In case it's not common knowledge, Bahrain - which has just seen peaceful protesters shot dead - is an awful, repressive place. The Sunni rulers have long remained in place through the use of secret service repression and a policy of importing Sunni Muslims from other countries to rebalance the native population, which is 75% Shia.
Saudi Arabia is providing tactical support and large amounts of cash as Bahrain's oil money disappears (the last thing the Saudis want is a democracy on its borders), but the muscle comes from the British. They gave Bahrain a savage secret policeman - Colonel Ian Henderson - and provide all the weaponry and training required to keep a dictatorship in good running order. Why? Because Bahrain's an ex-British possession and democracy comes a bad second to oil and an obsessive desire to control dark-skinned foreigners. Henderson learned his torture skills in Kenya at the fag-end of empire, before being transferred to the Bahrainis.
Documentary about torturer Henderson.
BBC news article about his involvement in torture.
I wonder what the UK government has to say about what's going on today.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Thursday conundrum
My grandmother is 98 at the weekend, and I'm stuck for a present. Last year's was, frankly, a disaster. Who knew that a skateboard was considered 'inappropriate'? She never got the hang of grinds though her lip tricks were coming on nicely until, well, let's not go into the 'until'.
So - your suggestions please?
Meanwhile, treat yourself to the sounds of Zoot Horn's guitar licks as part of Cruel Brother - now with Myspace and a producer.
So - your suggestions please?
Meanwhile, treat yourself to the sounds of Zoot Horn's guitar licks as part of Cruel Brother - now with Myspace and a producer.
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Everyone has his price: politicians are cheap
Here's the shocking story of how the alcohol merchants got together with untrustworthy researchers and lobbyists to stop the Scottish government putting a minimum price and alcohol, despite the research showing that higher prices = lower consumption.
In case the politicians weren't sure they'd been bought and sold, SAB Miller rubbed it in by sending every opposition MP a gift:
In case the politicians weren't sure they'd been bought and sold, SAB Miller rubbed it in by sending every opposition MP a gift:
When unit pricing was taken out of the bill, all the opposition MPs received a free crate of beer from SAB Miller.I hope - but doubt - that they had the grace to feel insulted. But I bet they cracked open every can without a qualm.
Love
If you didn't have a great Valentine's Day - or if you did - you need to watch the inimitable Charlie Brooker's How TV Ruined Your Life, episode 4: Love.
Without doubt, this is one of the bitterest, funniest shows I've ever seen. Clearly filmed before he married an ex-children's TV presenter. Wonder what she thought of it. Settle down and be glad you're not him.
Without doubt, this is one of the bitterest, funniest shows I've ever seen. Clearly filmed before he married an ex-children's TV presenter. Wonder what she thought of it. Settle down and be glad you're not him.
Page 43, Liars…
OK, the awards ceremony wasn't like the Golden Clerics (watch it here). For all my teasing, the prize-winners were the magnificent intellectuals I really miss - Selina, Dorota, Katrina and Ed (of this parish) who took the English prizes and have gone on to great things at prestigious institutions while others are similarly forging their own paths and it was lovely to see them all again.
However - management almost succeeded in turning the event into a something with all the charm and fire of a lost luggage queue: no inspiring speeches on the value of education or the students' achievements until the very end, when Andy (associate dean) did pointedly add a much-needed injection of politics and emotion to the proceedings, in stark contrast to his colleagues.
Highlight of the evening was Rachel Whittaker, winner of the History prize. In a very few minutes she managed to accept the prize, attack the notion of prizes in general, defend the principle of free education and proselytise very convincingly on the virtues of anarchism with astonishing intellectual acuity (we discovered later that she thinks syndicalism is anarchism while I think one wing of anarchism is syndicalism). In a couple of minutes she inspired those of us who might be feeling defeated or weary, and certainly reminded me why I'm an educator.
Anyway, tomorrow's a big day. Firstly, I'm off to Purcell's proto-opera The Fairy Queen in Birmingham, and secondly my boycott of The Archers is over. Normally I don't listen to it because it's smug and dull, but I've been not listening to it deliberately rather than accidentally for the past few weeks because I object to Radio 4 being used for monarchist propaganda: Camilla Windsor - Old Jug-Ears's Comfort Woman - made a guest appearance today. Typically, the BBC ignored the cries of the peasantry.
However - management almost succeeded in turning the event into a something with all the charm and fire of a lost luggage queue: no inspiring speeches on the value of education or the students' achievements until the very end, when Andy (associate dean) did pointedly add a much-needed injection of politics and emotion to the proceedings, in stark contrast to his colleagues.
Highlight of the evening was Rachel Whittaker, winner of the History prize. In a very few minutes she managed to accept the prize, attack the notion of prizes in general, defend the principle of free education and proselytise very convincingly on the virtues of anarchism with astonishing intellectual acuity (we discovered later that she thinks syndicalism is anarchism while I think one wing of anarchism is syndicalism). In a couple of minutes she inspired those of us who might be feeling defeated or weary, and certainly reminded me why I'm an educator.
Anyway, tomorrow's a big day. Firstly, I'm off to Purcell's proto-opera The Fairy Queen in Birmingham, and secondly my boycott of The Archers is over. Normally I don't listen to it because it's smug and dull, but I've been not listening to it deliberately rather than accidentally for the past few weeks because I object to Radio 4 being used for monarchist propaganda: Camilla Windsor - Old Jug-Ears's Comfort Woman - made a guest appearance today. Typically, the BBC ignored the cries of the peasantry.
A most distinguished man
Congratulations to Neal, Map Twat Monkey, for gaining a Distinction in his MSc. If you need help with your hemp-lime walls and energy-efficient building quandaries, he's the man. (Job/PhD offers passed on to him with thanks). You can read the whole thesis and an abstract here. It's gripping.
Books again
A few more in the post: teen fiction for next year's Literature and Identity course, if I still have a job then. Nancy Garden's Annie On My Mind, Hautzig's Hey, Dollface, and the first Judy Blume I've ever held, Forever, which is apparently still controversial and frequently banned (haven't they ever read this or this: they make Blume look like a medieval nun?).
Cue female readers telling me their Judy Blume stories. Please! Being male, they're rather out of my comfort zone. I'm sure at least one of my 4 sisters must have read them, but I'm certain that they'd have been on the banned list in the family home, being about it.
Also on the subject of identity, P J Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, has arrived: an exploration of competing versions of Englishness. As far as I can tell, Harvey objects to the way Englishness seems to be defined by aristocrats cheerfully sending peasants off to die for imaginary reasons. I do love her music - very few artists are as consistently unsettling and challenging. Not sure why she focuses on England rather than Britain - only she could answer that, I guess. Britain's Patti Smith?
Cue female readers telling me their Judy Blume stories. Please! Being male, they're rather out of my comfort zone. I'm sure at least one of my 4 sisters must have read them, but I'm certain that they'd have been on the banned list in the family home, being about it.
Also on the subject of identity, P J Harvey's new album, Let England Shake, has arrived: an exploration of competing versions of Englishness. As far as I can tell, Harvey objects to the way Englishness seems to be defined by aristocrats cheerfully sending peasants off to die for imaginary reasons. I do love her music - very few artists are as consistently unsettling and challenging. Not sure why she focuses on England rather than Britain - only she could answer that, I guess. Britain's Patti Smith?
Timber!!! Another Tory policy falls
Yes, they've finally ditched the insane plan to flog off the woods to the spivs (if you want to know what happens when Tories sell land to their businessmen mates, read Private Eye on goings on in Worcestershire's Rotten Boroughs).
The whole plot depended on the Tories' belief that we all see government as a big oppressive monster destroying our rights and infantilising us, while stopping business from innovating efficiently (i.e. stopping them paying us in bootlaces while poisoning the earth, air and water). Sometime government is like this: when the Tories, Labour and now Tories again spend our money on nuclear weapons, illegal wars and bailing out the banks which have ruined our countries in the pursuit of private gain, they are like that. But on the whole, I think most people see most of government as expressing our wishes. We want good doctors, minimum wages, health and safety rules at work, decent schools, green space, social services, libraries and so on, and we think that democratically-elected governments are the least-worst way of organising these things for maximum benefit. We can sack them if they get it wrong, and we can become the government if we really feel strongly about it.
When was the last time you saw millions of people flooding the public squares demanding less government, more privatisation and the Big Society? Never. The Eastern European masses weren't Friedmanites demanding that corporations run everything for profit - they wanted responsible government. The Egyptians don't want no government - they want a democratic one. Handing the NHS and the schools over to dodgy companies isn't democracy: it's theft.
The forests outcry is a bit of a red herring: it appeals to the romantic nostalgic Tories who no doubt bothered their MPs in exactly the way they won't over SureStart or the NHS, but it's still important. Green space is a key idea of Britishness, and the public are uncomfortable with the idea that it can or should be worked for profit by uncaring shell companies. In this instance, the state and nation are the same, and it's the Tories who failed to understand this.
The whole plot depended on the Tories' belief that we all see government as a big oppressive monster destroying our rights and infantilising us, while stopping business from innovating efficiently (i.e. stopping them paying us in bootlaces while poisoning the earth, air and water). Sometime government is like this: when the Tories, Labour and now Tories again spend our money on nuclear weapons, illegal wars and bailing out the banks which have ruined our countries in the pursuit of private gain, they are like that. But on the whole, I think most people see most of government as expressing our wishes. We want good doctors, minimum wages, health and safety rules at work, decent schools, green space, social services, libraries and so on, and we think that democratically-elected governments are the least-worst way of organising these things for maximum benefit. We can sack them if they get it wrong, and we can become the government if we really feel strongly about it.
When was the last time you saw millions of people flooding the public squares demanding less government, more privatisation and the Big Society? Never. The Eastern European masses weren't Friedmanites demanding that corporations run everything for profit - they wanted responsible government. The Egyptians don't want no government - they want a democratic one. Handing the NHS and the schools over to dodgy companies isn't democracy: it's theft.
The forests outcry is a bit of a red herring: it appeals to the romantic nostalgic Tories who no doubt bothered their MPs in exactly the way they won't over SureStart or the NHS, but it's still important. Green space is a key idea of Britishness, and the public are uncomfortable with the idea that it can or should be worked for profit by uncaring shell companies. In this instance, the state and nation are the same, and it's the Tories who failed to understand this.
The Line of Beauty
I've just been to Raphael Selbourne's talk about his novel, Beauty, and run a seminar afterwards. Both were fascinating and stimulating. As an aside, embarrassing too: Raphael's mother has been reading yours truly and he 'outed' me in front of the whole class… So anyway, hello Raphael's mum. Always good to acquire new readers, as I'm sure your son agrees.
One of the great things to come out of the talk was how confident and intelligent this year's first-years are - they asked really interesting questions and aren't afraid to pass judgement. It helped that the novel is set in named places around this city. I was a bit disappointed that only one Asian student asked questions: the novel engages very directly and controversially in notions of Bengali femininity and cultural traditions - but perhaps the classroom reflects a Caucasian dominance that's hard to break.
Selbourne's use of dialect came up, and questions were asked in the same broad yam-yam. His position is that the kind of literary fiction he despises doesn't represent regional accents (Philip Pullman hated Beauty and claimed that everyone knows how regional accents sound so there's no need to recreate them on paper). It's a conundrum: get them wrong (as DH Lawrence sometimes did, and Howard Jacobson really does in the Hegemon-set Coming From Behind) and it's horribly patronising. Ignore them, and you're accused of tipp-exing out diversity.
Something that was refreshing about Selbourne's approach was his strong belief in the novel as intervention. I asked him if Beauty was a return to the 19th-century 'Condition of England' novel: he used the phrase 'state of the nation' but roughly agreed. Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli and many others thought that one of the things fiction should do was do uncover the hidden injustices and oppressions at work in society, whereas modern fiction often doesn't (though the mythical Great American Novel tries to do it without the liberal-ish concern for social justice.
To Selbourne, contemporary fiction is narcissistic: bourgeois middle-class people writing about their minor inconveniences as though they were in some way profound. It's a nice line with some truth in it, but there's a deeper divide. The Condition of England novelists were right to represent cruelty and oppression, and they chose the novel as a way of getting round humanity's abiity to ignore facts (when you read about massacres and famines in the newspapers, do you do anything about it? Of course not). They knew, instead, that giving faces and names to otherwise anonymous masses would appeal to your emotions, hence the millions crying over little Pip or young Cratchett. But: these novelists could do so because everyone believed in the novel's ability to represent something called reality. They had beginnings, middles and ends because we felt, somehow, that life was like that. It had purpose, direction and an Author - God perhaps.
That belief died, for two (perhaps more) reasons. With mechanisation, working-class lives became meaningless: they were even called 'hands', disembodied machines. Mechanisation led to the senseless slaughter of untold millions: the US Civil War, the first World War: it seemed like the old rhetorics of a Plan no longer counted. We're clearly all too willing to do terrible, destructive, stupid things to each other, and unfortunately no Sky Headmaster is going to come out into the playground and break it up.
The other major influence was psychology. All the characters in a George Eliot novel (one of my favourites) have clear motivations and rationales, whether they're stupid, wrong, clever or right. People were predictable, it was felt, and a good author could make them 'real'. However, when psychology emerges, it turns out that we don't know ourselves, and can't be known by others. An author can't justifiably direct his or her characters without a degree of self-consciousness and acknowledgement that characters aren't people in a real world. Once you've got ego, superego and unconscious, how can you ever know what another person is 'really' like or is likely to do? We become an unstable, twitching, untrustworthy and changeable bundle of nerves: interesting, but not knowable in any profound sense. We can't know ourselves, or other people, and so to create 'rounded' characters is a charade, according to the modernists, which is why you get Joyce and Woolf and all the others trying to present human experience as provisional and subjective above all other things.
Selbourne dismisses this. To him, the novel must be about real lives in real places, and he feels that the literary world has failed to remember this, retreating into a narrow space of individualism and narcissism. I'm torn: I think there are reasons for it, though I do agree that an awful lot of the stuff that gets reviewed in serious newspapers is self-regarding.
Related to this is Selbourne's defence of his engagement with foreign, Asian and female voices. Although he said that authorial experience is important to authenticity (he couldn't write about his years in Italy, he said, because he had nothing to say about them, hence his move to Wolverhampton to do some good - something which is just as bourgeois in a 19th-century way as the narcissism of bourgeois fiction, in my view), he justified representing the voice of a young Asian female on the grounds that 'we're all human' and we all want roughly the same things. I'm not sure - perhaps this is me being a wishy-washy bourgeois cultural relativist, but I wouldn't have the confidence to assume this. I wish we did have universal values, but I just don't think it's true. I admire Selbourne for his approach, but I have doubts (as I do about his diagnosis of Britain's ills). What I really admire is his determination to challenge the assumptions of the market and the literary audience.
I should probably add at this point that he's a very interesting speaker and the novel is much much funnier than I make it sound. And that's not just because his mum's reading this! Buy the book. It's worth it.
One of the great things to come out of the talk was how confident and intelligent this year's first-years are - they asked really interesting questions and aren't afraid to pass judgement. It helped that the novel is set in named places around this city. I was a bit disappointed that only one Asian student asked questions: the novel engages very directly and controversially in notions of Bengali femininity and cultural traditions - but perhaps the classroom reflects a Caucasian dominance that's hard to break.
Selbourne's use of dialect came up, and questions were asked in the same broad yam-yam. His position is that the kind of literary fiction he despises doesn't represent regional accents (Philip Pullman hated Beauty and claimed that everyone knows how regional accents sound so there's no need to recreate them on paper). It's a conundrum: get them wrong (as DH Lawrence sometimes did, and Howard Jacobson really does in the Hegemon-set Coming From Behind) and it's horribly patronising. Ignore them, and you're accused of tipp-exing out diversity.
Something that was refreshing about Selbourne's approach was his strong belief in the novel as intervention. I asked him if Beauty was a return to the 19th-century 'Condition of England' novel: he used the phrase 'state of the nation' but roughly agreed. Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli and many others thought that one of the things fiction should do was do uncover the hidden injustices and oppressions at work in society, whereas modern fiction often doesn't (though the mythical Great American Novel tries to do it without the liberal-ish concern for social justice.
To Selbourne, contemporary fiction is narcissistic: bourgeois middle-class people writing about their minor inconveniences as though they were in some way profound. It's a nice line with some truth in it, but there's a deeper divide. The Condition of England novelists were right to represent cruelty and oppression, and they chose the novel as a way of getting round humanity's abiity to ignore facts (when you read about massacres and famines in the newspapers, do you do anything about it? Of course not). They knew, instead, that giving faces and names to otherwise anonymous masses would appeal to your emotions, hence the millions crying over little Pip or young Cratchett. But: these novelists could do so because everyone believed in the novel's ability to represent something called reality. They had beginnings, middles and ends because we felt, somehow, that life was like that. It had purpose, direction and an Author - God perhaps.
That belief died, for two (perhaps more) reasons. With mechanisation, working-class lives became meaningless: they were even called 'hands', disembodied machines. Mechanisation led to the senseless slaughter of untold millions: the US Civil War, the first World War: it seemed like the old rhetorics of a Plan no longer counted. We're clearly all too willing to do terrible, destructive, stupid things to each other, and unfortunately no Sky Headmaster is going to come out into the playground and break it up.
The other major influence was psychology. All the characters in a George Eliot novel (one of my favourites) have clear motivations and rationales, whether they're stupid, wrong, clever or right. People were predictable, it was felt, and a good author could make them 'real'. However, when psychology emerges, it turns out that we don't know ourselves, and can't be known by others. An author can't justifiably direct his or her characters without a degree of self-consciousness and acknowledgement that characters aren't people in a real world. Once you've got ego, superego and unconscious, how can you ever know what another person is 'really' like or is likely to do? We become an unstable, twitching, untrustworthy and changeable bundle of nerves: interesting, but not knowable in any profound sense. We can't know ourselves, or other people, and so to create 'rounded' characters is a charade, according to the modernists, which is why you get Joyce and Woolf and all the others trying to present human experience as provisional and subjective above all other things.
Selbourne dismisses this. To him, the novel must be about real lives in real places, and he feels that the literary world has failed to remember this, retreating into a narrow space of individualism and narcissism. I'm torn: I think there are reasons for it, though I do agree that an awful lot of the stuff that gets reviewed in serious newspapers is self-regarding.
Related to this is Selbourne's defence of his engagement with foreign, Asian and female voices. Although he said that authorial experience is important to authenticity (he couldn't write about his years in Italy, he said, because he had nothing to say about them, hence his move to Wolverhampton to do some good - something which is just as bourgeois in a 19th-century way as the narcissism of bourgeois fiction, in my view), he justified representing the voice of a young Asian female on the grounds that 'we're all human' and we all want roughly the same things. I'm not sure - perhaps this is me being a wishy-washy bourgeois cultural relativist, but I wouldn't have the confidence to assume this. I wish we did have universal values, but I just don't think it's true. I admire Selbourne for his approach, but I have doubts (as I do about his diagnosis of Britain's ills). What I really admire is his determination to challenge the assumptions of the market and the literary audience.
I should probably add at this point that he's a very interesting speaker and the novel is much much funnier than I make it sound. And that's not just because his mum's reading this! Buy the book. It's worth it.
Wednesday conundrum
One of the problems of subscribing to the otherwise wonderful London Review of Books is that it keeps bringing to my attention books that I really, really want and of which I wouldn't otherwise have heard. Such as the Oxford University Press 2-volume Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, the (temporarily) most radical thinker and activist of the Civil War period - in some senses the father of English communism and eco-activism.
The only slight wrinkle is that it's £189. What do you think?
Meanwhile, it's a great day of teaching: Milton and then Raphael Selbourne's coming to talk about his very interesting novel - set in The Dark Place - Beauty. After that, it's the school's prize-giving ceremony, or as I like to call it, The Montgomery Burns Awards for Excellence in the Field of Excellence (and plagiarism).
Actually, that sounds far too bitter: last year's graduates were stunningly good (I'm looking at you, Ed, amongst many others), and they deserve recognition - it's just that this particular event seems a little disorganised.
The only slight wrinkle is that it's £189. What do you think?
Meanwhile, it's a great day of teaching: Milton and then Raphael Selbourne's coming to talk about his very interesting novel - set in The Dark Place - Beauty. After that, it's the school's prize-giving ceremony, or as I like to call it, The Montgomery Burns Awards for Excellence in the Field of Excellence (and plagiarism).
Actually, that sounds far too bitter: last year's graduates were stunningly good (I'm looking at you, Ed, amongst many others), and they deserve recognition - it's just that this particular event seems a little disorganised.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Give with one hand, take with the other
This is what David Cameron said - a few days ago - about Advantage West Midlands, a quango optimistically designed to encourage investment in the region:
This is what's happening to Advantage West Midlands:
They're not just evil, they're incompetent.
I hope you enjoy this radio interview with a government minister on the Big Society as much as I did. Squirming doesn't cover it. Did you know that two government ministers' only 'voluntary' activity is being on the governors of fee-paying schools?
"You are the doers and the grafters who are going to bring the wealth, the jobs and opportunity our country needs so badly." … That is one of the things the big society should be all about."
This is what's happening to Advantage West Midlands:
However, most of the 340 staff who worked for Advantage WM expect to be made redundant in September and the organisation, which has an annual investment budget of £300m, will be wound up in March next year.
They're not just evil, they're incompetent.
In November Vince Cable, the business secretary, described the abolition of RDAs as "a little Maoist and chaotic".
I hope you enjoy this radio interview with a government minister on the Big Society as much as I did. Squirming doesn't cover it. Did you know that two government ministers' only 'voluntary' activity is being on the governors of fee-paying schools?
Perhaps he doesn't have a computer
We all know that Paul Uppal isn't exactly au fait with the modern world: he had a party mandated blog for about a week in the run-up to the election, and deleted the few comments he received, before getting rid of the whole thing after having an unpleasant rant about the 'race relations industry'.
Judging by the questions he's asking in Parliament, he seems to be treating government ministers as some kind of personal search engine.
I'd have told him to sod off and have a look at Ofsted's website. But the minister asked a highly trained and expensive civil servant to do the research. Shockingly, Ofsted trains and monitors its schools inspectors intensively. Rather unpleasantly though, it subcontracts some of these activities, which bothers me. An inspector should be highly trained (expensive) and thorough (also expensive). Introducing the profit motive encourages corner-cutting. Though I doubt Paul sees it this way. I wonder if his children go to state schools anyway.
Cheers Paul - another few quid of our cash gone to raise your profile.
That answer cost us several hundred pounds.
Judging by the questions he's asking in Parliament, he seems to be treating government ministers as some kind of personal search engine.
To ask the Secretary of State for Education what mechanism he has put in place to (a)train and (b) monitor the performance of Ofsted inspectors.
I'd have told him to sod off and have a look at Ofsted's website. But the minister asked a highly trained and expensive civil servant to do the research. Shockingly, Ofsted trains and monitors its schools inspectors intensively. Rather unpleasantly though, it subcontracts some of these activities, which bothers me. An inspector should be highly trained (expensive) and thorough (also expensive). Introducing the profit motive encourages corner-cutting. Though I doubt Paul sees it this way. I wonder if his children go to state schools anyway.
Cheers Paul - another few quid of our cash gone to raise your profile.
That answer cost us several hundred pounds.
Go Swimming, See The Sights
What could be more picturesque than a naked man drying all his genital crevices under the wall-mounted hand-dryer?
Google appears to lack illustrative images. Yes, I'm sad too.
Meanwhile, on the way back from swimming, some spectacularly arrogant driving inspired a new marketing slogan, which I'm happy to licence to Range Rover and other companies, perhaps accompanying a picture of a child in crosshairs.
Oddly, Google fails to provide an appropriate image for that too, but here's one I made earlier.
Because let's face it: hit a kid in a tin can and she might bounce off alive. Smack her with a 4 ton brick carrying one person and an iPhone and it's Game Over.
Google appears to lack illustrative images. Yes, I'm sad too.
Meanwhile, on the way back from swimming, some spectacularly arrogant driving inspired a new marketing slogan, which I'm happy to licence to Range Rover and other companies, perhaps accompanying a picture of a child in crosshairs.
Oddly, Google fails to provide an appropriate image for that too, but here's one I made earlier.
Monumental
I've just received a massive book: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed: basically an architecture-porn tome of the most bonkers and brilliant modernist buildings you'll ever see.
The USSR wasn't all purges, executions and bread queues: there was an optimistic side to the People's Revolution (see also Spufford's novel Red Plenty, though admittedly it was submerged in grey concrete and misery for long periods (thanks to Stalin's perversion of Communism, but that's a rant for another day). Modernism and progressive politics once went hand-in-hand, until lack of money and imagination, coupled with poor-quality materials, produced the horrid hutches beloved both of East German commissars and British municipal housing officers. But there was a window in which People's Palaces and amenities were made with the very latest materials (to show how modern the USSR was), which meant concrete, allowing buildings to branch out, swoop and swerve. What a shame that concrete ages so badly and the building standards weren't great. But the architecture was often magnificent.
Here's the Druzhba Sanatorium in Ukraine - once mistaken by the Pentagon for a launch-pad: rooms now available.
The USSR wasn't all purges, executions and bread queues: there was an optimistic side to the People's Revolution (see also Spufford's novel Red Plenty, though admittedly it was submerged in grey concrete and misery for long periods (thanks to Stalin's perversion of Communism, but that's a rant for another day). Modernism and progressive politics once went hand-in-hand, until lack of money and imagination, coupled with poor-quality materials, produced the horrid hutches beloved both of East German commissars and British municipal housing officers. But there was a window in which People's Palaces and amenities were made with the very latest materials (to show how modern the USSR was), which meant concrete, allowing buildings to branch out, swoop and swerve. What a shame that concrete ages so badly and the building standards weren't great. But the architecture was often magnificent.
Here's the Druzhba Sanatorium in Ukraine - once mistaken by the Pentagon for a launch-pad: rooms now available.
Any port in a storm
Many thanks to Who The Fudge Is Benjamin Judge for the bottle of 2003 vintage port. I gave him a reference for his Manchester Uni Creative Writing MA. Perhaps I should get a CW qualification. It was a fine piece of work, even if I say so myself.
Though according to young Benjamin, his knitwear gave the edge over other applicants.
Though according to young Benjamin, his knitwear gave the edge over other applicants.
Autobibliography
I read an interesting piece about what our personal libraries say about us. It shouldn't be a surprise that collections indicate a cultural context: the first thing I do in a stranger's house is go through their bookshelves and music collection. If there isn't one… oh dear. If it's hidden away, that's fairly suspicious. Reams of anthologies tell us that the core is an English degree curriculum. Flashes of orange-spined Penguins imply diligent trawls through second-hand bookshops or an eye for design. Virago apples tell us we're being entertained by someone with feminist tendencies, whereas a full set of Wodehouse indicates a nostalgic desire for cossetting and carefree luxury (I possess lots of all these categories by the way: my collection indicates nothing more than bibliomania, though the poetry section is sadly lacking, not that I have an internal critic telling me I'm a moron at all).
How are books arranged? Mine are boringly alphabetical, without separation for genre - Mark's library is organised professionally using the Dewey Decimal system. Actually, my unread books are organised by novels/non-fiction/poetry/drama/biography/autobiography. Other people like all their Penguins in a row or a chronological structure. That would be interesting, though I'd agonize: chronologically by first publication or your edition? What about Penguin who for decades didn't date subsequent impressions and editions (the bastards). How about subject matter?
That's all by the by. The article I read is about the interesting little bits about your personal collection: when you acquired books (Mark scrupulously records on the flyleaf when and for how much he got each one of his 14,000+ books) and what you've done with them. I like finding inscriptions and dedications, old bookmarks (once a perfectly preserved crocus fell out), receipts and jottings. If I look at my books, I find receipts from shops all over the country and years back: Kwik Save Broken Biscuits, 37p marked the spot in The Faerie Queene at which I gave up.
Sometimes your books tell you so much more about what's happened to you. For instance, my collection of Paul Auster and Don Delillo texts. I read New York Trilogy for university and loved it, which tells you that I'm geekily male, interested in structure and postmodernism and cleverness. So I bought all the other books he'd published up to then, in a variety of new and second-hand editions. But by a couple of years later, I'd continued buying work by these authors, but they're not on the shelves with NYT. They're languishing in the unread section, and the collection isn't complete as my enthusiasm, judgement and tastes change.
Another thing you can tell from my collection is how much money I have at any particular time. Although my purchasing habits are sometimes arbitrary, there are authors whose work I buy automatically. When I have money, I'll buy the hardcover which is published first, at greater expense. When I don't, I'll force myself to wait (yes, it does happen occasionally) for the paperback or a second-hand copy. Far too often, I buy the hardcover at full price and find it in The Works for £3.99 only a few weeks later, and curse myself for foolishness. My Terry Pratchett books consist of two shelves of paperbacks (from when I was a teenager and then poor student), then leap into a shelf of hardcovers marking my entry into the labour market.
There's also a kind of apartheid going on in my collection. At work, I have the books I'm working on at the moment, plus all the new books I've bought but not read, because my house is already full. But at home, the general shelves have some things that might be considered Literature mixed in with what I've bought for pleasure. Except that I have a couple of bookcases devoted to Welsh literature, which was both pleasure and what I formerly worked on (and will again, by Grabthar's Hammer), and a couple of bookcases of literary theory and the like. I sometimes think that stuff should be at work, but then I think that it separates my professional life and my personal interior life. However: am I keeping the theory books at home as part of a performance of intellectual activity - showing visitors what I'm 'really like' after they've seen all the 'fun' books? Why not mix the academic in with the general population - the separation is artificial, after all? (Partly because they're easier to find, of course). One of the great things about my job is that it's based on what I'd do anyway: read and talk about books, so keeping 'work' books at work and 'other' things at home seems somehow wrong - and in any case, my Cultural Studies angel keeps whispering to me that separation implies Leavisite value judgements.
A few years ago, I lost my passport. I had to phone the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs to cancel it, provide a police report and beg for a new one. It was made very clear that I'd been irresponsible. I suspected that my landlord had thrown it away because he accidentally disposed of a box of my stuff. How I cursed him.
A few months ago, I found it. It was serving as a bookmark in a very dry analysis of masculinity in modernist poetry. I am ashamed.
Spot the difference: Eastern edition
One of the interesting features of Egypt's semi-revolution was the United States's tortured negotiation between its pro-democracy rhetoric and its realpolitik which continues to require the installation of obedient puppet regimes (and yes, the UK is one of them) in furtherance of its global interests.
Today, protests continue in Iran, which is at least partly democratic, however flawed. Very instructively, Hillary Clinton is first in line with demands for liberation, almost exactly like she wasn't last week.
Hil(l)lariously, she takes the Iranian leadership to task for praising Egypt's revolutionaries while cracking down at home. Er, Hillary: I wouldn't cast any stones right now, given your craven attempts to 'manage' Egyptian politics in favour of strong-armed dictators.
Democracy, it seems, is a virus with which you infect your enemies, not your friends.
Today, protests continue in Iran, which is at least partly democratic, however flawed. Very instructively, Hillary Clinton is first in line with demands for liberation, almost exactly like she wasn't last week.
Hil(l)lariously, she takes the Iranian leadership to task for praising Egypt's revolutionaries while cracking down at home. Er, Hillary: I wouldn't cast any stones right now, given your craven attempts to 'manage' Egyptian politics in favour of strong-armed dictators.
Democracy, it seems, is a virus with which you infect your enemies, not your friends.
Just Larkin About
Here's a bitter, satirical poem from Philip Larkin which may strike a chord. It's called 'A Study of Reading Habits':
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
Monday, 14 February 2011
Thanks God!
Six people died in a plane crash in Cork, Ireland last week. An evangelical God-botherer survived with minor injuries:
That's right. It was a miracle. God decided that he wanted to bump off a random selection of people, but that He would spare Donal.
Statements like this are one of the things guaranteed to make me an angry Vole. Whenever anything like this happens, these morons say things like 'it was a miracle' or even worse 'God saved me for a purpose' or something similar.
I'd really like to see them say these things to the families of the dead, because the subtext is that God wanted the others dead. Thanks God!
One of the survivors has been named as Donal Walsh, a volunteer for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Ireland.
A spokesman for the organisation said: “I can confirm that one of our Relay (intern) workers, Donal Walsh, was a passenger on the aeroplane that crashed on landing at Cork Airport this morning.
“He miraculously walked away from this tragic accident, escaping with minor injuries. He is in hospital at the moment receiving follow-up treatment.”
Director of the organisation Adam Jones said he received a reassuring text message from Mr Walsh shortly after the incident.
“I am fine with very minor injuries all things considered. Thank God,” it said.
That's right. It was a miracle. God decided that he wanted to bump off a random selection of people, but that He would spare Donal.
Statements like this are one of the things guaranteed to make me an angry Vole. Whenever anything like this happens, these morons say things like 'it was a miracle' or even worse 'God saved me for a purpose' or something similar.
I'd really like to see them say these things to the families of the dead, because the subtext is that God wanted the others dead. Thanks God!
And so to bed…
Well, I feel like going to bed. It's been a long day. I will say though that I really enjoyed my seminar with the 3rd-years. We did Munday's conservative, poor-but-interesting The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington from 1599 (crudely hacked into two not very good plays) in which Robin is a thoroughly good aristocratic chap and never poses any sort of threat to feudal society, and Geoffrey Trease's 1930 socialist propagandist take on Robin, Bows Against The Barons.
The class really enjoyed the Trease: he's pretty realistic and writes characters and plots with considerable facility. And of course, he's completely right. It's a fascinating negotiation of 1930s debates about socialism: the relationship of vanguard parties to the proletariat, the dangers of Strong Leaders, the need to reject racial division, monarchy, religion and hierarchies. Highly recommended.
Next week it's a pair of plays on the thorny subjects of class and money: Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts and Carryl Churchill's Serious Money.
The class really enjoyed the Trease: he's pretty realistic and writes characters and plots with considerable facility. And of course, he's completely right. It's a fascinating negotiation of 1930s debates about socialism: the relationship of vanguard parties to the proletariat, the dangers of Strong Leaders, the need to reject racial division, monarchy, religion and hierarchies. Highly recommended.
Next week it's a pair of plays on the thorny subjects of class and money: Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts and Carryl Churchill's Serious Money.
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