Death to you, late abstract submitter
Death to you, abstract changer
Death to you, disorganised panel proposer
Death to you, late registrants
Death to you, delegate who suddenly remembers near-fatal allergies during the aperitifs
Death to you, delegate annoyed to discover we don't have an OS/2 compatible projector
Death to you, who demands a presidential suite
Death to you, full-salaried academic enquiring about the postgraduate rate.
Death to you, inhospitable 'hospitality liaison officers'
Death to you, finance departments
Death to you, funding committees. Death to you twice over.
Death to you, invisible keynote speakers.
After all, you'll all be the death of me.*
*I'll be fine tomorrow. I just never, ever, want to open a spreadsheet again. And I have learned never to call any document 'Final'. It just tempts fate.
In short, Grant Shapps MP is in trouble again. As I helped with the original story, I thought I'd summarise what happened and explain why I think it's important.
Grant had a business called HowToCorp. Essentially, it was an online version of snake oil, selling 'business secrets' and the like to rubes: titles such as 'How To Make You Own Money Making Mint', How To Bounce Back From Recession' (a volume his colleagues in the Treasure evidently didn't read) and The Meaning of Dreams, a $29.97 reprint of an 'extremely rare' book which could actually be found on the internet for free, or for pennies if you wanted the dead-tree version. Shapps also promoted a classy pamphlet called 'Stinking Rich'. You can read my original piece on these magnificent economic treatises here.
Using the names Michael Green and Sebastian Fox, Grant flounced round shady business seminars and the web flogging these products simultaneously trading on his status as an MP while all three identities denied any links. The other side of the business was TrafficPaymaster, a nasty little bit of software that helped you plagiarise or 'scrape' other people's websites and promised to beat Google's algorithm, which generally took a dim view of this kind of behaviour (hilariously, one of 'Michael Green's booklets is How To STOPDigital Product Theft which suggests buying his crappy software!). He also operated sock-puppet accounts for political dirty tricks and frequently sanitises his Wikipedia page.
All this was exposed thanks to the sterling work of various bloggers and journalists, but it wasn't really going anywhere. However, I was young and angry in those days. And bored. Very, very bored. So I had a look round 'Michael's' websites (now sadly deleted) and smelled a rat when I read the testimonials from satisfied customers. So I spent a good few hours trying to track them down. Nothing. One had the same name as a minor PG Wodehouse character but the rest appeared to have no web presence (despite being enthusiastic web marketers) and some of their locations appeared not to exist. So I reported the sites to the Advertising Standards Authority and chronicled events here and here.
That got quite a lot of attention, including this classic piece of Shapps and Michael Crick charging round a conference venue like Benny Hill.
But he got away with it. He withdrew the adverts rather than go through an investigation, which allowed him to claim – without evidence – that his testimonials were all genuine. He dismissed me as 'politically motivated', a criticism that still sounds a little odd coming from a Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Conservative Party. A police report concluded that while Shapps' company's activities 'may constitute an offence of fraud', an investigation was dropped. Why? Who knows? No satisfactory explanation was given.
So that seemed to be that, until this weekend. Grant's had a glorious career as the Tory Party's bullshitter in chief, turning up to defend the indefensible whenever no more senior politicians could be bothered to turn up. But some journalists have stuck to the story, and this is why it's still alive. Shapps recorded an interview on LBC radio three weeks ago denying that he'd carried on the business while an MP (this was during the Double Jobbing Scandal), but someone unearthed a video of him saying that he did:
So why is this story still alive? It's pretty simple. Shapps/Green/Fox's business was a spivvy, seedy little operation, but the real story is that last bit: using the law to cover up a lie. He isn't just some dodgy businessman, he holds public office and should answer to a higher standard. He's a powerful man who deliberately silenced justified criticism using the law.
The wider story is the debasement of public life. Politicians have always associated themselves with shady businessmen, but rarely so blatantly. I can't imagine Douglas-Home, Macmillan or Balfour promoting someone like Shapps, author of Stinking Rich. While the PM and Chancellor go round talking about The Rise of the Makers and fiscal prudence, their closest colleagues flog rip-off pamphlets promising that you can 'Make $20,000 in 20 Days Or Your Money Back'.
This morning the Tory spin machine is in full swing. There are two lines of attack. Alongside others, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (who has also made millions in a pretty dubious web-marketing line which didn't treat its employees very well after several other businesses failed: funny that he's happy to slag off welfare dependency while his own business depended on contracts with the state) claims that this proves Labour and the Guardian are 'anti-business',
Except of course that JK Rowling is an author, didn't set lawyers on a Facebook poster and didn't lie to a radio station. Nor, of course, does she hold public office.
Nadine also reckons that:
Yes, all the best business withdraw their advertising and get banned by Google for being copyright thieves, plagiarists and cheats.
What we have here is the progressive loss of a moral compass, in the political class in general and in the Conservative Party in particular. Shapps is the latest in a long line of cheats and bullies at the heart of government. Andy Coulson's in prison. Rebekah Brooks miraculously escaped it. Hunt and Shapps are spins, while Shapps is demonstrably a liar, though his defence is that he 'screwed up dates' while 'over-firmly' denying allegations. Clarkson apparently punches people while drunkenly abusing them for being Irish, while Hamilton, Archer, Asil Nadir and Aitken rattle their bones in the background. There's a pattern of shady behaviour which the classic old Tory party wouldn't have condoned: these types would have been despatched to the library with a bottle of whisky and revolver. But now politics is about the sales pitch, they come to the fore, and as long as they ride out the news cycles, they're OK – principles are so old hat.
What does this mean for the world of social media? Having played some small part in this saga, I think it demonstrates the symbiotic nature of social media and journalism. I heard the original story via the newspapers. I followed it by doing some digging of my own, which was picked up by TV and newspapers. Then the story went dead until a radio station asked Shapps the question and The Guardian unearthed the video that proves he was double-jobbing. I think we need each other. Bloggers don't have editors demanding instant results. We have the freedom to get obsessed with small details that may turn out to be important, and we have the ability to harp on about things to semi-interested audiences. Professional journalists though have time, training and resources, plus the credibility that comes with a cover price and masthead.
Will Shapps go? I doubt it. There's an election coming and resignations tend to overshadow photo-ops. People tell us that we should be more engaged in politics. Then they select and promote specimens like this and wonder why we aren't.
I'm having to learn iMovie so I can publicise the work done by my colleagues, guest speakers and hated rivals fellow researchers in the field of Welsh Writing in English in multimedia formats. As I'm a cutting edge participant and commentator in the world of social media (ahem), I thought I'd demonstrate these qualities by joining in the world of unboxing movies and 'haul girls'…without the designer clothes or shiny bits of technology. Here's Zoella, a UK haul phenomenon whose book turned out to be a cynical cash-in designed to exploit teenagers which she didn't even write (I know, you're shocked right?) and whose videos became very slick very quickly almost as though they're just thinly-disguised adverts.
'Drugstore' Zoella? Really?
And here's a fairly typical Unboxing video, though this one features a female unboxer. It has to be of the iPhone 6.
At first glance you might see these things as reflections of late capitalism's inexorable decline: deeply unpleasant people lacking cultural or moral depth simply showing off. There is, however, slightly more to it. Some of these people earn sponsorship if they're deemed cool enough which means that they're utterly compromised as works of art, while YouTube makes cash from ads if enough people watch for long enough. My fervent wish is that my video earns enormous amounts of money for bookshops and outlets for deliberately boring clothes (now apparently known as 'normcore').
I'm a bit wary of the division between 'unboxers' and 'haul girls': there's a silent and hierarchical binary opposition at play, drawing on long established gender stereotypes. However, you could argue that the haul video/unboxing video is an example of popular culture. It's not the 'folk' culture idolised by the Frankfurt School and no longer available in Western society. Instead, it's a popular reproduction of the values and perspectives derived from mass media. It's explicitly capitalist and requires the producer to view themselves as a brand or object for consumption by a mass audience. While it is in some ways spontaneous, it depends entirely on the structures and ideological demands of consumer capitalism, and offers no resistance (or does it?).
Should we blame individuals for this phenomenon? Of course not: we all exist within ideological, economic and cultural structures which determine our behaviours. Hating these people doesn't help: hating the system does. Psychoanalysis tells us that desire is at bottom a desire for recognition by the Other, while for Freud the circulation of economic goods or their representations (cash) is a version of libidinal desire. In short: we buy stuff and then need to buy new stuff because it validates our insecure, fragile selves. If we can extend Lacan's claim that our desire is to fulfil our perception of what the Other desires to the products of corporate capitalism, we can see Haul Girls and Unboxers as people on a mission to improve themselves.
“Man’s very desire is constituted, he [Hegel] tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognised. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example, his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labour” (Ecrits, 182).
They want to be the kind of clean, efficient, sophisticated people who can live up to the sophistication encapsulated in an iPhone or a designer dress: the self becomes (s/he fervently hopes) an extension of the item. 'Che vuoi?What do you want?' asked Lacan. If you want the item, you must want me, because I have made myself indistinguishable from it. The video is a disguised appeal to its viewers and to the item's manufacturers: Desire Me. I Am Worthy. It's the baby's cry that establishes a relationship between Autonomous Self which wants to be an object of desire and the desiring Mother within a system.
But of course if you construct your desire from what you think the Other desires, you can never be satisfied because you avoid the subject of what you really want. Which brings me to my own Haul video.
I like to think that by contributing to this craze, I've helped kill it. Next week: I unbox a new set of drawing pins. Before long I'll be able to shake of this actual salaried job and live off backhanders from drawing pin manufacturers.
St. David's Day has just passed, and lots of newspapers with space to fill used it as an opportunity to create a canon of Welsh writers. Comparing the lists struck me as an interesting way into the papers' cultural perspectives and positions. Who knows, maybe there's a journal article in there?
Let's start with the Daily Telegraph, recently exposed as an arm of HSBC's PR department and generally understood to be a forthright but anti-intellectual conservative and Conservative publication. It picked 11 'great Welsh writers', presumably because they think Buzzfeed has somehow outlawed even numbers and made listicles compulsory.
Now I thought this an interesting set of choices. Bertrand Russell was an astounding philosopher, moralist, activist and very prolific author (I'm especially drawn to In Praise of Idleness), though not of fiction. Though deeply attached to Wales, better minds than me will be able to say whether there's a specifically Welsh dimension to his thinking. Is he a great writer rather than a great intellectual? I'm not sure.
I was thrilled to see Kate Roberts on the list: even in English translation her work is superb. She reminds me of Chekhov or even Marilynne Robinson: concise explorations of tightly-circumscribed lives (often of domestic labour or rural existence) which somehow encompass big philosophical questions. I'm certain that if she'd written in English she'd be world-famous. However, the Telegraph's account is oddly lacking:
KATE ROBERTS was one of the most significant Welsh-language authors of the 20th century. She was born in the village of Rhosgadfan, Caernarfonshire, and became known as Brenhines ein llên ("The queen of our literature"). Her childhood home Cae'r Gors – a Grade II listed quarryman's cottage – was taken over by Wales' heritage body Cadw in 2007, restored and turned into a heritage centre. She once wrote about her favourite Welsh childhood game "being five-stones", where you had to catch five stones in a shawl. The trick was finding a shiny pebble, she said.
It avoids almost any discussion of her work, making me wonder whether the author has actually read any.
Good to see RS Thomas on the list even though they concentrate on his grumpier side - a good excuse to publish yet again this wonderful photo of him. I recently reviewed his love poetry for Poetry Wales so promise you that there's more to him than troglodytic grump, but that was certainly his reputation amongst the English.
Dylan Thomas has to be on the list, though the Telegraph's account is restricted – somewhat predictably – to 'do not go gentle into that good night' and a couple of lines about his alcoholism. The next couple are surprising in a sense. Having worked on Welsh literature for more than fifteen years, I was surprised to see Dahl and Francis here. I knew the wonderful Roald Dahl was Norwegian-Welsh, but I've never seen him discussed as a Welsh writer, raising interesting questions about what qualifies one as a Welsh writer: residence, birth, language, subject matter, sensibility, self-identification? You'll get a different answer from everyone you ask, but the question never goes away: Richard Llewellyn wrote the most famous (and worst) Welsh mining novel in history (How Green Was My Valley) but continually fiddled with his CV to claim stronger Welsh roots than he actually possessed. Actually, I'm surprised he's not on the Telegraph's list. His politics would fit in with them very nicely: he advocated nuking Vietnam. Anyway, back to Dahl and Francis. I like Dahl's work but can't remember anything particularly Welsh about them, though I'm sure experts can correct me on that. It's tempting to claim, however, that the Gothic grotesquerie so prevalent in his novels echoes Arthur Machen, Dylan Thomas, Caradoc Evans, Gwyn Thomas, Rhys Davies and several other Welsh authors' works (see the brilliant Jane Aaron's book Welsh Gothic for more on this).
As to Dick Francis: he wrote rather repetitive crime thrillers set in the world of horse-racing. My Arthurian literature professor loved them in a shame-faced way: I met him in WH Smith once and he tried to conceal his purchases, before grandly announcing 'one cannot live on Arthurian literature alone, you know'. I was scared of him before that but rapidly grew to like him very much. Was Dick Francis a 'great', 'Welsh', 'writer'? Although his name featured on the covers, they were very much collaborative efforts, mostly with his wife and then with his son, though this was not really known until he died. I can't really say he was a 'great' writer: I love genre fiction and don't hold with snobbiness, but his stuff just isn't much cop. I'm guessing he's in this list because Telegraph readers like books about horses and posh people (or because the compiler was struggling to reach 11). They give the game away rather by not discussing any of his books, and finishing with this observation:
He would personally take the first copy of each of his books round to Clarence House to give to the Queen Mother. It was, he confessed, partly to spare her blushes that he never included scenes of explicit sex, though he once observed: "I'd be no good at that kind of thing anyway."
I feel the same way about Ken Follett's inclusion too. Yes, he wrote Fall of Giants which takes in a Welsh miner's family, and yes, his massive tomes are astonishingly well-researched and satisfying reads, but I can't help feeling he's in the list because he's sold a lot of books. I'm sorry to say that I think of him as a left(ish) version of Jeffrey Archer, mass-producing novels which reflect an unvarying world-view in a formulaic fashion, with terrible characterisation. Unlike Archer though, I think Follett's world-view is humane and intelligent.
Choices 7 and 8 are really rather wonderful to see. Gillian Clarke's a well-known poet, often found on school syllabi these days and little more needs to be said. But I totally agree with the Telegraph that Rubens 'deserves to be better known': despite winning the Booker in 1970 (so I know my friend Ben has read it anyway, because he's read every single Booker winner) and regularly publishing with reputable presses she's fallen down the memory hole through a combination (I suspect) of being Welsh, female and unsensationalist. The Library of Wales republished I Sent A Letter To My Loverecently and I recommend it to you all: a tragic-comedy that starts out looking like it will be all tragedy and ends up pulling you between rueful tears and sadness without ever falling into sentiment.
Finally, we come to Sarah Waters and Owen Sheers. I've read all of Sarah Waters' novels. They're all thoughtful, often rip-roaring and mildly transgressive if you think lesbians are automatically thrilling, or fascinating assertions of lesbian presence in British history and culture if you're a bit more sophisticated. Welsh though? Waters is Welsh, but I can't think of anything else that makes her a 'Welsh writer'. Labels are difficult and suspect, but her output implies a primary identification as 'writer' and then 'lesbian writer' rather than 'Welsh writer'. If you're looking for a Welsh lesbian writer, you might profitably go back to Kate Roberts: though married to an alcoholic and closeted gay man, the recent biography Kate: Cofiant Kate Roberts('Remembering Kate Roberts) and the associated documentary claimed that she may have been lesbian, though the jury is very much out (not that I'm particularly interested in psychoanalysing dead people: how people identified themselves, however complex, is far more progressive than deciding posthumously which team people played for).
Owen Sheers: OK, decent poet, wrote the interesting Resistance, but that novel annoyed me because Jan Morris's Our First Leader covered similar ground much more wittily and perhaps profoundly, and nobody ever mentions it.
So overall, a mixed bag for the Telegraph's choices. Some obvious ones, some left field ones considering their readers. Not a lot of analysis, but well done them for not doing the expected thing from a unionist, rightwing paper of ignoring the Welsh language, and for avoiding the usual nonsense about bards. The obvious absence is anything on industrial Wales. It's not keen on miners, apparently, nor apparently anything related to social class. Credit to it for positioning Dahl, Follett and Russell as Welsh, though it's a shame their accounts are too short and biographical to explain much about the authors' cultural positions.
So much for the Telegraph. Let's have a look at the Irish Times's list. That it ran this feature isn't entirely unsurprising: the IT is the newspaper of record with all that entails. It can be very establishment, but it is also very self-consciously aware of its cultural responsibilities, which means that while it's obvious there's no money for global reporting, it's always had excellent coverage of literary and cultural matters. It also has the best letters page of any English-language newspaper in the world, for my money. So which authors are in the Irish Times Welsh canon, and how are they chosen?
There's much more context given in this list. As the primary newspaper of a (just about) bilingual Celtic nation, the Times is keen to stress the similarities in national self-definitions:
Today is Saint David’s Day and in honour of our close neighbours, fellow Celts and rugby rivals, and to (hopefully) compensate for the coming despair which may be inflicted when the Irish take on Wales in Cardiff in two weeks’ time in this season’s Six Nations, we salute the writers of Wales, a beautiful country with a dramatic coastline and mysterious valleys, which has nurtured great poets, singers, storytellers, life celebrants from Gwyn Thomas to Max Boyce, and some pretty good rugby players.
I have to say that this bothers me slightly – Celticism is a much more complex and elastic term these days than this implies, and the rugby reference suggests a certain blokiness. As to Max Boyce… 'dated' doesn't cover it, though it's important to keep in mind that while the British expect everyone to know the fine details of their cultures (like Americans), Irish readers have plenty of other things going on and don't obsess over what the Brits are doing. Anyway, onwards.
This bit makes me a little bit sick:
The Welsh accent, lilting and melodic, possesses a rhythmic ease which makes it easy to see why singing and poetry is so much a part of the culture of Wales. Music and words; myth and story are second nature to the Welsh.
Honestly. It's the kind of thing imaginary stereotypical American tourists say about the Irish on St Stephen's Green before tripping off to Temple Bar for a half-pint of Guinness, some microwaved Authentic Irish Stew and a session by the Paddy's Ould Sod Trad Band then experiencing a Real Irish Shillelagh Mugging. Blarney of the worst sort, the kind of stuff that makes you want to maroon the author in Ponty on a Friday night. Just as in Ireland, there are multiple Welsh accents, and if you think they're all 'lilting', 'melodic' and poetic, you've obviously never been saluted with 'iawn gont' in Caernarfon of a Saturday night.
The piece is given this headline:
Dylan Thomas and so much more – a St David’s Day salute to Welsh writers Eileen Battersby looks at and beyond the three great Thomases – Dylan, RS and Gwyn – to celebrate the rich literary tradition of our Celtic cousins.
OK, it plays on the 'limited surnames' stereotype, but the choices are interesting. Dylan is compulsory: he's basically got the Welsh Literature Figurehead job sewn up, despite having died in 1953 and being sui generis: his literary forebears and heirs are few and far between but that's OK because he's (mostly) so good. The emergence of RS as a persistent presence in these lists is interesting though. RS was a professional square peg – the Welsh language activist who wrote English poetry, the deist vicar, the serial stormer-out and the professional contradictor who could never see a consensus without wanting to upset it (he was also the unwitting star of a crisp packet PR campaign which shows you just how much respect England really has for its neighbours). There seems to be an unspoken agreement amongst metropolitan commentators that when it comes to the Welsh, their Literary Ambassadors should be poets, an echo perhaps of the Bardic history. Both RS and Dylan are interesting in these contexts too because while they seem classically Welsh, their literary and political meanings are fiercely contested at home, as the stand-up row during last year's Association for Welsh Writing conference about whether there should be a Dylan Thomas Day like Bloom's Day proved.
Certainly Eileen Battersby's account of DT is inflected by Bardism: the shooting star of a life packed into a short span, the difficult 'genius' and so on.
a wayward genius whose eloquent fury continues to beguile, excite and inspire… His voice and vision live on in those rare artists who appear to have been touched by an elusive element that could perhaps best be described as magic.
All true up to a point, but rather overselling the drama and soft-pedalling the hard graft of writing. Interestingly, Battersby's take on RS Thomas is more nuanced.
His poetry is cerebral and he has a metaphysical and political response to change and the destruction of the natural. Seamus Heaney had a huge regard for Thomas, the poet of clarity, who is one of the most rewarding of poets once a reader engages with the moral worth and linguistic precision.
Invoking Seamus is a good marketing technique: not only was he the foremost Irish poet of the last half-century or so, Heaney's work too found enormous scope in the narrowness of the small-holder's existence. I'm not sure what 'clarity' means here, though it could refer to Thomas's unflinching exposition of his own religious doubts and his contempt for his fellows' failures and weaknesses.
Top marks to the Irish Times for adding Gwyn Thomas to the list though, and not just because I wrote my PhD about him, amongst others. There are two Gwyn Thomas's, one of whom was an academic and poet who wrote in Welsh, and this one, who wrote scabrous and (initially at least) politically-engaged black comedies in English (his parents and the older of his 11 siblings spoke Welsh, and he enjoyed baiting the Welsh-language activists). GT described his work as 'Chekov with chips': his protagonists were trapped in dead-end valleys and dead-end professions, abandoned by a distant and hostile government. What makes his early work so stunning is that they know it and talk about it. They're all articulate, witty and analytical about their fates: read The Dark Philosophers or Sorrow for thy Sons. The later stuff is less interesting, I feel: too much light comedy. But when he's on form, he's really on form.
After that very male, very dead start, the Times list heads off in some very interesting directions: cultural theorist and occasional novelist Raymond Williams is recommended, alongside the excellent primarily-Welsh language Angharad Price, Trezza Azzopardi whose work injects a much needed dose of multiculturalism (and comedy) into the field, and Owen Martell, who is just a stone-cold genius in two languages (the over-talented git).
Having done so well, it's very disappointing that the Irish Times piece ends with a lazy bit of Celtic mythologising:
Simple question: why are Welsh writers so good? In common with all writers, they love language yet there is an additional quality, a playful feel for words. It is even in their spoken speech. Must be a Celtic thing.
Yes, there's a postcolonial school of thought that locates Irish and other colonised nations' linguistic vivacity in the context of communities with at least a shadow of the native language informing speech, but this is terrible Celtic Twilight rubbish. Ugh ugh ugh.
Between the two of them, you get a fair sense of how Welsh literature is viewed outside its borders. Mostly white men, but with a tendency to overlook the majority Welsh lived experience (post-industrial, anglophone, urban) in favour of the rural. There's an undercurrent of bardic stereotype and a shadow of the Romantic vision of Wales as an alternative or other to industrial modern England which is a bit lazy but not unexpected.
The remaining question is: who else should be on the list? Actually: which ones would you exclude too? I'd add Lewis Jones (another victim of my PhD), Gwyneth Lewis, my friend Niall Griffiths, Wiliam Owen Roberts (his work is just superb and every website adds an extra 'l' to his name), Rachel Trezise's short stories, anything by Jon Gower (he interviewed me for a documentary on Caradoc Evans, then I read his short story collection and immediately made one of them the opening salvo in a chapter I've written for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Working-Class Fiction), Cynan Jones, Caradoc Evans (who really pissed people off), Iain Sinclair (yes he is Welsh) and Charlotte Williams's Sugar and Slate plus…well, I'd better stop. Canon-making is a terrible addiction and only leads to arguments. Thankfully, I'm off to the 2015 Welsh Writing conference in a couple of weeks and can have these arguments in person. You can too if you like…
PS. Maybe I've gone slightly overboard examining these lists, but I do find media coverage of literary matters interesting, especially when they're from outside the field. Do lists like this matter? Who now remembers the authors who outsold Dickens and Trollope? George du Maurier, Frances Trollope, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, William Clark Russell, Coventry Patmore, Marie Corelli or Dinah Craik other than nerds like me?
Sadly, academia is no better than the rest of society when it comes to institutional misogyny: it takes five minutes over coffee to hear the most appalling examples perpetuated by people who probably think they know better, or exist within structures and cultures which do not encourage reflection or critical perspectives.
Which is why this Conference Sexism Bingo Card exists (click to enlarge):
Take it along to your conferences and see which excuses you hear. Having seen it, I wondered how the conference I've co-organised on Welsh writing in English holds up.
Organisers: one male, one female.
Prize winners: both female.
Keynote speakers/special guests: 4 female, two male.
Presenters: 25 female, 13 male.
Panel chairs: 3 female, one male (more tbc though).
I can't say anything about the attendees yet, as bookings have only just started to trickle in, but I have to say that the Association for Welsh Writing 2015 conference is looking fairly good. Largely female speakers and chairs, A wide range of texts, periods and subjects covered, with no evidence of personal or institutional sexism. We hope the atmosphere and personal behaviour will match this, and I'm pretty certain that it will. We hope too that the debates and critical perspectives taken are also free from patriarchal perspectives which can't be captured in a check-list such as that I employed above: power and discourse are so intimately bound up with notions of sex and gender that unbundling them has to be done slowly, carefully and (obviously) retrospective, and I have no intention of acting like some kind of ideological cop.
The one cavil I have is that of the papers with an identifiable author-subject, it's running in favour of men by 17-11. There has been a concerted effort in the field recently to promote the study of work by female authors, sometimes in the teeth of some who wrongly believed that the political-industrial nature of Welsh anglophone culture meant that there were only male writers. This is part of the wider discussion to be had about female writers and their histories of suppression or exclusion. They were always there, but ignored or silenced by family, publishers, reviewers and also academics. Hence this book:
So I think AWWE15 proves that the top line of excuses doesn't hold true. Nor does 'women never volunteer to present'. Perhaps it's easier in the humanities, which have a larger proportion of female colleagues than some other disciplines, but I'd have to be an idiot to think everything was fine.
If you'd like to attend a conference like this, get in touch. March 27th-29th, Gregynog, Powys.
Last week we had the enormous pleasure of Eimear McBride visiting us. I put her debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thingon a first-year course last year and was stunned by how strongly the students responded to this experimental, poetic, harrowing novel.
This year, Eimear kindly took a class with the second group of students to study the novel, reading beautifully from the text, discussing the process of writing, editing and (eventually) publishing it. She took their questions seriously and answered them in depth. I particularly liked the way she insisted – with considerable grace and no trace of ego – on her right and that of other women to engage in modernist fiction and 'high' literature, often portrayed as a boys' club. Joyce, she told us, did women beautifully but left room for the interior voice of women in the modernist tradition, a task Eimear fulfilled with astonishing success. Her novel's linguistic style, she said, is 'about the point before consciousness, about experience before language tells you how to feel about it' – just what modernism tried to do. Her return to modernism, she says, is fuelled by a distaste for the distancing irony of postmodernism, an attitude shared by my friend and our writer in residence Niall Griffiths. Asked to recommend other forgotten modernist authors, she recommended Dorothy Nelson's In Night's City, which I've now ordered. She also put in a word for Edna O'Brien - rightly so.
We talked about the experience of being reviewed, and the way misogynist attitudes can crop up in even the most appreciative assessments: James Woods' review in the New Yorker was positive and perceptive, but still described the rape of the 13 year-old central protagonist by her uncle as the start of
a sexual relationship with her uncle, an affair … a sexual encounter
Interestingly, she said that Australian reviewers and audiences are interested in the (largely self-destructive) sex, whereas British ones talk about style. What that says about both cultures, I couldn't possibly say, but Eimear is very clear about the need to address uncomfortable material and to find a style to suit: 'If you don't want to offend or write what you're compelled to write, don't bother. There are enough bad writers out there'. Invited by the students to name the worst book she'd read recently, she politely declined in case someone (who, me?) tweeted the name. Let's just say she's an exacting and discerning reader who thinks life is too short for adults to read children's fiction.
Irish reviewers have also been positive. Anne Enright in the Guardian called her a 'genius', which Eimear said would only be a problem if she believed it were true (it is) and was a deliberate attempt to end the critical reluctance to apply the term to women. One un-named reviewer accused her of being a 'court jester' to the English (the same treatment given to Caradoc Evans and Brinsley McNamara) but the rest were positive. Eimear has strong views about ghettoising work by sex, nationality or genre: her books, she says, are in the prize-winners' section in the shops. Retort of the day, I thought: she's won 5 literary prizes for this novel no publisher would touch until Galley Beggar took it after a chance meeting. She also had this to say on the subject: 'Novelists who accept the post of representative of a particular group tend to turn out to be shit'. Biographical readings also get short shrift: this is a novel, not a misery memoir.
Eimear McBride signing a student's copy of her book
In the evening, Eimear gave a public reading and Q+A session to a paying crowd at the compact and bijou Arena Theatre (thank you!), which was also a triumph thanks to her and my colleague leading the conversation. On the subject of being a writer of 'women's issues', Eimear was very clear. Modernism may have been a boys' club, but it had to make room. She is a writer, not a purveyor of women's writing, but her novel makes space for a female character for whom sex is not a route to love but a way to make choices again and again, whatever the consequences. Asked again about prizes, she said this: 'I like winning prizes but the writing is all that matters. Fuck the rest of it': the creative writing students were left under no illusions: write because you're compelled to write, not because it's cool to say you're a writer, or because you want to be famous.
Eimear talking about her novel
I already had an autographed copy of A Girl which I've kept pristine, so I asked Eimear to sign my battered, heavily annotated teaching copy ('a bit stalkerish', she said). I got her to write 'all your theories are completely wrong, and she laughed!
Then we went to dinner and had a brilliant night. It's not all work, work, work. Thanks to Eimear, my colleagues, the students and guests. If you're sad you missed out, here's a short interview we recorded with her.
Blogger's owners Google has announced that sexually explicit blogs will be forcibly made 'private' - available only to individuals the author personally invites to view.
As you may have noticed, Plashing Vole largely eschews sexual material you're one of those discerning souls who flushes at the thought of a well-applied preposition or a neatly-turned phrase. You I welcome. In short, there's nothing 'blue' to be seen here, though a look through the search terms used by people who land on Vole implies that a lot of people are a) sick and b) very disappointed quite quickly.
As perhaps the least sexy author and blog in cyberspace, I protest. Google, Apple (another deeply prudish company) and various other tech corporations are happy to spy on us, spy on us for governments, avoid their taxes, promote a politics which disempowers the citizen in favour of oppressive states and oppressive, unaccountable corporations, and yet they fear the expression of sexual appetites. Reaching back to my days reading Freudian literary theory, I seem to remember an argument that the exchange of money is a fetishised transference of the exchange of libidinal energy – if that's true, Google is the horniest beast in existence.
I don't view pornography for a range of reasons personal, political, social and sensible (for a start, I only use the web at work, and shared offices aren't the ideal setting for a session with the Kleenex; besides, I like my job). But I do want to stick up for my invisible comrades in the blogosphere. Firstly, explicit material is not necessarily pornographic. There are millions of people out there discussing their sexual development and appetites in constructive ways. Human sexuality is a wondrous (bonkers) landscape and take it from this ex-Catholic: not talking about it produces damaged people and societies. I want the gay Saudi or Nebraskan kid to find out that there are people like her or him, and that anyone who feels a bit odd at home has a community of people exploring the same feeling.
Not all sex blogging is pornographic. A large amount of it, frankly, is. I'm largely opposed to pornography but accept that there's at least the potential for 'ethical' porn. My guess is that it's more likely to be found on blogs than on the corporate pages of commercial producers. I'd far rather hear about Hilda and Cyril's wife-swapping parties in Tunbridge Wells than some violent rape-fantasy produced by the Gb in Los Angeles in conveyor-belt fashion. Artistically, too, let's hear it for awful mobile-phone footage and the glories of DIY home decor and (don't blame me; Boing Boing thinks it's cool) Indifferent Cats in Amateur Porn (link is harmless but please, people, shut your bedroom door).
Most of all, I'm bothered that Google is going to be the ultimate arbiter of what's unacceptable. A tiny elite group of mostly-white, mostly-male, mostly-heterosexual elitists is now going to decide what can and can't be written about and shown in one of the few uncommercialised spaces on the web. Yes, you might say, Blogger is a commercial service, freely available on the understanding that content and metadata become Google's profit-making data. It's a pseudo-public space rather than a public one, and it has the right to dictate what goes on under its roof. I suspect Google will claim that this is an issue of public protection, but it doesn't stand up. A Tory MP last year appealed to the Prime Minister to ensure that children are prevented from seeing sexual material. From the party which hates the Nanny State, this is a bit cheeky: how about he do some actual parenting? I don't think children are going to read blogs about shoe fetishes. They'll google the obvious things or view stuff their mates pass on.
I don't think this washes any more. There is no public equivalent of the blogosphere for those who don't have the resources to host their own sites, and without the visibility the comes from being on a major site, you may as well not exist. Yes, there are compromises (WordPress even tracks bloggers through a hidden feature in the typeface) but we should demand at least a clear and accountable process for determining what is and isn't acceptable. My guess is that the ideological and cultural position occupied by Google's censors will disproportionately hit blogs dealing with homosexuality, trans-gender sexualities and other 'minority' positions on the sexual continuum.
I have a sneaking suspicion that big-boobed-babes of the kind purveyed for heterosexual men by Playboy and its multiple imitators will somehow remain visible (bloggers making money from erotic material are banned: you can find corporate porn via Google any time you like).
I don't mind my government passing laws about this stuff even when they're wrong, because I can vote them out if enough people agree with me, but Google et al. are informed by only two things: profit and their own private perspectives on what's 'icky'. That's not good enough when their service is fast becoming a utility.
The old saw about 'first they came for X, and I said nothing because I was not X' applies here. However disgusting you might find them, it's time to stand up for the perverts, not only because someday Google might decide that you're one too, but as a matter of principle.
I'm desperate to tell you about brilliant author Eimear Mcbride's visit to the university, but I haven't time yet to edit all the photos and video - a few more days.
Instead, I wanted to show you a few of my favourite photos from last weekend's British Junior and Cadet British championships: all weapons, age groups from U14 to U20s. As usual I wandered around with my camera when duties allowed. There are a lot of people taking pictures (some of them on iPhones and iPads, which won't come out well) so I thought I'd give a few hints about how to get some decent shots. (Click on all these to enlarge, and see the whole set here).
Fencing halls are the bane of the photographer. The pistes on which the fencers perform are very close together. The fencers and referees very disobligingly move up and down, while other fencers, coaches and parents get in the way. The photographer can't get as close as s/he would like, and the angles are hard. It's OK if you can afford a massively fast long lens, but I haven't got £4000 spare, and anyway, people would be walking in front of you all the time.
Shall we dance?
The lighting is always, always terrible in sports halls: artificial and low. Add to that the incredible speed of the action and things get hard. Autofocus struggles to find the piece of the action you want amidst all the movement, so you're always struggling with the tension between getting enough light for a visible photo and missing the action. A full-frame camera and very fast professional lens will do it for you, but for the rest of us there's a trade-off.
My camera is an ageing Nikon D7000 - very good when new but not a full-frame, so it doesn't have a high-end sensor (which is what really matters, not megapixels). Under most conditions, it's pretty good but sports photography is hard - if you have a D3 or D4 you're thinking of replacing, let me know). For fencing, I use an incredibly cheap but brilliant lens: the f/1.8 50mm, which I think cost me £80. Another £150 would get me an f/1.2 which is very tempting, but for now this will do. 50mm lenses are incredibly sharp - the quality is superb because there are no moving parts, just lots of glass. The drawback is the fixed width: you can't focus in and out. Instead, you have to move until you've framed the shot you like, or be prepared to crop heavily. The strength is the aperture: you get loads of light with a 1.8 so you can up the speed and ISO settings. For fencing, I have it set on 1/1000th of a second, ISO 800. Never, ever leave your camera on automatic.
How to choose your shot: watch your fencers. See where on the piste they like to mix it up and focus on it. Then switch autofocus off: if you don't you'll miss the shot you want while it hunts for perfect focus.
The curse of autofocus: what would have been a great shot ruined because the focus settled on the background
Then wait for the fencers to move into your shot. As you can see from my photos, 1.8 gives you an incredibly narrow depth of field: there's a central point of absolute focus and a lot of the shot is out of focus. It's a lovely effect, but not one I'd choose all the time - it's one of the things which would be solved by investing the price of a used car on a lens (if you'd like to buy me one, get in touch).
What should you look for? Go for the badly-behaved and/or technically deficient fencers, especially at foil or epee. The best fencers are calm, controlled and undramatic. A slight movement at the right moment gets results with the minimum of fuss. But that's rubbish for photography. What you want is great big moments of acrobatic, balletic skill. Thankfully, lots of British fencers rely on athleticism rather than brains or timing: lots of their coaches will be looking at these photos and wincing!
Another victory
Note the score: he then lost 15-14
An armourer, viewed from above
Defeat
Defeat and consolation
Disgusted with herself
Hit scored, but disgraceful technique
I like the symmetry here: hits, score, position.
It's hard to get a sense of movement in a still photo, though it can be done. I didn't have a monopod or tripod with me this time, but if I had, I'd have played with slow speeds and pans to capture movement. There are two types of shot I particularly like: the moments when blades bend when landing on an opponent or are parried, which require high-speed and luck, and the moment a fencer celebrates or despairs: when fencers have their masks on it's hard to convey personality but the seconds after a match ends are good for this.
I didn't take too many shots of defeat this weekend: the fencers are young and probably wouldn't appreciate it, though one mother framed a shot I took of her daughter on her knees in front of the victor as an aide-memoire to never let it happen again!
In some age groups the size difference is enormous
The final tip: digital cameras are great. I couldn't imagine using film: every shot costing money with no guarantee that you got it right. With digital you can fire off 50 shots in 10 seconds, knowing that you'll keep only one or two of them. What a luxury.
Last night I went to my local theatre for an evening with Polly Toynbee and David Walker, promoting their new book Cameron's Coup, basically a summary of all the evil things the Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks have done to us all over the past few years.
The audience was as you'd expect: Guardian-reading academics, social workers and teachers: those of us with the time, energy and enthusiasm to still be angry. In short: Toynbee and Walker were in friendly territory. Perhaps too friendly: aside from a smattering of SWP-style critiques, her shady past as an early adopter of the SDP (thus allowing Thatcher's reign) was largely overlooked. There was some discussion of the Guardian's endorsement of the Lib Dems in 2010, but she made it clear that it was the editor's sole decision, made in the teeth of opposition from the staff, and based on civil liberties grounds – which is understandable given New Labour's total contempt for such things.
I mostly enjoyed it. The first half of the evening was devoted to a fusillade of statistics and facts which we probably could have done without. Everyone in the audience was highly informed and often faced the realities every day. I'd have preferred Toynbee and Walker to focus on fewer things in more detail, throw in material related to the location of each night's talk, or to give more analysis than fact, as that's their super-power. Once that was over though, things improved hugely. They took questions from the floor and relaxed hugely, giving informed, witty, thoughtful answers to a range of questions: the breadth of their shared knowledge was astounding.
I also enjoyed it because I was sitting next to one of my students - a hugely likeable chap who for some reason is a damned Tory, and was reviewing the gig for the local hard-right paper. Given that the event was solely devoted to Tory-bashing and gingering us up for the election, I teased him about potentially being converted to socialism - sadly it didn't happen, and Toynbee never looked in his direction when he had his hand up so he never got the opportunity to ask what I'm sure would have been an interesting and challenging question. But at least he had to listen to someone other than me explaining just what these bastards have done to us all!
I didn't ask a question either, but if I'd had the chance, I'd have asked about the Tories' motivations. As far as I can tell, some of them genuinely believe that what they're doing is good for the country: Gove, Letwin and some others. They're massively wrong and perhaps even more dangerous than the others, whom I strongly suspect don't have this public service ideal. I remember a newly-elected Kenyan government minister replying to a question about corruption with the words 'now it's our turn to eat'. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I think there are a lot of Tories who take this line: the public good is far less important than the disposal of state assets and alteration of laws and policies to benefit themselves, their class and their global allies. I think Osborne's one of them. Cameron is half-way between: he's PM because the job appealed to him as a bit of a jape but he's also from a class which had a public service ideal, but his personal fortune is derived from tax evasion. Hunt, Shapps and others seem like nothing more than looters in the service of the global super-rich. My own MP is rarely spotted outside the rich suburbs where his core vote lies, and when he does emerge it's to dine with arms dealers or tour the Syrian Golan Heights in the company of the Israeli occupiers, and he's certainly acquired some extra chins since 2010, so he's certainly taken his turn to eat.
They do, like me, see this government as highly successful. Yes, the deficit is up, Sure Start centres have closed, the poor are poorer and the rich richer, but what people forget is that none of these things are 'collateral damage' cause by 'tough choices'. Occasionally the cleverer Tories fake a note of regret ('this hurts me more than it hurts you'), but the Tory project was always to shrink the state and abolish social protection. As Naomi Klein predicted, they took advantage of a crisis – this is the Pinochet manoeuvre – to impose their fantasies, without warning or a mandate. The only vaguely humorous aspect of this is that the crisis was one of neoliberal capitalism's making (despite their partly-successful attempts to blame it on the last Labour government) and their solution was more neoliberal capitalism. The crying shame is that enough people swallowed this to vote them in, however marginally.
Will the event change the course of the election? I doubt it, and so did the speakers: as Toynbee pointed out, people read the papers and columnists with whom they agree. Perhaps a few more people in the audience will help deliver leaflets in this marginal constituency, but the point was really for like-minded people to huddle together in mutual outrage at the vile things done to us.
Perhaps this is a little reductive, but given the confluence of sexual predators such as Jimmy Saville, Tory-donating tax avoiders and the Conservative Party's 'Black and White Ball' (lots included pheasant shooting, Swiss holidays, shoe-shopping excursions with the Home Secretary and a run with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions), it seems accurate enough. Click to enlarge.
I'm marking. It's not really #markinghell in terms of quality, merely in terms of volume. I have to say that the proportion of cheats and idlers has been in decline over the past few years – there are always people who struggle but in the piles on my desk right now, they're honest strugglers who've clearly tried their best. Unlike, for instance, the senior manager who rejected our MA proposal with the biggest load of unreflective nonsense I've seen in quite some time. D– for that. I can't go into details, but let's just say that reading the feedback (hand-scrawled then scanned for distribution) I wasn't angry. I was embarrassed on their behalf.
Anyway, I'd better get on with the marking. At this rate, not only will Harper Lee's second novel be out but the Chilcot Report will be published before I finish. I'm a bit dubious about Go Set a Watchaman the To Kill A Mockingbird sequel. The stories of a manuscript just being 'discovered' sound a little suspicious, and the press statement from Lee reads as though drafted by a PR operative. The feminist website Jezebel is much more hostile: they reckon that publication is coming suspiciously quickly after the death of Lee's sister and attorney, who was famously protective, and may be the result of machinations by her new attorney (ironic, given TKAM's idealisation of honourable lawyers). I'm not so sure: that seems to deny Lee agency and autonomy because she's old:
…leaving the intensely private author (who herself is reportedly in ill health) vulnerable to people who may not have her best interests at heart.
Tonja Carter, Harper Lee's attorney since Alice Lee retired at the age of 100, acknowledges that the author—who was left forgetful and nearly blind and deaf after a stroke in 2007—often doesn't understand the contracts that she signs. "Lee has a history of signing whatever's put in front of her, apparently sometimes with Carter's advice," Gawker reported last July. But now Alice—her Atticus—is gone and an unhealthy and unstable Lee must alone face the publishers, interviewers and literary agents that she's spent her entire life avoiding.
The novel was written back in the 50s, so if it's legitimate, it's was produced at the height of Lee's powers. It may be an apprentice work, and there are thousands of authors who wrote only one truly great book, but that's one more than me, so I wouldn't begrudge Harper Lee an 'ordinary' one.
Instead of being grouchy about this book, be wary of the hype machine. This novel was written at least half a century ago. A lot of literary and cultural water has flowed under the bridge since then. Readers' expectations are different, style and language has changed. It may or may not be a great novel, but it will be a period piece and should be read on those terms.
Despite being a professional literature academic, I don't actually have much to say about To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it several times as a child and saw the film adaptation once or twice. I'm not sure I appreciated it fully then – it was given to us to demonstrate that racism is bad, but I'd never heard of actual racism the first couple of times I read it, so I imbibed the intellectual lesson (very successfully: still not a racist) and I'd little conscious experience or knowledge of the United States at that point either. Nor was I sufficiently developed as a reader to have much sense of style. I guess in some ways this is beside the point: many of the texts we discover as a child become untouchable and unreal: reading them as an adult is unsettling for precisely those reasons. Instead of a cherished but impressionistic memory, we're confronted with actual words existing within a hugely changed interpretive community. To Kill A Mockingbird taught me in advance that racism was wrong. Going back to it now would require a whole new set of criteria for analysis derived from my own experiences, cultural context and my education and I'm not sure I want to disturb my dim but positive memories. I have done so with other childhood texts: I wrote a conference paper on Anne of Green Gables and its many sequels a few years back and found the experience fulfilling but also quite difficult: re-reading revealed so many dark or disagreeable aspects of the texts which my young self couldn't have understood. I don't think that cherished texts should be left untouched in the golden halls of memory but at the same time, I'm happy for other people to do the revisionist work!
