Cameron's New York smackdown

The New York Times isn't impressed with David Cameron's adoption of Mubarak techniques for dealing with urban disorder:

Mr. Cameron, and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, should know better. They risk long-term damage to Britain’s already fraying social compact.Making poor people poorer will not make them less likely to steal. Making them, or their families, homeless will not promote respect for the law. Trying to shut down the Internet in neighborhoods would be an appalling violation of civil liberties and a threat to public safety, denying vital real-time information to frightened residents.Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services. Even police strength is scheduled to be cut. The poor are generally more dependent on government than the affluent, so they have been hit the hardest.What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Mr. Cameron has figured that out. But, at a minimum, burdens need to be more fairly shared between rich and poor — not as a reward to anyone, but because it is right.

Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk. 

When you're too rightwing and populist for Americans to stomach, you've really lost it. His desperate cheerleading for swingeing penalties (6 months for stealing a bottle of water) is driven by two things: fear, and a pathological preference for Daily Mail-friendly electoral calculation over thoughtful administration.

A-levels: just for girls?

As you can see from this site, only fruity teenage girls pass A-levels. Or is it just that the entire news media only print pictures of fruity teenage girls opening their results because the implied reader is a lecherous heterosexual male encouraged to view all human beings - but especially teenage girls - as sexual commodities.

If the Daily Telegraph and the Mail could get away with naked teenage girls on the front page (white and upper-class, naturally), they would, but until then, results day is a fixed highlight of their year.

But sadly, it does contribute to ideas of attractiveness and to excluding non-fruity-teenage-girls from the Platonic Academy. Even worse, Badminton College (very expensive exclusive girls' school) even sends newspapers speculative shots of their fruitiest girls to tempt the photographers down on results day. I believe the word for that is 'pimping'.

My recent reading

Having just expounded at length on academic understanding of reading, I should say what I've been reading recently.

I have a lot of books - my flat is bursting with them, and I've colonised my shared office with the overflow. This, naturally, leads to book anxiety, the horrible feeling you get when someone else scrutinises your shelves, like they're looking into your soul. If a colleague comes round, I find myself muttering excuses ('the lit theory's mostly at work', or 'the rest of the Shelley must be in the bedroom') for my collection. Books do, as someone said, furnish a room, but they also give the viewer a history of the reader. My books are a mix of work, of childhood sentiment and of pleasure: the fact that I have a work/pleasure divide means I'm not really an academic compared with some of my friends. I've internalised the Leavisite division between Literature and books. Not completely, and the academy is more open to the stuff I read for fun than 50 years ago, but the division's still there, in my head at least.

So I'll confess: here's what I read for pleasure on holiday:
Butterworth's A World That Never Was, a history of 19th-century anarchism (which revealed that pretty much every terrorist outrage was a covert police provocation).
Robert Bennett's The Company Man: a union/industrial/alternative history/SF thriller.
Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory
Ian McGuire's Incredible Bodies, a satirical campus novel.

No doubt I'll be quoting all four of these at length over the next few days - so much of what they had to say resonated with the riots, my job and other things. But that aside, they do indicate that I have different reading 'modes'. With The Company Man, I chose it for its promised political element, and the purpose was entertainment and sensation (and because my friends The Nightingales have a song of the same name). The anarchism volume was entertaining, but I read it primarily to deepen my understanding of the context. Lights Out… was chosen because its reputation was so high, and because I've become interested in the same things as Sinclair to some extent. It felt like Literature, and it stretched me intellectually, while giving me ideas for lectures. Finally, Incredible Bodies was entertaining but also bore some relevance to my situation - insecurely employed as a lit/cult studies lecturer, trying to cope with the tides of theoretical moves, not keeping up with the multivalent demands on the modern, commoditised academic. Reading what's essentially a farce about my own life added a kind of perspective: you could say I read it as a form of self-help.

Your turn: what are you reading and why?

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain"

OK, that's Louisa M. Alcott, being witty in the days when novel reading was seen as a dangerous, self-indulgent pursuit for idle women (see also Northanger Abbey). I've been following a debate online about the kinds of reading people do in various contexts, whether the special kind of reading we do at universities is a minority pursuit for a special class of people, and whether it can (should?) be taught.

Part of the problem is that we're not explicit about what this special reading is, and what other forms of reading are. We don't explore the reality. Back in the days of Close Reading and Practical Criticism, students were encouraged to forensically dissect individual words - for example in a poem - to discover the poet's intention: what was lost was cultural context, the reader's role in creating meaning, and the wider imaginative and intellectual location of the collection of words which made up the text.

We also (sadly) teach skim reading: pick up a critical work, scan the index and chapter headings, rip out the bits you 'need'.

But really, what are we asking students to do? To 'lose themselves' in a book? Or to retain a degree of critical distance in which enjoyment and other emotional responses are to be set aside in favour of seeking to understand a text's structure, or underlying symbolism?

Outside the university, despite the claims made in this piece, people are reading: the UK has the largest newspaper readership in the world, and books are being read at an incredible rate. Everywhere I go, people are reading books. Not ones I'd like, admittedly, but the appetite is there. What I don't know - it's not my field - is how they're reading them, and why. Are they consuming the words for plot, or revelling in the style? Both? Something else?

What kind of reading do I want from my students? Put on the spot, it's hard to say, and it's also a chicken-and-egg situation. I want them to understand the dynamics of plot and the complexities of 'meaning'. I want them to get away from the idea that texts have 'messages' and that the author's intention is paramount. At the same time, I want them to appreciate the richness of language. If there's a definition of 'good' and 'bad' literature that I'd go with, it's that 'bad' literature uses words as if they're a wheelbarrow used to trundle you from scene to scene, whereas 'good' literature displays the tensions, the ambiguities, the complexities of using words to express 'things'. Plato was very suspicious of reading - he thought it would supersede speech, to the detriment of society.

"he who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words, which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually."

(Interestingly, modern literary criticism is equally, perhaps more, suspicious of words. To us, words are an exercise in power, and a smoke-and-mirrors trick. Meaning is always just out of reach (read your Derrida) and any attempt to claim a link between word, meaning and reality is an imperialist act of oppression. This idea makes a lot of people very angry indeed).

So I want my students to weigh words, and sentences and paragraphs - to catch the deliberate and accidental echoes of other texts and ideas: but this requires a reader familiar with a canon whose contents are impossible to nail down. Each of my students has read different things which affect their response to what I've given them: Stanley Fish's wonderful Is There A Text In This Class? pursues this argument fascinatingly. Because they're mostly young, they haven't read very much, relatively speaking: asking an 18-year old to spot the Virgilian echoes in The Waste Land is an oppressive act rather than an educational one.

They've also been misled - by schools and examinations - into thinking that books have messages to be extracted. They're often frustrated by being forced to slow down, to engage in a non-linear kind of reading. Trained as book-miners, it's hard to try a different tack. One of my friends - a Vole reader - announced after our last day at university that he was never going to read a novel again, because analysis had stripped the wonder and enjoyment out of the reading experience. It took him several years to return to fiction. Other people have told me that learning to spot 'how' a text works ruins the enjoyment: I've always felt that it adds a layer of appreciation or misery, depending on whether I think it's a 'good' book or not: a brilliantly plotted crime thriller is a thing of beauty, even if there's nothing more to it than the efficient delivery of act/detection/retribution.

One of the hardest questions I ask in class is 'how did this make you feel'? The question seems wrong in a classroom. The architecture, the fees, the examinations all conspire to make an individual's feelings seem insignificant or transgressive - yet emotion is at the heart of the reading experience. Even if the answer is 'bored', we can discuss why.

One of the most important moves in modern literary theory is the Death of the Author. The basic idea is that once a text is in your sweaty paws, it's yours. The author can't dictate meaning to you. Well, he or she can try (read Suleiman's stunning Authoritarian Fictions) but you'll only get resentful, and give up or read against the author's intentions. Meaning is located between you and the text: your cultural condition determines which bits you respond to, and how. I think this is true of stuff you read on the bus and what you read in class. It doesn't mean that 'what I reckon' is the ultimate arbiter of quality or reading - you still need to apply and active and open intelligence to get anything from a book - but it does recognise the agency of the reader.

I could go on in this vein for hours. But you've got plenty more to read out there…

A-levels: the horror…

Results tomorrow (and Leaving Cert if you're in Ireland). I can't say I remember much about that day, other than the overwhelming senses of firstly, depressingly low expectations. My headmaster's reference on the UCAS/PCAS forms was 'does not deserve a place at any university - thanks to the very kind man at Derby University who told me I didn't really seem to fit the description, and let me read it.

After the miserable anticipation came the phone call, and the dreadful dawning of reality. I knew I'd do well at English. I knew I should do well at French but would drop some grades thanks to stupidly answering 3 questions from the same section rather than two from one and one from the other. Can't complain. It was dumb. I fully expected to fail Latin because a) I didn't know any and b) nobody listened to me when I told them I didn't know any. Oh and c) I didn't want to do it and was made to because there was only me and the teacher was in a wheelchair. I didn't quite fail but nor was I acclaimed Emperor.

So, there it was. I'd already been banned by the parents from taking the Drama and Theatre degree I'd auditioned for at Trinity Dublin, so it was into Clearing. If you're reading this, kids: Clearing is your friend. I ended up at a brilliant university, and turned from a lazy failure to a lazy success. It certainly wasn't my doing, so all credit to Bangor University for taking a chance on an unknown kid.

In a few weeks, you won't care about your grades. Once you're in, you can change from the course you chose under parental pressure or because that was all that was available in Clearing. You're free. You might not end up where all your friends are, but these random and unexpected turns are where all the fun is. You'll make new friends, try courses which never occurred to you. New hair, new clothes, entirely new background if that's what suits you. I turned up with tapes of Automatic For The People and The Lark Ascending. I left with hundreds of books and records, and even some friends (not forgetting the massive debts). Who'd have thunk it?

Of course, you shouldn't just take my advice. If you're a spoiled airhead, then listen to Rosie Millard at the Daily Telegraph (thanks, Nicola):

Freshers should take a tip from boarding school veterans, and pack a large trunk with all the nick-nacks and antiques that make their rooms feel special.

Yes, I took along the cannon my great-great-grandfather used to singlehandedly annex the Limpopo. And a stuffed Dodo. Mumsie was so pleased.

Pack that lovely Mexican throw, the baseball glove from your summer in America and the cushions from Bulgaria. They will make your room look different, and encourage conversation on something you know about. 

These conversations will take place later on, when you're not there. They will largely revolve around the proposal that you are without doubt a Massive Wanker.

Invest in some proper blankets or Egyptian cotton sheets from John Lewis. You could also check out linen in the Heal’s sale as it is usually available at a massive discount. While we’re on soft furnishings, a pair of decent curtains will brighten up your room and make it personal. Habitat or John Lewis have a ready-made selection.

Although soft furnishings from Tesco or TJ Hughes are so ironic, darlings.

A portable instrument such as a ukulele or guitar is a brilliant accessory. Particularly if you know how to play it, and have a selection of seductive Paul Simon numbers up your sleeve.

Ah yes, the guitars. There were occasional people who could produce an acoustic guitar at a party and judge the mood perfectly: communal singing, adoring looks, confident performances. Actually, there's one: my friend Matt, who spent his gap year touring with a band, and had 3 albums out before he ever went to a lecture. He can walk the walk. But on the whole, getting your guitar out is a tragic attempt to look sexy and soulful, and it's never improved by the fact that you only know one verse and one chorus of a very narrow range of boring 60s songs. If you could, for instance, do a madrigal version of a Slayer track, I'd say yes. If you can't, then you deserve a ruthless beating for your presumption. You are not a Musical Sex God. You are a David Brent wannabe.

I had the misfortune to attend a rural-ish university in the 90s. That meant that an outrageous proportion of the menfolk - often Southern, rich and privately-educated - thought that they could acquire dreadlocks and perform on the didgeridoo as though doing us all a favour. (Why were the women so much more sensible/mature/tasteful? These men were wrong. It is the devil's instrument. Every time I heard one, or smelt that mixture of sweat and bad weed which meant that a didge-toter was in the vicinity, I wanted to commit unspeakable acts of violence.

Looking back, I was right.

Where was I? Oh yes, Clearing. Grasp it. It could be the making of you. And if you're really unlucky, you might find me at the front of your first lecture. You'll recognise me by my hunted look and the desperation in my eyes.

Your suggestions required

My young cousin has been asked to do a school English project on the transition from adolescence to adulthood (actually, I thought adolescence is the transitional period from childhood to adulthood, but we'll let that go).

I've suggested a list of texts, but now it's your turn. What signifies adulthood? Sex? Work? The end of education? Tragedy? Send me your book titles.

Meanwhile, have some North Sea Radio Orchestra. I've set up my new hi-fi (except for the faulty record player, which gets replaced tomorrow) and things like this sound great. It's indie mixed with Steve Reich. Perhaps it errs on the twee side, but I'm comfortable with that. I've also been listening to Glass's Another Look At Harmony part IV, and Norwegian fiddle band Majorstuen. Actually, reading that paragraph back, I'm clearly a bourgeois tosser of the highest order.

In case of emergency, lift cover and release Meades

Jonathan Meades knows what causes riots: bad architecture and the bad faith which causes it. Here's part 1 of his 2007 'On the Brandwagon'. This may be the best few minutes of your life.



Talking of Garden Festivals, I played in the orchestra at the Stoke Garden Festival. The site is now a concrete retail park fit only for joyriders, junk food and muggings. Regeneration was a mirage. And my violin playing hasn't improved either.

Meades was right. And we've learned nothing.

The Horror, the horror…

One of the scariest songs ever written is Tom Waits' bleak 'God's Away On Business'.
Seeing the Sesame Streets puppets singing it makes it even worse. But at least it introduces the kids to the idea that the universe is an arbitrary concoction indifferent to the activities of bipedal carbon-based life forms (who's in charge in God's absence? 'Killers, thieves and lawyers'). I had a friend who used to cry when I outlined this world-view. Ah well.



Mind you, there's always been a streak of savage violence to Kermit, as these early adverts show:

And the award for irony goes to…

… The Hegemon, for its honorary degree policy. We've just given an honorary Doctorate in Business Administration to

Tony Collins – Honorary Degree of Doctor of Business Administration in recognition of his significant and successful contribution to the railway management and rail passenger service of Virgin Trains

That's right. Not, you'll notice, for the top quality, efficiency and affordability of the railway system: the slowest and most expensive in Europe, not aided by yesterday's announcement of 8% price increases for the next three years.

But as a means of extracting cash from our pockets directly and through taxation, it's a winner. Did you know that Virgin Trains merely licenses the name from Richard Branson's Swiss company? That means that there's never enough profit to pay tax on, because the fee charged to license the brand is so huge. So cuddly Uncle Richard is essentially avoiding tax by salting the cash away in no-tax Switzerland. That's what we're giving degrees for. And we wonder why Britain's economy is screwed: we reward financial trickery, rather than, for instance, people who make trains.

So, hats off to The Hegemon for demonstrating that even major educational institutions are capable of parody and satire. It's a grand gesture, a sophisticated piece of grand comedy played out on an official stage. I'm actually really pleased: it shows that there's a living, beating heart here, one capable of witty commentary on contemporary society.

Recipe for social decay

Andrew Maxwell, who is a comedian, knows why we're in a mess. He's a comedian, which suggests that the days of the fool speaking truth to power are coming back.

Create a society that values material things above all else. Strip it of industry. Raise taxes for the poor and reduce them for the rich and for corporations. Prop up failed financial institutions with public money. Ask for more tax, while vastly reducing public services. Put adverts everywhere, regardless of people's ability to afford the things they advertise. Allow the cost of food and housing to eclipse people's ability to pay for them. Light blue touch paper. 

Hard to disagree with any of that.

Meanwhile, it's come to my attention that - rather ironically - the Tory Party's 2007 Conference was soundtracked by Jimmy Cliff's 'You Can Get It If You Really Want', which would fit rather nicely with images of looters trashing Carphone Warehouse.

I'd suggest a Rolling Stones track. No, not 'Streetfighting Man', but 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'.

Dusk in Cork, Dawn in Swansea

A few shots I took from the overnight ferry. What a way to travel. No humiliating searches, cramped conditions, being treated like cattle. Instead, a customs official who cheerily wished us a pleasant journey, a fine pint of Beamish and a proper bed. Rest here.

Puck off!

Final few favourite photographs (how's that for consonance?) from Puck 2011: rest here.

Watching Dr. Fox's Old-Timey String Band

A proud mother at the fancy dress competition

O'Grady's bar before the breakfast-time rush

Spraoi Ciarrai storyteller

The effortlessly cool French band Fanfare Piston

The goat's stand reflected in a trombone

This guy invaded Miss Australia 1963's comedy set. It was hard to pick the best pictures of him. 

All's Fair?

Some shots from Bird's, the funfair that accompanies Puck Fair in Killorglin, Ireland. I love neon and fairgrounds are wonderful - edgy, glitzy and tasteless. I went in the pouring rain, which heightened the atmosphere. Very few people were there, but the lights were still on and the music pumped.

The horse-racing game, at which I failed miserably

A prize pooch

Ok, the pedant in me is distracted by the lights

The definition of loneliness?

Like some giant mechanical flower

Another of my favourite shots.

I was playing with long exposures to capture movement here - I think it worked, though I was shooting handheld.

Fair enough?

Some more of my favourites from Puck Fair 2011. More here or click these to enlarge.

One of my very favourite photos.

The Traveller girls have a style of their own - regardless of atrocious weather - which I admire. Many wore far fewer clothes and much more fake tan, but I'd have risked a beating for sneaking a shot.

This is what the rest of us wore

King Puck himself, about to be crowned and hoisted up for his 3 day reign

And his neon counterpart

All the fun of the fair

Lots of photographs from Puck Fair 2011 here.
Some more samples from the horse fair - click for larger versions.

Daddy, I Want A Pony! I really do want a Kerry Bog Pony. Who'd want a dog when you can have a miniature horse?

Trading is done using a system of grunts and frowns. And always away from the prying eyes of the taxman

Why the long face? Said the horse… Arf.

While you were out looting

I took quite a few pictures whilst I was in Ireland: moody beach shots, rain, horses and mad old hippies. For the full set of Puck Fair photos, go here, or click on these samples to enlarge.

Mountains on the Dingle peninsula from Ballykissane on the banks of the Laune

You'll need this playing in the background for the horse fair shots.