These people are dead inside

I popped home to see my family yesterday. I was all ready to sympathise with them on the death of our cat, Sherpa, which has died at 23 years old.

Until I noticed this on the fridge (the Pope John Paul II fridge magnet is an added bonus).

That's right. My family and their friends were running a sweepstake predicting the cat's death. Given that my mother won, is a doctor and was the only person in the house when it happened,  I'm calling shenanigans.

The Death of the Author. Live.

The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes which posits that the author's intentions and context shouldn't be taken into account when reading a text: meaning is repeatedly created in the space between the words on the page (expressed in a language which predates and survives the author) and the reader's interpretation(s) rather than fixed. An author might try to constrain interpretation, but it's hard to do: the reader might be 200 years later, in a completely different context. Not that authors don't try: read Susan Suleiman's excellent Authoritarian Fictions for some examples.

However, the Death of the Author means something slightly different today. I've just ordered Terry Pratchett's new novel, Snuff. The title alone is redolent of death - snuffed out, snuff movies - and the work is a fantasy take on the murder-in-the-library country house crime genre. As a fan and admirer of Pratchett's increasingly leftwing satire, I'm sure it will be a winner.

But - I'm increasingly aware of a personal and public interest in Pratchett that impinges directly on the Death of the Author. Pratchett announced some time ago that he's contracted Alzheimer's disease. He's made documentaries about its progress, spoken movingly about the need for euthanasia, and donated large amounts of money to research. What concerns me is that there's a morbid interest in the books that isn't literary. I'm starting to feel that we aren't reading the books, we're reading the author, searching the text for indication of Pratchett's mental decline - perhaps a narrowed vocabulary, maybe a looser plot. It's like rubber-necking a car crash.

The problem is that I can't ignore it. If I didn't know about Pratchett's condition, I'd read the book and judge it by comparison with his previous work, with other authors, with my own mental conception of a successful novel. Now, I'm forced to read the novel in the prism of Alzheimer's, and I resent that. I'm not a purist Death of the Author critic: I'm interested in the context of a work's generation, but I'm finding it hard not to read Pratchett through the novel, as though it's an index of its author rather than a discrete work of art, which I'm sure he'd hate too.

We can hardly blame the media for milking all the pathos it can out of the situation - one could hardly expect vampires to swear off a drop of the red stuff - but I don't like it one little bit. When's the decline coming? How much editing is needed before publication? Will the publishers wring him dry or do the decent thing when the time comes? The clock's ticking. It's Celebrity Literary Deathwatch - and we're all hooked. Ugh.

Liam Fox RIP

In tribute to the Minister, who laid down his friends for his job only for it to backfire, and his bungling sidekick Adam Werritty, here's AC/DC's 'Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap'.

Pick up the phone, I'm always home/huh, huh, huh, huh, huh
Call me anytime/huh, huh, huh
Just ring: three-six-two-four-three-six, hey
I lead a life of crime

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap
Dirty deeds and they're done dirt cheap

You got problems in your life of love/huh, huh, huh, huh
You got a broken heart/huh, huh, huh
He's double-dealin' with your best friend/huh, huh, huh, huh, huh
That's when the teardrops start FELLA, well-uh/huh, huh, huh
Pick up the phone, I'm here alone/huh, huh, huh, huh, huh
Or make a social call/huh, huh, huh, huh
Come right in, forget about him
We'll have ourselves a ball, eh


It's time you made a stand/huh, huh, huh, huh
For a fee, I'm happy to be
Your back door man, hey


Concrete shoes
Cyanide
T.N.T
Done dirt cheap
Ooo, neckties
Contracts
High voltage
Done dirt cheap, eah

Dirty deeds, do anything you want me to, done dirt cheap
Dirty deeds, dirty deeds, dirty deeds, done dirt cheap

Meet the Tories' greatest fear

Here's a poster from the Norwegian Students' and Academics International Assistance Fund, which provides higher and informal education opportunities in the developing world. It sounds great.

Judging from this poster, it's exactly what our know-nothing government fears: opinionated, critical thinkers challenging authority. If only Michael Gove was in the cast of tyrants fleeing Mechastudent…

Dispute, Debate, Dissent: what a great slogan. If only my seminars took that line.

Why I am a fencer

There's a piece in today's Guardian calling for the return of swashbuckling movies

Swords are sexier than guns, and not just because they're longer phallic symbols. Any idiot can fire a gun, but it takes training to wield a rapier. The best duels are like games of chess with extra sadism – why dispatch opponents quickly when you can humiliate them with your footwork, or inflict death by a thousand cuts? Duelling can be a substitute for sex – and not just the seductive fence-off between Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Mask of Zorro; check out Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, smiling at each other during their duel on the beach in Captain Blood. It's enough to make you sorry for Olivia de Havilland.

To be honest, I've never got a sexual thrill from fencing, but the rest of it stands up. There's something immensely satisfying about pulling off a complicated, deceptive, fast action culminating in plunging the point into your opponent's chest while s/he wonders what just happened.

The humiliation's good too, though we're all friends after the match. I'm not a good fencer - my repertoire is too limited and my stomach too capacious, but I can beat much more gifted opponents because my footwork's good enough to spoil their flashy moves, which frustrates them into wildly slashing rather than calmly picking me off.

The older and slower I get, the less I move, relying on good timing and precision rather than force - which is why a top-level bout is over quickly and silently: anyone who tried swashbuckling in a fencing match would lose immediately. But I do still adore a bit of Errol Flynn.

Once more, Mr Uppal, with feeling?

A few days ago, our egregious MP Paul Uppal, put this 'question' to Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary:

Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West, Conservative) I thank my right hon. Friend for the sterling work he has done in respect of Sri Lanka. Will he elaborate on the work that he has done in relation to the Sri Lanka Development Trust, and specifically on the work that Ministers have done in that regard?

The newspapers have been taking a look at Liam Fox's 'sterling work he has done is respect of Sri Lanka'. It consists of setting up two linked bodies: a corporation and a charity:

the Sri Lanka Infrastructure Development Fund, which was intended to raise money abroad from investors who would then share in the profit of ventures on the country, and the Sri Lanka Charitable Fund which would undertake charitable projects in Tamil areas in the north and east.

Unfortunately:

Inquiries in Colombo could not establish any activity the trust or its subsidiaries have so far carried out. Aid experts, senior politicians and officials in Sri Lanka said they had no knowledge of the trust. Nether the trust nor its subsidiaries are registered by the National Secretariat for Non-Governmental Organisations, a prerequisite for any such project.

So what have they done?

The only activity the Sri Lanka Development Trust appears to have engaged in has been the payment of up to £7,500 of Fox's travel expenses, incurred on three trips to the country in 2009 and 2010.

So what we have is a dubious body set up in conjunction with Bell Pottinger PR (employed by the murderous Sri Lankan regime to improve its reputation internationally). It hasn't done anything other than help a government minister with his air fares - outside the normal paradigms of ministerial behaviour.


What is Fox up to?

 a senior Whitehall source said the minister had been operating a "maverick foreign policy"

So we have a minister with extensive business interests running his own operation in clear contradiction of the government's fairly decent attitude towards Sri Lanka.


And yet drones like Paul Uppal describe this as 'sterling work'. Is he merely stupid or actively cynical? I sense a letter coming:

Dear Mr Uppal,
the Hansard record of Defence Questions records you complimenting Dr Liam Fox on his 'sterling work' in Sri Lanka in regard to the Sri Lanka Development Trust. Newspaper investigations reveal that the two bodies forming the Sri Lanka Development Trust, the Sri Lanka Infrastructure Development Fund and the Sri Lanka Charitable Fund do not have the requisite permits to operate in Sri Lanka, and appear to have undertaken no activity other than to pay for Dr. Fox's aeroplane tickets. Could you explain to me a) what the 'sterling work' might be, b) what you knew about the Sri Lanka Infrastructure Development Fund and the Sri Lanka Charitable Fund at the time you addressed the House on this issue and c) the sources of your information on this matter?
Yours etc.

Start the clock…


Update: Fox has now resigned. Is there a Curse of Uppal? Who can we get him to compliment next?

Subversives in the staff room

Our central university management launched a new curriculum and structure a year or so ago, with no consultation or planning period. A fresh look at how and what we do is a healthy thing to do periodically - but imposing one without any academic justification (we were constantly told that pedagogical support would be proffered, but none appeared).

Now we have 3 timetables (semester-long modules, year-long modules and postgraduate modules) with a confusing smorgasbord of start and end dates, less choice of modules and various other confusions. Worse, it was imposed on students without warning: final-year students returned to find the modules they'd planned to take had been cancelled or moved. Some changes have been positive: a whole academic year to do the third-level dissertation is a really good idea.

On the whole, the students weren't happy. Our National Student Survey result dropped, with a large number of comments relating to 'Learning Works'. So you'd think that some reflection might be in order.

You naive saps. Management response is that the students only think they're unhappy. In fact, the new structure worked perfectly, it's just that nobody noticed because they'd been hoodwinked by their teachers. Why do they think they're unhappy? Because academic staff (i.e. the experts not consulted about restructuring) manipulated the students like puppets. Because obviously students are malleable drones who'll do our bidding. Heaven forfend that they might actually decide off their own bats that the new system is flawed.

I confess. I'm guilty. From my lair I hypnotised the student body until they were ready to march on the Executive Suite with pitchforks and flaming module evaluation forms, ready to serve my nefarious aims.

If only. I get an enormous thrill if a student tells me they enjoyed a lecture. The idea that suddenly we have the rhetorical skills and manipulative ability of the bastard love-child of Hitler and Edward Bernays is just laughable. Is it too much for these people just to accept that rather than a conspiracy, the teachers and the students (i.e. the people at the sharp end of their bright ideas) reached the same, reasonable conclusion?

Every man has his price

I didn't think I did. But my friend Georgiana has just been in to thank me for proofing her PhD thesis on computational methods of automatically resolving time references in texts - and left me with a bottle of wine and £50 of book tokens. We agreed on the secret of completing your doctoral dissertation: it's never finished, you just stop.

I was hoping to be bought a pint on viva day, so I'm overwhelmed. There's a new minimum tariff. Who's next?

Time for you shady foreign types to try the REAL citizenship test

Never mind the government's frankly bonkers citizenship test - you all did abysmally, and my 18/24 score was nothing to write home about (geddit?) either.

So try this one. I got 10/10. Feeling very proud. Record your score in the comments box.

Book news

It's been a joyous week for book purchases: all sorts of things have been flooding in.

Peter Day's Franco's Friends, detailing the support afforded British Intelligence to the fascist rebel who conquered Spain.

Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside, about all the scrappy bits of land we usually ignore, and which I particularly love: railway sidings, abandoned industrial quarters, factories and canals. I shall use it for my lecture on the City and Psychogeography.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. It got a stinking review in the LRB, but it's a romance set in the critical theory culture wars of the 1980s (which I missed). What's not to like?

Two variations on the vampire tale: Matt Haig's The Radleys (Radio 4-loving suburbanites discover why they need a lot of Factor 50) and James Lovegrove's political, dystopian Policing the Damned.

Claire Flay's PhD-based biography of Dorothy Edwards: finally a serious (though short) work on this semi-forgotten and fascinating author.

And a print-on-demand copy of Nahum Tate's happy-ending Lear for comparative purpose. The foreword brazenly announces that he's cleaned up Shakespeare's 'Quaintness of Expression' in the original, which he likens to 'a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht'

Life imitating art?

I've been wondering from where George Osborne and the Tories sourced their piss-poor and manifestly untrue slogan 'We're All In It Together'.

Turns out it's from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a film described as a 'dystopian satire' of a dysfunctional industrial world, in which the

 bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slapstick quality and lacks a Big Brother figure.

The difference between Brazil and Britain being that the Tories are using fear to cow us, rather than enforced jolliness.

Meet Liam Fox's new special advisor

Like Adam Werritty, I've got a business card to prove it:

You can get one too: click here.

and here's the Wordle version of Foxy's statement to the House of Commons:

Back Street's Back

Thanks to the unelected political donors, washed-up ex-backbenchers and celebrity stunt appointees in the House of Lords, the NHS as a legal entity has now been abolished.

The government - Tories who promised 'no top-down reorganisations' and the Lib Dems who… well, it doesn't matter what they said, does it - has turned the National Health Service from an aspiration into a brand, under cover of which the profitable bits will be sold to corporations and the grotty bits (mental health, geriatrics) will moulder away and die.

Doctors will be forced to contract out to cherry-picking companies: some doctors will take the cheapskate options because they get to keep the change, others will make cosy deals with private providers. Either way, the interest of the patient will be less important than now.

Meanwhile, the public good is to be abolished. Like education, the Conservatives see health as a private good, rather than a public one. In reality, your health is important to me. If you're free of contagious disease, so am I. If you quit the cigarettes or start wearing your seatbelt, less of my tax will be spent on reinflating your blackened lungs or scraping your remaining brains back into your skull.

The NHS died today for many reasons, many of them obscure and legalistic. But here's one: the  Secretary of State for Health is no longer legally required to maintain a National Health Service. There are two immediate effects. Firstly, local health bodies can decide for themselves what the health priorities are. This may have some positive effects, but I can just as easily see some localities deciding that sexual health, or vaccinations aren't important. Diseases associated with poverty will be ignored, while the sexy ailments which make the front page of the Daily Mail will get priority funding. It's a return to the back streets, especially if your local authority decides that sexual health and terminations are morally unacceptable.

Secondly, if the 'NHS' fails in future, there's no democratic way to get answers, or to make heads roll. You'll pay for it, but your MP won't be able to ask the Secretary of State for Health to answer your questions. 'It's not my responsibility', he'll say. It's up to your local provider - and good luck with that, as they'll probably be exempt from Freedom of Information requests (just like the 'free schools' that we're now paying for).

I liked the NHS. My parents are doctors and many of my friends and family have been nurses or - more often - patients. It's been underfunded, kicked and abused. Some areas of provision are shockingly bad. But I've always understood that they're ultimately working for, and answerable to, us.

No longer.

Men/Are as the time is

I was teaching King Lear today, which was hugely enjoyable. The group was talkative and quick to grasp the thornier conundrums (conundra?) raised by the play, though we didn't do much on the classic linguistic/poetical issues.

What we focused on was the kind of universe envisioned by the various characters. To some, it's a Epicurean-Lucretian-humanist world in which (as Edmund says) the stars and the gods do not intervene. To others, it's a humanist-individualist world in which individuals make their own way over the blasted, storm-tossed heath that is life. A third position is that duty, temporarily set aside by those who should understand it (Lear) is restored after its source has been recognised and atonement made. Poor Cordelia, who knows all along yet still dies.

You can understand why Shakespeare's successors hated it: Cordelia's death implies that - despite Noel Edmonds' weirdo claims - there isn't a system of cosmic justice. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people, and God's not going to turn up and make everything right again. Hence Nahum Tate's version with the happy ending (you know him: he wrote 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night' to which we've all sung hilarious alternative words).

This leads to the final point, the one implied by the title of this post. The despairing lament is that we behave as badly as the time, which I take to mean the moral and social context. A general decay leads to individual dishonour. Perhaps this is why Liam Fox won't resign: why should he individually pay for a minor role in the wider social failure which sees bankers paid billions to turn us to beggars, politicians enrich themselves at our expense, youths take a violent short-cut to material riches?

It's a seductive view, and a common one: the basis of Conservatism is that without restraint, humans will always tend towards selfish individualism, and that the last-age-but-one was Golden. I don't subscribe to it myself, despite the occasionally Eeyore-ish pronouncements you might see here. I tend to think - anarchistically - that removed from hegemonic control, most people are altruistic: just look at the nicer bits of the web, where public data analysis is performed by thousands of geeks, where technical help is always a Tweet away. But I do think that the corrosive effect of the Tories' hatred of government per se has led to corruption on an individual level and on the level of the political class. Like Lear, they take the prestige and the private advantages while publicly decrying the notion of government as a duty and as a public good. Arriving with all the advantages of private wealth and social capital (the same goes for Berlusconi), they can only conceive of government as either oppressing them or enriching them: those of us who have benefitted from the state (education, healthcare etc.) have very different relationships with it. We're Edgar and the Fool - and we're being locked out onto the blasted heath for good.

See? Shakespeare's still got a lot to say, kids!

Can bloggers write?

This is what Oscar Wilde had to say about people who wrote to newspapers:

(Scots Observer, 16 August 1890): "I am afraid that writing to newspapers has a deteriorating influence on style. People get violent and abusive and lose all sense of proportion, when they enter that curious journalistic arena in which the race is always to the noisiest."

I think this can largely be applied to people like me, though I should point out that there are many very stylish bloggers out there.

Thought for the day

'It is a wise ordinance of fate – or Providence? – that I cannot get all the books I want, or I should certainly never accomplish much. I am simply a "book drunkard". 

LM Montgomery.

Sadly, I can get all the books I want. Though all the post held today was Ryan Kiernan's Shakespeare, some record cleaning fluid and the box set of remastered Smiths albums. Mmm.

Take the citizenship test

Have a go at this: a selection of the questions asked of immigrants seeking UK citizenship. I am ashamed to admit that, despite my addiction to news, politics, history and culture, I only managed 18 out of 24 (wrong on 8, 9, 10, 14, 18 and 24). Thankfully, my Irish passport means you can't get rid of me. Mwahhahahahahahahahaha etc. I wonder how UK citizens would fare.

Post your scores in the comments box.

Call-Me-Dave's Shop A Minority Wheeze

Anyone else choke into their cornflakes over the headline 'Cameron Urges Public To Report Suspected Illegal Immigrants' this morning?

As I read it, I could hear crowds chanting 'Juden Raus', smashing glass and shifty phone calls. How, exactly, are you meant to tell who is an 'illegal' immigrant, who is a 'legal' immigrant and who is a refugee? My guess is that Daily Mail readers and other racists will be making anonymous calls when black people move into their streets. Gangs of EDL supporters measuring noses and

Imagine the possibilities for abuse. One quick call and the sweatshop owner gets rid of his uppity workforce. Neighbourly disputes escalated by a 4 a.m. raid, mistaken or otherwise. I could get rid of students to whom I take a dislike, and they could do the same to me.

This is vicious lunacy. We all know there are illegal immigrants in this country. Many businesses depend on their slave labour. But the way to deal with it is certainly not to encourage a culture of vigilante mobs, anonymous informers and spies. The public isn't informed enough - nor should it be inclined - to know who is legal and who isn't. I suspect most of us don't understand the EU freedom of movement laws, let alone the refugee legislation. There's a border authority which exists to apply the immigration laws If citizens do start flooding the police with calls, the system will collapse under the weight of xenophobic paranoia.

There's only one explanation for raising such an impractical, dangerous notion: David Cameron thinks there are votes in raising lynch mobs and blaming the nation's ills on immigrants rather than speculators and their pet politicians.

Cynical political adverts of our time

Here's an ad for a Polish political candidate from the SLD party. Any Polish readers care to translate the message at the end? It's slightly odd because Poland's such a conservative country: yesterday's election results returned a business-conservative party ahead of the cultural-conservative party, which is pretty depressing.



When I taught political communication, one of the themes we addressed was the replacement of policy communication with brand/lifestyle political ads. Here's an Austrian one which is both highly sophisticated and utterly, utterly cynical: my non-Germanophone students were stunned when I revealed at the end that it was a political advert. Entirely lacking in policy ideas, it trades on the idea that no attractive woman would ever sleep with a liberal.

Paul Uppal: will he never find a war criminal he doesn't like?

The MP elected to represent the interests of his poor, Midlands constituents is - of course - pursuing rather unedifying subjects of his own. 


Hot on the heels of Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary's dubious meetings with President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka (who presided over the wholesale slaughter of Tamil civilians and arrested for treason a man who dared stand against him in the elections), Paul Uppal spies opportunity knocking. 


Who's he talking too? Well, it's Foxy himself. Clearly the presence of Fox's business partner, researcher, flatmate and best man at every meeting he had doesn't deter our doughty defender of business interests:

Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West, Conservative) I thank my right hon. Friend for the sterling work he has done in respect of Sri Lanka. Will he elaborate on the work that he has done in relation to the Sri Lanka Development Trust, and specifically on the work that Ministers have done in that regard?

Liam Fox (Secretary of State, Defence; North Somerset, Conservative) As I have said, the point of involvement in Sri Lanka is to create greater stability which will contribute to stability in the region. I was particularly keen to see a mechanism for investment that could reduce some of the regulatory restrictions imposed by the Sri Lankan Government, on the basis that a proportion of the profits would go into social projects that would benefit ethnic minorities. I still hope that that project will succeed, and give it my full support.

To recap: Sri Lanka's government murdered thousands of people, and Dr. Fox paid a social call to Rajapaksa to congratulate him, bringing along his little pet. Now he reckons the only problems is Sri Lanka are 'regulatory restrictions'. Here are some highlights:

One of the most serious claims of violations of the laws of war and human rights law centers on the shelling of civilian areas, including hospitals, during the final phases of the conflict.

The Sri Lankan army has been accused of knowingly shelling Puthukudiyiruppu Hospital in February 2009. When an eyewitness to that incident, Dr. T. Vartharajah – one of the Tamil government doctors who was detained by the army at the end of the conflict was questioned about this incident, LLRC members repeatedly asked about the position of LTTE artillery, the presence of LTTE members inside the hospital and LTTE imposed restrictions on freedom of movement. Dr. Vartharajah was never asked whether government forces shelled the hospital. (After some time in detention, Dr. Vartharajah publicly recanted reports of civilian war casualties at a government-sponsored press conference, leading to charges that he had been compelled to contradict his earlier statements.) 

Enforced disappearances are a gross violation of human rights and a particularly persistent form of abuse in Sri Lanka – where tens of thousands from earlier periods of conflict still remain unresolved and unpunished – but enforced disappearance is not specified as a crime under Sri Lankan law  

No doubt the whole exchange is part of the whipped (i.e. compulsory) Tory turnout in defence of their bent colleague, which shows you what a mightily independent 'thinker' Mr Uppal is. If you need an arse licked, he's your man. I hope he's proud of himself.