So we hosted two very exciting novelists last week in an art gallery!, reading from and talking about their work. Hosted by poet, novelist and creative writer Paul McDonald, the first was James Hannah, author of the elegiac but also very witty The A-Z of You and Me, who explained how necessary it was to be funny about impending death. Coming from a family of medics black humour has always been part of the conversation so I didn't need persuading, but the audience was enthralled.
This is how we always dress for literary occasions
The headline act was Catherine O'Flynn, who made a huge splash with her debut novel What Was Lost back in 2008. Her latest piece is Mr Lynch's Holiday, an exploration of emigré Irish identity and the ways in which we come to terms with our parents' agency and autonomy just as we realise that 'kidulthood' just isn't enough to cope with the demands of contemporary life (something I thought about recently while reading Margery Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin, in which the fun-loving Bright Young Things of the 1930s have to cope – or not – with killing and being killed in WW2).
As well as reading from their works, Catherine and James discussed their habits as authors, the ways in which they consciously structured their texts, the challenge of being funny through multiple drafts, the notion of the 'difficult second novel' (Catherine says she only writes a novel when provoked by interesting thoughts, which seems reasonable) and much else besides.
Many thanks to Wolverhampton Art Gallery for hosting the event: the Georgian room looked lovely, the beer was cold and we look forward to many more similar events with them.
The audience gathers
Audience members react to Catherine O'Flynn
Catherine O'Flynn
Catherine O'Flynn amidst a literary salon
Sometimes it got a bit hairy
Dr Colbert introduces the guests
Catherine O'Flynn reads from Mr Lynch's Holiday
Catherine O'Flynn receives tumultuous applause
Catherine O'Flynn and James Hannah
James Hannah reads from The A-Z of You and Me
James Hannah reading from The A-Z of You and Me
Catherine O'Flynn and James Hannah
Catherine O'Flynn and James Hannah
James Hannah gets passionate
It all gets a bit spooky for James Hannah
Miniatures
One audience member recoils from the filth purveyed by our visiting authors
Unlike some academics, I'm completely upfront about struggling and failure. One of the distinct things I remember from doing my PhD was stretches of getting nothing done, or nothing good, or understanding nothing, or being unable to string together two meaningful sentences. All around me were people who'd apparently swanned through their studies and went on to write two books for breakfast then securing a Leverhulme before lunch. Now I'm a PhD supervisor and am on friendly terms with several of the other postgrads we keep in the cellar, I try not to fake it. There's a line between being realistic and open and being discouraging that I try not to cross, but I think there's something useful in acknowledging that one can get through a PhD, then build something that from a distance looks like a career without being a Nobel winner. Examples don't have to be shining, they sometimes have to be relatable. I'm a plodder. I get through things and once in a while there's a diamond in the clay. All the postgrads I know are smarter than me but they aren't necessarily as together as they appear or as their role models, so perhaps talking to someone who is open about struggling to get by might be reassuring.
Failure is something with which I'm long acquainted. I was pretty awful in school and only did well when inspired by decent teachers or subjects I liked. My university reference, written by my headteacher, advised any institutions not to admit me as it would be a waste of their and my time. Many thanks to the University of Derby English department for showing me that at the interview: I may not have chosen to come to you but I've had warm feelings about you ever since. I went to Bangor (via Clearing) and on paper, thrived: got some prizes, a First and an MA but it never felt easy, though it was enjoyable. When it came to the PhD I struggled the whole way and took a long research break afterwards, and still find writing difficult. And teaching. And admin. And talking intelligently to colleagues, managers and students. But I get through. I care about these people and I believe in my subject's importance. I just don't think it's helpful to constantly pressure people with talk of nothing but 4* articles and excellence. There's too much to do in too little time with too little money to be world-class in everything we do. What we can and should do is recognise the limits of what's possible and encourage people to do their best – and I don't just mean that managers need to do better. We all need a little more humanity.
I failed on Wednesday morning. I turned up at my class to discover that the rooming staff had accidentally forgotten to book a room. After a bit of stress we walked over to the other campus and tried again. I was discombobulated and those students who made it to the second venue were distracted too. Very few had read The Duchess of Malfi and I could tell it just wasn't working, so we skipped the seminar afterwards. Definitely a failure, though not entirely mine. Pedagogically though, probably the right decision, and an experience which has given me ideas for improving the lecture's focus and structure next time.
Over in Australia, this kind of banal event's disappearance in favour of the Permanent Revolution is what concerns Kate at Music For Deckchairs:
It’s a strategic move, that demands that we abandon modest efforts and incremental, careful practices; it mobilises us to the barricades of whatever—innovation, disruption, competition—trampling each other as we go.
And in each life lived in these unprecedented times we have to figure out what is enough for us, and enough to give, so that we can get on and survive the encroachments of big claims on our attention, our action, our loyalties to each other’s care. Figuring out what is enough is how we each hold on to the clover of our own values, and protect the thing we’re trying to protect, the small and hopeful thing we came here to do.
I agree. I've long thought that kindness is underrated. I want to see more boring, low-level, humane kindness and empathy. I've long thought that HE 'thought leaders' have inhaled too many 1980s management textbooks and regard we plodders (or is it just me) as enemies of progress. Personally, I work at a university because I'm unemployable elsewhere it's a different, older model of cooperation. We're not chasing profits or churning out product. We have the space to nurture each other, though the walls (of TEF, of REF, of 'competitors', of fees, of metrics) are closing in.
I won't be buried in a mausoleum with a permanent guard and eternal flame. There will be no Voleism, no Vole Prize, no Vole Street or cohorts of eager young hipsters doing PhDs in Mid to Late Vole Studies. But if one or two people are persuaded that they can do what I've done, or a little bit better because I've been kind or encouraging, it's good enough for me.
Today's duties:
1. Write next week's lecture on The Duchess of Malfi, along with a seminar task and a forum discussion theme.
2. Individual tutorials with the first-year students who are writing about A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing and About a Boy (did you see what I did there?).
3. Read another chapter of the PhD on Romanticism and Translation I'm examining next month.
4. Read the validation documents for a Greek university I'm external at.
5. Design two new modules.
6. Read my young cousin's A-level extended essay
7. Read my sister's best friend's MA essay because he's disputing the grade awarded.
8. Hold a budget meeting for this region's fencing committee. At least we have the unexpected luxury of too much money!
9. Come up with some funding applications for my (unsurprisingly stalled) research.
10. See one of my final-year dissertation students who is writing a fascinating piece on Queering Shakespeare in performance.
11. Find some way to gently encourage students to complete the NSS even though they're sick of being asked, don't see the point and most of us think it wouldn't pass muster on an undergraduate Research Methods module.
As you can see, all of these are interesting and many of them are important, but after yesterday's 13 hours at work – fast becoming normal – you might understand why I read Liz Morrish's latest with an appreciative eye. She and Kate Bowles should be put in charge of everything.
I'm going to need a soundtrack. On days like these, I go for minimalism, metronomic repetition or ethereality: Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup, some Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Can, Cluster, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, Canto Ostinato, Allegri, Esenvalds, Tallis, and so on. You'll notice that the vocals are in French, German and Latin: I can understand them if I pay attention but they're not so insistent that I'm distracted from work (Radio 4 had to go I'm afraid: either too interesting or too infuriating).
(I often put this on when I do a session on the turbo trainer).
Actually, I'm under no illusions that there's a Public out there thirsting for the latest pearls of wisdom from my keyboard, but one or two people have noted that it's been a couple of weeks since my last blogpost, and let's face it, that one was basically filler wasn't it? Has Vole hit the wall? Is it 'difficult 3978th album syndrome'? Has PV finally, blessedly, run out of opinions? Is it safe to venture outdoors once more? Is this, in fact, the liberation for which you have long since yearned?
Perhaps the answer is all of the above. Unlike Clarkson et al who as Stewart Lee points out, have, controversial opinions for money 'to a deadline in the Sunday Times almost as if they weren't real', I can't churn them out like that. Many of my opinions are either overly-familiar to me and so (I assume) to you, or so predictable that they're fit only for ridicule. Occasionally I call a halt in my lectures when I realise that I've bored myself into a corner, and sometimes that happens on here too. It's not that there's a shortage of things to have an opinion about, it's often that I don't have a distinctive one: Lord preserve us from the 'hot take' which as far as I can see only fosters divisiveness and the crude magnification of minor differences. (Though I guess that constitutes a hot take in itself, and recent personal experiences lead me to believe that 'hot take' culture is now infecting the pursuit of academic research: too often those tasked with securing grant money for the institution are gently trying to warp research priorities, with the connivance of funding bodies and league tables which promote impact and visibility at the expense of depth.
I don't think blogging has had its day, and I'm grateful for the space in which to opine at reasonably length without needing to go through the peer-review process, but I'm finding Twitter useful for making links to interesting people, while the incredible pressure of work at the moment means that the space to think things through has entirely disappeared: blogging comes way down the list of priorities at the moment. It doesn't mean I'm not doing interesting things that some of you might find interesting. It's that I can't really talk about them, good and bad. I'm reading a PhD thesis I'm examining soon, for instance. I can't tell you what I think about it because that would be neither ethical or professional, but I can tell you that it's utterly fascinating and I'm learning a lot about the subject and some interesting new ways to view a field. Once it's all over and I can ask the author maybe I'll share some of the highlights for you. There was one quotation in there about Napoleon which seems particularly relevant to the EU Referendum campaign and the US election primaries though. Who wouldn't think of Trump, Rubio, Clinton, Cruz, Johnson, Cameron, Gove, Grayling, Farage and Co in these lines?
What else have I been up to? An lot of enormously enjoyable teaching: Hamlet and the Duchess of Malfi amongst them (working at a university is not at all like coping with the twisted, dark, suspicious, surveillance culture of Danish and Italian royal courts, obviously) but it's wonderful being able to immerse myself in extended texts like a PhD thesis and these plays. I'm completely exhausted but at the moment teaching is an absolute highlight. Admittedly the written work doesn't come in until next week, but every single class has been a joy so far.
What else? Well, I've been organising visiting speakers and finding interesting places to host them: on Monday Catherine O'Flynn and James Hannah are reading from and talking about their novels in the city's art gallery (March 14th, 6.00 p.m., free). There will be wine and cake (not free) and hopefully and audience which might not have considered walking into a university on a Monday night. Many more events coming. I'm also involved in the Birmingham Literature Festival (the gits held a 'breakfast meeting' in a bookshop one morning. I emerged from that considerably fatter and poorer, damn it. Like having a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in downtown Medellin. (Medellinistas: don't write in. I know your city has had a wonderful renaissance in recent years but all my cultural referents are decades out of date). I'm supervising a couple of PhDs and some very interesting undergraduate dissertations, and I've been to London on external examiner duties and stolen wholesale a lot of their ideas learned about fresh approaches to teaching and learning, then went down again to help plan a Festival of English which you should all either contribute to or come to. Also coming up is the Stafford Castle Open-Air Shakespeare: it's Othello this year and my colleague and I are once again writing the programme notes. It was lovely to be involved last year and we're hoping to really build on it.
We're also in the middle of rewriting our course structures (in both departments I work in). While there's an awful lot of bureaucracy involved and a certain amount of brick wall/head interface activity, it's rather lovely to be able to indulge in dreaming up whole new areas of teaching. In particular, the first-years will discover that all the world is indeed a stage, as I'll be getting them into a theatre with actors to learn the arts of acting, directing, producing and designing plays as well as interpreting and interrogating them. Sadly The Skinhead Hamlet will not be our first text. But one day…Then there are all the Governor activities, the course committees, the VLE assessment group, the union representation duties and the whole panoply of academic things. The one thing I haven't managed to do is any actual research recently, though I have been applying for funding which is close enough. I'm enjoying life enormously at the moment but something will have to give. I'm slowly recovering from a few months' Repetitive Strain Injury caused by work and the last thing I want is another bout.
4AD though: the home of highbrow ethereal semi-goth. Pretentious, hypnotic, self-regarding and brilliant. I mostly learned about them from living with goth stoner maths'n'computing PhD students when I was but a callow undergraduate. So, for Matt, here are my favourite 4AD tracks
This will never fail to fill my mental dance floor:
Tindersticks have been an obsession since I bought my first records ('Sweet Kathleen' and Gorky's Zygotic Mynic's Patio, both on 10") so their album on 4AD was a dream:
I hope everyone else is as confused by Britain's 'negotiations' with Europe as I am. Cameron seems to exacted a series of pledges from the rest of the EU that are either meaningless or minuscule. The effect seems to be calculated solely to appease the headbangers on his own backbenchers whom he personally riled-up during the days of the coalition by promising them a referendum solely for tactical advantage. Having promised it, he then had to generate some heat to justify it, and so along comes this list of supposedly earth-shaking agreements that actually look a bit embarrassing. Some fiddling with child benefit that doesn't cost much and doesn't apply to many; an exemption from one of the vaguest clauses ever to be committed to parchment 'ever-closer union'; a temporary brake on in-work benefits in unspecified circumstances to solve a non-existent problem and – perhaps the sole thing Cameron actually cares about – some perks for his donors in the financial sector (who show their gratitude by, er, not paying any taxes). Then of course we have the utterly grotesque sight of a backbench MP and Mayor of London being invited to Downing Street for 'talks' as though he were a visiting head of state rather than a rival in the Conservative Party's power struggle. Call that democracy?
If I was a European leader I would be seriously pissed off about being recruited to play a part in a political stunt that's of no interest to most British citizens and of no international merit. Europe is falling apart under the contradictory pressures of the Syrian crisis, the environment is degrading in front of our eyes, Russia is annexing chunks of our neighbours' countries, corporations are poisoning our children, selling our data and evading their taxes and yet the British have hijacked the political agenda to ensure that sugary tea and gristly sausages get protected AOC status (while, I would like to point out, lobbying to weaken car emissions laws in the wake of the VW scandal).
The British have never been anything other than wreckers within the EU as de Gaulle knew. What baffles me most of all about the whole thing is why the rest of Europe puts up with it.
Somehow the UK wants to be America's lapdog and Europe's top dog with very little justification for why it deserves it. Wielding rented nukes is no excuse. Yes, the UK has a very large economy – apparently not large enough to fund public libraries – but an awful lot of it is either shady money or dependent on access to EU markets.
Like most people, I'm fairly conflicted by the EU debates. For the British hard left, of which I am often aligned, the EU is a capitalist plot designed to weaken the working conditions of the masses and ensure the continued hegemony of unaccountable financial elites, though the continental socialist movement doesn't feel the same way. However, I have long felt that while it is a capitalist plot, the alternative is a much nastier capitalist plot with added viciousness. Even the rightwing Western European governments are herbivorous compared with the vicious asset-stripping the UK labours under. What little workers' rights British citizens have are guaranteed by the EU and the various (but not related) European courts. The same applies to human rights (don't forget that the Conservative Party wants to abolish them), reproductive and sexual minority rights, environmental protections, consumer protections and so much more. Leaving the EU would result in a hostage situation. Between the wing of the Conservative Party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the finance sector (look up tax-avoiding Treasury minister Andrea Leadsom's funding for example) and the wing that sees the poor, sick, Welsh, Scots, young and professional classes as the enemy and you'll soon discover that the EU's mild capitalism is a damn sight more welcoming than British government which will sell us to the lowest bidder just so long as they can carry on fox-hunting.
I look at the Tories and UKIP and see several strands of contradictory thought. They believe in the free movement of capital above all else, but detest the free movement of people. They hate regulation of banks, emissions and everything else, yet they hark back to some imaginary golden age. They hate superstates which are unelected and distant, yet adore the British parliamentary system which features 900 unelected Lords and 650 elected MPs (about to be reduced to 600). They love the British Empire at the same time as hating the EU superstate. They say that the Eurozone is undemocratic and economically unwieldy, applying the same fiscal rules to diverse conditions, while condemning the Welsh and Scottish nationalists for criticising Westminster's identical behaviour. I have a dystopic vision of a non-EU largely derived from Julian Barnes's England, England, in which the Isle of Wight becomes a theme park based on a fantasy bucolic past, while an independent England becomes a backwater ruled by narrow-minded authoritarians. Coincidentally enough, I found the Grassroots Out campaign's decision to design club ties before doing any actual campaigning hugely rich in sociological data.
It's redolent of the kind of golf-club fascism that lurks under the surface of these reactionaries, scared of women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, northerners, the Celtic nations, the poor etc. etc. And just think how many more of them there will be when Spain sends back those hundreds of thousands of Daily Mail readers who just wanted a sunnier, whiter Britain and moved to the Costas without ever learning a word of Spanish or gaining any wider perspective. I wonder if the UK political classes' blinkers mean that they assume everyone wants to come here and no True Brit will lose out by not being able to go Over There. After all as we well know, Abroad is Ghastly and They All Think In English Really, They're Just Being Difficult.
In the end, I'm sorry to say, I would take a Brussels government over any British government of whichever party. I remember all too clearly Labour's Tony Blair going round boasting that the UK had the harshest trades union laws in Europe. I don't like or understand Britain's sense of exceptionalism. Yes, its Empire was one of the largest but there's nothing it did that anyone should be proud of, nor does it justify special treatment. If part of the EU's purpose was to bind nations like Germany so closely to its neighbours that it will never misbehave again, Britain certainly deserves the same treatment. Rather than kow-towing to these braying toffs and small-minded UKIP bigots, our friends should keep Britain bound and gagged in a back room until it's ready to behave like a global citizen and good neighbour rather than the local bully.
In an ideal world, I'd vote for a EUSSR in a heartbeat: a radically democratic and socialist continental nation which afforded responsible government to a hugely diverse population with due regard for the rights of minorities everywhere, while combining to provide justice, peace, security and environmental protection in all those cases where collective action alone can make the difference. In the real world, too, membership even of this decaying structure is a positive benefit: just look at South Yorkshire, or the Welsh valleys, or the ex-industrial belt in Scotland. All these and more places have been thrown lifelines not by an indifferent and even hostile British government. I genuinely believe that Britain out of the EU will be a meaner, crueller and poorer place. But at least it might occasion the break-up of the UK and render it harmless for the ages.
So in the end, my answer to the EU referendum is vote Yes, but not with any joy. The negotiations were a political charade and it feels awful to reward this kind of cynical shenanigans with a positive outcome but the alternative is just so much worse. Imagine Farage, Grayling and Johnson's faces grinning at you from every TV screen as they joyfully announce the closure of the last women's refuge or adolescent sexual health scheme, as they sell the last old folks' home to Goldman Sachs (unelected distantly-run and unaccountable corporations are totally different from 'Brussels') and finally as they oversee the loading of the last cattle trucks to Dover bearing the last foreign care workers, while Jeremy Clarkson revs his engine ready to take them off to the the unveiling of a statue to Margaret Thatcher at Rhodes (formerly Oxford) University (chancellor: Michael Gove).
As I said, my feelings are confused and emotional, a bundle of crude political assessment, atavistic fears and ideological prejudices. But I do tend to think that in an uncertain world, building bridges with largely good neighbours is a damn sight more constructive than arrogant one-upmanship.
There's an awful lot of stuff going on at the moment but I'm way too busy to get into it all, while other bits aren't for public consumption right now, so you're spared one of my classic VoleRants for today.
Instead, I'll mark Welsh Language Music Day. I had the extreme good fortune to pitch up at Bangor University in 1993, just as the wave of young Welsh bands later clumped together as Cŵl Cymru were getting started, so I got to see them all the time: Gorky's, Catatonia, Super Furries, David Wrench, Topper, Melys and many more. There was also a great record shop in Bangor called Cob, staffed entirely by drone-rock experimentalists determined to fill my shelves with their unsuccessful albums. Despite the cheerful contempt with which they greeted my own choices, I bought everything they shovelled at me, so I discovered the joys of Ectogram, Datblygu, Llwybr Llaethog, Tystion, Y Cyrff, Anrhefn and so much more.
Here are some representative samples (though possibly slight outdated as I'm quite old now). I'd love to put something from David Wrench's first album Blow Winds Blow on but it's all been removed from Youtube, as has Super Furries' Mwng album.
It's been quite a week. First teaching week of the year so I've covered the entire origins of the Renaissance in one class and the emergence of individualism in another ('deep', according to one hopefully thrilled student).
Highlight of the week was a visiting lecture by Prof Thomas Docherty of Warwick University. He's written multiple essential books on literature and literary theory, but he's also developed a line of inquiry into the nature of modern higher education and what he sees as the contemporary academic's complicity with unethical educational structures and even illegal modes of accounting. He also has a personal interest: having become a thorn in the side of Warwick University's management (that place has been at the forefront of grasping neoliberalism since its foundation) he found himself suspended for a year on trumped up charges of subversion, including 'inappropriate sighing' and 'ironic' body language before winning the case at a cost of an enormous amount of money and damage to his health.
Thomas's presentation examined the gap which has developed between the educator's ethical responsibility to humanity and students/colleagues in particular, and the newish discourse of accountability which he feels has replaced the former. Starting with a discussion of the Accountant of Auschwitz's disavowal of moral responsibility and drawing on Arendt and the work of John McMurray, Docherty called for a visceral, spontaneous engagement with the world rather than the cold and distancing practice of accounting (which includes 'outcomes', NSS satisfaction rates and the whole panoply of data which he sees as replacing true responsiveness). Action, he says, is replaced by linguistic evasiveness. HE, he feels, has become a part of the neoliberal machine which atomises society into competing individuals by encouraging them to behave as profit-seeking units. Academics aren't 'desk murderers' as Arendt put it, but the neoliberal university puts us in a similar structural position to the Accountant: able to repudiate our moral or ethical responsibility to our fellows and exhorted to focus on the same qualities which assisted the death camps: the prioritisation of efficiency, management and output. As Thomas was a pains to stress, he's not likening academia to the death camps, but he is saying that our infinitely more mundane settings promote the same forms of complicity in dehumanising relations. At this institution the Personnel department became Human Resources, a sinister move that horrifies me still but maybe I've read too many semiotics books. Wait until they rename it OfSoylent.
Essentially Thomas's argument is that HEI's have become self-perpetuating bureaucracies (not the good sense of bureaucracy in which systems provide equality of access rather than corruption and privilege) in which the removal of inconvenient individuals is seen as a necessity. See, for example, the American university head who ordered his staff to get rid of students by putting a (metaphorical) 'Glock to their heads' (he also described them as 'bunnies' who should be 'drowned') to preserve the institution's funding stream.
It's become a matter of distancing by discourse. The language of management which has infected education insulates the individual from the effects of their decisions. I know of a secondary school which has a photograph wall of every student next to their predicted GCSE grades, which are for some of them 5 years away: the practice encourages the reduction of a complex human to an achievable outcome. The same school, by the way, used to give hungry pupils breakfast. Now breakfast is restricted to those deemed to be on track to achieving their predictions. Docherty's point is that whether it's a university, hospital, school or social services department, accounting has replaced the much messier, complex, difficult and more important priority of being ethically responsible (to the individual student/patient/client but also to wider society). The dominance of economic accountability, he says, is a form of corruption in the technical and moral senses – one of his examples was the TRAC scheme for determining the unit value of academics' time, which explicitly and deliberately discounts any work done above the notional contracted hours, thus undercounting our labour by as much as 60%. Tough on us, you might say, but it's a wider problem: at a time when lawyers are scandalously over-billing for work on an hourly rate, we're allowing governments to claim that education is cheap and should be cheaper (though not for the children of the rich and powerful: Oxford and Cambridge get extra money for their special methods).
The big question about all this is what your average academic can do. Thomas was singled out because he's fearless, and because punishing prominent people encourages everyone else to shut up. However, many institutions, particularly the famous ones, are rapidly casualising their workforce. Young people are on temporary contracts and expected to be 'shovel-ready' in the terrible jargon of industry: a book out before they start their first jobs, no holiday pay or pension contributions, no space in which to become good teachers and researchers. Thomas says we should start saying 'no' (shades of Bartleby the scrivener), but the wider context of neoliberal capitalism means that an ethical stance is a vote for unemployment. The student loan company, your children and the mortgage company are apparently reluctant to take principled refusals to collaborate with injustice in lieu of payment or breakfast.
One audience member offered a strong challenge to Docherty's discourse. The refusal to engage in the kind of metrics swamping academics is as nothing compared to the daily lives of millions of fellow citizens, or of academics being locked up or murdered across the world. Closer to home, refusing to address employability, for instance, is a betrayal of students from widening participation institutions such as mine, who lack the capital – and social capital – taken for granted by elite institutions' intakes. In our case, providing students with this kind of thing is an act of social justice and counselling refusal is, he said, 'bourgeois seminar anarchism…good philosophy but bad socialism'. Docherty took this well: the rhetoric of widening participation is, he said, an accounting form of what should be an ethics of responsibility, because it perpetuates the fiction that individual failings in the student can be remedied by individual training in how to conform to the demands of the market. He also described the 'student experience' (a common phrase round here) as a concept designed to prevent students having experiences. I can understand this: there's remarkably little room for spontaneity and friction on campus these days. Under the guise of customer management we've managed to convey the impression that decent coffee and meeting deadlines are far better than demonstrating against or challenging authority – the transformation of Students' Unions into de facto arms of the marketing department is a sinister disgrace. This is the challenge: within institutions which have developed a panoply of policies, mission statements and procedures to look ethical, how is the average citizen meant to develop a truly ethical – and therefore uncomfortable – position, as another member of the audience asked. We have a simulation of ethics which suits everybody on a daily basis, but should scare the hell out of us.
Lots to address there, and I haven't thought it all through myself fully, but I do regard the demands of 'employers' with some suspicion. They're always demanding 'skills' but don't really seem to know what they mean (and experience Docherty had when he challenged an employer-body spokesperson). I suspect that what they often mean is obedience and conformity of thought, whereas what I want from a graduating student is critical independence and new ways of thinking: a challenge to orthodoxy rather than resignation. At the same time, my students are through no fault of their own struggling against a culture that views them en masse as too provincial, common, brown and primitive to deserve consideration on their considerable merits and every time one of them gets a well-paid job I see it as a victory however much I'd rather they storm the barricades and create a new Eden. I'm a middle-class child of privilege, so it's very easy, some might say, to ask them to deny themselves my privileges and act on my principles.
So ended one of the most stimulating public lectures we've had in a while - challenging material and robust challenges from the floor. Plenty more coming up: watch @plashingvole for more details.
The end of last week was both sad and joyful: it mainly consisted of self-anaesthetising myself at a party to mark the departure of one of my many bosses, who is off to extend his reign of terror to the staff and students of Oxford Brookes University. They are very lucky people. I applied to fill his shoes (and my boots) but wisdom prevailed and one of my friends got it to general rejoicing. I shall remain an humble droid, the Wall-E of the English and Cultural Studies departments. This delightful CIA document shall be my Bible in the years ahead, though I fear that the higher echelons of management have mining the same seam for aeons.
Anyway, I rose the morning after the party with a clear memory of the night before, which is better than some colleagues, but a slight headache and a guilty sense that it was much later than I planned to be up and out. Having done the majority of my marking and attended more meetings than any human should, I needed to blow away the cobwebs with a decent bike ride. The rain eased off as I got off the train at Wellington and headed (as I thought) to Ludlow. Sadly between the electronic map in my phone and the hastily jotted list of villages in my pocket conspired against me and I discovered that my route took me up every hill in Shropshire – some of them twice as I retraced my steps.
Despite the pain, it was glorious. The sun was out, Shropshire's rolling hills looked beautiful and the back roads were empty as I headed very, very slowly around the Wrekin
to Little Wenlock, Dawley (wrong way), Buildwas, Much Wenlock,
Brockton, Aston Munslow and all sorts of tiny villages the length of the county. It was cold, sunny and deserted - absolutely perfect for a fat git hauling his weary bones across the landscape. Nobody needs to see me in head-to-toe lycra (yes, I may be a MAMIL but I'm not a full pro kit wanker because I don't want to be mistaken for an habitual, professional drugs cheat).
I finally creaked into Ludlow three hours later and scarfed two chocolate bars down before getting on a train home because I'm not a proper cyclist and couldn't face the return journey at all, let alone in the dark. A day's recovery later and I was off walking in the Pennines with my friends: we scrambled up to a cluster of the very biggest inland wind turbines they make – deeply uncanny as well as majestic. Despite being way off the ground, when the blades come towards you it's hard not to flinch. The sound is wonderful too: a deep hum overlaid with a slicing noise as they cut through the air.
And now here I am, back at my desk with more marking and admin to do than your average junior employee at Das Schloss… Woe is me. Still, at least my Hungarian colleague has brought me some fine paprika to snort. That should keep me awake during meetings…
Oh yes, I also read Llewellyn Powys's Ebony and Ivory: very much the minor one amongst the three Powys brothers who were writers – he was one of eleven – I would suggest (I have yet to read his sister Philippa's novel or see his sister Gertrude's art), and Jonathan Coe's new novel Number 11, which has many good moments but doesn't quite hang together.
Instead I have a pile of marking, a new nephew in New Zealand, lots of Module Specification Templates to write, new lectures to contract (The Duchess of Malfi, The Tempest, The Sorrows of Young Werther and many more) two chapters to get into publishable shape and more to start on, some external examining work to read and a PhD to examine. Oh, and 7 meetings in the next few days. I also have this terrible pain down all the diodes on my left side.
While I get on with all that, some incidental music from recent purchases.
Séan O'Sé's still going - I saw him singing An Poc Ar Buile at Puck Fair only last year.
“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.”
- Cervantes
This morning David Bowie died, of cancer, aged 69. As you can imagine, the airwaves and social media are full of emotion, from sadness to shock. I'm saddened too, though human mortality is not as much of a surprise to me as it clearly is to many people. Being born in 1975, I'm too young (not a phrase I'll be able to use much in future) to have experienced Bowie's work in its original context. I suspect my first exposure to him was either his role in Labyrinth or his duet with Mick Jagger, Let's Dance. I recall the former with some affection, the latter with none. Some years later I bought and liked Low and Heroes, enjoyed the film The Man Who Fell To Earth and liked scattered songs from his other work. I also read about his pioneering embrace of financial instruments when he sold off futures in his royalties in the form of Bowie Bonds. I loved, by the way, Philip Glass's reworking of Low and Heroes into symphonies.
So in musical terms I'm an interested bystander. Bowie wasn't ever important to me in the same way Joni Mitchell, Tindersticks, Gorky's or Ligeti were, but I'm an admirer. However, I'm also an academic, and one of the uncomfortable things academics do is remember everything and point them out. So this morning I recalled the dark side of Bowie, particularly this and similar statements he made.
My direct source for this is Standpoint magazine (not one I like but it's not given to make things up) and the same interview is cited in conservative historian Dominic Sandbrook's Seasons in the Sun – the interview is with Cameron Crowe in (apparently) Playboy in September 1976, following up comments in a similar vein he made to the NME a year earlier. Here's the full interview.
Occasionally I teach literature or art by people who held deeply unpleasant opinions: Eliot, Larkin, Eric Gill to name but three. I do think that we should be capable of appreciating the art separately to the attitudes. Bad people have made good art. Good people have made good art. Good people have made bad art and bad people have made bad art – and that's before we even get close to defining 'good' and 'bad' in artistic and moral terms. However, I don't think that the attitudes should be forgotten or overlooked. With Bowie, everyone from the Prime Minister to the Archbishop of Canterbury (perhaps Eton had a copy in the prefects' Beatings Chamber) was quoted without reference to Bowie's mid-seventies stance. It's not as if nobody noticed at the time - newspaper articles were written when he turned up in London dressed in black, riding in a black vintage Mercedes drop head and 'waving' (as he later put it) in a suspiciously stiff-armed manner:
Bowie isn't the first celebrity to flirt with – or even plunge deep into fascism or racist politics. Nothing Bowie has said or done compares with Eric Clapton's speech from the stage in Birmingham (also in 1976, clearly a peak year for pop racism), while a few years ago the editor of GQ magazine was fired for printing something facetious about Nazi uniforms being stylish.
So, this morning I posted the Bowie quote on Twitter. A lot of people didn't know he'd said it. Some were shocked. Some were angry that I'd posted it. Some contextualised it within the cultural and political conditions of the time and noted that a minority of artists have either employed fascist imagery to shock, or have dabbled in fascism more substantially (Lemmy, I recall, collected Nazi weaponry, uniforms and so on). Some made the point that the work and the attitudes should be separated. Many took the attitude that you shouldn't be held responsible for things you say when you're on drugs.
Here's a taste: I've removed the authors' names because I don't believe in publicly shaming people: I'll deal with the arguments instead. The drugs ones first:
I don't think this argument washes. Lots of people take large amounts of drugs. Very few of them make substantial and internally coherent arguments in favour of fascism across the course of at least a year. Is cocaine a gateway drug to fascism, or is fascism the natural habitat of people who like cocaine? Secondly, I'm not entirely convinced by any argument that uses the copious intake of illegal substances as a defence. Bowie was not spiked. Nobody forced him to repeatedly take loads of mind-altering substances. Nor do I see anybody claiming that it was just the drugs which produced the great music – so if he gets the credit for the songs, he gets to take the blame for the Nazism. I tend to go along with the interlocutor who put it like this:
Likewise, I hugely admired John Peel for many reasons but I don't think that 'it was legal in Texas' is sufficient justification for him marrying a 15-year old girl. 'Legal in Texas' is no defence of anything.
A couple of people made very interesting comments about the role of celebrity in our lives: that they're such public property that the uncomfortable details are washed away. A kind of cognitive dissonance. I think this is understandable and probably true. It's an extension of the 'death of the author' argument. The celebrity-as-text is transformed by the reader's purposes and cultural context and made anew.
This also links to the tweet listed above in the 'drugs' section that promotes Bowie as a 'provocateur'. I can see the argument – nobody more than Bowie operated on the basis that his entire visible existence was a performance of some sort, and perhaps his utterances should be understood in this way.
However, I do have a problem with this. If Bowie's point is that dressing in a Nazi-esque fashion, appropriating Nazi salutes and calling for an extreme right-wing dictatorship is simply a performance, it requires us to put aside the specifics of Nazism and fascism. Concentrating on the style or the attitudes demands that we put aside the mass extermination of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, the intellectually-impaired, trades unionists and other ethnic, religious and political groups. It asks us to put aside the occupations and slaughter, the ghettos and the gas chambers. Bowie didn't just make provocative statements, including some about Hitler: he moved to Berlin which as well as having a vibrant artistic scene, was a divided, occupied city whose government, judiciary and media spheres still harboured lots of former high-ranking Nazis hurriedly rehabilitated as the Cold War took hold, while the general population consisted of many former Nazis and their victims. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd think twice about turning up in Cambodia wearing a Pol Pot t-shirt and explaining that he had style, or that I was just being 'provocative'.
I enjoyed the robust exchange of ideas that Twitter enabled this morning. People gave me context and supplementary information. They provided context and new ways to approach the facts – some calmly, some passionately. Excellent – this is what it's for. The only really sour note was this one:
The sender blocked me. Again, normal practice on Twitter, and I'm big enough and old enough to be able to take it. What really rankles is that this was an academic. Rather than discussing the substance, like academics do as the core of our existence, she decided that intemperance and blocking was the way to deal with uncomfortable facts. A shame: I like following people with whom I disagree.
The header to this post includes a Tweet about letting the dust settle – a dry, amused and amusing point which deserves serious thought. When is the right time to introduce inconvenient elements? Should the Bowie fans be left to fill social media with uncritical assessments for a few days while their grief is fresh? (As an aside: thank heavens Twitter didn't exist in 1997. I'd have been lynched for my opinions on Diana). I think it's a judgement call. Everybody's talking about Bowie so I felt the time was right to introduce other aspects to the conversation. That may be insensitive but I don't think it's 'vile'. Perhaps we need a more grown-up culture in which we don't idolise those we admire, nor pillory those who err in our eyes.
Well, here I am, in the deserted building on December 23rd. I like it when there's nobody here (this also happens in the depths of summer). I can stock up on stationery, chocolates, whiteboard markers, pornography and alcohol by ransacking my colleagues' desks. The canteen's quiet and I can practice my different handwriting styles ready to fill in a whole load of Module Evaluation Questionnaires.•
Shakespeare finger puppet from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
How's the year been? For me, mixed (as ever). I've been to a record number of funerals, none of which were for people I actually wished dead (the list is available on application: if you suspect you're on it, you probably are), made some good new friends and caught up with old ones.
Culturally, it's been great. I've seen a lot of good plays, most of them at the New Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, a couple at the RSC in Stratford and one at the Globe in London. I also saw Stephen Greenblatt launch his new Shakespeare, which was a little bit disappointing, and did some photography from the top of the Shard.
In music, I was surprisingly smitten by the new Joanna Newsome album, Sally Beamish's Viola Concerto, New Order's 'Music Complete', Bridget St. John, Euros Childs's 'Sweetheart', the Spectralate album 'The Students' Companion', Biber's Rosary Sonatas, Gwen's 'Y Dydd Olaf' (named after an interesting Welsh SF novel), John Lawrence's 'Songs from the Precipice', Meilir's 'Arabella' and was a little disappointed with the latest Low album, although I think they're one of the best bands in the world taking everything they've done into account.
The old album I bought and fell utterly in love with was Young Marble Giants' 'Colossal Youth'. Many thanks to David Byrne for playing that on 6Music one rainy Sunday afternoon. I bought Esenvalds's 'Northern Lights' and was simultaneously entranced by it while getting very suspicious of the easy-listening tendencies associated with 'mystic minimalism'. C Duncan's 'Architect' and Jocelyn Pook's 'Untold Things' also struck a chord with me.
Live, I loved seeing my old friends The Nightingales a few more times: their latest album is also wonderful.The other great gig of the year was Andris Nelsons' last concert as conductor of the CBSO: he's been wonderful and the last concert was just an outpouring of emotion from him, the orchestra and a crowd which knew how lucky it was to have had him for a few years. Another high point was a reading by Liz Berry, the poet.
In terms of books, having moved house 13 months ago I bought and moved around many, many more books than I've read. Shelving them took/is taking more thought than their contents. There a still several boxes taped up and plenty of piles on floors. It turns out that I should have bought a bigger house. Still, I made some shallow aesthetic choices, like shelving all the original Penguins together, which was mentally troubling. Yes, they're a series and a few shelves of orange and white spines looks lovely, but it means separating works by the same author. The same goes for the output of people who wrote poetry and prose. Argh! I've also been moving books around – carrying a backpack stuffed with them from home to work and work to home. Anything 'work' is going to the office, anything 'non-work' is going home, though the borders are porous as my main subject is English literature. Plus there are space issues in both places as my long-suffering office-mates will gladly tell you. I discovered along the way that I own at least six versions of Tristan despite having only done one year of Arthurian studies back in 1994. Paths not taken and all that…
I've read a funny lot of books this year. Going to the Association for Welsh Writing in English conference (which I co-organised this time) meant acquiring a whole new list of must-reads: Nicholas Royle's Veering was particularly interesting, and Andy Webb even persuaded me to go back to Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral. I also got caught up in the Caradoc Evans's centennial, contributing to a BBC Wales documentary in January and presenting a paper at a special conference in January. This meant reading that Irish cause celebre, Brinsley MacNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows – which reminds me that I need to write up the paper for publication. If you haven't read it or Evan's My People, you're in for an infuriating treat. Less controversial was Jon Day's Cyclogeography, his compelling memoir of being a bicycle courier. As a fat cyclist who has spent most of this year injured (RSI, Achilles' injury) and not being able to go fencing, cycling or swimming, at least reading his book let me be out on the road vicariously. I also absolutely loved James Hannah's The A to Z of You and Me. I hesitated to read it at first for the same reason I hesitate to say too much about it here: because James is a friend and I worried it wouldn't be up to the standard I expected of him. As it turns out, there was no need for alarm and I think I'd be recommending it to people even if I had no idea who the author was. It will make you laugh and it may well make you cry. The other book that made me roar with laughter – in public – was Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, his tricksy melding of an Irish banking crash tale with the story of a blocked novelist. The satirical elements are so dark too that they put the non-fictional coverage of Ireland's recession in the shade. Literature seems to have become an Irish colony once again: Anne Enright's The Green Road is brilliant, Eimear McBride told me to read Spill Simmer Falter Witherand she was right. Kevin Barry's Beatleboneis waiting for me, while Thomas Morris's We Don't Know What We're Doing is a stunning collection by a Welsh writer based in Dublin who is also part of the Stinging Fly press, which is a leading light in the new Irish literary revival.
Sadly an awful lot of my reading this year has been rather less enthralling, though interesting in its own way. One of my research projects at the moment is about politicians' writing. I've built a database of (hopefully) all the politicians who've written fiction, poetry or drama – please let me know if you come across any I may have missed: I have only a few in Welsh and none in Irish – and the plan is a couple of journal articles and a book over the next few years. The Times Higherand the Times (the latter behind a paywall) both ran articles about it and my colleague and I won an AHRC-sponsored gig at the Cheltenham Literature Festival which seemed to go down well, but the hard work is only just beginning. Of the several hundred novels, most are parliamentary thrillers, with espionage and murder mysteries coming up behind. There's very little poetry since politics became professionalised, and almost no drama – and virtually no Liberals or Liberal Democrats write. Amongst the working hypotheses at the moment are a sense that thrillers act as the political subconscious of the legislators' class, and that they are bored and disillusioned by quotidian democracy. Norman Tebbit's novel was a particular low point, though Iain Duncan Smith's effort is certainly down there. Boris Johnson's Seventy Two Virgins is (predictably) more fluent but in a sense more disturbing: a comedy about suicide bombers might be expected to be tasteless, but there's a concurrent strand of unconscious racism throughout the text. Over the Christmas break I'll be taking Nadine Dorries, Roy Hattersley and Michael Spicer to bed with me. Now there's a coalition we can all get behind! I've also been working on contemporary Welsh working-class fiction with my Coleg Cymraeg counterpart Lisa Sheppard - there are some amazing works in both languages appearing at the moment. I've also got plans to force an Alison Bielski revival somehow, and look at David Jones's time in Ireland, which never gets mentioned in the critical work. The other thing I really should do is write something on Jilly Cooper's Riders series: I teach it every year and it goes down consistently well, but there's no critical work on it.
I am looking forward to reading Mary-Anne Constantine's debut novel Star-Shot though. Trying to work my way through the unread orange-and-white Penguins I was pleasantly surprised by Chesterton's oddity The Napoleon of Notting Hillin which a man from that place is unexpectedly made ruler and promptly starts wars simply to manufacture civic pride. That certainly wouldn't happen now… I'm also loving Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, about a simple chap who simple accepts the cruelties and insanities a war-mongering world throws at him, his innocence throwing their megalomania into sharp relief. Wish I'd read it years ago. I've also started reading Margery Allingham's Campion novels - more for my 1930s interest than for the detective format, but they're fascinating, and slightly odd. Terry Pratchett's death was very sad: I've long loved him not just for the angry liberal humanism that shaped his novels, but for his deftness of touch and the love (of life, for people) that spilled from the page. I was pleased that his last novel was a Tiffany Aching one: she's the chalk-bred witch whose strength reminded me so much of PJ Harvey's bleak, wonderful album White Chalk.
In the SF world, I was addicted to Peter Higgins' Wolfhound Centuryseries, set in a strangely altered version of the USSR (and before I forget, it's not SF but is Russia-set: Wiliam Owen Roberts's Petrograd was translated into English from Welsh and is just stunning - Paris is available in Welsh but there's no translation yet). Paul Kingsnorth's The Wakewas also a magnificent re-situation of the dying Anglo-Saxon world as a linguistically-alienating dystopia.
Anyway, I'd better stop going on about books - I've read so many good ones this year, and bought so many, many more. It's time to talk about the major event of the year: Labour's defeat and the Tories' election victory. So many feelings, amongst them ones I'm not proud of, such as a flash of misanthropy. Despite having the most reactionary, vile and rightwing press in the world, I hoped the British electorate would see through a government promoting the policies which led to the recession, was openly planning to reward the businesses and classes which caused the crash, and was going to take the opportunity to strip the state of all the social protections and worthy activities a century of neo-democracy has achieved. They didn't. The result taught me several things, amongst them that social media does not reflect the state of the nation, and that I have absolutely no insight into how the Great British Public thinks. As a Labour member, I have no regrets about voting for Ed Miliband to become leader, and I wish he hadn't resigned. In the subsequent election I voted for Jeremy Corbyn because I believe many of the same things he believes. I expected him and his team to be more competent and much more aggressive so I'm disappointed on those aspects, but at least at the next election there can be no doubts or claims that all politicians are the same. It'll be a clear choice between serious socialism and the most vicious neoliberalism, conducted amongst the ruins of the post-1945 settlement. The cynicism and triumphalism we're now seeing reminds me of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Reports of the Prime Minister partying with Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks once more shows you exactly what they think of us.
First up, of course, is another war. A couple of years ago the Tories were telling anyone who'd listen that Ed Miliband was supporting terrorism by refusing to vote in favour of bombing Bashar Al-Assad. Now Jeremy Corbyn's apparently supporting terrorism by refusing to bomb Assad's enemies. Nobody, apparently, thinks that the British in particular have done plenty of damage to these countries over the past century or so and might usefully engage in a period of quiet contemplation for a while. Instead, we're going to drop democracy from 35,000ft again and buy a whole new generation of holocaust missiles…in the name of peace, British values and Punching Above Our Weight. I'd just like us to stop thinking about the world's problems as reducible to punching people.
Finally: work. I'm enjoying my research. Teaching is absolutely brilliant at the moment: all the year groups are engaged, intelligent and composed of interesting and likeable students. It's a sheer pleasure to walk into a classroom at the moment. On the down side, I'm losing one of the best heads of school we've ever had and I'll miss him a lot. Other aspects aren't so great: Faculty leadership has been unremittingly hostile to the humanities this year and I've had to fight a series of losing – and depressingly personalised – battles over basic things for students and colleagues, and not only in my roles as governor and union representative. There have been times when the good things have been overwhelmed by the bad and going to work has been less than joyful. I could always go somewhere else of course…except that I can't: I can't even get an interview these days.
I'm sure that there's plenty more to mention, but I'm tired and I need to go home and do some ironing. Enjoy your Christmas wherever and whoever you are, and I'll be back in January. As always, thanks to friends, colleagues, loved ones, readers and Twitter interlocutors for a) knowing so much and b) knowing the right thing to say.
•Note to Jo Johnson: this is satire. It never happens. All Higher Education metrics are entirely legitimate and statistically sound – just like the claims you made about teaching standards. Nobody would dream of questioning them. In point of fact I once received an MEQ which read simply 'nice arse'. Which was (once) true but wasn't particularly salient. But it's still better than the one my friend got in LA: 'fuck off back to Britain you Limey bitch'.
