Wow, a new ally!

Who described the Daily Mail in these terms?

"sexist, racist, bigoted, comic cartoon strip".

He also apologised for breaking the trade descriptions act by describing the Mail as a "newspaper".

John Bercow.

So?

He's a Tory Scum MP (and speaker of the House of Commons). I couldn't have put it better myself.

As predicted

I suggested yesterday that the proposed New College of Humanities (profit-making, £18,000) per year would be a sham.

I was right: it's offering the same University of London External degree, lots of the course content is stolen, and the celebrity profs are merely window-dressing:

In another blow to the fledgling institution, it was reported today that two of the high-profile academics involved – historians Sir David Cannadine and Linda Colley – will only teach for an hour each in the institution’s first year.

Anyone who goes there will get what they deserve.

This is a real book

I think I've finally found a book I don't want to buy, courtesy of Awful Library Books. Though I may recommend it to students at exam time.

Bits'n'bobs

I'm an inveterate ripper-out of newspaper articles, turner-down of page corners and magpie for quotes. This one caught my eye the other day: it's by the formidable American journalist, Janet Malcolm:

"The invented I of journalism" as Malcolm calls it, is not a stable entity. One of the things she realised early on in her writing career was that, she says, "this 'I' was a character, just like the other characters. It's a construct. And it's not the person who you are. There's a bit of you in it. But it's a creation. Somewhere I wrote, 'the distinction between the I of the writing and the I of your life is like Superman and Clark Kent.'"

It seems particularly relevant - hopefully obviously - to our online lives, whether it's a Facebook profile that only presents your best features, or a blog such as this: you may have noticed that parts of my personal and professional life are off-limits. I have colleagues, friends and loved ones; quite rightly, I don't want to discuss them in this forum and many of them don't want to be discussed. I also edit out the boring bits of my life unless I think I can entertain you with them (coming next: tips for ironing your socks). I don't even talk about my meagre research very much because I recognise that your enthusiasm for Welsh and proletarian 1930s literature is less constant than mine. Other people are different. LitLove and The Red Witch are exemplary my favourite online academics, whereas Blossom shares her insight into the (fascinating) life of a student divorced mother with a candidness that I admire but couldn't (and wouldn't) share.

That's partly why I use Plashing Vole rather than my actual name: not particularly to hide, but because the I of the blog is not the rather greyer I some of you see in class, the pub or at home.

And on the same subject, anyone else who writes that Prospero 'is Shakespeare', I will fail you on the spot. Biographical criticism is a blind alley. If people could only write about what they'd personally felt or seen, we'd have no SF and very little other fiction. What's more, Prospero is a very sinister individual, not the kindly old gent people seem to think he is.

Meanwhile, as I head home to do some ironing while watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'll leave you with some wise words from W. H. Auden, a man who liked his commas even more than I do:

…one does not have to be ashamed of moods in which one feels no desire to read The Divine Comedy… among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honour should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right to play, the right to frivolity, is not the least'.

That is all.

'Spare rooms a luxury too far' says multimillionaire Baron

Yes, it's true. Apparently the country isn't being sucked dry by corporate tax evasion and bailing out the banks. It's the greedy low-paid who think that housing benefit should fund a home with a spare room.

Spare bedrooms for people in social housing are a luxury the country can no longer afford, a minister has said.

Tenants with spare rooms will lose £11 a week in housing benefit under changes going through Parliament.

Asked by You and Yours presenter Julian Worricker, if a spare bedroom should be regarded as a "luxury" for those in social housing, Lord Freud said: "Exactly - we have got a housing benefit expenditure that is simply out of control. 

You single parents disgust me. Wanting your children to have their own room. Can't you see that the world's 5th biggest economy is being dragged beneath the waves because of YOUR selfishness. 


Privately educated Baron Freud didn't make hundreds of millions of pounds by leeching a spare room courtesy of hard-working taxpayers. He made it through financial speculation and probably through inheriting a large amount of money. Why can't you?


(And while they're fining these people, it turns out that they couldn't move to smaller places if they wanted to):

Figures from the National Housing Federation suggest that around 180,000 social tenants in England are "under-occupying" two-bedroom homes, but just 68,000 one-bedroom social homes became available for letting in a single year.

Amongst the dreaming spires

Over at Oxford, they're debating a motion of no confidence in David Willetts, the Universities Minister. I'm trying to organise the same thing here, as are concerned academics across the country.

But occasionally, our colleagues in the kind of élite institutions which prefer not to admit working-class, poor or ethnic minority students get it horrendously wrong. Here's an extract from a speech by Donald Fraser of Oxford University:

He calls for a return to higher education before 1992, and the creation of the new universities, and refers sceptically to a new university in the Midlands that offers courses in "cake decoration, wines and spirits appreciation" - adding, to laughter from the dons, that he knows students who already do this in their spare time. He says there are too many universities and calls for a cull.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there isn't a single degree-awarding institution offering degrees in these subjects, here in the Midlands or anywhere else: this is a fantasy straight out of the Daily Mail.

If I'm wrong, do let me know. Did you graduate with a First in Cake Decorating?

Caps off to the Oxford Dons though: no confidence in Willetts by 283-5.

What teachers can learn from cinemas

This is what a Texas cinema did with a complaint from a woman kicked out for persistently texting during a film.



At the university, I used to make a fuss when students did this. Now it's rife and I've given up. Reckon I should boot people out for disrupting other people's learning? After all, a lecture's far more important than a movie.

I'm definitely reading the wrong books

One of my interests - which might eventually lead to writing something - is children's and teen fiction, and I've got a lot of it on my shelves, from The Wind in the Willows to I Capture the Castle to Inkheart to Doing It and Philip Pullman, and everything inbetween.

So imagine my surprise when I read this:

 all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff."

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18. 

a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds. 

Really? Yes, Burgess's Doing It and Lady: My Life as a Bitch are deliberately provocative (and moral), but if it's true that mainstream children's literature is a sink-hole of filth and depravity, then I've definitely missed out. The top dogs of teen fiction, Pullman and Rowling, don't do sex. They do love, and loss, and desire and the host of conflicting emotions which come with the ambiguous relationships of teen peer-groups, but there's no gratuitous - or recreational - sex.

The same is true of most children's literature. Browse any bookshop and you'll find that apart from the now-fading rash of vampire stuff (which was once truly sexual when aimed at adults but is now populated by abstinence-promoting conservative trash like Twilight), the vast majority of kids' books are about two things: emotional deprivation and environmental fears. The astonishing success of Jacqueline Wilson's books are testament to kids' desire for emotional bonds and their admiration for Tracy Beaker, the neglected, complex heroine coping with life in a children's home.

As for the rest - you'd be astonished how much post-apocalypse material there is for teens: floods and environmental collapse have replaced nuclear war as the trigger: Bloodsong: Burgess's speculative retelling of the Icelandic Volgsungsagas set in ruined London, Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, Meg Rossoff's elegiac How I Live Now and many more.

Who would I recommend? Add to those listed above Neil Gaiman, Anne of Green Gables, Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor series, T. H. White's The Once and Future King, The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice of course, the Moomins, Tom's Midnight Garden, anything by Terry Pratchett, Molesworth, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner above anybody else, Bella Bathurst, Mervyn Peake, Joe Dunthorne (you may have seen the recent adaptation of Submarine). And if you think that escapist children's literature is somehow immune from 'issues', you haven't read Alison Lurie's Don't Tell the Grown-Ups.

So what is it with these reactionaries whinging about teen fiction? Their central claim - that there's nothing more than abuse and misery on the shelves - is laughable. Sweet and 'innocent' texts abound: I've mentioned some above, and could go on.

No, the subtext is a denial of one of the central teen experiences: the revelation that there's a complex world out there. Developing a moral and political personality is as important as sexual maturity. For me, acquiring, testing, discarding and sometimes keeping ideas and opinions as a teen defined me. From the magic words of my headmaster ('you're just a bloody Guardian reader' - which I hadn't been but quickly became), I accessed politics, philosophy, economics and everything else through the medium of books. The alternative was to take my learning from my religious parents and religious school, and from my narrow, rural middle-class background. Morality seems to simple to a teen. Things are just right, or wrong. Minor evils abounded, but it was only through reading that I became aware of the structural, systematic immorality of humanity.

To some extent, the secret to becoming a moral adult is to hold on to that feeling, while understanding (as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis didn't) that people believe, think or do immoral things not because they're irredeemably evil themselves, but because human society is structured in such a way that we do these things without thinking. Everything I'm wearing is made by a child for a pittance. So is the Mac on which I'm typing this. A well-read teen possesses the moral clarity to know this and has the leisure and powerlessness required for idealism: the jaded, lazy, busy adult I've become knows it too, but he also knows that we all like it this way as long as we don't have to think about it too much.

Underneath this howl of protest is a deeply reactionary, conservative political position, and it's one which is a huge, backhanded compliment to children's writers. It says, in essence, that children shouldn't know that the world is a complicated and often dark place. To clear the shelves of everything but the saccharine and anodyne is to deny children fundamental truths about ourselves.

The Guardian, Militant (my late-teen newspapers of choice) and Karl Marx didn't turn me into an armchair Trotskyist. Who did? Ratty and Mole. Hazel and Fiver. Mary Poppins. Mrs. Rochester. The Children of the New Forest (stuck-up gits, wish the Roundheads had executed them. Mrs. Frisby. Pink Rabbit. Molesworth and Jennings.

And let's not pretend that disturbing children's literature is somehow a product of 21st-century moral decline: have you ever read Perrault's stories, or Grimm, or Struwwelpeter and so on ad infinitum. The oldest, most popular stories are all about the grim consequences for children who meet adults or try to learn something about the outside world: abducted ('The Pied Piper of Hamelin') or even eaten ('Hansel and Gretel'). The Wind in the Willows makes light of car theft and lynch mobs. Little Red Riding Hood wasn't a heroine really: she was a naughty girl whose pubescence made her the victim of the Wolf because she strayed from the path. What this lazy journalist objects to isn't 'issues' in kids' books: it's a morality which doesn't depend on fear and repression. Her old favourites are designed to scare children into accepting the status quo: the new breed want to shake it up. Good for them.

Also: she's writing for the Wall Street Journal: the house magazine of naked capitalism. The books she objects to wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market demand for them. The society she helps create and maintain has produced these books, so she hasn't a leg to stand on.

Of course, there is an argument against giving teens miserable books about self-harm and so  on. It's that old chestnut 'effects':

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures.

It is, of course, unbelievably weak, which is why it features in the Daily Mail most days. Because Jamie Bulger's killers watched Child's Play, that must have made them kill a child. Sorry, it doesn't work. I read hundreds of books about dwarves and fairies killing demons and never believed in them (ditto the Gospels). I've read and watched enough murders to shame Goebbels, yet I've never killed anyone. Tortured bodies are not dumped on the streets every time ITV screens Saw. Children can distinguish between fiction and real life. The idea that unhappy kids start carving their own flesh because someone in a book did it (and no, I can't think of any books in which it's presented as a cool idea) is an insult to those who do self-harm.

Gurdon also objects to books like this:

the latest novel by "this generation's Judy Blume," otherwise known as Lauren Myracle, takes place in a small Southern town in the aftermath of an assault on a gay teenager. The boy has been savagely beaten and left tied up with a gas pump nozzle shoved down his throat, and he may not live.

The author makes free with language that can't be reprinted in a newspaper. 

Er… loosely based on an actual murder. If you don't want kids to know about what happens to isolated teens in redneck communities, don't blame the author: blame the society which allowed this to happen. And if your newspaper is scared of language as its spoken (even by its own readers!), it's a risible newspaper more concerned with pretence than reality.

The final word goes to one of Gurdon's prime targets, Jackie Morse Kessler:

"Issue novels ... are not simply 'relevant for the young'. They're urgent for the young, and for their parents. Ignoring issues such as self-injury or eating disorders or bullying doesn't make them go away. Covering our ears and shutting our eyes and going 'LA LA LA' as loud as we can doesn't make these problems magically disappear. The only things that go away if you ignore them are your teeth," she wrote.

Now let's hear Ms. Gurdon's recommendations for teens.

Rant over.

So, how will these private universities work?

Well, according to this article, Richard Dawkins and David Cannadine's for-profit New College (£18,000 per year for an External BA from the University of London) relies at least in part on course content dreamed up 20 years ago by a 21-year-old eking out his MA grant with a little moonlighting…


Who needs experts, or contemporary scholarship. Hope Dawkins' courses aren't similarly outdated: genetics has moved on a little since then. If you really think that Dawkins will take time away from research, book-pushing and TV appearances to teach first-year frog-cutting, you're insane. Though no doubt Niall Ferguson will make the effort: he rarely gets to spout his unthinking rightwing crap to receptive audiences without being howled down, and he'll never get a more adoring crowd for his lectures on why free-market capitalism and Empire are brilliant than the spoilt toffs who'll pack his lectures.


What a horrible little institution it will be: stuffed with the mega-rich, expecting (and presumably not getting) personal attention from mega-stars. There's a long list of big names, some of which (Linda Colley!) disappoint me hugely. They have a lot to give, but these ageing lions, gradually being edged out of the pack, have decided that it's more important to make a fast buck trading on their reputations than spreading the wisdom down in the paper mines with the rest of us. 
Or not:

Every student will have a one-to-one tutorial in their main subject each week in which they will be grilled on their latest essay, though these will not be conducted by the star names, but by a professional teaching staff that is currently being recruited.

The Hegemon is about widening participation: I'd rather teach here forever than spend my time fawning over the braying privileged brats who'll flock to New College. 


One more time, with feeling: what you get out of tertiary education depends on what YOU put in. We're here to guide you, not to sprinkle you with stardust or tell you what to write. Celebrity - in academia and other walks of life - is no guarantee of quality teaching or support. 


This isn't an education: it's branding. It's the Vuitton of schooling: loud, vulgar and selfish.

Bah Humbug!

Now you know me, and you'd trust me never to say anything critical about my august employer, The Hegemon.

So like me, you'll read its annual report with drooling and fervent admiration. You won't mentally footnote every claim, and you certainly wouldn't choke on the proud references to our sterling work on behalf of various repressive dictatorships (for a cynical, carping, nitpicking attitude towards this country - which very sensibly bans academic freedom of speech and the right to free assembly, and allows close relatives of our friends to film themselves torturing and murdering business rivals with impunity - you might like to click here, or here).

The growing profile we enjoy in the United Arab Emirates is apparent from the relationships we have developed there. In February 2010, senior staff from the University visited Abu Dhabi to present an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Social Science to Deputy Prime Minister, His Highness Lieutenant General Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The award was presented in honour of His Highness’s considerable contribution to urban development, in particular his leading role in designing security and safety measures for the protection of residents of, and visitors to, the UAE.

What do we mean by 'security and safety measures'? Well, we mean sending troops to crush the disenfranchised citizens of Bahrain, and we mean death threats, the state kidnapping of  academics, the closure of civil society groups and a range of oppressive activities.

'And the award for most academics arrested in a term goes to…'

Should a university really be supplying courses to - and giving awards to - people who lock up my colleagues? This is what Human Rights Watch says about NYU and the Sorbonne, who have failed to protest the imprisonment of their employee, Nasser al-Ghaith:

As partners of the UAE government, these non-profit institutions are not only well-placed to condemn these outrageous attacks but have a responsibility to do so. These public institutions claim to be doing more than turning a pretty profit with their glamorous, starchitect-designed outposts in Abu Dhabi. They promised the world that they will serve the public good by creating a powerful UAE center of "ideas, discourse, and critical thinking" and that their branches will serve as a "bridge between civilizations," as the Sorbonne Abu Dhabi motto says.

The Hegemon certainly doesn't have 'star architects', but we do seem to be advising and training the security apparatus, so we're morally culpable for what's going on.

(Mind you, what to expect from an institution whose billionaire tax-avoiding Chancellor was suspended from the House of Lords for fiddling his expenses to the tune of £41,000?).

And so the day is ended…

What a day: stolen sandwiches and two hours of our external examiners telling us how brilliant we are despite our management… It's also fascinating hearing how other institutions do things (i.e. research-led teaching, small classes, academics making academic decisions).

Books in today:
A translation of Béroul's prose Romance of Tristan, Cyril Edwards' translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval German Arthurian romance poem Parzival, with Titurel too, Norris Lacy's The Lancelot-Grail Reader (the condensed version, unfortunately), and Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret. Oh, and an interesting CD, Julianna Barwick's The Magic Place. It's not Enya, it's looped polyphonic sampling, I keep telling myself.



Now I'm off for pints and a slap-up feed with the examiners.

Owling at the moon

Final set from the Etruria Canal Fair. There was an owl stall: presumably rescued ones which can't be released into the wild, I hope. 

Pygmy owl. Very cool. I could have one on my shoulder in class. "Wrong. Peck out his soft little eyes. Fly, my pretty".

Bengal Eagle Owl

Pygmy owl again

'Free badger stroking'. An odd way to promote a town council.

Barging in

Some more pictures from my day at the Etruria Canal Fair. Click them to enlarge, or see the whole set here.

The top two chaps are reflected in the window: the one at the bottom is inside.

I was trying to capture motion with slow exposures. Lots more in the main set. Without a tripod, it's really difficult. 

A right hook

Looking up the flint kiln

Caught speeding…

Potter's hands

This is the real Stoke

'Owling mad…

Of badger-stroking and other activities…

You already know that I like to take photographs. But when I see sets like this, I feel like giving up: here's someone with a fantastic eye for composition and lighting. I'd love to go on an urban decay photography tour.

Talking of weird exploration, Cynical Ben has yet another website to which you're invited to contribute. It's called wehatewords. Authors and sentences are hated too. Try it. I'm going to.

Anyway, back down at my level, I had a very busy weekend. Spent a day in a Sheffield hotel's seminar room preparing for the UK School Games 2011. Mostly efficient and matter-of-fact, though one individual's speech resulted in a quite good doodle and a list of phrases which I may well donate to We Hate Words: 'empower', 'baggage', 'key learnings', 'in a good place', 'operational delivery', 'dynamic' and 'interactive'.

Then it was off to see a not-very-good play supposedly about maths called Proof: it turned out to be sickeningly soapy. Finally, the Map Twats visited the Etruria Museum's Canal/Steam/Random Stuff fair in the town Prince Philip called 'ghastly'. Truly, there was a child lost in the Tunnel of Goats.* So I took some pictures and we had a great time.

Stoke-on-Trent always seems monochrome to me

Portrait of a stoker-engineer with the saturation reduced

Mill engine detail

Ripping Yarns: textiles volunteer group

Rag rug detail

McCormick Farmall tractor. Lovely typography

*Father Ted reference for the uninitiated.

Taking the moral and intellectual high ground

If you haven't discovered the delights of Conservapedia yet, then you should abandon all thoughts of work for the rest of the day. Imagine an encyclopaedia with most of the facts taken out and replaced with snide, rightwing, dishonest and disingenuous commentary (e.g. it presents George Washington as an orthodox Christian rather than a deist: he and the other Founding Fathers accepted that there was a creator, but that he'd since lost interest). 

The site is an object lesson in 'playing the man not the ball'. If you're an atheist, for instance, Conservapedia is very keen to link that to your perceived moral or physical failings. Rather dangerously for an American website, given that nation's unfortunate tendency towards ponderousness, it thinks that the most damning thing it can say about any atheist is that they're a little porky because they aren't Christian. Here's a selection from the list of Atheists

Dara Ó Briain is an Irish comedian and he is an atheist.^[201] A 2008 picture of an overweight Dara Ó Briain can be found HERE

Walter Block is an atheist economist. A picture of an overweight Walter Block can be found HERE.

Carol Ann Duffy, CBE,(born 1955) is a Scottish poet and playwright. Carol Ann Duffy is an atheist.^[202] A picture of an overweight Ms. Duffy can be found HERE

Edmund White is a author, literary critic, homosexual and an atheist.^[203][204] Photos of an overweight Edmund White can be found HERE and HERE.

The Bible declares lesbianism to be a sin (Romans 1:27) and lesbians have significantly higher rates of obesity.^[214]Since the Bible declares gluttony and lesbianism to be sins, no doubt there are obese people and/or lesbians who reject Christianity, despite the abundant evidence for Christianity, and decide to become atheists rather than repent and become Christians. 

That last entry is accompanied by a photo of Beth Ditto. Perhaps they've got it in for Buddha… and footnotes.

Why the Liberal Democrats are (and deserve to be) dead ducks

A very interesting report into the operation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition was published today. Unsurprisingly, it declared that the Lib Dems are too few, too poor and too weak to make much difference to the Tory juggernaut.


Most damning of all was this bit:

In a sign of the ideological unity inside departments, the unit said: "There have been very few – if any – cases where ministers in departments have divided on party lines.

"Indeed, across whole swathes of policy the coalition partners have discovered little difference in their policy responses when confronted with the hard choices of government.

We on the left have always known that under the Arran jumpers and sandals was a party of selfish rightwingers, but many deluded people have seen them as the 'nice' party. No longer. Why vote Lib Dem if they're Tories? If you're a Tory, vote Tory. If you're not, vote Labour, Green or the imaginary Green Socialist party I've just thought up. If you're actually a Lib Dem, be honest and vote Tory. 

Everybody needs a holiday

The world continues to crash round our ears. The environment is ruined to such an extent that there's no escape. It's too late. The NHS is being dismembered. The poor and the sick and the old and the young are under constant attack. Universities and schools are degraded in the pursuit of a low-skills, low-wage economy. This city has 25% empty shops and a host of social problems associated with social decay.

What's my MP, the lovely Paul Uppal, doing about it? Well, the good news is that he's put in a cameo appearance in the city. The bad news - according to his Twitter feed -  is that he's spending it lounging around in the gardens of a National Trust stately home, in the only area unaffected by his party's disgraceful policies. No doubt charming the rich old ladies who volunteer (and - entirely coincidentally - vote Conservative) there is exactly what Cameron thinks the Big Society is all about, but it's not going to get the rest of us out of the mire, is it?

Still, there's a great view from Wightwick Manor (one of my favourite places). From the manicured lawns, Uppal can gaze down on the tumbledown schools, abandoned nurseries and sink estates which are his and his party's legacy.

Wondering about Uppal's workrate? Well, this is what you get when you put his name into Google News:

Your search - "Paul Uppal" mp - did not match any documents.

Meanwhile, some naughty Wrexham supporter living here has also been teasing Mr. Uppal. Are we in a situation where his detractors put in more effort than the target of our affection?

Where I live, imaginary MP Paul Uppal (a man who’s only connection to Wolverhampton seems to have been getting a shiny Mick McCarthy sticker in his Italia 90 Panini album) represents us having won under First Past The Post.  

Your friend the corporation

It's a truism that corporations resent the warm fuzzy emotions people get from doing things you can't commodify: love, in particular. That's why so many ads try to insert their products into scenes of joy: family life, relationships and so on. It's called simulation, whereas the relationships they can't actually appropriate are known as symbolic exchanges, in Baudrillard's terms.


Some companies actively take the piss though. Chief amongst them is Vodafone. Fresh from its triumph in tapping every Greek mobile phone call on behalf of the American Embassy, they've released a short film and campaign called Our Power, in which they attempt to claim a central role in the Egyptian revolution.

The video goes on to show images from protest rallies in Cairo's Tahrir Square before claiming: "We didn't send people to the streets, we didn't start the revolution … We only reminded Egyptians how powerful they are."

The short film features screengrabs of Facebook and Twitter messages posted by Egyptians approving of the Vodafone ad campaign, then an audio recording of Hosni Mubarak's resignation as president being announced on TV.

To make matters worse for Vodafone and JWT, both the original ad campaign and the latest video feature Adel Emam, a veteran Egyptian actor who initially denounced the pro-change protests in January and has been widely derided in Egypt for his close links with the Mubarak family.

Vodafone is one of several firms in Egypt that agreed to shut off its mobile and internet networks in the early stages of the revolt as the government attempted to isolate anti-Mubarak protesters. It also allowed the Mubarak regime to send out anti-revolutionary text messages en masse to subscribers.

The firm is facing a series of legal challenges over what some critics have called its "complicity in dictatorship". It is accused of passing on information about opposition activists to the Mubarak regime's security services – a claim seemingly confirmed by Vodafone's global head of content standards, Annie Mullins, in February 2009 but later denied by Vodafone Egypt. 

By a funny coincidence, a mobile phone provider called Vodafone followed the dictatorship's orders and closed down their network to prevent the revolution spreading. 


I wonder if they're related.


This is of course an extreme example of how capitalism works, and it's no surprise to see Vodafone back-pedalling like mad, but it's a mode of behaviour that's become normal. Every gig you attend 'sponsored' by a hair gel firm or a lager maker is a trap. They've bought a captive audience, and it's you.

More tales from the Rock and Roll frontline

You may know that I share an office with Alan Apperley from post-punk heroes The Nightingales. It emerged this morning that my colleague Alison co-wrote this track by OK Venus. It's… well, it's of its time. They got on TV a couple of times but didn't quite make it.

For Ryan Giggs, Max Mosley and the other shrinking violets

I went to the Wolverhampton Beer Festival last night, which was a hoot. The crowd was of course drawn from the road and drum tech fraternity (bellies, beards and prog rock t-shirts, but also a surprising number of the young and trim). 


Top tip: Skinner's Ginger Tosser was lovely, though slightly spoiled by the image of Paul Scholes I couldn't shake off. It's made with ginger (duh) and honey. Mmm. Top marks to the Hobson's Mild (tastes of nuts) and the various mindblowing chocolaty stouts and porters. No pork scratchings though, what an oversight for a beer festival.


After that it was back to my place to drink more fine ale and play records: REM's Document, some Burt Bacharach and Wire's Pink Flag. Which reminded me of their 'Field Day for the Sundays'. I imagine Mr. Giggs might empathise with the lyrics.

I wanna be a field day for the Sundays so they can fuck up my life
Embarass my wife, and leave a bad taste
That striped toothpaste can't remove on Monday mornings
I wanna be a target for the dailies so they can show
Pictures of me with a nude on page three, so lacking in taste
Touched up near the waist,  looking as limp as Monday morning

Good Mormon USA!

So, the Republicans have finally got an official Presidential candidate who isn't howlingly mad (i.e. not Palin or Ron Paul).

Or have they? OK, Mitt Romney ticks all the boxes for a candidate from any party: hugely rich, privileged and ideologically well to the right. But what caught my eye is his Mormon belief. Now as far as I'm concerned, any religious belief is akin to mental illness (whether you agree with a Vengeful God or a Nice God, you'd still rather think that somebody deliberately made Auschwitz, plague and Justin Bieber rather than accept that physics brought them about without regard for our feelings).

But Mormonism. Wow, that's crazy. And offensive, especially when you get to the bit about Americans being the chosen people. I've never quite got why God would go 'eeny meeny miny mo' when it comes to humanity, and it's certainly clear enough that Somalians, for instance, haven't come in for any special treatment - unless from the Vengeful Smiting God), but there's something rather unpleasant about Joseph Smith announcing that Americans are the Special Ones. You can bet he didn't mean African-Americans or Native Americans, too: black people were only recently permitted entry to the priestly caste in 1978. Apparently Christ did have a go with the natives, but they didn't take to it.

What of other Mormon beliefs. Well, like Catholicism, it's male supremacist, which is why you only get neatly-dressed young men wearing out your door bell. We'll pass over the polygamy: like mainstream Christianity dropping social justice when it made a pact with political power, most Mormons quietly dropped this when Joseph Smith got Utah into the Union after Missouri chucked them out for staging a violent insurrection (wonder what Romney thinks of that). Smith was lynched while awaiting trial for treason.

This is the Joseph Smith who was given the new texts of Mormonism on solid gold plates, dropped off by an angel. Solid gold plates that he carelessly mislaid.

Oh yes, and Mitt Romney will be wearing the special and compulsory Mormon Religious Underpants.

I'm uncomfortable with anyone religious wielding power, because I want them to answer to and act on behalf of their citizens, not their religious beliefs. Perhaps I'm more bothered by Romney because his chosen sect is so recent and therefore merely looks more bonkers than Catholicism or Islam.

There are plenty of reasons to find Romney repulsive, starting with all his revolting hard-right policies. But I still think that anyone who has to wear special undercrackers shouldn't have the nuclear launch codes.

Take the sex test

VS Naipaul (not a writer I particularly rate) has made some headlines claiming to be able to spot a writer's sex immediately. He also claimed that there are no female writers at all up to his standard.

So try this Guardian quiz. I got 7 out of 10 right. How will you do?

What gives it away? I'm not sure. Many women writers don't dwell on female bodies in the drooling way a certain group of male ones do. I can tell the difference between Austen and Amis, for example, but a lot of it is period, class and subject matter. On similar grounds and generations, it's more difficult. There is linguistic research into gendered language use, but it's not my field at all.

Filling in the longeurs

With marking done and my desk disinfected, there's a danger that my waking hours will once more become a wasteland of sitting around in my pants rocking back and forth in front of Jeremy Kyle…

Luckily, The Hegemon's management are so unpleasant and incompetent that those magic hours with Jeremy will have to be postponed in favour of emergency union meetings. The latest wheeze is to reduce the hours reserved for various types of activity, so that it looks like we aren't horrendously overworked. In reality, of course, we're hugely understaffed. Classes are too big, administration (only managers get admin staff) takes weeks and research doesn't get done unless you're one of the Big Beasts who refuses to teach, sit on committees or help students.

Here's one of my favourite meetings, from the glorious Glenngarry GlenRoss, a film summarising why I like working in the public sector, despite everything.

Rats!

I spent the morning tiptoeing round the corpses of rats in my apartment block's basement, trying to find my water meter - very unpleasant. The rest of the day should be slightly better: reviewing a paper on Hinduism for a colleague, then off to my local Beer Festival! Huzzah.

Meanwhile, my Canadian readers and those of you who've been to Canada might care to offer tips on Coping With Canadians: last night I had a farewell drink and curry with my young friend Jim, who's off to Toronto for a year. He was there for a year as a student, but now needs to find a job.

My friends… national treasures!

This is what Mojo (I know it's about the dead, read by the nearly dead, but bear with me) had to say about The Nightingales' London gig on Monday:

…the astonishing revelation of Rob Lloyd's Nightingales. Formed out of the ashes of blackly-comic Birmingham punk upsetters The Prefects, Nightingales Mk. 1 existed from 1979 to '86, Black Country Magic Banders spinning Daedalian indie skronk around Lloyd's slashing gnomic utterances. Since reforming in 2004, Nightingales Mk 2 have survived - like post-punk fellow-travellers The Fall - as an ever-shifting cast of players, a tightly schooled all-ages boot-camp in the employ of one man's absurdist poetic invective.

Recently retrained at Jochen Irmler's Faust Studio, tonight Lloyd and founder Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley field a side barely three weeks old. Bassist Andreas Schmid, a Faust Studio apprentice, is suitably young and severe, the possible leader of some Marxist-Leninist '70s student cell, in academic black suit and socialist haircut. Skinny in black jeans and black western shirt, hair like squid-ink candy floss, rhythm guitarist Matt Wood resembles a teenage Horrors offcast, while from behind her own heavy witch-black fringe ex-Violet Violet drummer Fliss Kitson pounds out the glam-kosmische bin rhythms. As Lloyd takes the stage - stout, bespectacled, wily smile flickering between joy and contempt - the image is complete; it is the embittered Marxist history teacher fronting the school band, the academy in peril.

With no time for nostalgia, tonight The Nightingales ignore any notion of greatest hits in favour of joyous reinvention. Feeding off the hard-drilled energy of these junior initiates, Apperley spins frayed Bo Diddley riffs around Lloyd's tumbling psychedelic eavesdroppings, allowing the singer to recycle, reinvent and repurpose thirty years of vituperative notebook aphorisms, constructing an intense, breathless narrative from the recycled past to the scorched present. And, like some Christ-like curmudgeon, newly risen to grouse again, Lloyd feeds off the audience fervour, growing stronger, yet ever wary; grinning broadly, flicking the Vs, and mouthing "What the f---?!"

With every repurposed song - plus a combative cover of Gary Glitter's I Didn't Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock & Roll) - the band become yet more powerful, Apperley and the kids locked in a heavy zig-zag groove as Lloyd bellows out caustic images from his mordant world-view, like some Black Country Stuart Staples, holidaying in the window of an Arndale Pound Shop. The cumulative effect is one of euphoric delight, of old knowledge in the hands of new disciples. "Dig the depth of the furrow of mirth that I can plough," sings Lloyd on The Overreactor. Tonight The Nightingales hit an epic new low. Catch them when they're at it again.

The Scotsman has this to say:

The combination of youthful fire and Lloyd's grouchy old geezer persona made for a set with real personality. Suited, bespectacled and with the air of the teacher everyone knew not to mess with at school, Lloyd wasn't as cantankerous as the Fall's Mark E Smith, although his insistence that one chatterbox "****ing shut the **** up" was the kind of thing most singers probably wish they had the guts to do.

Although often lost amidst the wash of jazz-shaped discord, battering beat group stomps, primal new wave and psychedelic interludes during tracks like Wot No Blog? and Workshy Wunderkind, Lloyd's lyrics were the highlight of this set. They painted bleak but vivid pictures alongside a drumbeat battering down like rain during Born Again in Birmingham, their anger and humour the main argument for this band claiming the credit they're long overdue.

They (and Ted Chippington) went down well in Bristol. Even the Shropshire Star's getting in on the act!

Ewar's latest wheeze

OK, before I start cleaning my desk and corner (my office mates are horrified by the squalor), I need to plug Ewar's current activity. Now lectures and exams are finished, he and his minions are clearly very bored.

So they - in concert with the ne'erdowells over at Football 365 - have decided to subvert Next's 'Next Model 2011' PR stunt by nominating someone called Roland Bunce.

It seems like a good use of your time. So don't be a dunce, vote Roland Bunce.

Got your Olympics tickets?

I applied for all the fencing finals, hoping I wouldn't get them all as it would cost a fortune.
It looks like I've got about half of them: £196 has gone from my account, but there's no notification from the organisers as to which ones I've managed to get.

Hopefully I'll be working (voluntarily) at the Olympics anyway: interview towards the end of June. It's way too late to be on the referees list (though I've done the Modern Pentathlon World Cup and some other international stuff), but I hope to get something exciting.

Ici commence l'aliénation

Alienation starts here: one of the slogans of the 68 uprising, in which French students and workers united against the capitalist regime of Charles de Gaulle, which they saw as neo-fascist, with some strong evidence in their favour, and as the local manifestation of systematize oppression. Over a period of months, strikes, riots and savage police violence brought France to the brink of revolution, only for minor reforms to buy off the voters.

Do I sound wistful? I am of course. Before we were all bought off with consumerism, the 68ers had the intellect, the vision, the strategy and the bravery to force bourgeois capitalist democracy to reveal its contradictions and hypocrisies. Not just in France, but in the US, across the developing world and even in the UK. The moment passed, but it can be revisited, even improved upon. The witty, spontaneous UK Uncut and the student protesters of last year were hopefully merely the beginning. We may be cowed by our narrowed imaginations, our debts and our manners, but we all have the potential to express ourselves with the joyous rage of Mai '68. We mustn't nostalgically revisit 68, but we should remember that cowed acceptance is not the way it's always been.

Here are some of the posters produced by the Atelier Populaire during the evenements of 1968.

Be Young and Shut Up. 

Have an iPhone and leave the politics to the grown-ups.

They revolutionnaires believed that French tertiary education removed potentially troublesome individuals from their class, nipping rebellion in the bud: it was time to reconnect the proletariat with the student body. It worked for a time too, though there are always points of tension (even Chaucer's students are smartarses).

Or as another slogan had it: the owners need you: you don't need the owners.

What distracts the population? Racial antagonism, foreign wars, TV, minor concessions. Sound familiar?

Systems are automatically oppressive. Foucault called them 'disciplinary systems' and they certainly are still in play here.

Time to end the exclusive and ideologically conservative nature of education and make it a public right, available to all. Time to revive this one, I feel.

Kids with no books tend to be less good at reading!

I know, what a shocking conclusion to this report. Four in ten 11-13 year old boys own no books, and 3 in 10 girls. Poor kids and those from ethnic minorities tend to own fewer books and have lower literacy rates.

I wouldn't be too bothered about the ownership figures if it wasn't that the government's closing libraries to pay for the bank bailout. I read my first school's entire library in two years, then they had to buy more just for me. That still makes me proud. I was also taking out the maximum number of books from the local library each week. Having exhausted the kids' section, I started on the adult collection, only to find my mother interfering constantly (anything secular was a point of contention). Libraries are brilliant and every kid should be marched down there once a week. If parents won't do it, schools should, like the weekly trip to the swimming pool.

So (even though I obsessively buy books), I'm not too hung up about ownership. But without free access to libraries, we need to find ways of getting books into houses and persuading parents to communicate enthusiasm for them. There are plenty of charities, but I'd target the Sure Start Centres: literacy can be included in the parenting classes. We can prescribe reading like doctors prescribe exercise or medication. Free boxes of books can be presented to every child on his or her birthday for the first 5 or 10 years: it's bound to be cheaper than remedial classes and unemployment benefit.

So: what would you put into the Big Society Library? We live in a Golden Age of children's literature: what should they be reading? I'd try to avoid anything to obviously educational: enforced reading and 'improving' literature will only lead to a book-free, drug-fuelled adulthood. I'd shovel the most shocking, lefty propaganda available at them: Kenneth Grahame, Pullman, The Phantom Tollbooth, Trease… keep adding them. If you're into children's literature, you really need to read Alison Lurie's wonderful Don't Tell The Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature.

What have I received today? Belloc's translation of Joseph Bédier's reconstruction of 10th-Century Tristan and Iseult, Gottfried von Strassburg's 13th-century Tristan and the version he based it on, Tristan by Thomas (in translation) because I'm on a European Arthurian kick at the moment. Also a collection of Paris 1968 Uprising posters (Beauty is in the Street) and 2 more volumes of the DMZ series (think Baghdad transplanted to New York).

A Lady's Guide to Suffrage

I'm leafing through Lady Clodagh Anson's Another Book, and a charming read it is too. Here's the section on Votes for Women. You have to read it in a posh, slightly scatty English accent:

Susan and I were tremendously keen on women's suffrage at that time, and though we did not clamp ourselves to the railings in Downing Street or drop lighted matches into letter-boxes ourselves, we none the less realised that the brave women who did these things had grasped the great truth about the English character, in that if you behave well about anything and do not make a fuss, everybody thinks that you do not mind and will not to a hand's turn for you. But if you make yourself a nuisance and behave as badly as possible, the authorities will do anything to keep you quiet. However, in those days all really nice people looked with horror at these performances; so Susan's husband, Hugh Dawnay, used to take great delight in saying to respectable acquaintances of ours that we were suffragettes, just to see them shy away from us with panic-stricken faces.

What larks: the next paragraph is a series of anecdotes about 'a Yorkshire yokel'. No more to be said about the franchise.

Free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last

I don't know if you care about or have been following the shenanigans at FIFA (sharp businessmen + sport + £billions = corruption!!!!!), but it's fascinating. I'm involved with my sport's governing body as it tries to modernise from amateurish snobby incompetence to professional outfit, so I can see some of the pressure points.

What's wonderful about FIFA is the pantomime villain quality of these people: they've turned their organisation (like the IOC, run for decades by actual card-carrying Fascists) into a cash cow protected from corruption enquiries, tax authorities and justice (gotta love the Swiss), and they still acting like they're the victims.


Hence Sepp Blatter's plaintive cry in his re-election speech today (unopposed, his opponents having been less subtle than him with the suitcases of cash):

""Football belongs to everyone and we are in charge. I have found my voice again. If you agree with me, say it!"

It brings to mind images of poor Mr. Blatter bound and gagged in the cellar of his Zurich eyrie, eyes rolling as his opponents drag trolleys of gold bullion towards waiting trucks before making a fast getaway. You wouldn't think he's been there since 1975, and President since 1998…

What a rotten bunch. And talking of rotten football records: