Gibbering with expectation.

Amongst the facts you may have gleaned about me are my love for science fiction and Marxism. So imagine my delight at the arrival in the post of Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville.

SF has many political variants, though my personal sense is that the rightwing version is fading away with the end of communism as a bogeyman. In the Cold War period, conservative SF projected Aliens as threatening Communists, and the application of massive military superiority was the solution to all situations. Early Star Trek tilted this way (Klingons were particularly Asiatic, for instance), though Vietnam brought about a decisive change of view. Robert Heinlein was a particularly unpleasant neofascist: the film version of Starship Troopers gleefully satirises his approach. Blasting everything out of the sky if it contradicted the small-town values of an imaginary America was rather commonplace: I'd even suggest that Back To The Future's construction of an idyllic 50s and the utopian and dystopian presents and futures betray a politicial consciousness which is at least liberal.

But there were plenty of lefty and hippy SF writers of the time: Spinrad extended the counterculture across the galaxy, for example. Ursula K LeGuin took the toys out of the boys' hands in her feminist fantasy and SF. Sheri S. Tepper produced serious and rather wonderful eco-feminist SF, while I think that Gwyneth Jones is one of the best writers in any genre, and she primarily writes liberal-left feminist novels about the near future of the UK. It goes back further of course: H. G. Wells was a radical and prominent Fabian socialist, and even Lionel Britton, the working-class modernist, wrote science fiction plays. Adam Roberts's novels tackle technology and society in a quietly leftish fashion, while Ken MacLeod's novels have covered everything from future economies to the War On Terror from an anarcho-Trotskyist Scottish perspective.

I haven't had a chance to peruse Red Planets yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Marxist and neomarxist theory should have a lot to say about the economic and social formations predicted by technological and political change. Class formations and permutations, the extension of hegemony online (despite the carnivalesque resistance offered by groups like LulzSec) and the economic injustices perpetuated by discredited but not defenestrated capitalist élites will all become more, not less, relevant as we move into an era of triumphant, guiltless and naked class warfare. If you don't think that moving jobs, pollution, (reduced) wages and environmental destruction to the browner continents is an act of class warfare in which you and I are on the wrong side, then you're a moron.

Sooo cute

Everyone's going on about how adorable that Star Wars VW advert is. So here's an even cuter one.

A public service announcement on behalf of Lawrence from Felt

There's been chatter on Plashing Vole recently on the subject of whether 80s Brummie indie-popsters Felt are, or are not, any cop.

I feel that this track, 'Hours of Darkness Have Changed My Mind', settles the argument. It's upbeat, poppy, catchy, and sounds uncannily like The G0-Betweens if that band had consumed happy pills by the bucketload. It's from the astonishingly excellent album Forever Breathes The Lonely Word.



And as I'm in a generous mood, here's 'Primitive Painters', the track Felt recorded with Liz Fraser on keening duties: she of Cocteau Twins fame.

For Dan: a gull

Final few from Lichfield. Click to enlarge, or see the rest here.

Lichfield Cathedral South Aisle

Shit gets dumped on me when I'm trying to read too.

This chap was performing for the tourists as far from the sea as it's possible to get in the UK - Lichfield. I had the wrong lens on but they came out OK. Is it a black-headed gull? More on the full set.

This is what we've done to our towns. I've desaturated it for effect too.

No tripod or warning, but still a useful shot of a high-speed train

We're liking Lichfield

A few more pictures from Lichfield. Click to enlarge, and see the rest here. These are internal shots of the Cathedral.

Sausage! SAUSAGE!

By which I refer, of course, to Blackadder the Third's depiction of 'the big batey fellow in the black', known to history as Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first Dictionary of the English language. The entire episode starts here, and the 'sausage' reference is explained by this sequence (from 12.48 minutes). It's true, too. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to check the dictionary for rude words when we visited his house, as is usually compulsory (11 minutes in).

But why am I dribbling on about Johnson? Because on Saturday, I mooched around in his home town, Lichfield, graced also by one of the most elegant cathedrals in the country.

I took some photographs, which you may view here: below are some samples: click to enlarge. If anyone can identify the various flowers here or on the Flickr site, that would be great. I recognise the roses, by the way.

The new gargoyles don't look entirely Christian even to my atheist eyes. In fact they're more Buffy or the 'Blink' episode of Doctor Who than devotional

I've desaturated this - I think it works quite well

Lavender

?

More lavender

Things I learned at my Olympics volunteering interview

1. Cadbury chocolates are very good for you and the more you eat, the more athletic and community-minded you will be. Community is important to Cadbury/Kraft Foods. Though not paying taxes or employing people in the UK.
2. Eating MacDonald's food is a shortcut to sharing the 'Olympic Values'. As with Cadbury's, the food is merely a signifier for the love that both corporations
3. What you can do isn't important. Whether you can repeat the buzzwords enthusiastically is.
4. People who decline to record an inspirational thought on the 'thought wall' will be re-educated in some kind of camp for the glum.

That is all.

Out of their own mouths, they condemn themselves

What do the Tories think about themselves?

"Over the years we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take"

"collectively we are not always an appealing proposition". 

 "Over the years we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take."

He concluded that people don't join because they "think we'll beg and steal from them. And they're right". 

"When we are together we are not always a group of people to whom many of our potential members are going to be magnetically drawn." 

Their solution: snob appeal and corruption?

One idea was for "The PMQ DIY Lunch: Bring your own sandwiches to watch PMQs in a different fine country house in the constituency (by courtesy of a PPC member) every week; glass of wine, cup of coffee, informal discussion, yours for a fiver".

He also proposed party supporters are given access to politicians in the US in return for cash. "We might have 'Just Another Ordinary Day: We'll organise it but choose how you get there, stay where you like for as long as you like and on one of the days breakfast briefing with a senior staffer, tour of the White House, lunch with a senator … yours for cost plus a £1,000 donation to Woca."

Who is this guy? Well, until he was found dead in a toilet at Glastonbury Festival this weekend (and what an indictment of the so-called 'alternative culture' that Tories feel welcome there), he was in charge of West Oxfordshire Conservative Association. Its MP? One David Cameron.

Mo' Money, Mo' Problems…

I'm minted. My pockets are bursting with sovereigns. Kruggerand are spilling from my intestines. Yes, at a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor this afternoon, she (£246,000 pa) and her Executive Team (minimum salary: £100,000) announced that our pay rise - despite a surplus of £10m - will be 0.031%. That contrasts with an inflation rate of about 4.5%, meaning I'm actually getting a pay cut (again) of 4.469.

Trebles all round! I should have worn holier shorts. Whatever the £8500 fees (£8000 for business students, as if we should be encouraging them) is reserved for, it's not for teachers, secretaries or cleaners.

Trivia roundup

OK, I'm in considerable pain - I've actually pulled chest muscles from coughing so much. It may be the infection I've got, or it may be the sheer spleen-busting disbelief occasioned by watching U2 and Primal Scream performing at Glastonbury. It wasn't the musicians so much: U2 were reliably pompous, while Primal Scream yet again pulled off the trick of persuading the public that they're somehow interesting or relevant.

No: they do what they do and some people - unfathomably - like it. What made my intestines make a bid for freedom was the jaw-dropping idiocy of the BBC's presenters. U2 were discussed by Jo Whiley and someone called Zane Lowe. The pearls of wisdom spilling from their mouths would have shamed a toddler. Mostly, of course, just unconnected adjectives ('amazing', 'awesome' etc.). But then Mr. Lowe started claiming that U2's power was due to their set being 'raw', 'stripped down' and 'all about the music'. Really? Doing a live video link from the stage to the International Space Station so that an astronaut (the one whose Congresswoman wife was recently shot in the head) can mumble some platitudes to a drug-addled bunch of hipsters is somehow 'raw', rather than 'incredibly pretentious', 'arrogant' and 'pompous'? They then 'interviewed' U2 afterwards with the kind of journalistic incisiveness that inevitably leads to the interviewee having to wipe drool from the soles of their shoes.

This idiot - or it may have been some other idiot, all BBC yoof presenters are pretty much interchangeable - then proceeded to claim that Primal Scream's set proved that they'd 'always looked forward' in their music. For feck's sake: they're touring their Screamadelica album in some kind of retro cash-in. You know, the one that was released 20 years ago. The one that was a deliberate retro homage to the Rolling Stones' 60s work. The band which released and album with a bloody Confederate flag on it. How, in the name of all that's holy, is that 'always looking forward'?

Bloody charlatans, the lot of them. Time for a salad to calm me down.

Claws out for Paul Uppal

By now, many of you will have seen the fine sight of an independently-minded Tory MP, Mark Pritchard, exposing the Prime Minister's shenanigans as he first tried to bribe, then bully, Pritchard into cancelling a vote on banning wild animals in circuses.

Why a PM should be so politically obtuse as to put himself of the wrong side of animal cruelty is completely incomprehensible, and all the Tory MPs knew it, falling over themselves to support Pritchard. A lot of RSPCA-member old ladies vote Tory, and there's nothing more dangerous to a Tory MP than an avalanche of lavender-scented letters threatening to withdraw their votes. The Lib Dems, to their credit, were all in favour of the ban - for a reason which was all too clear to Labour's Nick Dakin:

I am particularly pleased to see a good turnout of Lib Dems for this debate. I suspect that they feel a certain empathy with circus animals, as an endangered species being kept against their will for the entertainment of others.

I say all the Tory MPs, but it's not quite true: the toadies and loonies were out in  force. Neofascist bruiser Andrew Rosindell blustered about animal rights' activist conspiracies, and our old friend Mr Paul Uppal loyally and slavishly did what he was told by the Prime Minister: and got royally slapped down by a Labour MP for his pains.

Those are fine words, but will the hon. Gentleman explain to the House why the Labour party did not do something about the issue when it was in power?

Gavin Shuker (Luton South, Labour)

I appreciate the opportunity to say what we did when in government. We banned animal testing for cosmetics. We banned the process of battery farm eggs. We created new powers to stop animal cruelty. We banned tail docking. We stopped the trade in seals. We ended fur farming, and we passed the hunt ban. I am proud to stand on that record as a Labour Member of Parliament. We introduced the 2006 Act that allows the Minister to ban the practice of wild animals performing in circuses, and that is exactly what we are calling for today. 

The horror, the horror

It's 30C here and I'm hating it. So much so that I have resorted to shorts for the first time since 1986. They aren't the same shorts: back then, it was compulsory grey flannel for school.

Because we were 'too menny', as another young chap with a large family put it, we travelled in a brown Peugeot 505 estate: it had three rows of seats and clearly sold well in Catholic countries.

It therefore had the glass acreage of a commercial greenhouse, and was always baking hot. The seats were upholstered in a particularly unpleasant brown tweed, which had two unfortunate properties: bare legs came out in a very nasty rash, and vomit became permanently enmeshed in the fabric, the odour becoming a permanent top-note to the sweaty anger of the passengers. We did try to chunder outside the car, but there were few opening windows available: where other cars had go-faster stripes, we had a linear splatter of lunch trailing from each rear window. It's memories like this which have ensured that I've never learned to drive, that I still get car-sick, and have never worn shorts until this day: scratchy tweed and fresh vomit on the back of ones thighs are the kind of childhood memory that rarely make it into autobiographies.

I'm not proud of today's resort to amputated trousers. In fact I'm hating this capitulation to weather-related casualness. My legs are not objects of beauty: stumpy, overly-muscled from fencing, and utterly pasty. I look, in photographs, like flash has been used when in fact I'm just a shade pinker than a boil-in-the-bag cod fillet: thousands of years of my Celtic ancestors trudging home in the rain, weighed down with peat for the fire, has militated against me ever resembling the lithe tanned images relentlessly pushed in our media. Imagine Wayne Rooney without the charm or good looks… though with more hair). I'd post a picture but you're my friends and I'd like you to come back.

To counteract the horror, I'm wearing what's essentially a Charles Ryder ensemble: simple brown shoes, the shorts, a silk-and-linen shirt and a fine white trilby. Though on second thoughts, it's more like something worn by a minor and despised character in Forster.

Thankfully, most of my colleagues are absent. The sidelong glances of citizens on the street were painful enough.

Guerilla typefaces

You all know that I'm an old-fashioned statist (though one with syndicalist leanings), and a fan of typography. So you won't be surprised that I'm impressed and touched by this magnificent synthesis.

The Russian currency (rouble) never had a symbol as the $, £ and € do. The government announced a design competition, but the designers couldn't be arsed with the kind of mimsy bureaucratic stuff, so they just got together and came up with a winner.

There's no law enforcing it, no official approval - but it's being used everywhere.

And that, my friends, is why syndicalism, workers' collectives and anarcho-communism is far better than Stalinist state capitalism any day. If you don't believe me, read Ken MacLeod's Scottish-Trotskyist-Libertarian science fiction novels.

Talking of novels, nothing in the post today except some strike leaflets and a Felt compilation, but I did read two yesterday: Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman (I've cancelled the surgery after reading this book) and Mary Poppins Opens The Door. Moran's book is a breezy bit of fun, with some local interest - she's from The Dark Place, and I'd recommend it to any bright but blinkered 18yr-old. She's not as funny and clever as she thinks she is, but she is quite funny and clever. Recommended.

The Mary Poppins is much more interesting. Cast aside your Disney glasses: the literary Mary is a capricious, often cold, forbidding and untrustworthy individual, and there are some very interesting mystical interludes which have very little to do with the rest of the work. Absolutely fascinating.

Well, that's me done for the week. I'm off to my Olympics interview tomorrow - which sadly means I'll miss Paul Uppal appearing at a Climate Change meeting in the Civic Centre at 2. Won't someone go and report back on his pearls of wisdom?

The new torture

Today is the highlight of any academic's calendar: appraisal.

Here's a visual guide to the process:

Cliché watch

When people's jobs are lost, it's always a 'JOBS BLOW' in journalistic language. As a punishment for reaching for the clichés, whizzy graphics have proved the BBC's undoing:

Chris Morris would be proud.

Uppal Cameron's Colon: the full horror

I remarked yesterday that Paul Uppal MP is inconsistent, at best, in claiming that nationality is more important than religious identity, then boasting about swanning off to schmooze with the Sikh Council.

Here's the full nonsense of his exchange at PMQs:

Earlier this year, the Prime Minister demonstrated his strength of character in talking about multiculturalism. In view of the fact that I have a Christian first name and a Sikh surname, I try to combine the best of my traditional Indian values with my core British values. Does he agree that we can learn a lot from our Indian partners in this respect, many of whom define themselves by their nationality first and foremost, regardless of their ethnic or religious background?

David Cameron:

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and his work on this issue. It is vital that, as a country, we build a stronger national identity. Of course people can have all sorts of religious and cultural identities, but it is very important that we build a strong British identity. He is living proof of that.

What Cameron actually said was that Multiculturalism is dead, because he's only bright enough to know that lots of racists vote Tory (and what the hell does Cameron mean by Uppal's 'work'?.

Uppal's incredible though. Wow, he has a Christian first name? Not really. No. Apart from names having no bearing on the debate (did he choose his own name?), 'Paul' isn't Christian. There aren't any Christian names other than those brilliant Puritans who gave their kids entire Biblical quotations as first names. Even Jesus is a European corruption of a Jewish name.

Most amusingly, Paul is a derivative of the Latin familial name Paulus, and it means 'small' or 'humble' (which is why Saul chose it to mark his conversion to Christianity) - not terms generally associated with this Honourable Member!

I wonder what Uppal defines as his 'Indian' and 'British' values? They're completely meaningless. Hegemonic cultures always insist that they have some moral superiority, often while behaving appallingly: a quick canter through British imperial history should be enough to counter the 'fair play' claims. Given that both India and Britain are artificial states constructed from a patchwork of linguistic and cultural groups, the idea that these entities can have any shared 'values' is laughable. Though I can't help admiring Uppal for enlisting the unwitting support of more than a billion people in his endless quest for cheap publicity.

(And while we're on the subject of nominative determinism, my names translate from Irish as Fiery Raven. Make of that what you will…)

Olympics: I'm a winner!

Sadly, only in the lottery to get tickets. I applied to tickets to all the final tableaux, including medal ceremonies. I got tickets to FE012 and FE018: the notification email isn't helpful enough to explain which events they are, but a quick Google reveals that I'll be attending the  women's team foil and the men's team foil - premium seats too.

I'd have liked tickets to the individual finals of any of the weapons, but I'm fairly happy with these: the atmosphere should be electric. I'm surprised that  I couldn't get any tickets for the individual events, but hopefully (interview tomorrow) I'll be there as a volunteer for some of them. How did you lot fare?

The Sad Decline of Britain's Educational Standards

Lots of politicians, especially Tories, are wandering around telling any newspaper and TV show they can find that British children are the least-educated in the world, and that only privatised, Victorian-style schools can arrest the decline.

Take the case of this product of British education:

“What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton’s laws of thermodynamics and Boyle’s law.”

“My daughter does toys through the ages, then she does the Vikings, then the Greeks; and she gets confused.”

Poor Michael. Newton, of course, didn't come up with a law of thermodynamics. Even with my arts education I know that. He was interested in gravity and motion (and alchemy). Kelvin came up with some of the laws of thermodynamics. Meanwhile, the Greeks definitely came before the Vikings, and they're not really comparable: the Greeks are a cultural/national group, whereas the Vikings were military units of various Scandinavian national groups.

So why have I highlighted young Michael's education shortcomings? Isn't it cruel? Well, it's because - despite the obvious blind spots in his schooling - Michael's risen to be the Secretary of State for Education, and really do better, especially when lecturing the rest of us. It must have all gone wrong for him when he left his state school for the posh Robert Gordon's College and then Oxford University. Stick with the State, Mikey!

Perhaps he's a perfect example of the situation he explained to Parliament thus:

"In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children when they arrive at school [and] the situation as they go through gets worse"

So, the results of my escapade with Ben

A heavy cold, an extra stone in weight, and a lot more books.

Stratford on Avon - birthplace of Shakespeare apparently, though they're very reluctant to make a song and dance about it - is slightly odd: half ancient beauty beloved of coach tour brochures, half run-down trap. It has an awful lot of charity shops, and we visited all of them, plus one bona-fide secondhand book shop.

We bought Dan the 3-DVD John Lydon's Mega Bugs (yes, the Sex Pistols' John Lydon), and I bought a few books: Julian Barnes's England, England; Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur: The Seeing Stone, Emma Donoghue's Stir-Fry, Frederick Buechner's The Return of Ansel Gibbs (lovely 1950s Penguin), Thomas Disch's The Genocides, a classic Panther SF title with a stunning cover (Disch managed to write both the children's book The Brave Little Toaster and The Businessman, in which a man gets his murdered wife pregnant with a hideous foetus ghost), and Robertson Davies's philosophical/historical What's Bred in the Bone.

After that, we lunched at the revitalised Swan Theatre: deep-fried breaded strips of pig's ear for starter then a quality steak, washed down with a non-alcoholic mojito for me, a fine Riesling for Ben, who also found room for pudding. No wonder they treated us like a couple. Then it was off to Paxton and Whitfield, where we both purchased ridiculous quantities of fine cheeses, before meeting the Map Twats in Brum for even more food and a stupid pub quiz. The evening was rounded off with - yes - a cheese-eating marathon. At this stage, liposuction is the only thing that will save me.

Ben didn't arrive empty-handed: he brought me a huge stack of politics books (mostly Readers Union reprints from the 50s and 60s, and a Millennium Falcon, which Ewar claims is for his brother.

Bad News For Blossom

I've lost my voice, but I'll never lose my typing ability.

Today's topic for outrage is the Child Support Agency's plan to charge single parents for its services in tracking down parents who refuse to cough up their share. If you read Blossom's Blog, you'll see how easy it is for them - mostly fathers - to make shedloads of cash while evading their responsibilities.

Now the Tory government think that the deprived parent - struggling already - should surrender part of the child support as some form of commission. If this principle is accepted, then nothing we pay for as taxpayers will be sacrosanct. Our NHS doctor will have a tip jar on the desk. The military will demand cash at checkpoints before fighting off invaders. This is INSANE. Our taxes pay for the CSA, and the support payments are calculated to suit the child's needs: they can't just take 10% off for themselves. I'd certainly charge the recalcitrant parent for their meanness and irresponsibility, but not the kid. Jesus.

So the question is: how long before the Tories realise that several of their MPs are errant fathers, and change their minds on this one.