Debating the city's future: not for the likes of you

Big event at the Hegemon tonight: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England is coming to give a talk. It was good constituency but rightwing Labour MP Pat McFadden's idea:

I wanted us to focus on the city’s future and what we might do about the key challenges the city faces: what will Wolverhampton do for a living in the future and how could it create more jobs; what can we do to raise the levels of ambition and standards in the local education system to give young people more opportunities; how can we tackle the public health issues facing the city; how could we improve the quality of life for the city’s residents and visitors?

All very serious issues facing this failing place. Why Mervyn King?

I was clear that the economy was the number one issue and keen to begin the Wolverhampton Debates with Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England. Sir Mervyn went to school in Wolverhampton and has retained an association with the city. He has been at the heart of the country’s response to the economic storms of recent years. He is ideally placed to talk about our economic future.

OK, he's local. He's also a big name and it does the university good to attract the movers and shakers. But Mervyn King? If I've learned anything from the past few years, it's that he's not fit to run - or regulate - the parking fines division of the local council, let alone an entire financial system.

Steve Bell on King's approach to Bob Diamond

He presided over the substitution of an economy with a fiscal economy. He blithely colluded with the systematic deregulation of the fiscal sector. It crashed, and took us all with it. Then he presided over a bailout which channelled hundreds of billions of pounds from education, healthcare, social services and benefits to the reserves of the banks which impoverished us all, without insisting on any fundamental change to their behaviour or structures. He allowed a property boom to turn us into a nation of haves and have-nots, and not once has he suggested that our economic model needs anything more than a little tweaking.

Steve Bell on Bob Diamond facilitating the madness under the previous government

Will I be putting these points to the Governor this evening? No I won't. Despite our institution's avowed purpose being 'widening participation', I'm not invited, and neither are you. The event isn't even listed on the university's events page.

Sir Mervyn will give his talk to an audience of business, education and political leaders in Wolverhampton.

Who are these leaders? No doubt Uppal will be there, alongside the city's élites. But this is how we got into this mess in the first place - self-appointed and self-perpetuating political and business classes debating our lives behind closed doors. No new ideas, no raised voices, no basic questions. Warm white wine and furrowed brows. Outside, my students beg for work.

What does leadership entail these days? Holding on to your comfortable seat and seeing and hearing no evil. Or alternative arguments. So much for democracy and widening participation. This event demonstrates everything that's wrong with our political and social system. Who is this 'we' to which McFadden refers? The great and the good, not the citizens of a democracy. Those who'll be most affected by decisions made are precisely those who are excluded from the discussion. It wasn't always like this: political parties used to be mass organisations whose members took decisions. British life was made up of a patchwork of bottom-up voluntary groups and societies. No longer: 'we' are explicitly characterised now as the passive recipients of wisdom, not repositories of it. McFadden's a nice chap, but he can't comprehend a society in which 'leaders' listen to the citizens. This is why he and his class - across all parties, organisations and companies, must be treated as a temporary aberration in the march towards a participatory democracy - a democracy which is now under serious threat, as this new report explains.

This is the era of open source: software, art, education and democracy. Shame the news hasn't reached The Hegemon or indeed this country's opinion-formers.

Democracy baby!

Update: apparently some students from the Business School were invited. I see: the city's future is relevant to them but not to anyone else - humanities, urban design, sociology, science or healthcare students. That's a pretty reductive idea of what a city consists of.

The ghost of Vole Future

To justify my reduced but still prodigious blogging output, I drank from the well of Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson, doyens of politics and social science academic blogging. Apparently I'm not wasting my time at all: I'm on the cutting edge of the public's thirst for enlightenment (though they're probably thinking about more serious academic blogging than Vole Towers).

Highlights:

One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities.  So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.

Yeah.
Actually, over the past couple of weeks I've assisted an historian at Manchester University and discussed some joint writing with an academic at Salford, and directed someone whose name I don't even know towards some obscure German masculinity theory - all via Twitter.

This is one of the key points for me:

But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.
Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. (Twitter is a huge supplementary help, in forcing academics to communicate key messages in 140 characters!)

Or it would be if I had a journal publication history to boast about and then reject. Peer-review is really important still, and speed is less of the essence in literary studies than social sciences, but I'm very conscious that my time is paid for by trash collectors (ironically), nurses and data entry clerks via their taxes, so the least I can do is show them what I'm up to, rather than hide it away in a low-print run, expensive journal. They've already paid for it.

Although I'm firmly convinced that my research interests excite precisely 1 person, with perhaps 5-6 who'd be vaguely interested, it's an academic's duty to behave as though the entire world wants to know.

The only point at which we part company is this: they think the future's in multi-author blogging.

According to some good estimates, perhaps 80 per cent or more of the single-author blogs on the web are currently inactive, or are ‘desert blogs’ that very rarely updated. And this is because people start them with high hopes, in determinedly individualistic mode, but find that hard to sustain after a while. Coming up with fresh content, day after day or week after week, is hard work for any academic, especially in the current climate where there are so many other demands on people’s time. But if you don’t post regularly, in a rhythm that is clear to readers so they know when to come back, then it can be hard to keep things going.

I agree to some extent: if there was a circle of people into the same thing as me, we could get it going, but online social networks are extensions of offline ones. There's one in my field - the CREW blog - but it's geographically determined and not updated very often. I also quite like running my Blog of Random Stuff, though it's a bit rubbish compared with the ferociously intellectual and single-minded ones written by many of the Serious Academics I follow.

So anyway, whenever you groan at my puns or moan about my attitude, remember this: you're looking at the future, pal. Say thank you.

Anyway, despite the essential nature of academic blogging, I'm having a day off tomorrow: going to That London for Olympic meetings. Deep joy.

Snap, crackle and pop

I see NME's music photography competition is up and running again. I was going to enter but discovered that the file and shot size restrictions are so limiting that none of mine qualify, and I'm damned if I'll compress them to within an inch of their lives.

So instead, a small selection of my favourites:

Low, Manchester. Trying to do something slightly different with focus

David Wrench at the Little Civic, with Julian Cope

Talking of Cope… reality's answer to Zaphod Beeblebrox

Lead singer of the Primitives, Little Civic 2012

Same again

Matt, of the Nightingales. He's so fey. 

Alan, also of the Nightingales. Not so fey.

Duelling guitars with the Nightingales

And a couple from Richard Thompson at Warwick Arts Centre:

Being a bit shambolic, I don't have much advice for gig photography. I do have a regular habit though: no zooms, no flash. Use a 50mm f/1.8 (or a 1.4 if you've more money than me) wide open, fast shutter speed and a high ISO. Easy. 

The devil's typeface

If you ever doubted the humorous resources of scientists, consider the typeface employed by the Poindexters who all but confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson yesterday:

Only the other day I was telling someone of my intention to have my gravestone done in Comic Sans, preferably with !! sprinkled liberally around. It'll relieve the grief, I think. And if I ever get diagnosed with a terminal disease, I hope the news will be delivered like this:

See? Doesn't that seem less depressing already? It works for all sorts of buddy-duddy old texts. Here's Churchill's Chamberlain's (thanks, Steve Sarson and Grumpy Historian, I am a moron) declaration of war, transformed by Comic Sans into a jolly jape:

And who could resist the Declaration of Independence in Comic Sans?

The CERN scientists had to make a special effort to use Comic Sans - their PCs run a form of Linux, but I guess they had the right to be a bit flippant when they've made the discovery of a century. But I think Twitter's right - every time Comic Sans is used, a kitten dies. And students - every time you use it, a grade point dies too. 

Bob Diamond: you couldn't make it up

Entirely coincidentally, I'm reading Alan Plater's The Beiderbecke Connection, which features Ivan, a computer hacker (though the word isn't used), who deliberately caused the 1987 stock market crash to bring about the collapse of capitalism.

'Your plan is to overthrow world capitalism? Give or take a dollar or so?'
'The hands that touch the keyboard rule the world… We started a long time ago. You might remember the crash'.
She remembered the headlines, if not the small print… The way the bubbles had burst and the yuppies fled from the temple of Mammon, clutching their portable telephones as souvenirs of the never-never land. And nothing could be heard above the sound of gravy trains crashing into the buffers, and the metallic shriek of Porsches as they were pushed through the shredder.
Jill had enjoyed every second of it: it was really good fun. 

And later, an MI5 officer returns to the subject.

'The central problem is that he seems to regard the whole thing as a game… Straightforward bank robbers are no problem, as we know… But this man is different. His aim, apparently, is to dismantle the financial institutions of the world. I need hardly remind you, if we do not take these institutions seriously, we perish. The precise balance of currencies… the symbiosis of the stock markets of London, New York, Tokyo and Hong Kong… on all these temples we all depend. Whether we like it or not, they are our bread and butter. Our life and death'.
Hobson caught a sliver of irony in the Commander's words. 

What's changed since 1992? Well, the vandals are within: bonus culture, greed and social irresponsibility has put our financial institutions under the control of the wreckers. They aren't anti-capitalists trying to push the capitalism to its inevitable collapse under its own contradictions: they're capitalists pushing capitalism to its inevitable collapse. Instead of Ivan the Leftist Bank Robber, we've got Diamond the Capitalist Bank Chief. The result is the same, except that this time it's not just yuppies feeling the pain. If they are at all. 

Diamond's defence

Poor old Bob Diamond. He's telling a parliamentary select committee that he felt 'physically sick' when he discovered his traders manipulating the LIBOR rate. He's done nothing wrong, but 'the culture' is to blame. Oh, and he's using that tired old trick of using every questioner's forename, often. It's meant to establish rapport and restrict hostility. It actually comes across as smarmy and calculated.

Show some backbone, Bob. Here's one particularly bumptious young man's defence:

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Yes, Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. He'd be a corporate PR adviser these days.

While we're here, have a bit of Alan Plater on 'changing the culture': this one's for Michael Gove and friends.

The education of our children is a sacred responsibility. It cannot be entrusted to time-serving politicians. Especially those whose social judgement and emotional development have been permanently warped by the public school system. 

Big Al, in The Beiderbecke Connection.

In honour of Independence Day

I love many Americans - family, Woody Guthrie, Angela Davis, Thoreau ('many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book'), Whitman, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Huey Long to some extent, Cartman, Cesar Chavez, Denis Kucinich, Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Emma Goldman, Stokely Carmichael (immigrants, but aren't they all?) and all sorts of glorious heroes and misfits. I must confess to only having visited Fayetteville (go, Razorbacks) and Eureka Springs, both in Arkansas, and apart from the Confederate flag-wavers, the people I met were very lovely indeed.

But never mind them. Here are a couple of very sweary clips of American-European cultural differences you might enjoy.



The other two I can't embed, but you'll find them here and here.

Meanwhile, as it seems appropriate, here's Woody Guthrie's 'Jolly Banker'.

Farewell fame, hello principles!

Having just written a post about the exploitation of our willingness to undertake unpaid labour for corporations - such as by using automated tills and thereby causing the redundancy of till operators - I've just turned down the chance of national fame.


BBC Countryfile Magazine (circulation: 60,000 or so) contacted me:

Hi we would like to use one of your photographs of Simon Armitage reading 3, on the 23rd July at Mytholmroyd, ref:4834034893_e78851aae2_o in our August issue of BBC Countryfile Magazine. 

We will of course credit you and send you a copy of the magazine once it has been printed.

Now the magazine isn't a BBC publication: it's part of a commercial group called Immediate Media, and the magazine costs almost £4.00. I'm not a greedy man - thankfully, as my earnings from photography wouldn't keep a gnat fed - and I always give my pictures to non-commercial outlets for free, such as the fencing shots I take, which grace websites and publicity releases up and down the country.


But I object to a profit-making organisation not paying for content, however flattering it is to be asked. It's not actually a great picture - conditions were awful and I didn't know what I was doing - and Armitage failed to turn up the next day as promised, so I'm conflicted anyway.


So… farewell glory.


Meanwhile, don't think of this an an isolated incident. It happens to you every time you tag a photo on Facebook or mention a brand on Twitter. They aren't charities. They sell a product, and that product is you. The buyers are corporations - and they want to know who you are and what you buy. We think of social media as leisure, but they're actually work: you're doing market research on yourself, on behalf of the company. 

It's Gonna Rain

Lying in bed this morning shouting at Radio 4's Today show (my usual matutinal routine), the weather forecast was glumly summarised as 'It's gonna rain', so sick were the presenters of repeating the same prophecy.

We know a very repetitive song of that name about rain, don't we kids?

It's called It's Gonna Rain, it's from 1965 and it was an early experiment in tape-looping and sampling by minimalist composer Steve Reich. I've loved it from the first moment I heard it. Sorry about the picture quality.


It's Gonna Rain Part 1 - Steve Reich from Lost Highway on Vimeo.


As a companion piece, John Adams' hypnotic Christian Zeal and Activity. The cadences and repetitive phrasemaking of gospel preachers really fits the minimalist mode. Apologies for the flippant visuals - Youtube really doesn't have much classical music. I've been searching for Turnage's Three Screaming Popes to no avail.

A short plea on behalf of checkout workers

It's not a glamorous job. The pay's rubbish and you end up with Repetitive Strain Injury. Sometimes they call you 'buddy' or 'blood', sometimes they treat you as an inconvenience. But it's a job, and they're hard to find these days.

So please refuse to use the automated checkout machines. Apart from the fact that they rarely work properly, they're not 'efficient' for you, but for the company. They're explicitly designed to take jobs away.

Or rather, they're explicitly designed to move jobs, from someone paid a pittance to someone not paid at all: YOU. What automated machines do is transfer labour value from them to you. Unpaid, you do what a till operator once did. Under the guise of convenience, they've found a way to persuade you to do someone else's work.

In a sense, you're actually paying extra to do it: the price of the goods remain the same whether you go to a staffed till or use the automated system. This means that the profit margin has increased by the amount an operator would have been paid to serve you.

I hate it when workers encourage me to use the self-checkout. I look embarrassed and politely decline. If they carry on, I explain that it's a ruse to replace them. They either don't believe me or look worried that management might overhear this tiny act of subversion. It's not nice - but please do the same.

Oh, and Boots? They've discovered a neat line in sarcasm - when I went in for medication yesterday (overactive sarcasm gland), they were playing the tuneful folk ditties of notorious anarcho-crusty band The Levellers. Now that's appropriation, folks!

Wisdom of the 80s

I'm reading - for work purposes, naturally - Alan Plater's 1985-1992 jazz-inflected Beiderbecke trilogy, novels adapted from the comedy-drama series he wrote, starring (as appeared to be compulsory), James Bolam.



It's got some decent plotting, sharp characterisation and a good pace, but it's undercut by the addiction to one-liners at the expense of any plot or character development.

Mind you, pretty much every one-liner is very funny indeed. Try these:

You think I don't know what a thesis is. Well I do. I've got a daughter at a polytechnic and she's doing one. Great fat bundle of words about sod all. 

On class distinctions, mealtimes are a battleground - which reminds me of my existential doubt when the plumber's 'dinnertime' visit turned out to be lunchtime… a day late of course, and of the notorious 'country suppers' and 'kitchen suppers' so beloved of the Tories and the Chipping Norton set:

In Trevor's world there were three fixed meals and one optional: breakfast, dinner, tea and fish-and-chips or chicken vindaloo if you'd been to the pub. In Jill's world these became breakfast, lunch and a floater that was sometimes dinner, sometimes supper. An element called afternoon tea occasionally sneaked in under the fence.

My favourite character is Sylvia, named after the good Pankhurst and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War:

Her view of the world was clear-cut. People were marvellous and politicians were shit. Asked for evidence she would say: read a history book. 

There's also a bit that rather presciently summarises my awful MP Paul Uppal's theory of regeneration:

     In the early 1960s, property developers and financiers prowled the North of England, brandishing bags of gold before the eyes of councils, great and small, making an offer that few could refuse: allow us to demolish your town centre, your much-loved but obsolescent market halls and High Streets, your ancient tea-houses and variety theatres, your bakeries and butcheries, your tie shops and pie shops, and we will give you in return mighty skyscrapers and crystal palaces, precincts and parking lots and a nominal mural or piece of sculpture and the people will rise in their thousands and cry: verily, this is the Athens of the North.
     The gold changed hands, the old towns were demolished and stiller there was only one Athens in the world, where it had always been, in Greece. The North of England was left with an abundance of office blocks, unwanted, unloved, unused. 

Ya-Boo Politics, Uppal Style

A little cognitive dissonance from my favourite MP and yours, Paul Uppal. First up:

Following on from my question last week, could my right hon. Friend find time for a debate about the use of parliamentary language in this place? A specific theme of such a debate would be the public perception of parliamentary procedure. Does he agree that this would be a debate in which hon. Members from both sides of the House would actively participate?

Basically some petty point-scoring because he didn't like Jeremy Hunt being called a liar. Which he is, by the way.

But don't worry, readers: he's not going to let sanctimoniousness get in the way of the pettiness:

Continuing the “Newsnight” theme, last night Lord Myners, when asked about the previous Government’s role, shrugged his shoulders and said that this was nothing to do with them. Does my right hon. Friend agree that although Opposition Members are anxious to distance themselves from banking involvement, the anything-goes culture was driven by light-touch regulation, and that if we are to make progress, those who sit on green benches or on trading desks must ultimately take responsibility for their involvement?

This is too, too easy. OK: New Labour, that horrid rightwing clique which seized control of the party never met a rich man, bank or hedge fund it didn't like. But this is hypocrisy of the highest order.

For instance, who said this?

As a free-marketeer by conviction, it will not surprise you to hear me say that a significant part of Labour's economic failure has been the excessive bureaucratic interventionism of the past decade too much tax, too much regulation, too little understanding of what our businesses need to compete in the modern world.

That's right! It's David Cameron in 2008, calling for more deregulation to free the banks from the pesky rules which held them back. Great timing, Dave!

What of little Uppal's approach to regulation? Well, I can confidently say that he's against it. He's never spoken out against deregulation in any field. Far from it: he's joined campaigns against regulating herbal quack treatments and is campaigning against plain packaging of cigarettes. Indeed, the letter he signed contained these magic words:

Given the continued difficult economic climate, businesses should not be subjected to further red tape and regulation"

What a dumb attitude: regulation in general is bad for business (except for the drugs laws, for some reason). Get those kids up the chimneys! What do you mean, 18 hours is too long to spend down a mine? Shut up and eat your asbestos sandwich.

And oh yes, these brave new thinkers have come up with a stunning new category:

a dangerous precedent for the future of commercial free speech

This is a new one on me. So while he votes through draconian spying regulations, helps ban public protests and generally cracks down on citizens' freedom of speech, we're to shed tears when the merchants of death have their activities slightly curtailed. This is rank hypocrisy. He'd have had William Wilberforce thrown into jail for damaging slavers' 'commercial free speech'. 


But at least he's been consistent until now:

To borrow a phrase from Reagan in the end it is free enterprise, not government regulation, not high taxes nor big government spending, but free enterprise, which will lead to the creation of a better Britain.

He also thinks environmental controls should be deregulated 'in partnership' with destructive landowners).  In the very interesting article he wrote, 'Making Regeneration Happen', he's very clear about what he wants from the taxpayers and local government:

land and other assets

and of course control over any of this land. Rather cheekily, he also writes 'we in the UK government', which implies he's actually in government, rather than lowly backbencher voting fodder.


So he opposes regulation when it's convenient, and supports it when there's a neat point to be made in a parliamentary debate and/or money to be made for his friends in the property industry. But still he thinks that parliament is being brought into disrepute by… someone else?

He reads the news! He's gay! OMFG!

You've probably never heard of Anderson Cooper. He's an American journalist and news anchor. Chiselled. Silver hair. Doesn't rant much.

Yesterday, he was 'outed' by Brian Moylan, who seems to have been fixated by Cooper's sexuality for years, as his account described.

The odd thing is that Anderson Cooper appears to have been 'out' for years, perhaps decades. As Moylan's article makes clear, Cooper appeared as a couple with his male partner at all sorts of social events, frequented gay gyms and generally got on with his life. Additionally, Moylan has written numerous articles telling the world (well, his readers), that ANDERSON COOPER IS GAY. As though it was anybody's business. In fact, the only people to whom Anderson Cooper wasn't 'out', are those viewers who don't spend their lives wondering what particular stimuli excite Mr. Cooper's gentleman's area.

Which is exactly as it should be. Anderson Cooper isn't the news. His sexuality doesn't determine what's news and how he reports it. I don't preface my lectures with 'Here's a fat boring (they assume this bit anyway) heterosexual's perspective on trochees and spondees', Kirsty Wark doesn't have to warn viewers that they should take her genes into account ('And now the news… in a kilt'). While there are plenty of intellectual arguments about identity and the ways in which our orientations influence us, reading out the news doesn't seem to be a prime example of the way in which sexuality does or doesn't define us. Cooper shouldn't have to overtly or covertly tell the viewers that his understanding of the LIBOR scandal or an earthquake is informed by the fact that he's a big old gay: 'Here's the Gay News… and over to Chuck for a straight's perspective on the famine. Chuck?'.

I distrust most major news media because the system is compromised by capitalism and conservative hegemony. Because they're under assault by PR and marketing executives. Because they're underresourced. Because they keep hacking into people's phones. Because they distort science and valorise speed over accuracy and evaluation. Because they prefer power to accountability. Not because the author or presenter is a friend of Dorothy.

I'm glad there are prominent gay people out there proving - and it's sad this is still necessary - that homosexuality, holding down a job and being happy are compatible, but I don't see why anybody should be forced to become a role model, particularly for one facet of their identity. It's reductive: Cooper's journalism qualifies him as a role model. I don't really believe in role models anyway. It's just pompous Daily Mail-style bullying. Anderson Cooper doesn't seem to have been a self-hating hypocritical McCarthy or advocating self-repression.

That is all.

DON'T say 'cheese'

Looks like the Olympics - at which I'll be working - is going to be a barrel of corporate laughs. Apart from the cynicism of the main sponsors being McDonalds and various other corporate vampire squid, the restrictions on spectators, athletes and volunteers look utterly draconian.

This is on my tickets:

“Images, video and sound recordings of the Games taken by a Ticket Holder cannot be used for any purpose other than for private and domestic purposes and a Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet more generally.”

So if the BBC says 'send in your favourite picture' - banned. I can't film a segment of the event I'm attending and stick it here on Vole TV. Nor can I post pictures - I'm only allowed to view them in the privacy of my own home.

Obviously I intend to ignore these rules, and I assume everybody else will too. And there's nothing they can do about it, unless they want to be in the papers every day for suing ordinary citizens. I can understand the rules about not selling images: there are plenty of professional photographers there who've paid a lot of money for access (though I don't agree with this system), but for us amateurs, it's insane.

The other rules are for Olympic staff. According to the Press Gazette:

Athletes and other ‘accredited persons’ are banned from uploading images to social media platforms. They can’t even tweet! And if they want to post a photo or image taken in the Olympic village, they must get consent from anyone appearing in it.

Again - no chance. I have no intention of taking anything embarrassing to the athletes, of advantage to rivals or anything like that. I'll be too busy to do much anyway - but forbidding me from tweeting my usual mundanity or posting a photo of a happy medal winner is bonkers. Thankfully, our sport's boss is much more sensible. She's told the volunteers to respect the athletes' privacy, focus and need for personal space at the highlight of their careers, by not requesting photos or getting in people's faces. Perfectly reasonable.

Be sure you'll be hearing from me on the other side of the barbed wire! Oh, and if you're thinking of running a Quadrennial Sports Event Themed promotion - like everybody else - make sure you don't use 'Olympics' or '2012', because they'll sue you. However, you can use 'Olympian' as much as you like - the Wenlock Olympian Games, at which I've won several cups - carries on gloriously unsued.

Those blue remembered hills…

It's often forgotten that Housman's blue-remembered hills were glimpsed by a narrator standing in Herefordshire, using the Shropshire hills on the horizon to reflect on lost - possibly homosexual - love.

Here's the Guardian's video about this beautiful (though Tory-infested) county's literary history, 'the nearest earthly place to Paradise', according to Wodehouse. I'd recommend small doses of Mary Webb, large ones of Lorna Sage (lived on the Welsh side of the border but educated in Shropshire). What the county lacks is true darkness - there's lots of rural romance but not a lot of grit. It's good to know that nasty Wycherley was from Shropshire though. And of course Philip Larkin's misanthropy was fuelled by a few years as librarian in Wellington.

Brain Capers

It's our staff research conference today. I'm not presenting this time, but I chaired a fascinating opening session this morning. The first paper was by a new Phd candidate analysing letters to the Dudley News about the new mosque which local politicians have repeatedly blocked for over a decade. What fascinated me was that all the objections (lack of integration; they're all terrorists; they're not loyal to the UK state; they're culturally alien and taking over) were virtually identical to those made about Catholics in the run-up to Emancipation (1829) - Catholics in England, Wales and Scotland were painted as overwhelmingly Irish, uneducated, liable to undercut local workers, subversive, violent terrorists and disloyal. Hence many early new Catholic churches were designed not to look Catholic - unobtrusive, calm neo-classical buildings wouldn't inflame the Protestant majority. Then neo-Gothic architecture appeared and it all kicked off, but that's another story.

The second paper was something close to my heart: a personal view of Anarcho-Syndicalism in Alicante, 1910-1923. Not that I've ever been there, but some of the authors I study were frequently suspended from the Communist Party in Britain for their syndicalist leanings (the anarchism didn't really take off, though London was a refuge for retired anarchists).

Finally, my philosopher colleague Cecile gave a magnificent tour around political resignations: what's the morality of the resignation? Is it narcissism? Pompousness? Principle? How should they be understood. On a day when Agius (but not Diamond) went, very timely indeed.

I've also been to two excellent presentations on Eastern European attitudes towards European integration, and there's more fun to come.

In the beginning was The Word…

Sometimes it seems like every music magazine I read goes bust. I'm like the Typhoid Mary of popular journalism. First Select, then Vox, now Word - it got thinner every episode while the price inexorably rose, so the writing was on the wall. NME staggers on as a repository of press releases and fawning interviews, but there's very little of anything recognisable as journalism in there. 


I'm a Word reader more by default really: its proportion of dead/60s+70s rock blokes on the front cover was slightly lower than Mojo or Q: if I never see Richards-Jagger-Bowie-Weller-Cohen-Waits-Curtis (even though I like the last three) on a newsstand again I'll be a happy man. Once a year they allow a woman to grace the front page, as long as it's Kate Bush or PJ Harvey (again, both of whom I like). Word was similarly guilty, but to a lesser extent. It was well-written and thoughtful - a mix between the good bits of Radio 4 and Radio 3's Late Junction. It was, like all these magazines, pretty masculinist, and paid far too much adoration to 'craft', but it was always a good read. The music coverage was fairly wide-ranging, they took popular culture seriously without being pompous, they took criticism well and their passion shone through in every article. 


Where does an ageing indie-kid go these days? I'll cut off my ears and pull out my eyes before touching Mojo or Q, and NME is now like a bright 15-year old hopped up on E-numbers telling me that everything's brilliant, but the dominant websites are similarly unbearable - the Quietus and Pitchfork are so po-faced, so utterly determined to be the hippest kids on the block that I want to leave their authors locked in a bunker with only Whigfield and The Corrs for company. 


One new kid on the blog is Hand in Glove, written by some friends of mine. It's only just launched, but sounds like it could be good:

Hand in Glove is a new on-line magazine, it is a scrapbook of nostalgic memories and artefacts, a sound board to voice our anger against anything that irritates or annoys us, a vehicle to showcase the talent that is inherent in us all.
It is unashamedly biased towards bands, artists, football teams, culture, emotions and ideas that have shaped the people we have evolved into, and will continue to change by the volatile and dynamic environment in which we are ensconced.

Hand in Glove is currently in an embryonic state and unsure of its future direction at this moment in time…

I'm cautious: it's a bit nostalgic and they don't know how to deal with apostrophes, but we'll see how they get on.

Back in Stumville

Good morning, comrades and random people who've landed here by searching for Unmentionable Practices. Seriously, wipe the keyboard occasionally. 


You find me both energised by a long weekend in Dublin, and cast down by the inevitable return to The Land of Pork Scratchings (though I'll confess to a lifelong romance with the baked outside of the noble porker). 


A few snapshots of the Dublin weekend: bumping into my brother-in-law as soon as I got there - his elegant gait and splendid beard of burnished copper distinguished him amongst the throngs. Wading through packs of Italian tourists in 'Irish' t-shirts, hastily donned to replace the 'Oxford University' ones they'd bought on that leg of the tour. Unfeasibly tanned Tallafornia girls giving the world insights into their personal lives on Grafton Street. The clash of cultures as Bloomsday survivors, Sudanese refugees, Republicans and Dublin Pride adherents mingled outside the GPO. The seedy pub (J. Kennedy's, on St. George's Quay - honourable mention too for the Library Bar) which boasted a 1960s Stereogram playing Yo La Tengo and Neu! albums (on white vinyl) in their entirety. A friend passionately denouncing sheep ('the woolly bastards') from bitter personal experience. 


Seemingly every woman clutched a copy of Shades of Grey (top tip, ladies: a trusted source tells me that for proper, well written filth, you want Susan Lewis, apparently available in a all good youth hostels around the world): what happened to reading porn alone, at home? Dev would have been turning in his grave. Not even a Customs officer confiscating the filthy books at the border like the old days. Actually, nobody at the border at all - immigration to Ireland consisted of a friendly man asking people what their nationality was, while Holyhead was entirely bereft of customs or immigration staff. If you fancy doing a spot of smuggling, the ferry is the way to go. Actually, I should confess to aiding illegal migrants myself - a few years ago I took a Ghanaian friend over for the weekend. He was a bit worried that he didn't have a visa for Ireland, but I knew it would be fine. Just follow me, I said. Sure enough, he claimed to be Irish and strolled straight through: a fine weekend was had by all. 


Recession? Not a sign. Abercrombie and Fitch opening (though as far as I could see, every single native and tourist was wearing head-to-toe A+F already), Brown Thomas doing a roaring trade, high-end outlets booming everywhere you looked. 


On a personal note, I was reminded at the National Library's Yeats exhibition that it isn't only voles which plash: 'Easter, 1916' contains these immortal lines in the third stanza:


Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.


Yeats's plashing foal (boom…tish) got there first - the poem was published in 1920, whereas Waugh's vole didn't plash until 1938 - by which time Yeats had his testicles rerouted through his liver (true story, connected to reactionary masculinity theory) and taken up weirdo magic rituals with his Golden Dawn friends. 


So here I am, back in the Hegemon, the only souvenirs of my brief escape a multi-pack of Taytos and some soda bread. And the rain still falls…

The book avalanche returns!

I've been very abstemious with the books recently - down to a trickle of 4-5 per week. Until this week - a couple of Jane Austen books, The Geek Manifesto (copies are being sent to every MP, thanks to Transworld and sympathisers) and a pile today which really demonstrates why I never get anything substantial done - my interests are too easily attracted by shiny things.

So today I got some books from the rather magnificent annual OUP sale: Frances Horgan's translation of that medieval French classic The Romance of the Rose, Corley's translation of Lancelot of the Lake (it turns out I already have the same edition, so if you want it, present yourself at my office next week), and Kent Puckett's Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Not my field at all, but it sounds fascinating and will go on the shelf next to Marcus et al. on the Victorians' filthy sex lives. (Shelfmark: Tea-Tribadism).

Also in, Robert Stradling's Wales and the Spanish Civil War, which has some interesting detail on Lewis Jones I hadn't seen confirmed, but nothing on the mysterious 'Frank + Beat' (friends of Lewis's) or the Cambrian Pit miner, communist and Spanish Civil War veteran whose handwritten autobiographical notes were found in LJ's copy of Das Kapital. If you think you know who it is, let me or @cathfeely know: it's her baby.

I'm currently reading The Geek Manifesto to angry up the blood, Alan Plater's Beiderbecke and Colbert's edited collection Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (I've borrowed the author's copy, but you'll have to find £50 to get your mitts on it) for a paper on Borrow and O. M. Edwards. When I'll actually start writing is anyone's guess… Not tomorrow though - I'm off for a long weekend, then it's the staff research conference on Monday.

Au revoir!

Why Cameron can piss off today of all days

The 'line' taken by the Conservative Party on Barclays' multibillion £ manipulation of LIBOR is that it's a consequence of Labour's failure to properly regulate the banks in the boom years.

It's true: the neoliberal clique called New Labour spent over a decade boasting that deregulation was 'good for business'.

But let's remind ourselves what the Tories thought about this at the time:

As a free-marketeer by conviction, it will not surprise you to hear me say that a significant part of Labour's economic failure has been the excessive bureaucratic interventionism of the past decade too much tax, too much regulation, too little understanding of what our businesses need to compete in the modern world.

That was one David Cameron (28th March 2008), demanding even less regulation. That's why I won't take any sententious moralising from that lying face.