboard thing you blow into), she demonstrated how the flat second (sing the Jaws theme to yourself: it's when the second note of a sequence is flat rather than a whole tone higher) went from being a suspiciously feminine technique used in madrigals to being a macho 'diabolic' sound used only in heavy metal.

After the conference, I tried to find somewhere to eat and got repeatedly turned away for being on my own on a Saturday night. Does wonders for one's sense of self-worth.

Rochdale welcomes the English Defence League

A crowd of racists are planning to descend on Rochdale at the weekend, as if that town hasn't suffered enough. Do turn out for the counter-demonstration, or at least read Ben's excellent piece on why the EDL are bunch of unpleasant fantasists.

They infest the West Midlands and Stoke to a very unhealthy degree, though their recent Luton event was a ridiculous flop. The plain truth is that not only are they too stupid to develop a convincing narrative for their problems (it's much easier just to blame Muslims), they're too stupid to understand that turning up in depressed towns, abusing the locals and smashing up a few shops while giving Nazi salutes isn't the way to persuade anyone.

Just to be clear - because I'm aware that EDL-types have difficulty with multisyllabic long words:

You are scum.
The vast majority of the UK's population are far too intelligent to fall for your lies.
You make the BNP look like the master-race, and they're poisonous, vicious, incompetents.
Muslims and immigrants didn't make your areas horrible: capitalism did, and you've helped.

One step closer to statehood

It's referendum result day in Wales: the vote was to give the Welsh Assembly law-making powers similar to the Scots Assembly. I have no idea why Wales didn't get them from the start other than Anglocentric discrimination, and it's about time.

Live TV coverage of the results here or an English-language webpage here: final tally at 1300.

Hands-on sex education

Northwestern University biology classes get straight to the point: a class featured a naked woman demonstrating female sexual arousal to the class, with the aid of a sex toy.

Luckily, I have footage of the event:

HarperCollins can sod off

This particularly grasping publisher has informed libraries that its e-books will self-destruct after 26 loans because 'that's how long physical books last'.

1. Untrue.
2. Isn't part of the point of e-books their indestructibility?
3. What an appalling attempt to disguise a simple financial decision. They must think we're all morons.

Book 'em, Danno

Tomorrow's World Book Night - hope you're joining in the celebrations in some way - perhaps by reading a book! I'm away at a conference for the weekend (got to write the paper this morning) so I'll have to collect my box of books on Monday. I applied for 48 copies of Nigel Slater's memoir, Toast, proposing to hand them out to the cooks in The Dark Place's pubs and cafés: Slater is a chef and food writer from this fair city, so it should catch readers' interests.

Ireland's cricket victory: the gloating continues

There will be a lot more of this to come.

It's amazing what a Labour/Fine Gael coalition can achieve a mere 4 days after the election.

Would you like to tuck a fiver down my y-fronts?

Horrific image, isn't it?

But Richard Drayton, an eminent Cambridge professor claims - with some cause - that this highly-educated government's philistine attack on education will turn educators into whores.

"A nomadic global pirate class buys 'onshore' services from prostitutes and politicians, journalists, mercenaries and academics...(who) can become a kind of intellectual lap dancer, gyrating to excite the attention of the rich and to provoke small tips."

He's right. If you read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, you'll recognise what's happening. In the aftermath of any disaster, the hard-right free-marketeers take the opportunity to cut and public services, demonising government as 'socialist' or 'incompetent. The hollow irony this time is that the disaster is one caused by free-market economics. They've smashed up the world economy and their solution is… more of the same!

Academics think of themselves as professionals because we get paid monthly and choose our own clothes, but we're deluding ourselves. I've never had a permanent job: I'm on a series of temporary ones. That means no security and no prospect of doing ordinary things like get a mortgage, saving for the future or not worrying about the possibility of long-term illness. More importantly: the more we're kept in a state of fear (they call it 'flexible employment'), the less likely we are to disagree with management or protest when they arse things up.

Right now, I'm acting as union representative for a colleague in an employment dispute. How am I meant to negotiate robustly, knowing that the people on the other side of the table will be examining my contract in the summer? How can I choose interesting, perhaps provocative texts for study when I'm aware that the institution is terrified of radical ideas and edgy texts?

The proletarianisation of education won't just beggar me and my colleagues: it is leading towards bland, safe curricula and self-satisfied students. How can I tell someone their work isn't good enough, knowing that their responses to satisfaction questionnaires will contribute to discussions about my job and - much more importantly - potential course closures?

What we'll end up with is boring courses taught by cowed academics churning out high marks to high-paying customers. Society is the loser: undereducated conformists do not generate cultural, scientific or economic innovation.

Drayton's not impressed by his colleagues' responses to this situation:

 "most British scholars have made only token opposition to these changes".

"The British Academy has offered cowardly hand-wringing, (while) vice-chancellors and many administrators have been active quislings, merely asking how they can best adapt to the new order," he said.

Students: how not to treat your research

You might think that a government-commissioned review of higher education funding would be utterly scrupulous in the way that it conducted and processed its research, even if the head of the commission, one Lord Browne, is a perjurer.

You'd be wrong. In a move which would get him expelled were he a third-year undergraduate writing a dissertation, it turns out that he spent almost £70,000 on qualitative focus groups, and then promptly suppressed the evidence because the results weren't what he wanted to hear. He could have presented their views and provided a counter-argument, but - in true Tory style - he just decided to ignore them and go ahead anyway.

I guess old habits die hard.

You know you're bourgeois when…

…you own two and a half butter dishes. Admittedly, one is a Marmite one and the half is the tray bit: I dropped the cover. Do you lot eat butter? I got so confused by all the bullshit health claims (first hydrogenated fats were good, then bad, cholesterol was going to kill us all then it was announced that dietary cholesterol didn't affect blood cholesterol etc. etc. etc.) that I decided just to go back to thick slabs of creamy butter. Sometimes even goats' milk butter. Mmmm.

In case you aren't entirely convinced by my middle-classness, check the incisive comments of Anonymous to this post I wrote earlier. He's got me bang to rights.

William Shakespeare, Botham, Quentin Crisp, Adam Ant, the Queen, David Cameron: your boys have taken a hell of a beating…

England have just lost a World Cup cricket match to Ireland! This just shouldn't happen, given the massive gulf between the teams, but it did - with several balls and wickets to spare.

Apart from the result, Kevin O'Brien set a record for the fastest World Cup century ever: 100 runs in 50 balls, and finished on 113 from 63 balls.

This is how the Guardian's commentators put it:

 I'm not sure even those words can do this justice. Ireland were completely out of it at the halfway stage, but then Alex Cusack and particularly Kevin O'Brien decided to give it a lash, with astonishing consequences. O'Brien demolished the record for the fastest World Cup hundred, smashing his off only 50 balls; and then, at the finish, Ireland were ice cool. They played with stunning maturity when the pressure was on. Ireland have also set a new record for the highest World Cup chase. More importantly, they've beaten England. At cricket. England had a shocker, but this is not about them. It's about one of the most charming and joyous wins we'll ever see and a match we will never forget, at least not until we're in the special home and the faculties have gone. 

This is definitely one of the most amazing results in any sport - what a shame that the cricket authorities are planning to block the Associate nations (Ireland, the Netherlands, Kenya, Canada and so on) from the World Cup.

The Scary Mail: giving voice to your darkest thoughts

This is rather wonderful: a website which animates the comments section of the Daily Mail. Don't watch too many, the stupid hurts.

Here's a sample:

Green about the gills

Ireland and England are playing each other in the 50-over World Cup match, right now. England should slaughter Ireland, but they're making slightly heavy weather of it: only two wickets down, but the scoring's not particularly fast. I'm praying for a sneaky Ireland win, though it's going to come down to the quality of the bowlers.

Unfortunately, due to a finger injury, Ireland won't have the pleasure of smashing the stumps behind Eoin Morgan: ex-Ireland turncoat and underwhelming current England player.

Follow it live here.

Causing offence

Morning all. How are you? You miserable bunch of…

Well, perhaps not. But yesterday evening Gandalf and I went to an English Subject Centre discussion about teaching potentially offensive material, what 'offence' might consist of, and how it affects our teaching practice. It was mostly the stylish young men of Birmingham City University, plus a senior academic from Keele and one from Newman (Birmingham's Catholic university).

True to form, Gandalf and I provided most of the examples from our wide repertoire of edgy teaching material (his Unpopular Texts module which examines taboo subjects, my Olivier Othello, Sappho, Rochester, Beauty, Freshers et al.) while the others provided the intellectual input, and the discussion was so good that we ignored the excellent buffet and carried on talking for almost three hours. I certainly picked up new perspectives and hopefully everyone else did too.

So over to you: have you taught or been taught anything which you found offensive, or feared that others might? What did you do? I certainly have. For instance, Rochester's poetry is deliberately crudely sexual - try being a young male lecturer reading that out to an all-female class.

Then there are the texts which I think are dubious. Samuelson's Beauty attracted a complaint of immorality because characters swear and look at porn. That didn't bother me: what made me very uncomfortable was the author's assumption that he - white, middle-class - could adequately inhabit the inner life of a young Asian woman, for whom he eventually decides that sending her back to care for her ageing parents constitutes freedom and the only honourable way to live. Faced with a class including many young Asian women, I worried about cultural sensitivity - perhaps needlessly. They split between finding the book true to life and laughably stereotypical, which was fascinating.

I could go on forever on this topic…

Meanwhile, could you contact your MP (via Twitter, faxyourmp.com or theyworkforyou.com) and ask them to sign EDM1185, asking the government to reconsider the closure of the Subject Centres - vital networks for sharing good teaching practice at university level, something the government apparently feels we no longer need?

Hello Colonel Pot, Meet President Kettle

The US Ambassador to the UN quite rightly described Gadaffi as delusional and accused him of 'laughing… while slaughtering his own people'.

Totally true. But it reminded me of another man who has killed hundreds of his own troops and hundreds of thousands of civilians in illegal and unnecessary wars, all seemingly without losing his levity.

Ah yes, here it is: it's George W. Bush

Sorry everyone

I'm going to a seminar at the English Subject Centre tonight, called 'On the Offensive', in which we're going to discuss how to teach subjects and texts which students may find challenging. Of all the quangos I've dealt with, the ESC is by far the best and most useful as I've become a university lecturer - so obviously the government is going to abolish it.

It's going to be very useful: I've had complaints about the immoral nature of the two books we've given the first years this semester (Samuelson's Beauty and Davies's Freshers). I've also (inadvertently) shown the students the Laurence Olivier 'blacked-up' Othello, and colleagues regularly examine the nature and role of pornography in a module on social taboos.

The Othello was a bit unfortunate. I actually only picked it because it was the only one with a running time of under 3 hours, which is the maximum teaching slot. Not only was Olivier's blackface a disgrace, it's an awful production. Hammy, stagy, melodramatic. As to Beauty and Freshers: they're both very flawed books - Beauty makes me more uncomfortable every time I think about it - but the fact that some characters do offensive things is the least of my concerns. If you can't deal with imaginary characters' behaviour, you probably shouldn't leave the house: there are a lot of bad people out there.

So basically what I'm going to say tonight is that your beliefs should be challenged by reading. Otherwise you may as well content yourself with the ingredients list of your favourite cereal for all the intellectual nourishment you'll get.

At this point I'd like to show you a clip from one of my favourite films, Clueless, but I can't find it on Youtube, so you'll have to make do with one of Cher's best lines in text:

Until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there's no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value.

Many, many more wonderful lines from that film here.

London School of Economical with the truth

LSE used to be one of the best universities in the country, despite being the alma mater of Jim Hacker.

But like so many competitive institutions, it's rather keener on money than morals: it took large amounts of money from the Gadaffi family and in return gave Saif Gadaffi a PhD (on liberal values!) despite the thesis being plagiarised, and showered praise on Libya's 'democratic' principles - as this film shows, even Saif couldn't help joking about it in a public lecture at LSE.

The LSE's former director Anthony Giddens obligingly cast Libya as the future "Norway of north Africa," writing in the Guardian, "Will real progress be possible only when Gaddafi leaves the scene? I tend to think the opposite."

Saif's also friends with the Blair, the royal family and Peter Mandelson. What scintillating parties they must have.

Still, LSE isn't the only institution to have sold its soul: Nottingham University has an International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. Who pays for it? Why, British American Tobacco of course. (File that one under 'you couldn't make it up'). I wonder if they run courses on Educational Institutions' Social Responsibility.

Meanwhile Oxford University has the Saïd Business School.

The School is dedicated to developing a new generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs, and conducting research not only into the nature of business, but the connections between business and the wider world.

The who business school? Wafic Said: billionaire tax-evader who made his money by attaching himself firmly to the Saudi dictatorship and becoming their main weapons dealer, particularly in the infamous Al-Yamamah arms deal, a byword for corruption and deceit so appalling that Tony Blair personally intervened to stop the police investigating it.

Having made billions supporting repression and dealing in death, the honours are pouring in:

 In 2003 he became the first recipient of the Sheldon Medal, which had been newly established by Oxford University to honour exceptional supporters of the University. He is also a member of Oxford University Court of Benefactors, Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In April 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Damascus University for his "important philanthropic contribution for Higher Education in Syria".

And like tax-avoiding Lord Ashcroft, he has a tame Caribbean nation to give him a diplomatic passport and somewhere to hide his cash:

Saïd is Ambassador and Head of the delegation of St Vincent and the Grenadines to UNESCO since 1996 (hence his entitlement to the style 'His Excellency' chiefly used in the context of his diplomatic role)

A model citizen. Large amounts of his money also go to support the Conservative Party.

But who am I kidding? The Hegemon would have given Hitler and honorary degree if he'd forked out some cash. After all, we've given one to

His Highness Lieutenant General Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan

deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister of the UAE because he is:

a pioneer in the realm of change and development and has made an outstanding contribution to society

Of course he is. And not just because we signed a contract to train this dictatorship's police forces. Is he a bad man?

Well, let's just point out one example of the UAE's approach to policing and justice under His Highness's guidance: his half-brother Sheik Issa filmed himself and his underlings torturing a man with a cattle prod up his anus, pouring lighter fluid over his testicles then setting them alight, shooting him with automatic weapons, beating him with nail-bearing planks and literally rubbing salt into the wounds, then killing him by running him over with a Mercedes. The man was a former business associate the Sheik suspected of stealing $5000 worth of grain.

You can watch some of the tape here: Youtube pulled it because it's too horrific.

But surely this honoured 'pioneer in the realm of change and development' made 'an outstanding contribution to society' by making sure justice was done?

The UAE government concedes that Sheik Issa is the man shown in the video but says he did nothing wrong. “The incidents depicted in the videotapes were not part of a pattern of behaviour,” the Ministry of the Interior said in a statement, according to ABC. 

“All rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly.”

The Interior Minister is Sheik Issa’s half-brother. They are among the country’s 22 royal sheiks.

Makes me proud. I wonder if UAE will see protests in the current wave.

Time's swift chariot

In the old days, it took years before a new Prime Minister started invading Arabic and Islamic countries.

Although Thatcher 'let' the Americans use their UK airbases to bomb Libya (a mere three years after the Yanks had invaded the British dependency of Grenada without even mentioning it to her) in 1986, she didn't actually invade anywhere. She planned the Kuwait operation, but was booted out (after 11 years) before UK forces replaced the Iraqi dictatorship with the previous dictators. So although John Major technically did invade within a few weeks of taking control, it was already a done deal.

Blair of course invaded as many countries as he could find, but I guess Kosovo was the first part-Muslim one he dropped in on - 1999, two years after he was elected, and he left it until 2001 and 2003 to invade Afghanistan and Iraq respectively. He took a very different approach to Libya, as we all know.

So Cameron's record of getting the SAS into Libya within a year of reaching power is pretty impressive. The only way Ed Miliband can top that is to invade Oman now, before he even wins an election. Seriously: it's a small and undemocratic regime which has alienated its people ripe for liberation.

Just like New Labour.

Boom Boom.