Down goes students' average ages, down goes the learning

Statistics relating to university applications in the age of £9000 fees have been released. It's a complex figure, but it's clear that the groups who are under-represented in many subjects are the victims: women and mature students (down at least 25%). Applications are down 9% overall, with women's applications down more than men's: perhaps women are more debt-averse, given that they still earn less than men in comparable jobs.

This is a tragedy. Mature students represent those who - following the smug exhortations of politicians - take risks and change their whole lives in pursuit of betterment. It's also a pain for me: all teachers know that the mature students are wonderful to have in class. They don't waste time being shy, they've been round the block a couple of times and know a little more about life, and they ALWAYS do the reading, because they don't take being at university for granted. They've given a lot up to be here, and they put a lot in. They also expect more from us, which is great - most of the times when I've really been pushed in class, it's been mature students. Much as I enjoy teaching the kids, there's something special about mature students, and The Hegemon has been at the forefront of opening higher education to returning students. No more, from the look of it.

Sadly, applications for media-related subjects are down 40%. If you're a Mail reader, you're probably pleased about 'Mickey Mouse' degrees losing out. If so, I refer you to the News International scandals, your frequent moral panics about sex/violence/horror, your fear of The Internet and what your kids are up to on it, and suggest that in a world  of media immersion, perhaps it's a good idea to teach people how it works and what the actual effects are. You think?

Last few photos from Downs Banks

By the time we turned for home, the light was low through the trees: rest here, click these to enlarge.

The 50mm prime lens gives this child's-drawing sun effect. Very pleasing.

Sun through ferns

Evening sunlight through beech leaves

Windfall apples illuminated by evening sun

A single shaft of sunlight highlights an autumn fern

Autumn in Staffordshire

Some more photos from this weekends walk. Click them to enlarge, and see them all here.

I like this one because you can see the swan's head underwater

The starkness of autumnal fields

The last apple-eater to feel this foolish was Adam

Autumn is upon us

Thanks to Dan's magnificent map skills, the Map Twats went on gentle stroll this weekend - along the canal from Stone to Barlaston in Staffordshire, then up to Downs Banks and across country back to Stone. Thanks to our disgraceful treatment of the planet, there were spring flowers as well as autumnal colours.

The whole set is here: click these samples to enlarge.

The old John Joule's canal side brewery, Stone

The Iron Maiden What a great pun. Bruce Dickinson's new addition to the fleet

Details from a derelict narrowboat

Hip to be square…

 

One at a time.

You know my taste in wet, deservedly-obscure jangly indie bands, but you may not know that my favourite pieces of music of all time are J. S. Bach's Cello Suites, apparently written solely for private practice at the request of a pupil. Each Suite is based on the same tune, using the same forms of (originally dance) rhythms and styles: there's the Prelude, then an Allemande, a Courante, a Sarabande, Minuets, Gigues and Gavottes.

Benjamin, otherwise a very discerning chap and prize-winning author, was firmly resistant to my urging - it took a world-famous author, a professor of music and a PhD student (who fully deserves a scholarship for her part) with a baroque cello to persuade him of the Suites' worth. Giving him makes him a better human being.

My work with him done, I turn to you: listen to this, over and over again until you realise that this is definition of genius. Here's an extract from No. 4, my favourite. It's played by Rostropovich, second only to Yo-Yo Ma's version.



The Allemande from Suite No. 6:



And the ultimate, the sublime Prelude and Sarabande to Suite No. 1, this time played by Yo-Yo Ma and Mischa Maisky

Lord Chesterfield and me

Someone has stolen Neal's book

I don't have a lot in common with Lord Chesterfield, though I am an admirer of his Letters to his Son.

One thing I do share with Lord C. is his understanding that the best place to read is not the library, nor the sofa, but the lavatory. Much of my best work has been done there. After all, why waste time? Lord C. read all of Horace's work on the porcelain: I tend to take along whatever I have in hand (no pun intended). If I'm deep in the book, I don't want to break the spell.

The genesis is years of living in shared houses: it's the only place you can get any peace and quiet. If you're at your desk writing a PhD thesis, nobody thought twice about barging in to watch TV/moan about their current partner/borrow some pants. Locked in the magic, symbolic space of the bog however, and you're safe for a while. No inane conversation, no distractions. This guy thinks that reading on the toilet is an escape from the pressures of family life, or a Freudian desire to distract oneself from the shame of having bodily functions at all, but I'm not sure I trust a man who a) created a 'destination bathroom' and b) placed books in there to suit the decor (although books 'do furnish a room', as Anthony Powell titled one of his many novels).

Could anything be more smug than this?

 The bathroom of two publishing insiders who wish to remain anonymous could be called “Shrine It Up,” since all 46 of its books were written by people the couple know 

I once kept all my Calvin and Hobbes books in there, until we realised that queues were forming, especially when he held parties. Nobody could leave it at one page - they'd read the whole volume. Most antisocial. Not that I'm innocent - I once attended a friend's party to discover that she kept a stack of feminist SF by the throne: hours of entertainment. And, apparently, very good for the books: I once read a piece claiming that the glues used to hold cheap paperbacks together need moisture to prevent the books falling apart.

However, reading in the loo has a proud heritage, as this article reveals: Henry Miller, amongst others. He read Ulysses there, which - if you know the novel - seems entirely appropriate, containing as it does the first known novelistic defecation. Of course, before the advent of toilet paper (one of the most environmentally destructive products of our age), reading material had a further purpose… one to which the Daily Mail is uniquely suited, as it comes pre-smeared in excrement. I put that bit in deliberately because I read recently that the Daily Mail and General Trust employs a web consultant whose job is to present the editor with a digest of what people say about his paper. I assume that this is the worst job in the world, similar to being the bloke who told Hitler (whom the Mail supported) that the war was lost.

So, the Friday conundrum: what's the perfect bogtime reading? (Nothing shit…) I propose a new measure by which books should be judged: the Bog Standard. If it's no good, it gets flushed. If it detains you longer than bodily functions strictly require, it's a winner.

Soundtrack to my life

There's a new Half Man Half Biscuit album out. Cue rejoicing by the massed ranks of sarcastic balding men of a certain age, too old to mosh, too young to admit that they own a wide range of sensible walking gear.

This one is 'Descent of the Stiperstones': a beautiful range of hills (highest in Shropshire, fact fans) I've walked many times. It leads, as do so many Half Man Half Biscuit tracks, into an wry, well-observed disquisition on the absurdity of modern life.



If you need visuals, here are some old pictures I took on a very wintery walk up the Stiperstones, involving lunching on top of a dead sheep. Again.

Calvin and Hobbes explain the crisis of modern capitalism

I've loved Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes ever since I first saw them. Who couldn't love the twin-barrelled satire and sentiment personified by a kid and his cynical tiger, both astonished by the stupidity of modern life? I even spent some of my Philosophy prize at university on some C+H books, pointing to the characters' names and attitudes in my defence.

My friend Adam just reminded me of this strip, in which the roots of our present predicament are presciently exposed. Click on it to enlarge or follow the link.

Of all the bars in all the world…

A little genre fiction, dedicated to my colleagues.

As soon as she pushed open the swing doors and drew breath, she knew it was the wrong kind of place. The smell tipped her off. This wasn't the usual stench of seedy bars on the wrong side of town. Sure, she was on the wrong side of town, but stale beer, blood and sweat were kind of welcome. No, the top note in this dive was something else, something familiarly depressing. It communicated desperation, failure and cynicism.

Looking around, she saw the telltale signs: shabby, mismatched clothes in natural fibres, patched at the stereotypical places and pierced with badges testifying to youthful optimism and fervour: here a Cuba Solidarity pin, there a 'humorous' Derrida badge. Expressions were hunted, eyes peering suspiciously at her through thick glasses as they smelled both youth and affinity. Possessions hurriedly rammed into plastic bags or scuffed leather. Glasses were clutched with a preciousness that conveyed the central place of weak ale in their sad, shadowed lives. Shreds of tobacco littered the rough tables as the denizens rolled up with the skill and dedication of Cuban peons.

She knew that taking one more step meant becoming one of them. Meeting their eyes meant melding minds. And yet… resistance was futile. Fate, and her intellectual rapacity had brought her to this place. She took her place amongst them, ordering a cheap wine and rolling a thin cigarette before diving into a circle listening intently to the familiar tale of administrative woe, malfeasance by their shifting population of charges, and the ceaseless hunt for the Lost Text: a tale shared compulsively whenever these denizens of the underworld met over alcohol.

That fragrance, the one that had haunted her for so many years, was dry wipe marker and these lost souls were… academics.

Support Your Local Communist

Meanwhile, over in Greece, we have the fascinating sight of the Parliament building being protected from anarchist rioters by… the Greek Communist Party (KKE). In a scenario worthy of Ken McLeod's Scottish Trotskyist science fiction, the tired old arguments usually held in tiny meeting halls and smelly pubs are being fought out on the street.

The basic argument is between the KKE's call for a massive, peaceful demonstration of working-class resistance, and the anarchists' attempt to smash the state on the spot. Most communists believe in government as the peoples' tool (though some assume that the state will 'wither away' as industry-blocs learn to cooperate): anarchists believe that states are automatically oppressive, and that humanity is naturally inclined to altruism and cooperation. Isn't that sweet? Unfortunately, the anarchists seem to reach for this paradise through smashing the place up, which their 19th-century leaders always admitted was a weak point in the plan.

Which leads us to one supposedly revolutionary group - one which fought heroically first against the Nazis and then against the British/US-supported regime - defending the institutions of a morally, politically and financially bankrupt state against those who should be their allies but can't help making all revolutionaries look like spoiled children. Still, at least it's clear that the capitalists don't even get a look-in: their ideology is utterly discredited.

We got democracy from the Greeks - let's hope we learn the next phase from them too.

(Post title echoes that magnificent Western, Support Your Local Gunfighter).

Free Justin Bieber!

OK, you might not throng the streets in a mass protest calling for Justin Bieber's release. For me, his crimes against music call for eternity in an oubliette. But he's a great example of the iniquity of copyright law.

Amongst the many asinine and cynical applications of copyright (extending profiteering many lifetimes to benefit corporations rather than authors and artists; retarding the spread of academic ideas and wider culture…), the US is debating a plan to outlaw the performance of copyrighted work on electronic media. As the vast majority of electronic media are legally resident in the US, we'll all be caught.

So: no Justin Bieber, who caught the eye of music industry lizards by posting video of himself singing along to R'n'B tracks. No drunk phone video of you singing 'Happy Birthday' to your friend in the pub. No posting wedding reception footage of drunks bawling 'Too-Rye-Ay' en masse. The sentence is 5 years. Other offences include using copyrighted material in the background, or even accidentally including music, ring tones and jingles when you post footage taken in public.

Here are some criminals who will soon be in the cooler:



Most pleasingly, this poster calls himself 'PunkforChrist': we'll see how he, Josh, Danny, Ben, Bridget and Joe enjoy being Punks for Killer and his friends in Sing Sing.



There are no videos of me singing, and there never will be. I was in my school choir: three successful years of miming without ever being caught! It got me out of a lot of very boring classes and very painful rugby games, at the minor cost of faking both religious fervour and musical talent: the Catholic Milli Vanilli! The perfect crime!

More seriously: copyright laws are utterly outdated. I want artists to make a living from their music. Nobody would disagree with that. But major corporations are using copyright to squeeze out innovation. Your kids singing along to Lady Gaga using a hairbrush as a microphone won't snatch the food out of her mouth. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of our relationship to art: we don't steal it, we use it, alter it, admire it.

If you allow one hippy track into your house, it should be this one

I've loved this song, by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, since I heard Picture Center's cover of it. How did I get to Picture Center? Well, they're a Field Mice, Northern Picture Library and Trembling Blue Stars spin-off. Who are the Field Mice…? Agh. Sarah Records. St. Etienne's first single was a Field Mice cover.



And if you're in the mood for the bleakest melancholy, some Trembling Blue Stars.

Welcome back, the Passive Tense

Liam Fox, disgraced former Defence Secretary made a statement in the House of Commons today. It was an extraordinary performance, notable mostly for its gushing sentimentality, cynicism, and a bitter attack on the press for holding the powerful to account (which was the subject of today's The Only Way Is Ethics class).

But amidst the bluster was a perfect example of what I like to call the Politicians' Passive:

The ministerial code had been found to be breached and for this I am sorry. I accept that it is not only the substance but perception that matters and that is why I chose to resign. I accept the consequences for me without bitterness or rancour.

It's a masterpiece: not 'I've done something wrong' but 'the code had been found to be breached': that's four verbs in eight words! He's not sorry for what he's done, he's sorry for this mysterious finding that the code had been breached (by whom?). The implication, of course, is that he did nothing wrong. That impression is reinforced by 'not only the substance but the perception that matters': he resigned, he says, because people 'perceived' that he'd sinned, not because he actually had.

So to sum up: giving privileged access to special interest groups (a gruesome crew of arms dealers and pro-Israel lobbyists) without oversight isn't wrong. But being caught is.

Educational Ambrosia

My friend Benjamin is doing Manchester University's famed MA in Creative Writing - led by Colm Tóibín and staffed by a range of top quality authors who are too good to make a living by selling books.

This was yesterday's class:

…how music can affect our writing. Tóibín brought in the head of music with a stack of different recordings of Bach's Cello Suites (which, incidentally, you're right about and I was wrong about) to explain the variations between them. Oh, and a PhD student, with a baroque cello, to play some of them live. Heaven. 

I am utterly jealous. How I wish all students could have this kind of experience. How diminishingly likely it is that - underfunded and understaffed and unresourced as we are - that our students will get chances like this.

They are the Resurrection

OK, so the Stone Roses have reformed, despite the vicious, vehement ways in which they phrased their previous refusals to do so. I've already posted my objections to this kind of cabaret act, but there's another good reason for the Roses not to do so: have you ever heard Ian Brown sing live?

Here's what they sound like on record:



And here's what they sounded like live: you'll want to rip off your ears. This is why Alexis Petridis said this of Ian Brown's voice:

The line that Ian Brown cannot sing has been repeated so often that it feels very tired, but the degree to which he cannot sing still has the capacity to shake you awake. Here, his voice is a muffled, gloomy honk, like a despondent goose wearing a balaclava.

Which is why we should be left with the memories and the albums.

Cruelty to trees must stop. Full stop

I've pulled down yet another forest: today's mail includes 2 copies of Fflur Dafydd's The White Trail, the latest retelling of a Mabinogion story, this one being the classic 'How Culhwch Won Olwen'. I must be a complete moron to accidentally order two copies. Also: Chuck Palahniuk's new one, Damned, whose heroine is a teenager raising hell in, well, hell. Terry Pratchett's new one, Snuff is here, as is Emma Donoghue's Victorian pastiche The Sealed Letter and 500 Essential Graphic Novels so I can pretend to be well-informed on the bus (where I recently heard tell of the Marvel Zombies…).

On the positive side of the balance sheet, I've just received the issue of The Sword, and they've used quite a lot of my photos of the European Fencing Championships and the UK School Games, right next to the professional photographers'  shots, which is giving me a warm glow.

Don't forget the songs that made you cry/and the songs that saved your life?

Nostalgia… it ain't what it used to be. So why am I quoting a Smiths track ('Rubber Ring')? Well, it seems to be my generation's turn to revive their youths. Twitter is alive today with rumours of a Stone Roses reunion, while the release of remastered Smiths box sets has produced a wave of sentiment.

It's a bit cheeky of me to say so, having bought the Smiths CD set (I've got everything on vinyl already) despite them splitting up when I was 12, but I'd advise against returning to your salad days, because they weren't. This is especially true of the Smiths, the lyrical, elegiac sound ('I will not go, back to the old house', as Morrissey sings on 'Back to the Old House') of alienation and exclusion. (And let's not forget their attack on releases and promotion: 'Paint a Vulgar Picture').

Reunions are especially to be avoided. Jaded, faded money hounds temporarily burying the hatchet to make enough for a third house by recycling lyrics that now mean nothing to them. Part of the joy of pop music is the blink-and-you'll-miss-it quality. Bands have their moments, if they're lucky. A select few split up, broke and hungry, only to be rediscovered by later generations (Slowdive, Slint, hopefully Gorky's, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). The last thing we want is for our idols to reform: that's when we realise that they're only human, fat mortgage-payers with thinning hair.

Harken to me, nostalgics. I've been to two horrific gigs in recent years. The first was two people from Dodgy, purveyors of a few pleasant summery singles in the mid-90s. Stripped of youthful enthusiasm, I was confronted by a posh bloke bellowing over the groaning of the synthesiser which - to him - qualified him as a member of the junglist massive. The second was Spiritualized, doing an acoustic gig. Never have the Emperor's New Clothes been so obvious. Without the usual hypnotically massive brass section drowning him out, Jason Pierce's lyrics were exposed as a tedious repetition of 'my girlfriend's left me, there's no god and I've run out of smack'. This was lost on the audience, however. They weren't interested in musical talent: they wanted a note-perfect reproduction of their collective lost youth, and woe betide anyone whose clothes rustled or breathing disturbed the act of worship. Actually, there's another gig I could cite: The Wedding Present. It was both perfect and utterly depressing at the same time. Perfect, in that all my favourite tracks were played beautifully. Depressing, in that only all my favourite 15 year old tracks were played with mechanical precision. Not a single new song, not a twitch of improvisation. There's a band which understands the deadening reactionary nature of its audience, and has decided to take the money and run.

This is the point: we're treating these bands as time machines on an impossible journey. We're expecting them to be preserved in aspic at a time of our choosing. How disheartening must it be for the presiding musical genius to realise that all the mob wants is her radio-friendly hits, rather than what she thinks is the product of her late genius. We're not treating these musicians as autonomous, living breathing people with ongoing lives of their own: we're treating them as meat-iPods, as though they should churn out the hits whenever it's convenient for us.

That's why I like my bands to split and stay split. Alternatively, there's the Scott Walker route: use the cash from his early boy-band hits to churn out an album of gut-wrenchingly unlistenable avant-jazz terror every five years.  Of course I'd like to see all those bands who split before I got a chance see them first time round: Stereolab, the Boo Radleys, Slowdive, and many many more. I could get tickets for Pavement and Pixies right now, but I won't, because watching them flog their dead horses as though they were the same people in the same context is a sterile, masturbatory pursuit. It'll make you deaf. Go and find a new band.

The most disgusting pervert on the internet

I just got a notification from Flickr about another user 'favoriting' (I know, it's not a verb, and it's missing a 'u') a picture I took. Oh goody. Perhaps one of my beautiful landscapes? Or one of my fencing action shots?

Er, no.

This is Jeremy Hunt, a man so unpleasant that even a Radio 4 presenter made the obvious slip, live on air. He's a Conservative Party minister. I took his photo - in the dark, at a distance, hence the poor quality - at the UK School Games. Oddly enough, his boring speech didn't mention his government's abolition of the event.

Delving into the users' profile, it seems that he or she seems to have some deeply perverse obsession with rightwing British politicians. Haza610: unless you moderate your desires (perhaps bestiality is a step up the moral ladder for you), you're blocked.

This morning's email haul hasn't been all bad: I've won $5,000,000,00 dollars (is that a trillion?) without even trying, thanks to Mr Collins Moore, and a young lady from the Cote d'Ivoire, Lilian Yao, wants to give me 10% of her £3,500,000 fortune if I just let it 'rest in my bank account', like Father Ted. See you, losers!

Loathe Story

I've just given a lecture and run a seminar on genre, for media students. I quite enjoyed explaining why Jimmy McNulty doesn't bake and Miss Marple would never describe a suspect as a 'motherfucker', and why viewers would be made deeply uncomfortable were they to do so.

We got on to the structural and generic conventions which separate and unite American and British sit-coms. They picked up without prompting the more frequent comedy of shame, sarcasm and embarrassment in UK humour, as opposed to the general (obviously there are exceptions) niceness and zing-based American version.

So in their honour, here's a bit of Steptoe and Son, the comedy based entirely on Oedipal loathing, bitterness and isolation. It's a work of genius, though its attitudes are depressingly unprogressive in many ways. In this episode, Harold tries to kill his father with a cleaver. Somehow I can't see mainstream US comedy making anything similar.

Uncle Eric's Big Society Pickle

Talk of the government's plan to reduce the nation's calorie intake by 5bn per day (while putting junk food manufacturers in charge of health policy) reminded me of Eric Pickles, the Sontaran on secondment to the Tory government, a man who could cut down those 5bn calories simply by skipping lunch.

Eric Pickles

Sontaran interloper

Which reminded me of my birthday present from Neil:  a fine jar of Eric's Big Society Pickle (with added orphan's tears). Delicious.