A final selection of School Games 2013 fencing photos

Last few, I promise. Feast your eyes on the rest either here, or at a selection of others on Plashing Vole. Click these to enlarge.

Frustration

Katie Heeps' saltire fingernails

Ken Rose, Scotland coach

Leah King, U18 Foil Champion

Niamh O'Donnell, Scotland foil fencer

Harry Peck, England epee

Rajan Rai, England foil 

Sadeghpoor, Scotland foil

Flick to the back

Alex Fitton takes off

Webb evades Williamson in the sabre

Woodburn, Scotland sabre

Yet more fencing photos

Some more favourites from this year's School Games fencing event at the English Institute of Sport, Sheffield. See the whole lot here, click on these samples to enlarge.

For photography nerds: sports halls are awful, awful places for good pictures. The light is dank and/or harsh, and good spots for composition are hard to find. You need a really fast lens, a high standard camera and lots of patience: I took 1200 photos and edited them down to 500 acceptable ones. Then there's the problem that fencing can look very samey: once a fencer has the mask one, character is hard to capture.

I used a Nikon D7000 and a 50mm f/1.8 lens - the best I can afford. Flash isn't allowed and tripods get in the way. The lens is fixed, so you move rather than the hardware. Noise is a problem in these poor light conditions, because the speed of movement needs settings of at least shutter speeds of 1/640th of a second and an ISO somewhere above 1600, which causes noise. If anyone wants to buy me a 300mm f/2 (several thousand pounds) I'd be very grateful.

Anyway, these are what came out of the camera.

This one might be my favourite: Kate Daykin has such an expressive face.

Appealing to the referee

Appeal refused

Giving the referee your interpretation

Jai Birch, England foilist

Guess who's back!

Hi everybody. How are you all? I didn't mean to suspend bloggage for a full week, but life – in the form of the School Games and then the start of Freshers' Week – got in the way rather. The Games were mostly enjoyable. The fencers and other athletes were largely lovely and happy. Tired, bruised and focussed, with the usual fallings out between themselves, but nothing serious. The adults, on the other hand, were infuriating. Some team management seemed to consist of little more than sniping at each other, while some of the parents were vile. Not just demanding, selfish, reactive and dumb, but hostile, rude and arrogant to boot. For future reference, an early start is neither 'child abuse' nor 'a breach of the Children's Act'. Your son is one of several thousand elite sports performers and the occasional early alarm call is entirely normal. Oh, and describing the event as 'not serious' really insults the other participants: being selected to represent your country is actually quite a big thing.

Rant over. Here are some of my favourite pictures from the weekend. I'll spread them over a couple of Vole entries and you can see the rest of the 500 here. Click these to enlarge them. While I'm at it: Flickr Uploadr is awful and I've wasted a day trying to get it to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a taste of the novel:

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

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

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

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



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

On Not Being A Team Player

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

Paunch model's own. 

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

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

The Dean's just posted a slide reading

BE CREATIVE, GROW THE BUSINESS, MAKE MONEY

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving Books for Busy People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dish of hot lobby

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

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

A Moron Writes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Cover Version

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Tuesday reckon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Er… no.

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

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

Seamus Heaney - an appreciation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punch drunk?

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

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

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

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

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

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



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