Medieval studies, medieval attitudes

This week has mostly been consumed with rage about this advert, shamefully retweeted by University English on behalf of the British Library. 

Post-doctoral Internship - Medieval Manuscripts

Location:	London
Salary:	Salary is £10.55 per hour (The London Living Wage)
Hours:	Full Time
Contract Type:	Fixed-Term/Contract

The British Library is pleased to offer an Internship in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts section of the Western Heritage Department for a post-doctoral student in History, Art History, Medieval Language or Literature or another relevant subject. 

The intern will utilise specialist knowledge of medieval manuscripts to support the curatorial team on a wide range of curatorial activities, including cataloguing medieval manuscripts, supporting delivery of seminars and visits, publicising the work of the Section and the collections on the Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog and social media channels, responding to visitor enquiries, preparing labels and other interpretative material and supporting the digitisation of medieval manuscripts. 

The successful candidate will enjoy privileged access to the British Library’s world-class collections of medieval manuscripts. The post holder will work alongside specialists with wide-ranging and varied expertise.  This internship will provide an opportunity to develop writing and presentation skills, to engage with a variety of audiences, and to gain experience of curatorial duties.
This position is open only to those who have recently completed or are about to submit a PhD in a subject area relevant to the study of medieval manuscripts and who have a right to work in the UK full time.

How does this enrage me? Let me count the ways.
Firstly, the rate of pay. £10.55 may be the London Living Wage but it seems very low, whatever the qualifications and duties may be. An egg mayonnaise sandwich in the British Library costs £7, so the hourly rate is almost a sandwich and a half. The lucky winner of this post will presumably spend about the same again getting to and from work, and will have to find the price of a room in London, food, clothing, bills and so on out of his or her £13,000 pounds. 

The candidate must have a PhD: this means that s/he will have taken a BA, possibly and MA and then a PhD: 6-8 years of low or no earnings, no savings, no pension contributions, no NI. S/he will be roughly 25 years old at a minimum, and therefore several years behind friends who might have left school and immediately started working on the minimum wage or more. The unexceptionable dreams – a secure home, a family, spare pants – are deferred even further. To the British Library, however, none of this matters: it has no intention of sharing the costs of acquiring the high level skills needed for this job. 

It is a job: the work is mostly skilled and requires prior qualifications: the idea that someone with a modern PhD won't already have 'writing and presentation skills' already is a joke. There's no meaningful definition of 'post-doctoral student': PhDs require you to demonstrate to your peers that you have made an original contribution to the field. There's no higher qualification available – the use of the term here is simply a means to justify a low salary. 

The benefits are laughable: while the candidate may 'enjoy privileged access' to the British Library, I can't imagine s/he will have the energy to utilise this at weekends - it's a full-time job, so there won't be much time for browsing after work. 

Underlying all this is a simple refusal to acknowledge class privilege. The only people who will be able to take up this post (which looks like a great job) are those who have private means: my own students, virtually all first-generation HE entrants with no family money or funded PhDs are loaded with debt after their degrees and would never have the resources required to uproot themselves for a few months to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. No doubt the scheme's progenitors will speak of other forms of enrichment, and the networking opportunities available, but the whole structure depends on entrenched unfairness which will simply restrict (in this case) medieval studies to the same old small group of people. I simply note that the BL's director – a man unencumbered by a PhD*, but an alumnus of a very expensive private school and Oxford University (obviously) – scrapes by on £160,000. The canteen checkout holds no fears for him, especially as he has a second job as a non-exec director of Channel 4.  Perhaps there's a shortage of privileged white men, but it does seem that it's a buyer's market for desperate, fully-fledged medievalists, whereas the Roly Keatings of this world can name their prices.  

The sad thing is that there will be a queue of people applying for this post: we have an HE and public sector model which refuses to recognise the hidden costs of higher education, and wants to buy expertise on the cheap - this is why over 50% of university teachers are hourly-paid, temporary workers. Some will be able to coast through on private means; some will scrimp and save; others will remain invisible because they lack the means to subsidise one of the world's greatest institutions, thus depriving it of new perspectives and ideas. 

Of course, I can say this: I've lucked into a proper salaried job (though student application numbers suggest I shouldn't get too comfortable), surfing all the privileges that accrue to someone like me: the people who should be wielding the flaming torches are precisely those to insecure to speak up. Also, I may frequently clash with my own institution's management, but they have never stooped so low as this – while teaching opportunities are diminishing, PhD students are paid the standard rate here: c. £45 per hour, while the Graduate Teaching Assistants get 2-year contracts, take a PGC and a salary of about £24,000 per year. 

*OK, he has some honorary degrees but they require slightly less effort. 

Side note - as this is my weekly post, here's what I read this week:
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood. Disorientating, almost prose-poem of a modernist novel about pre-war Paris's queer society. Moments of stunning clarity and insight amongst dense, challenging, flights of fantasy. I'll definitely have to re-read it several times, but it's a short, astonishing text. 

James Bradley, Clade. I wasn't initially sure about this melding of the family saga with a story of eco-destruction, and I still think it threw in too many sub-plots (autistic scion discovers alien communication) but it's well written and the clear-eyed analysis of the way we're denying our way to a sterile, hostile world is utterly convincing. 

Susan Price, The Sterkarm Handshake. Shades of the later Outlander in this, but (despite Ian McEwan's stupid and snobbish comments about the genre), Price uses an SF trope – time travel in this case – to explore corporate colonialist attitudes towards agency and exploitation. It's also funny. 

Anna Burns, Milkman. Another one that's justified quick re-reading: there's a minimal plot and maximal first-person narration and it's wonderful to stand under this shower of thoughts, critiques and feelings and let them soak in. With the misery of Lyra McKee's murder providing space for previously-suppressed voices in the self-policed communities of Northern Ireland, Milkman is so timely. If you want more Northern Ireland/North of Ireland/Six Counties fiction recommendations, ask @DrMagennis, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the field). If you get the taste for contemporary Irish experimental fiction, try Eimear McBride next. 

I've also just started Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure, a feminist, Welsh novel in English which shares something with the good McEwan of The Cement Garden-era, with Lloyd Jones's Y Dŵr and yet is highly distinctive: a claustrophobic setting with its own unexplained rules, a fabular tone and multiple (sometimes choric, overlapping) narrative voices. 

Reading round-up.

Just a quick one about this week's reading.

1. Finished Richard Adams's Maia. Dreadful in almost every way, and for 1000+ pages. I finished it because I paid £1.99 for it. There were a few interesting disquisitions on the economics of slave empires but not enough to justify the other 997 pages of sexist – and ultimately deeply conservative – junk. The kind of book written one-handed, to be crude about it. However, if you're looking for something to read one-handed, this isn't it because Adams hasn't the courage to write straight-up porn. Weirdly, the narrative works hard to build a non-technological world that could be on another planet, or in the near-East at any point between Alexander and the fall of Byzantium, apart from a single reference to the Victorians.

2. Nick Hubble's The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Hubble suggests that the Modernist Question is essentially 'Who Am I', particularly in the context of twentieth-century masses:  the Proletarian response, he says, is 'who are we?' and what is the relationship between I and we. High modernist texts, to reduce Hubble's argument appallingly, is to worry about the fuzziness of the I amidst the encroachment of the we, and to retreat into style. The proletarian authors (and he redefines the term interestingly) take modernist techniques and use them to promote new ways of living based on intersubjective experience, i.e. encountering others and being changed by these understandings. He writes about Lewis Grassic Gibbons' complex A Scots Quair series and John Sommerfield's May Day at length, plus a good number of the classics of the proletarian genre, including Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live in passing. The close readings are superb, and not a jot of published critical material has escaped him. I did feel that some authors are missing however: Gwyn Thomas's early work just squeezes into the period in question and is strongly modernist and proletarian, but he seems to have escaped Hubble's otherwise panoramic gaze. There's also a lot of very interesting discussion of Empson's characterisation of proletarian literature as pastoral, in which middle class characters or readers learn about themselves through reading about industrial versions of the rude mechanicals – I wondered whether some consideration of proletarian literature about communities that just didn't have a middle-class perspective available – such as Lewis Jones's and Gwyn Thomas's Rhondda might have been a useful comparison. Anyway, it's a seriously impressive book that shines a new light on the field and unlike many good critical books, there's a paperback at £20.

3. Sarah Maria Griffin's Spare and Found Parts. A very interesting Irish feminist post-apocalypse homage to Frankenstein. There isn't enough attention paid to Irish SF, but perhaps this and Sarah Davis-Goff's forthcoming Last Ones Left Alive will help. I liked Spare and Found Parts a lot. Using Frankenstein as the basis of a teenage Bildungsroman isn't exactly subtle but it really works well. Ruined Dublin is evoked very well: anyone who knows the city will enjoy spotting what the plot does to their favourite bits.

4. Chris Mullin, The Friends of Harry Perkins. Less a novel, more an opportunity to make some fair points about Brexit and the Labour Party by a veteran ex-MP. The plot is perfunctory, the sub-plot (the death of a child) mawkish and lazy and the narrative expository. I read it as part of my politicians' fictions project. It's not the worst, but anyone hoping for a worthy sequel to his A Very British Coup will be disappointed.

I'm off for a few days' holiday ('from what?') I hear you cry. I'm taking the manuscript of a collection of essays on a Welsh author that I'm reviewing for UWP. Apart from that, I'm taking Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, James Bradley's eco-apocalypse Clade and Anna Burns's now-famous Milkman.

Finally, a quick thank-you to author and academic Donna Freitas: I put her teen techno-fear novel Unplugged on a course alongside Dave Eggers' interesting-but-dreadful The Circle and two of my students contacted her to ask some questions. She was generous enough to record a short video of her thoughts, which I thought was above-and-beyond. Restores one's faith in human nature.

Happy Easter to you all.

Hands Up For Wayne Hennessey

'Pob lwc, Wayne'
'Diolch yn fawr iawn…scheisse!'

Why am I mistranslating a famous scene from The Great Escape? In honour of Wayne Hennessey, the Wales and Crystal Palace goalkeeper who was recently found not guilty by the football authorities of deliberately making a Roman salute during a dinner. After initially claiming he was signalling the photographer, he later claimed total ignorance of the gesture's historic symbolism.

'…stressing from the outset that he was unaware of what a Nazi salute actually was.
“Improbable as that may seem to those of us of an older generation, we do not reject that assertion as untrue,” noted the panel. “In fact, when cross-examined about this, Mr Hennessey displayed a very considerable – one might even say lamentable – degree of ignorance about anything to do with Hitler, fascism and the Nazi regime.
“Regrettable though it may be that anyone should be unaware of so important a part of our own and world history, we do not feel we should therefore find he was not telling the truth about this. All we would say (at the risk of sounding patronising) is that Mr Hennessey would be well advised to familiarise himself with events which continue to have great significance to those who live in a free country'. 

Rather than cynically doubt such a claim, let's applaud Mr Hennessey. Alone of all British people, he has managed to avoid every single history lesson (the curriculum has long been derided for being Tudors'n'Nazis), every single war film, entire TV channels dedicated to Nazi Murder Mysteries, Nazi Collaborators, Nazis: A Warning From History, Nazi Exiles, The Last Nazis, Nazi UFO, Nazi Hunters, Shot Down: Escaping Nazi Territory, Weird Nazi Obsessions (ironic, that one), The Nazi Hunt for Atlantis and Nazi Underpants (I only made up one of these) and much more besides. Perhaps Hennessey has been a member of the first team for so many years that he's never seen a television on a Saturday afternoon, traditionally the spot reserved for The Guns of Navarone or some naval adventure. Clearly he only ever played football in the playground, and never noticed his schoolmates' games, unless of course, growing up in North Wales, the enemy was always the Saes. Though if he wants to read novels about Nazi-occupied Wales, he can choose between Jan Morris's slyly ironic Our First Leader and Owen Sheers's Resistance.

Well done, Wayne. In a culture saturated with the single war Britain was on the right side of, one which fuels the bigotry of armchair generals like Nigel Farage, Mark François, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, he's managed to escape the entire cultural weight of this malignant obsession with a period which only ever gets presented more simplistically as time moves on, particularly with regard to British motivations and achievements. If only we'd all been so lucky.

Put not your trust in princes. Even those who make jam.

I met my reader the other day, and he asked me why, as someone with a full spectrum of facile opinions and a Labour Party card, I haven't joined the fray re: Jeremy Corbyn.*

The answer, of course, is cowardice. Well, cowardice plus a certain degree of exhaustion with the whole tired, tedious argument, plus some socialist history.

On the whole, I like Corbyn's ideological positions: anti-colonialism, international solidarity, Irish reunification, a strong welfare state and the viscera of running-dog capitalists spilling from their suspended corpses a degree of redistribution. The big disagreement I have with him is on Europe: for all its faults, it seems to me that the EU has provided more worker protection, cleaner air and calmer international politics than any British administration ever has or ever will.

I also tend to think that someone seeking power needs to develop an ideological perspective that can adapt to changing contexts, and that is capable of being communicated vibrantly and persuasively in the teeth of a hostile media environment. Spending time outside your echo chamber is also a good idea, something Corbyn and Tony Blair failed to do: Alastair Campbell's diary records an instance in which Blair flatly refused to believe the shockingly low UK average earnings statistics because he personally didn't know anyone earning less than £50,000 ('cognitive dissonance'). People are the products of their environments – neither you nor I nor Corbyn are sufficiently aware of our own shortcomings because we are rarely exposed to alternative perspectives on our ingrained belief systems, mostly because it's emotionally painful to do so. That said, I do think that those seeking power should constantly interrogate their beliefs and seek alternative views more than the rest of us. However seductive rigid faith is, being a True Believer leads to mental inflexibility and an eventual tendency to see disembowelling as the solution to every argument.

Most importantly of all though, my lodestar – as far as I have one – is Lewis Jones, the communist councillor, activist and author who was deported from the USSR (it could have been a lot worse: this was 1936 and plenty of British Communists in Russia were executed) for refusing to join in a standing ovation for Stalin, on the basis that real communists don't have individual heroes, they build progressive mass movements. Jones himself wouldn't survive a day in modern politics: his enthusiastic sex life would feed constant Daily Mail headlines to the exclusion of all his work on behalf of Spain and the unemployed, while his political doubts (which to me make him more admirable) would be seen as weakness. The Communist Party of the time was certainly torn: he inspired thousands of people, but kept going 'off message' when the Party line and the need for discipline conflicted with the empathy that fuelled his activism.

'Put not your faith in princes' (Psalms 146 3-5) is a good maxim: they, like all human beings, have feet of clay and the world is complicated. One of the most pernicious aspects of contemporary society is the lynch-mob mentality that ruthlessly punishes personal flaws, mistakes or even inconsistency. Nobody can be expected to live up to perfection, and idolising a politician, a sports star or a pop singer will only lead to disappointment and anger.

So there are aspects of Corbyn's politics I like and others I don't. As to his personality: I largely don't care either way. Dreadful people (hello, Lyndon Johnson, Eric Gill, Morrissey) have done great things, apparently lovely people have done terrible things (yes, Mother Teresa, I mean you). Sometimes the people with the right ideas have no clear path to enacting them, sometimes people with the wrong ideas have all the skills to put them in place (I'm terrified of Mike Pence: evil and serious). As far as the Labour Party is concerned, I see Corbyn's wing as a group of people who have old – and mostly still relevant – solutions to structural problems but little idea of how to communicate, nor of how to cope with a ridiculous electoral system, and the right of the party as a group of people with some good communications skills but who were left high and dry by the failure of Third Way politics because technocracy isn't a viable political position when the machinery breaks down. It's not 1973 any more, but nor is it 1997. Pragmatism without purpose is managerialism; purpose without pragmatism is the impotence of those sects which have spent decades honing their ideology (with many purges) ready for the revolution without ever once trying to actually, you know, do something.

In the end, I just don't think that socialists should have messiahs, even if they do have the right initials. Socialists believe that structures generate subjects, not vice versa.

Nor do I want to spend my time on social media being abused for being either a fascist CIA agent centrist-dad or an anti-semitic Marxist terrorism-loving traitor, which seem to be the only two positions available in any debate about Mr Corbyn. I don't think it's healthy or constructive to either be or to accuse others of being Corbynites or Corbynistas, particularly as those people insecure enough to insist on rigid definitions must surely end up accusing Corbyn of not being sufficiently Corbynite. At some point, he'll have to change his mind about something (I'm hoping it's EU membership): being able to do so without being called a traitor would be good for him, us and at the moment, this country. Identify a point on the continuum that is socialism as you see it, sure, but don't over-invest in any individual or announce that everyone else is a betrayer. If you can't support or critique someone calmly, you're not doing politics, you're doing religion, and not the nice bits either. And you're outsourcing your moral and ideological responsibilities.

Doxxing to the usual address, please.

*While on the subject, I notice some shock that the Paratroop Regiment used Corbyn's image for target practice. It makes a change from unarmed teenagers and aged Irish priests waving white handkerchiefs, I suppose. But surprise? Only if you haven't been paying attention.

PS. All these arguments about leadership apply to universities as well. My heart sank when someone from the Leadership Foundation for HE enthusiastically said to me 'your VC is a visionary'. Lord, save us from visionaries…

Guess who's back

Apologies for the break in transmission. The beginning of the year included massive amounts of teaching, marking and admin, helping with the very successful city literature festival (highlights: Liz Berry, Elvis McGonagall, Tracy Thorn) plus preparation for a job interview (this never happens) in the EU (which felt like planning a prison break). I didn't get it, but I didn't expect to. In any case, the suspense was somewhat lifted by another distraction - getting hit by a car on my cycle ride to work. Ironically, given my near-incessant moaning about selfish, aggressive and careless drivers, the guy who hit me wasn't any of these things: I came down a slight incline with low sun behind me and he couldn't see me as he pulled out of a junction. An unfortunate accident rather than anything more malicious. I broke my collarbone but my lovely, irreplaceable Moulton bike was largely OK, and my assailant paid for the repairs.

Since then I've been hanging around the house, sporadically reading in between extended bouts of self-pity. My friends have been wonderful - visitors most days, almost always bearing flowers or fine comestibles. I've read a lot of books (and only bought 2!) and largely avoided daytime TV. I won't be fencing or cycling for another 3-6 months but I'm hoping that I'll be able to wield an iron earlier than that. The first two weeks were terrible: shapeless sports gear made from artificial fibres – ugh.

Apart from 4 months doing a night-shift data-entry job with British Gas in 1996, this is the longest I've been out of education since 1980. I didn't miss the admin or the marking, but I did miss my students and colleagues a lot. I'm quite happy in my own company but staring at the same four walls for six weeks is quite long enough.

So here I am: picking up supervisions and union case work again, but otherwise meant to be writing a major grant bid and at long last turning my PhD dissertation into a book. Wish me luck.

(Look: managed to get through a whole blog post without mentioning the B word…).

Books read during my convalescence in no particular order:

Cynan Jones, The Dig: short, occasionally shocking naturalism. Definitely contains scenes of harm to animals.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: astonishingly good - KIberd clearly read Imagined Communities and ran with it.
Kate Atkinson, Transcription: cracking good story, decent twist, but not as formally inventive as her work usually is.
Gardner/Carroll, The Annotated Alice: you'll feel like you fell down a rabbit hole but it's very much worth reading as a companion to the raw text.
Adam Thorpe, Still: not sure why I hadn't read this one before. It's seriously long, but totally justified. A Joycean tour of the twentieth-century through a bitter failed film-maker's 60th-birthday monologue.
Bill Newton Dunn, The Devil Knew Not: bad novel, interesting in other ways – Dunn was a Tory MEP who was largely pro-Europe, unlike his son, the political editor of the Sun.
Mike Berners-Lee, How Bad Are Bananas - a decade old, but a useful guide to the carbon footprint of everyday life. Bananas: not very bad. Cheese: terrible. Which is a shame for me because I far prefer the latter.
Pratchett/Baxter, The Long Mars: the best of this collaborative SF series so far.
Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: I really like Trollope's novels, but this was 800+ pages of mansplaining. A Trollope too far, I fear.
Henderson, Rotten Reviews Redux: an amusing round-up of scathing reviews of books that came to be seen as classics. Dip into it before appraisals and job interviews.
Elvis McGonagall, Viva Loch Lomond: I saw EG at the Literature Festival and laughed long and loud. Funny, political, witty poetry. Best experienced live, but the collection is good.
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward: decent SF thriller with a better concept than plot.
Keith Roberts, Anita: the cover design and blurb makes it look like exploitative sexy fantasy. It's actually a 1960s youth echo of Lolly Willowes.
Paul McAuley, Mind's Eye: a decent mix of SF and detective adventure plus a healthily cynical take on British attitudes towards the middle East.
Omar El Akkad, American War: post-invasion Iraq translated to a torn, post-oil US: not a novel idea but well done.
Tiffany Murray, Diamond Star Halo: an interesting tale of first love and fame which can't decide whether it's popular romance or literary fiction, to the detriment of both. Some wonderful characterisation.
Adam Roberts, By The Pricking Of Her Thumbs: an excellent future-detective whodunnit by Roberts set in a Britain largely abandoned for virtual existence, and his first sequel.
Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere: a big, clever space opera with a philosophical core.
Nancy Mitford, Pigeon Pie: short, snappy, witty 1930s roman à clef by one of the Mitford Sisters. A delight.
Nicholas Blake, The Deadly Joker. Possibly the worst novel Blake (C Day Lewis) wrote.
Robert Dickinson, The Tourist: a funny crime thriller set in a seedy and insular early 21st-century Britain visited by tourists on package holidays from the future. Any echoes of Brexit are entirely incidental.
Muriel Spark, Territorial Rights: I thought this was a very damp squib. Short, with some witty observations and witty lampoons of dreadful bourgeois middle-class types, but utterly sexless and occasionally in very poor taste, unredeemed by having much to say.
Paul McAuley, Whole Wide World: a very early attempt to novelise the then-new implications of the Web. Stands up rather well.
Christopher Brookmyre, Pandaemonium. A mash-up of 70s horror, Alan Warner's The Sopranos, Derry Girls and The Exorcist. A glorious romp.
Ken McLeod, The Corporation Wars: Syndicalist Robots (and uploaded racists) in Virtual Space. What's not to like?
Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree: semi-progressive politics, sexually-progressive and feminist, but still 850 pages of high fantasy, with a lot of early-modern Japanese international relations thrown in. Lots of nice touches but needed an editor.
Wodehouse, The World of Blandings: also 800 pages set in a fantasy world, with lots of plot devices familiar from his Jeeves and Wooster stories. Paper thin but beautifully-constructed and written with the lightest of touches. Contains the immortal 'it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine'.
Richard Adams, Maia: not a rabbit to be seen. Mostly badly-written soft-porn fantasy with occasional serious and interesting discourses on the social and economic effects of privatisation and what came to be known 30 years later as neoliberalism. No, really!

Gary: a cautionary tale of higher education policy funding, or Know Your Place

I have a friend whom we'll call Gary, because that's his name. When I got to know him, he was the university's copyright officer, and a good one. Then he quit to devote his life to music, disillusioned by the higher education sector's craven and incompetent attempts to mimic what it thought was cool in the corporate field.

Gary wasn't always a copyright officer. He left school without much in the way of qualifications and worked in various steel foundries across the Black Country until he pitched up at university (before my time: he became legendary), explained that he was sick of being made redundant, and took a degree in English before fees became a thing, never looking back.

I mention Gary because there won't be many more of him coming along. The government's assessment mechanisms for university quality in fact do little more than measure the relative privilege of their intakes. Gary and most of my students come from an unusually deprived area (unusual now: wait until Brexit really hits) with the associated dreadful outcomes in secondary education and low mobility. Multiple structural causes contribute to poor exam grades and limited opportunities to leave the area, let alone to pick up the soft skills and cultural capital that constitutes the unspoken elements of posh unis' selection procedures. Additionally, the government is planning to restrict student finance so that nobody with less than 3 D's at A-level will qualify. A low bar, you might think, but for someone from a disrupted background, a failing school, or who simply hasn't got it together by the age of 18 (a category I would surely have filled nicely) it's not as easy as you might think. 20% of my university's intake falls short of this minimum: excluding them would consign thousands of students to unemployment or underemployment, deny them social and cultural opportunities taken for granted by luckier people, and most likely close this entire university, having a massive impact on the area in every way.

This policy will save a short-termist government a fair amount of money, but it's a long-term plan for national decline. Every country that has successfully pulled itself out of poverty has done so by educating its people to the highest standard possible. A country which leaves its poorest to rot while reserving the pleasures and private advantages of higher education to the already-advantaged deserves to fail. I don't know what A-levels my colleagues got, but plenty of them came to HE in their own time and all achieved excellent PhDs and have inspired further generations of the people our rulers want to condemn to the ranks of the unskilled, zero-hours exploited that entrench poverty while enabling fat shareholder dividends. If universities are engines for social justice (and mine is) you couldn't think of a better way to end any hope of progression. There won't be any more Garys, that's for sure. What a stupid country.

Break out the green paint?

Well it has been an interesting couple of weeks since last I posted. Christmas came and went (siblings' children, saw friends, ate calorific food, read a PhD thesis and some books) and then came back to work ready to get stuck into marking (ahem).

Over the course of the first couple of days it became apparent that some very senior people in the institution are involuntarily enjoying an extended break… entirely coincidentally, these are the individuals we in the union branch have long found to be hostile, untrustworthy and incompetent. The usual polite fictions have been proffered by the management who appointed and encouraged these people and the rumours are (unhelpfully) flying around. Much has been made of 'leadership' in this place as in the HE sector generally in recent years, and it's time to make sure that blame for redundancies, shortfalls and – if true – malfeasance isn't apportioned solely to individuals but to a managerial culture that tends to allow credit to rise to the top while ensuring blame sinks down the hierarchy or dissipates entirely.

Culture is on my mind because aside from the turmoil, we had a very interesting mass meeting with the VC on the subject of environmental sustainability. It's long been a key concern for me and clearly for a lot of colleagues because the turnout was huge. After drifting badly for years, it looks like the university is planning to take these things seriously. One of the frustrations of my period as a governor was the general lack of interest in the matter: we'd cut our CO2 emissions impressively some years back and apparently decided not to do anything else. Senior management and many governors rolled up in their SUVs and tended to see green issues as a fad not worth pursuing, or as the first luxury to be cut when the finances got tight. However, aside from the random suggestions the VC had on his powerpoint, the key message was 'it's about culture: I'm not going to do anything: you are'. It sounds nice, but actually it feels rather evasive. Cultures, as any neomarxist critic will tell you, depend on structures and power. While it feels warm and cuddly to say that you're empowering everyone by developing a culture of sustainability for which we'll all be responsible, only a very small number of people actually have the ear of management and even fewer have the authority to authorise payments and sign contracts. If everybody is responsible, I can't help thinking, then nobody is accountable.

There's little point being generally in favour of environmentally sustainable if your first concern is short-term savings or quick wins. There's always the danger that the Finance Director whispers in your ear that money's tight, or that your International Director really does need to take that business-class flight to Australia.

Management wants to introduce charges for parking, and there's a suspicion aboard that all this sustainability talk is greenwash designed to conceal a straightforward revenue-raising plan, and it's hard to not accept that. I think I'm going to be quite unpopular amongst even my union colleagues (more unpopular, should I say) because I'm in favour of reducing the car-parking space available. It's not just the waste of land involved, it's the anti-social nature of drawing in huge numbers of vehicles into one of the most congested and polluted area of the country. If we expand parking spaces, research shows that more car journeys are taken; if we reduce them, we run the risk of dispersing cars around the local community unless we find a way to persuade people out of their cars. I'd like to see us support the reopening of the railway line between two of our campuses so that we can retire the inter-campus shuttles; seriously invest in cycling facilities (currently consisting of a random scattering of frames hidden in dark corners); reduce parking spaces; subsidise public transport season tickets and return to the idea I proposed a while ago of designing a ride-sharing app for students, 90% of whom come from a 25 mile radius.

There's an awful lot we can do, but as a group we'll have to be persuaded that this is meaningful rather than greenwash, and that takes more than slogans about cultural change. But it's a start.

Aside from this, what else have I been consuming. Well, my GTAs gave me Michael Cox's neoVictorian posh thriller novel The Meaning of Night for Christmas and I found that I couldn't get going on the PhD thesis until I'd read it - it's a big book that you can really wallow enjoyably in. I also read Lucy Boston's children's classic The Children of Green Knowe in one sitting: if you like John Masefield, Susan Cooper and CS Lewis, this series is for you. It was recommended to me by a colleague and I wish I'd come across it as a child. I've also inhaled the second of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City - I accidentally read the third one out of sequence during the summer, but it didn't make much difference. They're compulsively readable, though Maupin's attempt to make them more like standalone novels rather than serial/picaresque texts means that while the social comedy and tragedy of gay life in San Francisco elements work beautifully, the plots he imposes are pretty dreadful. This one involved Episcopalian cannibals; the next one introduces a Jim Jones subplot. That's the end of the reading for fun for a while though: I've got a massive pile of marking and two brand new modules to teach starting in a week, so it's back to re-reading course texts and writing lots of lectures. Not much new music since before Christmas, other than Euros Childs's latest eccentric work of genius, Olion (download it for free here or preferably give him some cash) and Sharon Van Etten's Are We There, both of which are repaying multiple listens.

Vole's Occasionally Festive nearly Fifty

Well here I am in the office alone, because the student who asked for a tutorial has stood me up, and all of my colleagues are curled up in their nests or out digging up acorns.

It's been an odd week. On Tuesday I had to represent someone at a disciplinary hearing, which turned into a version of one of the cheaper courtroom dramas on ITV3. Within 5 minutes of walking in I found myself reading out sections of the procedure to the chair and the HR lackey, neither of whom had apparently familiarised themselves with their own regulations. Two minutes after that I was heard to say 'don't answer that' and we walked out in the most corduroy version of a mic drop ever seen. Yesterday was a slightly happier encounter: finishing the year by examining a Creative Writing PhD thesis. These consist of a lengthy original work, a critical section on the literary context and a theorised self-evaluation. While we gave the candidate a good grilling over his theoretical contextualisation, the external and I were deeply moved by the novella, a polyphonic, destabilised retelling told entirely in Black Country dialect of the locally infamous and unexplained murder of 'Bella', an anonymous woman whose skeleton was found stuffed into a wych-elm in 1943. The cliché of PhD vivas is that they should be enjoyable conversations between the only three or four people who'll ever read your work with such close attention, but I genuinely think that was the case yesterday. The external examiner was Luke Kennard, a really talented poet and novelist in his own right, and it was a privilege to listen to two authors discuss the creative process with a keen critical eye. My contribution was largely centred on punctuation, but every little helps.

So rather than tackle any of the mountains of work I still have to do, I thought I'd look back on the various records I've bought and in most cases enjoyed this year. Despite my young GTA dividing my musical tastes into 'boring background music' (the classical stuff) and 'not as good as Ariana Grande' (inc. Kate Bush, Portishead and Massive Attack) I think it's been quite a good year. So in reverse order of purchase:

1. Suede, The Blue Hour. I bought this on vinyl, so marks are knocked off for not providing a download version for mobile/office listening. It's beautiful, and reflective: Suede have aged gracefully and thoughtfully, rather than trying to reclaim their youth.
2. Audiobooks, Now (In a Minute): I've always loved David Wrench's work, from Nid Madagascar to the bilingual (Welsh) folk-goth of Blow Winds Blow to the horny pop of The Atomic World of Tomorrow and all the collaborations he's been involved in.





Audiobooks is the result of his move to London and a chance meeting with a young art student called Evangeline Ling. It's another late flowering - having made a career mostly from producing other people's records, Wrench records albums at odd intervals seemingly for fun rather than profit, but this one really deserves to be a hit. It's funny - as the Welsh in-joke of the title promises - but it's also catchy and funky dance music.
3. Per Norgard, Symphonies 3 and 7. I'd missed Norgard's existence until this year, when a review in the Guardian mentioned the 3rd symphony as a good choral piece. They were right - it's contemporary classical that uses interesting rhythmic patterns to produce something that's uncanny without being unbearably abstract.
4. Julian Anderson, Book of Hours - Choral Music: some of this is beautiful without being memorable, but I really fell for the 'Four American Choruses', which push choral music beyond the familiar sounds and structures you get on Classic FM or daytime Radio 3.



5. Andrew Kirkman and the Binchois Consort, The Lily and the Rose. I much prefer medieval music to the Baroque and Classical period - early music can be a bit rougher and earthier, until it was captured by the church and princes and prettified. This CD is mostly of religious music, but it's full of life, and doesn't sound like the aural equivalent of the Sealed Knot society.
6. Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox. I'm still not entirely convinced that minimalist/post-minimalist opera can or should be a thing, but 'Wichita Vortex Sutra' has never been far from my turntable, so I bought this patchy but intriguing opera to hear what happens when Ginsberg and Glass get together. It's still growing on me, but I am starting to love it. I played 'Wichita…' to my students this year. I can't say they were immediately converted to Beat poetry and minimalism but neither did they race for the exit.



7. The Breath, Let The Cards Fall. Not as rough as the folk I really love (think Unthanks) but this is a superb example of modern Anglo-Irish sort-of folk music with not a hint of nostalgia.
8. Chris Isaak, 'Wicked Game'. It was stuck in my head and I've never owned a copy. It's good!
9. Tori Amos, Boys for Pele. I'm literally two decades late, as this is the 20th Anniversary re-release. I'd only heard the club remix of 'Professional Widow', so not bothered with her stuff. Turns out she's like Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Joanna Newsome and PJ Harvey, i.e a musical polymath, a poetic turn of phrase and a singular vision. A bit of a revelation to me.
10. The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor, Cerddoriaeth Ddefodol Gogledd Sir Benfro (Ritual Music of North Pembrokeshire). Tipped off by a friend who heard Huw Stephens play some of this on 6Music, I bought it, attracted by its witty song titles, to discover that it's an album of beautiful twisted folk-pop instrumentals. Even more pleasing was the discovery that one of the musicians is Owen Martell, the brilliant Welsh-language novelist, critic and translator I invited to the university a year or two ago.



11. Alison Statton and Spike, Bimini Twist. Statton was the singer in Young Marble Giants, who recorded one amazing album in the 80s then split up: this is a lovely though inessential record.
12. Pulp, It, Separations and Freaks. I'd forgotten how much I loved pre-fame Pulp until I bought electronic copies of these albums to horrify my office colleagues. 'My Legendary Girlfriend' and 'This House is Condemned' will astonish you.





13. The Nightingales, Perish the Thought. Disclosure: I'm friends with most of the band and quite a few of their ex-members too. That aside, they get better and better. This one's a compulsive rush of social commentary over the top of their most grumpily catchy tunes ever.
14. Norma Waterson and Liza Carthy, Anchor: the best folk musicians of their generations get together and wipe the floor with everyone.
15. Susanna, Go Dig My Grave: Scandinavian, hushed goth-ish chamber pop. Like being told a particularly good ghost story during a power cut - and it's a covers album of very unexpected songs.
16. Dubh Chapter, Silence, Cunning and Exile. For years I've had a solitary battered 7" of their single 'Happy is the Bride'. On a whim I got hold of the LP and it's lovely - pre-Britpop goth-tinged guitar pop. They should have made it big.
17. Low, Double Negative. A Mormon married couple plus a bassist who turn out albums featuring close-harmony rock about spiritual torment every couple of years: what's not to love? Seriously, I've loved Low since the mid-90s and while they build on their sound every time in surprising ways, they just get better and better. See them whenever you get a chance: they're mesmeric live. Another album of the year.
18. Daniel Bachman, The Morning Star. Not sure how to categorise this, but it's got guitars and folk tunings and found sounds. Like a particularly unstructured dream. Wonderful.
19. Chvrches, Love is Dead. I thought I was hip when I bought their last album, but the kids laughed at me. This follow-up is less immediate but it's cool and compulsive Scottish synth-pop.
20. Gruff Rhys, Babelsberg. Like Euros Childs's records, I'll get everything Rhys does. Not everything is a success, but all his records are interesting. I'm filing this one under fascinating: orchestral pop with a scathing view of contemporary America.
21. Stuart Staples, Arrhythmia. Staples is the lead singer of another of my enduring favourites, Tindersticks. This is a more personal record, but it hasn't made such an impression on me yet.
22. Mazzy Star, Still. An unexpected comeback in EP form. I expected hushed beauty and ethereality. I got it.
23. Joan as Police Woman, Damned Devotion. I always think of her and Regina Spektor as working in similar ways: classically-influenced, mistresses of the distorted torch song, should be more well-known.
24. The Nightingales with Vic Godard, 'Commercial Suicide Man'. A fun one-off collaboration.
25. Adwaith, 'Femme' (hilariously sarcastic attack on how teenage girls are kept down), 'Pwysau', 'Fel i Fod', 'Haul' - four singles from the future of Welsh-language indie.
26. Steve Reich, Pulse/Quartet. I'm trying to collect everything Reich has written. Pulse is new, and actually doesn't add much to his canon, but the Colin Currie Group do a great job.
27. Cavern of Anti-Matter, Hormone Lemonade: post-Stereolab warm electro dance genius. I may be alone on this one.
28. Joni Mitchell, For The Roses and Song to a Seagull: obviously everything JM did before about 1983 is amazing. I already knew this because I have these on vinyl, but I wanted download versions for those times when I'm dragged away from my record player. 
29. Kate Whitley, I Am, I Say. I bought this because I love viola concertos. Very glad I did: clearly a rising star in the classical world.
30. Paul Giger, Ignis - another contemporary-ish classical composer bought on the strength of 'Organum' popping up on Radio 3. Immersive.
31. Winchester College Quiristers, Three Wings. This is great: Perry is a contemporary composer who took a load of 14th-century plainchant and added washes of electronica. It could have been Enigma. It isn't.
32. Yo La Tengo, There's a Riot Going On. Only a polite one though. I love YLT very much: slacker harmonies and the occasional wig-out. This time with pop hooks! Saw them live in the spring and had a great time.
33. Breeders, All Nerve. Yes they're still going, and yes they're still providing good time guitar pop.
34. Various, Trans Limen ad Lumen. Lovely choral album, mostly bought for Giger's Tenebrae.
35. Levellers, Levellers and Levelling the Land. Saw them live once. Hated them. Listened to them as an undergrad: loved them. Didn't pay them any attention for another 20 years (or so) until I started teaching texts loosely based around the 1988 Summer of Love and the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield and decided the kids should hear the soundtrack to the last time their predecessors really freaked out the grownups. How I wish those days would return. With fewer didgeridoos this time.
36. Pauline Oliveros, The Roots of the Moment. I've been looking for the overlooked women in the minimalist/post-minimalist movement. Oliveros represents the best of 60s idealism, and her music is a magical blend of minimalism, drone and harmonica. Absolutely hypnotic.



37. John Adams, The Gospel According to the Other Mary. See previous comments about minimalist opera. Must keep trying with this one.
38. Grace Williams, Sea Sketches and Symphony No. 2: overlooked mid 20th-century Welsh composer. Lovely, but a bit conservative compared with what was going on in France and elsewhere. Just as good as her male British contemporaries. 2nd Symphony is really, really good though.
39. Simon Holt, A Table of Noises. Does what it says on the tin: quietly challenging contemporary classical percussion. A real discovery for me.
40. Powerplant, Electric Counterpoint and other pieces. Powerplant is Joby Burgess, a guy who does electronically-enhanced percussion music, sometimes on instruments he's invented: this CD includes some Steve Reich, Kraftwerk and other pieces. We saw him live at the start of the year and loved the way he made their music do something else entirely. He also did a live tape-looping piece using members of the audience that was thrilling to be part of (not that he asked me to contribute). Bah.

I've listened to a lot more music than this: these are just this year's purchases. Taken together, they show me how my tastes and interests are changing. A bit less folk than previous years, but more interesting ones. A lot more female artists and composers - partly because I've been deliberately seeking them out. Virtually all British, European or American, which isn't good. Also, almost completely white, which reflects badly on me, my ingrained cultural preferences and my sources of new music but also on the industry, particularly the classical world. I'm not going to list all the music by black people I own because it's the equivalent of 'Some of my best friends…' but I am struck by quite how exclusive this year's purchases have been. Something to think about next year, definitely.

Happy Christmas.

'…secret and self-contained as an oyster'.

You find me relatively full of festive cheer today. Despite spending an hour in the ring with my vindictive dentist – someone clearly prey to fits of irrrational violence – on Wednesday, the week has mostly been rather pleasant. The last class before Christmas is always an opportunity for reflection, and all the awkwardness of previous weeks (chiefly the chilly moment of silence after making grades available) is forgotten. We're a bit beyond the school-level technique of sticking on an inappropriate video, but there is something lovely about receiving the occasional card, enormous quantities of all the things the dentist has forbidden me to touch,  and wishing students well.

It's properly goodbye to most of the Erasmus students: with only a week of tutorials left after Christmas, they're taking their chances and saving their Euro by submitting work early and not returning. One of my French students yesterday told me that she'd enjoyed my module so much that she was going to recommend it to her successors. Sadly, the module is being abolished (we're struggling with staffing levels) but I appreciated the sentiment. The same student announced during the seminar that her home university had been shut down by student protests: the cause of the protest was unknown. Admirable. I very much subscribe to the view that universities have become slick, controlled consumer experiences that need a hefty dose of rebellion to keep them honest. There's something sickening about obedience in young people. Obviously that view is hopelessly middle class: most student resistance is led by people with economic and cultural capital rather than – as my students mostly are – those who are first in their families to reach HE and struggling economically. That said, some of them are political and principled (in various directions) so there's hope for the occasional occupation yet. The response to my attempts to decolonise the curriculum was fairly passionate, so perhaps that will kick something off.

Mind you, it's not just me being middle-class, it's age too: I remember my own tutors teasing us for not having half the arrest records and scars they'd acquired as students, and now here I am bemoaning subsequent generations' apathy. Age is on my mind not only because my teeth have voted for Mexit, but because we looked at Fight Club (the novel: I've never seen the film) yesterday, and the students repeatedly ascribed its attitude to its ancient historical context ('in those days', 'back then' and so on): it was published in 1997. We weren't quite communicating by drum and dragging each other round by the hair: I had a mobile phone and had sent several emails by then. In one of my more cynical moments a few years ago I constructed the Student Historical Timeline: it goes Dinosaurs-Tudors-Nazis-Grandparents-Now. In slight mitigation, one of the things my students often say is that the more the do at university, the more they realise was missed out at school in the pursuit of exam passes and league table rankings. I do rather enjoy introducing them to all the fun/subversive/unexpected things the British did and wrote when their masters weren't paying sufficient attention.

Other than work, I"m hard-pressed to decide whether the ongoing Brexit saga and Donald Trump's legal counts as tragedy or farce. On the one hand, two major nations are deliberately consigning themselves to the trashcan of history by self-immolation: on the other, there's something delicious about discovering how fragile hegemony really is. The Early Modernists (like Tracey Hill) will tell you that the exercise of power depended on performance rather more than action: Brexit and America's neo-monarchist presidency demonstrate that the two states only function if you don't look under the hood. The least stress and the mechanisms fail and some deeply unpleasant attitudes – such as Tory views of the Irish – come slithering out. For the British, it's the culmination of the establishment resistance to philosophy and conscious political organisation: making a virtue of pragmatism is all very well when you're making the weather, but without a clear set of principles based on higher beliefs than a general distrust of the unwashed and the foreign, the ramshackle set of institutions that make up the British state are revealed to be incapable of either resisting the more atavistic leanings of the gammons, or of responding to the complexities of interdependent international politics (known in Whitehall as Bloody Foreigners). If I wasn't living here and facing imminent economic and social collapse I'd probably enjoy watching all my suspicions about our overlords proved correct, but here I am, and despite being an Irish citizen, the combined efforts of various Irish university recruitment officers and my own failings mean that here I will remain for some time yet, sharing the wintry blessings of Going It Alone. However, having  been condemned to watch it all play out, I'm determined to get as much amusement from government shenanigans as possible. When I find some, I'll let you know. Until then: cold fury.

There have been compensations recently. Lego Masters has been a delight, and I've been reading escapist nonsense. I finished one 500 page volume of EF Benson's Edwardian Mapp and Lucia stories the other day. They're like a delicious, over-rich box of cheap chocoates: too many in one go will make you sick, but it's hard not to keep dipping in and reading another in the interminable merry-go-round of of small-town rivalries between genteel monsters. I also realised that my book-buying and reading has become slightly problematic when I found myself at a loose end in town the other day with – horror of horrors – nothing to read. I might have strolled around admiring architecture or making conversation with fellow citizens, but all I could think of to do, bearing in mind that I own nearly 6000 books including two rooms of unread ones, was to buy another book to fill that 40 minutes. It turned out to be Christopher Brookmyre's Places in the Darkness – I'd read one of his crime comedies years ago and not thought much of it, but this novel filled the gap nicely: it's essentially a 1930s Chandler-esque noir thriller crossed with Bladerunner…in space. If, like me, you think that any text or title can be improved by the addition of in space*, it's a winner: efficiently constructed, decent pace, intelligent: I know it sounds like I'm damning it with faint praise, but I did enjoy it as an excellent example of genre fiction (I also enjoyed Jeff Noon's pomo-SF-noir thriller The Body in the Library and Adam Robert's loving pastiches The Real-Town Murders and By The Pricking Of Her Thumb). Well worth £2. The other novel I read was Patricia Duncker's Sophie and the Sibyl - I'd seen my GTA enjoy reading it for her MA module on Neovictorianism and thought it sounded good: it's a very conscious postmodern pastiche of the Victorian romance form, using George Eliot and GH Lewes as protagonists, frequently interrupted by a narrator who has it in for John Fowles, who of course wrote his own postmodern pastiche of the Victorian novel (and its impossibility) in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Obviously it could be improved by becoming Sophie and the Sibyl… In Space, but it's a rattling good read which makes mediocre literary theorists like me feel very sophisticated by playing with form wittily. I won't have much time for non-work reading over the next few weeks thanks to a PhD viva on Thursday, another one at the end of January,  and a book review to write (leaving aside all the lectures I need to write and marking I need to do) but I'll fit in a few more. I'm about to start Richard Williams's Mostyn Thomas and the Big Rave, on the recommendation of an extremely eminent Welsh-language cultural theorist with zero interest in disco biscuits and gabba, and it looks fun. It's about time someone wrote a cultural history of the rave movement but it won't be me: I always hated the music and don't like drugs that make you feel like you love everyone because I'm a crabby, bitter old git. After that, I'm going to read Ernest Bramah's 1907 What Might Have Been, a deeply reactionary fantasy of a Conservative guerrilla resistance movement against the jackbooted Labour government. It's basically an Edwardian Red Dawn. I'm also going to dip into EBB's Aurora Leigh: it's got a reputation for being didactic and boring, but there are flashes of weirdness (often in the syntax) that remind me just a little of Emily Dickinson. How am I going to find time for all this? Well, I'm relying on my annual Christmas present from my darling nephews and nieces. In return for an array of outrageous gifts from me, they habitually present me the very latest bacterial infections. Last week's Stephen Collins cartoon felt horribly familiar.

So anyway, merry Christmas to one and all.

*Go on, try it: Martin Chuzzlewit… In Space. The Mill on the Floss… In Space. The Anti-Federalist Papers… In Space. A Brief History of Time… In Space. The Joy of Sex… In Space. Delia's Meals for One… In Space. And if you don't believe me, it's a tried and tested pop culture manoeuvre. What is Battlestar Galactica but the Aeneid (plus some Mormon elements) In Space, while Gene Roddenbury called Star Trek 'Wagon Train in space'.

Welcome to the Land of Do-As-You-Please

Well, it took me until Tuesday night to submit 17 amended Course Specification Templates (see last weeks's despairing rant), laboriously typed out because the Quality Control Unit could only send me locked PDF documents. You can probably imagine my joy when I discovered that said locked PDFs were actually so out of date that quite a lot of the work I did turned out to be all for naught. Reader, my stress dreams were replaced that night with delightful visions of certain bureaucrats being roasted to a crisp by a grinning demon.

Thankfully, there have been compensations for the relentless grinding misery of such duties, though sadly cold hard cash is not amongst them: subject leadership does not attract an increment despite it being the exact opposite of what anybody gets into academia for. However, the compensations include spending time with actual students. There are stresses and strains within and between groups of the little darlings: hard-working v. slackers, mature v. young, local v incomers and various others divisions, and the pressure of heading towards the finishing line is showing amongst the final-year ones, but after a couple of weeks of tension during which my tissues box needed replenishing more than once, peace appears to have broken out and my own classes have been a delight. This week I taught Book 9 of Paradise Lost to the second years, who once again amazed and impressed me with their willingness to engage with tough material without the benefit of any secondary-level literary or cultural context. A-level English and History seem to ignore what was once called the English Civil War and its causes and effects almost entirely. That said, this week's class showed me what acute and subtle critics reside in the ranks, aided by a barnstorming lecture from one of my esteemed colleagues. I have to say that despite everything Milton's friends did to Ireland and my residual Catholicism, I fall harder for Paradise Lost's literary qualities and philosophical underpinning's with every passing year.



The other text I taught this year was Moore and Lloyd's V for Vendetta, the graphic novel of a dystopian, fascist Britain which appeared fitfully throughout the 80s and was badly filmed a few years ago, spawning the fashion for Guy Fawkes masks amongst junior demonstrators indifferent to the irony of doing something plastic made by Chinese near-slaves for the profit of Warner Brothers (there's a whole module available on the legal complexities of comic book rights and Moore's ongoing war with Marvel and/or DC at any given time.



It's not a total leap from Milton to Moore: the older text informs V for Vendetta on several levels, from a protagonist's name to Moore's anti-patriarchal politics: where Milton's text mourns the Expulsion while guiltily celebrating the knowledge acquired by original sin, the graphic novel is a militant celebration of intellectual rebellion (and actual violent rebellion too, just like Milton). It's a superb text partly because it's seriously revolutionary: while the woke fanboys have picked up on the text's aesthetics, it's an intelligent argument for anarchy – the ideology, not just chaos. Part of Moore's continuous attempt to knock the hero off his pedestal, V behaves unspeakably cruelly towards his protegée Evey in order, he says, to release her from 'happiness…the most insidious prison'. His view is essentially a mix of Morris, Kropotkin and Gramsci. The book details his disillusionment with the contiguity of Law and Justice, and with the instruments of hegemony: the Church, sit-coms and soaps, the news, political institutions and the 'justice' system. The novel starts with V killing a group of rapist police officers; he then gleefully blows up the Houses of Parliament and the Old Bailey, but the core of the novel is his treatment of Evey, the teenage girl he rescues from the police. Gently rejecting her sexual advances, he breaks her Freudian conditioning, educates her in film, books, music and art (all banned under the new regime), before expelling her then subjecting her to physical and psychological torture until she is 'free' of all illusions about the nature of society. V violently brings down the tyranny, deliberately allowing himself to die in the process, insisting that while violence is necessary to bring about change, the perpetrators should have no place in the post-revolutionary society to come: people like Evey should take their places. It's also a lot of fun: Moore has a rich, dark sense of humour and is astonishingly well-read: you could spend hours tracking down every reference, from Enid Blyton (The Land of Do-As-You-Please comes from The Faraway Tree), Thomas Pynchon to The Road to Morocco, and he even got one of Bauhaus to write a cabaret song for it, incorporating the notation into the text. I've put together clips of all the music and songs reference in the novel: there are also loads of books and plays quoted or referred to).



Amongst all the militant, provocative texts I've taught recently, it's the most shocking to many of my students, more so every year. While many of them hail from societies which have had revolutions or civil wars within living memory, most (including me) have had no direct experience of such things, and have never had to address the philosophical justifications for violence – we've educated a generation to assume both that bombing wedding parties from a cubicle somewhere in Oxfordshire doesn't matter (or doesn't happen), and that affluent white societies are the primary victims of violence. Where I differ from most of my students though is that I remember a time when 'terrorism' wasn't a word applied by bureaucrats to any radical impulse (though extreme capitalism and state violence are still exempt), that got int he way of realpolitik, especially those espoused by brown people. I can remember decent English people recognising that there were indeed two (or more!) sides to the Troubles, and Western governments proudly supporting Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan…when convenient. My students are subject to so much silent surveillance, from the CCTV cameras that infest the university campus to the 'Prevent' training all academics undergo to equip them to Spot A Bad'Un And Dob Them In (they phrase it differently but it doesn't take a Foucauldian to spot what they're up to).

V for Vendetta works really well for getting this kind of discussion going because it's accessible without being simplistic or morally evasive. Moore and Lloyd are interested in the role of culture in hegemonic systems, and they care about emotion and the unquantifiable qualities of life: love, joy, autonomy: underneath the cold-eyed espousal of violent methods is a utopian impulse that I've long felt has been lacking on the left in particular. The Labour Party's infamous Controls On Immigration mug sounded the death knell for faith in a confident, altruistic socialism.



Where Morris and a range of other 19th-century socialists believed that The People were capable of cultural, artistic and communal fulfilment (though the Perfectibility of Man is what conservatives say led communism to build gulags), New Labour and its acolytes adopted the classic conservative perspective which held that people were brutes, having rarely actually met any. Conservatives believe in Big Government to restrain our brutish impulses: the true cynicism of New Labour was to go one step further by harnessing those impulses by directing their imagined people's ire at immigrants, the fabled benefits cheats and the like. For Moore, Lloyd and other inheritors of Victorian anarchism, the moral was that all governments, even the well-meaning socialist ones, are based on distrust of the people's empathetic and organisational capabilities. Socialist governments justified their existence by claiming to be the practical expression of the people's determination to distribute goods and services equally, a view I generally adhere to, but the anarchist view holds that governments at best outsource our moral duty to each other and at worst end up arrogating all power and authority to themselves in the name of unjustified self-perpetuation. The difference between anarchism and libertarianism is that anarchists think we're innately good and will care for and respect each other once the initial shock of freedom has worn off and the bonds of surly obedience have been loosed; libertarians reject the idea of mutuality in toto and believe in every man or woman for his or herself.

I don't know. I'm hugely attracted to the principle of humanity's innate goodness, but the daily news suggests that we are selfish brutes: the way we're polluting ourselves and multiple other species to death suggests that we're incapable of behaving responsibly at all even when doom is staring us in the face. Then again, no current form of political organisation has found a way to address it either. I still believe in humanity's general altruism, though perhaps it's only manifested under particular and rare conditions, but I also think that an effective collective decision-making structure with the ability to get things done is necessary, and we may as well call that a government.

Well, this has taken a gloomier turn than I expected when I started mashing the keyboard. Good things have been happening. We hosted a talk by Jessica George on Weird Fiction the other night – she's an expert on Lovecraft and Machen, whose understanding of humanity's cosmic insignificance is, depending on how you look at it, even more depressing than my musings, or paradoxically liberating. It doesn't matter what we do to ourselves and our planet, HPL would feel: the universe is entirely indifferent. Which certainly puts my wrestling with Course Specification Templates in perspective.

I've done 12-hour days at work every day this week, so little time for relaxation - I've been cycling home, eating bad food out of the pan then going straight to bed, so the only leisure has been the Lego Masters final (good creations, bad judges) and a total literary anecdote to the struggle: E. F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia stories. Inconsequential, lightweight, snide and deliciously witty, they were just what I needed. A real contrast to next week's text: Fight Club.

Computer Says Again

This afternoon, I am filling in a Course Specification Template to delete a couple of modules and add a couple of new ones. It's 23 pages long. Some of it requires you to write a list of learning outcomes. Then a few pages later it asks you to reproduce that exact list again, in a different format. By Tuesday, I have to do all this again. Twenty times, to cover the joint degrees, the part-time versions, and the versions that come with a foundation or sandwich year.

I have 150 hours in my workload to cover course administration. Each of these forms takes 3 hours to do. So more than a third of my annual allocation will be taken up reproducing the same information on multiple versions of the same form.

150 hours, by the way, is the same allocation I get to produce 3* and 4* REF research outputs - the expectations are the same as at a Russell Group university, but the allocations are, shall we say, rather different.

I am not, you may have detected, in a particularly good mood. The desk opposite me has been empty all week because my excellent boss is off sick – broken by the unceasing demands of a management which has no contact with the worlds of teaching and research, and no interest at all in the health, sanity or lives of their academic colleagues. To them, reproducing the same information twenty times is a perfectly reasonable request, and not at all a waste of anyone's time, let alone someone who is trained (in my case) in the literary qualities of twentieth-century Wales (and fictional cat sex, I should confess). This isn't about administrators versus snobby academics: the work seems, in a very real sense, pointless: the kind of thing a decent piece of software should be able to process, distributing the essential information across the relevant documents. Instead, I need to find 60 hours – between writing next week's lectures, including the sickness cover ones – before Tuesday to devote to cutting and pasting until my eyes bleed.

So there you are: an insight into the modern academic's life. It's not all bad: this week I went to a history seminar on British Army discipline in 1970s Northern Ireland (amongst the many eye-popping facts: the UVF bombed an American navy base because they felt the Yanks were getting too cosy with the local Catholics), taught Flyting and Broadsidess (the Reddit of their day), Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and Popular Culture from Matthew Arnold to Fan Fiction, and the students have been absolutely wonderful. I popped down to Swansea to examine an M.Res, which meant a detailed, fascinating conversation with a new academic and a walk along the beach from Mumbles to the university, and I read the first two novels in the Aftermath series: a bit of a stunt by which the publisher gets various authors to write novels within a serial set in the same world. The first one was Dave Hutchinson's: a bit too military and standard post-apocalypse for me, but the second one is by Adam Roberts, who plays with genre very wittily and knowingly. The only thing that spoiled it for me is the apocalyptic device: to choose a meteor storm is very Wyndhamesque/Silver Age, but it feels like irresponsibility when the real environmental apocalypse is staring us all in the face. I've also carried on with Kiberd's Inventing Ireland and a few other bits and pieces.

Having moaned about being too busy, it's a bit cheeky to blithely list a load of books I've read, but the fact is that I can't sleep unless I've read a substantial amount. I'll happily eat into sleeping time and function on three or four hours rather than cut out the reading.

Must go - forms to fill in.

Of Snidge Scrumpin' and more

No time for coherent thought this week, beyond the minimum necessary required to get through classes (Paradise Lost and Tales of the City - both appreciated by the students as far as I can tell).

There have been meetings. And demands from management that I furnish them with statistics that they already have, plus magic solutions for things like why my working-class students in one of the most deprived areas of the country don't have higher incomes when they graduate. Such is the Teaching Excellence Framework: universities and from next year courses are judged on things like post-graduation salaries because as we all know, if I'd been a little bit sharper on the definition of a trochee in year 2, average wages in the area would have gone up. Forget about the state of the local economy, or the decade-long wage freeze hitting the kind of jobs a lot of my students want to do for the good of society, or the prestige that undoubtedly helps graduates of certain institutions not including mine. No, it's just bad teaching. Trochee clarification. That's the answer.

There has been some pleasure this week: my colleagues' research into memory and the senses culminated in a very enjoyable evening of 'Snidge Scrumping', during which we had to identify various fragrances painstakingly collected from the area and consider their personal significance. I failed to identify at least half of them (including burnt tyre and canal water), and not being from round here, didn't have any Proustian epiphany, but maybe that's because I am – as an old friend once told me – 'dead inside'. It was very enjoyable and thought-provoking though, even if I do feel sick from the burning tyre one. You can see some pictures here – mostly of people reacting with disgust!

Other than that, I've been doing a little reading. Slowly, in the case of Declan Kiberd's meaty Inventing Ireland, and more rapidly with the entertaining things. I read the latest Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London series – police procedurals with a magica, folkloric twist – straight through: they're good page turners, very evocative of mood and slyly witty. Highly recommended. I've also started Jessica Townsend's Nevermoor, on the recommendation of a student's daughter, with a view to perhaps adding it to the Children's Literature module next year. It's very good so far: a reversal of the Chosen One trope in that the central protagonist is a Cursed Child who acts as a social scapegoat for anything that goes wrong (very expensive for the parents) and is scheduled to die on her eleventh birthday, having spent the previous years as a pariah. Other than that, my reading this week consists solely of the M.Res I'm examining in Swansea on Monday, and the two PhD dissertations I'm examining in December and January. 

What else? Well, I assume from the silence that I didn't get shortlisted for the job at NUI Galway, but a one line note to say 'thanks but no thanks' would be nice. To demonstrate that I never learn, I applied for another job, this time at UC Cork. I see applications as spiritual reminders of one's true place in the grander scale of things. Feel unappreciated at work? Apply elsewhere and discover that the universe is similarly indifferent. There's also a literary aspect to the quest for the perfect covering letter and CV too: constantly striving for the perfect way to make mediocrity appear desirable. Sisyphus meets the Wizard of Oz. 

Oh well. Applications are more of a hobby these days, though if cutbacks and student numbers slump any further they may become a full-time occupation – it's happened to enough friends recently to be a clear and present danger. A couple of weeks ago a newspaper suggested that one northern university and two on the south coast were on the brink of going bust: within days teenagers and their parents were asking me if I knew which ones they might be, as they decide on their final choices. The sad fact is that the government actively wants a couple of ex-polytechnics to go bust. They think it would be good for market discipline, and it wouldn't affect their children, or those of their voters. The same logic applies to the much-promoted 2 year degrees: their children will continue to take three-year less vocational courses (plus medicine) amidst medieval splendour, safe in the knowledge that institutional prestige, nice manners and intellectual fluency will land them a nice job. They don't see why the great unwashed should do anything other than wield spanners and deliver pizzas, and suspect that any subject not taught at a Russell Group university is a doss. They also wonder why highly-skilled technical jobs are being shipped out to India and China. Putting these two thoughts together is apparently beyond them. 

Anyway, that's enough from me. Paralysed by the competing demands on my time, I've decide to ignore them all and lie face down on the floor for the weekend. If sufficiently moved – by the news, perhaps – I shall occasionally thrash around in despair, a tactic adopted by a senior official at the Bank of England during the 1976 IMF bailout, I once read, and no doubt experiencing a Brexit-related revival in the corridors of Whitehall.