Slán, Sasana

I looked out of my window this morning to see my Italian neighbour, who has been here 40 years and is very patriotic, flying the British flag at half-mast to mark the end of this country's membership of the EU. A brave thing to do in this ultra-Brexit area, but also heart-breaking.

I have a complicated relationship with the Union Jack: too associated with skinheads and being waved triumphantly over piles of foreign dead from Ireland to India for my tastes, but my neighbour has developed his own more flexible version of Britishness which incorporates affection for a country which welcomed and nurtured him while not denying his origins: he still imports a freezer-lorry of grapes from his home region every year to make wine with. That half-mast flag speaks volumes about the way he – and many of us – have been forced by a vicious complex of paranoias and pressures to adopt less rich, less complex identities just as we thought that the poison of xenophobic nationalisms had been eradicated across Europe. 

I'm an Irish citizen (and have been for a lot longer than some of my friends who have suddenly taken to sporting underarm pigs) of multiple origins, from German Jews to turf cutters - and Europe has been an unalloyed good, economically, socially and culturally. The tensions between Britain and Ireland have been blunted by common membership of the EU, while freedom of movement has been the saving of both countries so often. I see the origins of euroscepticism in Britain's failure to address its imperial past, and to plot a post-imperial course. Every time I hear some pumped-up politician talking about Britain 'punching above its weight' I cringe. How about not wanting to punch anyone? How about – like ex-imperial nations like Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Norway and Spain – accepting that having heavy weapons isn't a global mandate to lead or dominate? I've heard so many Brexiteers explain that they can't abide the EU because it's a superstate, but they never make the logical leap to supporting Welsh or Scottish independence, and they're largely enormous fans of an Empire they've never considered from the perspective of those on the receiving end. Super-states aren't a bad thing, it seems, as long as you're on top. 

I'm desperately sad today. I look round my city and all the other desperately poor areas of this country which voted Brexit and wonder what they expect. Every social initiative and new building displays a discreet EU-funded flag. What few employment rights the precariat have come from the EU, as do the clean water and air directives the UK is currently breaching. Safe toys, cars and food, privacy regulations, freedom of speech and assembly: they all come from Europe. While a hunger for votes might make the Tories pay a little more attention to deprived areas, nobody should expect a renewed concern for the left-behind in Westminster: not the old, the poor, the Welsh, the northern, children, the sick or anyone else. Some Brexiteers are happy enough to accept that they'd rather be 'free' than fed, but I can't help noticing that the people expounding these principles tend to own hedge funds domiciled abroad, or have otherwise insulated themselves from chlorinated chicken and pharmaceutical price hikes. They will wave the flag while hiding their wealth offshore, creaming off the benefits of deregulated finance while consciously and deliberately exposing the rest of us to the viciousness of the free market. 

My passport means I can still move around and might qualify for an airlift when we get to the pointy end of things, but I'm taking no pleasure in having an escape route. I'm here because I love this place, from Marmite to sarcasm to cricket, Dorothy Richardson to AS Byatt, Moulton bikes, curry houses, wry demonstration placards, dusty bookshops to haggis. I've lost good friends and colleagues, frozen out by Brexit and the behaviour of some of its supporters. I know German people who've learned Welsh to the extent that they've become literary critics and historians of and in that language: now gone. Britain won't just become poorer: it will be narrower, sadder, culturally-bereft and more suspicious. There's no positive vision beyond 'freedom': to me it looks like the freedom Lear found on the blasted heath, only without the epiphany. 'Very well, alone' worked when Churchill said it, because 'alone' meant 'at the head of a global empire which will do what it's told': now it's the loneliness of the body left on the gibbet to be picked clean by its supposed allies and its leaders. 

I did wonder whether Brexit would be good for the world. A mad dog tamed, and perhaps split into its constituent parts, never to threaten anyone else ever again. I think it's unlikely - once outside the infuriating, ponderous system of patient, unsatisfying compromises that define European progress, Britain, or England, will just get madder and badder. When the inevitable results of Brexit occur, the Brexiteers will blame perfidious Europa, stabbing a freedom-loving people in the back, and they'll win more elections on that basis, slowly (or quickly) condemning a rich, fascinating, complex country to a bitter national dementia. You might not think so, but it's what a majority voted for in a referendum and under the stupid electoral system you decided to retain. You know your racist grandpa? That's your country, that is. 

(Good things also happened this week but they pale into insignificance. Maybe next week). 

A little ado about less

Another quiet week here: marking, reading, preparing lectures for the next semester and screaming inside as the world burns. Plus ça change really. The oddest bit was going to a recording of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue at the local grand theatre – very talented comics (all-male, somehow) doing very funny jokes that could have appeared in an episode broadcast in 1976. Which I suppose is half the charm, and clearly what the audience wanted. Silly wordplay, funny noises, familiar catchphrases, incongruous juxtapositions and the odd innuendo to make the audience groan. They didn't like the very mild Prince Andrew joke though… Samantha failed to appear though, which was very disappointing. She had a very good excuse though.



Other than that, not a lot. I went fencing as a charitable gesture: I stand there and let the young folk use me as target practice. Tectonic plates react faster than me these days, but it's still good fun.

I only managed a couple of books this week: Jennifer Donnelly's A Gathering Light and John Christopher's The World in Winter. I have no memory of buying A Gathering Light and historical fiction isn't usually my thing, but I enjoyed it. It's a bildungsroman - the story of a rural New York peasant girl's intellectual awakening, tied to a real-life murder of the early 20th-century. The community and its poverty is beautifully drawn, but I did find the central characters' perfection a bit much to bear. Matty suffers from maternal loss and paternal ignorance; she has a black friend and an inspiring teacher. There's an alcoholic, a groper and a racist in the cast and an unsuitable boy, and she eventually rises above the challenges they all set. It's essentially Anne of Green Gables without the psychological complexity, but it is a good read. I see from the reviews that it was marketed as a teen/young adult novel, which didn't strike me at all. The protagonist is a teenage girl but apart from the rather simplistic ending, it didn't strike me as one aimed primarily at teens at all.

The World in Winter is more problematic. The set-up of this 1962 eco-dystopia is fine: climate change (hot to cold in this case) renders Europe uninhabitable, causing Britain's residents to seek succour in the former African colonies. It could have been a fascinating examination of colonialist attitudes as the white former rulers adapt to being supplicants to those they previously considered inferior. Sadly, the novel's whole point is that whatever suffering must be endured, white people should look after their own. The hero casually applies slyly racist nicknames to people who later help him; he double-crosses them even when they're entirely sincere, solely to re-establish a minimal white population in Britain. The mass murder of the white population down to sustainable levels is presented as little more than a regrettable necessity and apartheid South Africa is the only congenial place (and one about to wiped out by the ungrateful African nations and their renegade white mercenary forces). The plotting and the evocation of a devastated, inhospitable Britain populated with gangsters and cannibals is brilliantly presented, but all in the service of a racist ideology. Without doubt one of the nastiest novels I've read in a long time – the Brexiteers will love it. To take the taste away, I've started Pynchon's hippy crime thriller, Inherent Vice – another one that's been sitting neglected on my shelf since it came out. It's good fun so far, but I'm not sure where it's going, if anywhere.

Bath, Bad Books and Beyond

January is always a weird month here in academia. We're still in Semester 1 but it's an assessment period: no lectures, no seminars but occasional individual tutorials with students mixed with marking (now online, to my chagrin), little daily structure but a lot of demands. When the semester ends we have a week to finish marking and prepare teaching before Semester 2 starts - in my case case reorienting what little remains of my cognitive functions away from The Book of Mormon, The Passion of New Eve, children's literature and assorted American literatures towards the European renaissance: Shakespeare, Webster, various sonnetteers and pamphleteers, plus all their Italian and French influences. Simultaneously there's the BBC novels project to work on, plus my books on masculinity in Welsh writing in English and politicians' fictions to get on with. And of course dissertation supervision, PhD vivas, course leadership and all the pastoral care that doesn't show up on workload allocation forms but very much does show up, in tears, at my desk at regular but unpredictable intervals. Pressured though all this is, it's also enjoyable - no day is the same.

Away from work, I've managed to partly block out the general misery (world on fire, local MP – who has blocked me from his Twitter feed – banned from Wikipedia for editing out the more inglorious episodes of his career, general gloom) by visiting Bath, riding my bike and (of course) reading books. I took some pictures in Bath which you can see here.

A Victorian chandelier in Bath Abbey

Sulis Minerva 

Two-faced (I can't resist a pun)

A hunting scene

Despite Jane Austen's horror of the place (she makes Mr Tilney describe it as 'the most tiresome place in the world whereas romantic dimwit Catherine loves it, and Austen refers in a letter to 'another stupid party'), I liked it: good food, good company, good bookshops, fine walking and the palpable presence of a counterculture challenging the deep sense of privilege. The Roman Baths were astonishing so much remains, history piled on history giving a striking sense of the way the Romans and their successors merged spirituality with commerce: the 'wellness' ethos avant la lettre.

I also went to the local council's cycling forum last night. An all-white, all-male and (other than me) all 60+ affair, it encapsulated citizenship in the best and worst ways. The best of it was the way a group of people volunteered to give their time up to help improve the city. They were highly-informed, altruistic, thoughtful people with a commitment to local and global environmental improvement, and they had practical, constructive ideas which the council officer considered and debated with respect. The downside was the homogeneity of the group, a function of wider structural conditions for which those present can't be blamed. The result, however, is that without wider representation, decisions will be made without consideration of other perspectives. This city is a traffic-clogged hellhole: only the hardiest (or foolhardiest) brave its multi-lane ring road, dangerous junctions, damaged road surfaces and psychopathic drivers on a regular basis. Enthusiasts like me will always take a chance and literally have the scars to prove it, but to make this place better it needs to be a safe and pleasant environment for cyclists of all sexes and backgrounds and speeds to take their rightful place. Not present in the room were all those people who'd like to commute by bike and choose not to, and a way needs to be found to take their views into account.

As far as reading goes, only the two books this week: Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance and Alissa Nutting's Tampa. I read most of Murakami's novels in the 1990s when I was young and (slightly) less embittered. I enjoyed the whimsicality, the mixed genres, the tinge of magical realism and the protagonists' slightly obsessive characteristics. If I'd read Dance Dance Dance then, I think I'd have rated it as one of his very best. As a quest novel, it works very well: the quest is of course whimsical and obsessive but it's also emotionally complex and not entirely resolved. There's some good humour, often at the author's expense: 'Hiraku Makimura' is a washed-up author character. With the benefit of experience though, I struggled with the protagonist's and the author's sexual and gendered attitudes - even if we assume that the protagonist isn't meant to be uncritically admired, the plot, resolution and attitudes are relentlessly misogynistic. The women are all waiting for a man, waiting to be sexually available, tarts-with-hearts or bafflingly out of reach. Dead women's bodies abound, too. There's no doubt about Murakami's ability to create a world and a character, but he clearly can't manage to empathise or understand women.

As for Tampa, it came close to being the first book I've never finished. I should have known it would be bad when I noticed that the cover blurbs were by Irvine Welsh and Alex Niven - the self-styled bad boys of literature. Hailed (by them) as a female Lolita, Nutting's novel follows a term or so in the life of a female paedophile and school teacher, Celeste, as she entraps a couple of 14-year old boys before exposure inevitably befalls. There's a vague attempt at psychological justification of Celeste's condition (first sexual encounter was with a 14-year old boy, fixing her idea of perfection, and her marriage is loveless) but it's perfunctory at best, and much of the novel is badly-written pornography. I'm not convinced that it's deliberate, an attempt to reproduce the damaged psyche of a sociopath: it's an endlessly repetitive series of encounters without the mechanical drive of a Ballard, Ellis's early work or Moore's Lost Girls.

Lolita, disturbing as it is, has style and structure. Tampa is just one unlovely word following another until we get to the end. If you want confrontational women's writing taking on previously male-dominated subjects (and you should: plenty of men get to publish books about bad things, often bad books abut bad things), I'd suggest Helen Walsh's Brass and Belinda Webb's The Clockwork Apple instead. Walsh's latest novel is about a woman's affair with a 17 year-old boy: I haven't read it yet but I'm pretty certain it's less exploitative and more intelligent than Nutting's effort. Tampa fails because it has nothing to say really, beyond the obvious fact that women can be paedophiles too. Celeste has no origins, no social context, no causes: she's just a monster to be judged (but enjoyed first, it seems). So what?

I actually regret reading this novel. I don't often feel that my time's been wasted despite having read an enormous amount of forgettable or meretricious work in my time, but this one just didn't justify the paper. If you're going to address something important and shocking, you've got to do it well. This didn't.

Back to the marking for me. Enjoy your weekend.

Back to the Future…sadly

New readers may have been lulled into a false sense of security by my generally sunny disposition and wittering on about books, but those of you with less active social lives and a longer acquaintance with this blog may remember the dark years of 2010-15, when far too much of my life – and yours – was taken up tracking the nefarious activities of one Paul Uppal, Conservative MP and a man whose venality was matched only by his idleness. Uppal's fans may be delighted to learn that having been given a sinecure by his old friends in the party, he has had to resign as Small Business Commissioner due to a conflict of interest – i.e. the same old same old. No wonder my Freedom of Interest request about his declarations of interest was refused. Let us hope this is the last stain Mr Uppal leaves on public life.

However, there's a new Sheriff in town: I have a new Conservative MP and it looks like he's going to fill Mr Uppal's corrupt shoes admirably. Even before he was elected the Guardian pointed out that he'd illegally taken £54,000 from his failing company – in a fit of sympathy not extended to your average teenage shoplifter, HMRC allowed him to repay only £2000 lest he go bankrupt through running a company badly and then stealing from it. Private Eye followed this with a report that Mr Anderson, a rabid Brexiteer, has started another company: one supported by European Union grants. Curiously, eTravelSafety has already been dissolved, though it still has a website. But don't worry, Stuart's got a third company on the go: Stand Sure Enterprises, which itself seems to have owned eTravelSafety. It's all very odd, but then there's a tradition of extremely marginal 'entrepreneurs' promoting the free market while sucking up state subsidies. No wonder he was listed as one of the most controversial new MPs. Still, now he's got a nice fat MP's salary, I'm sure he'll repay what he owes us.

Sadly Mr Anderson has blocked me on Twitter, which seems a little precious for a public tribune, let alone dubious given I'm a constituent of his. Still, I intend to keep an eye on him, which is more than the local paper – a long-standing Tory rag – has done. When the illegal payments story emerged they recorded a tearful video of him explaining that it was all done to keep his family off the streets. The latest delight is the government's launch of Town of the Year initiative. If you read the Guardian, you'll know that it was kicked off here by Robert Jenrick, another local. You'll also know that neither he, nor Mr Anderson, nor the government were aware that The Dark Place has been a city since 2000. Curiously, the Express and Star missed this insult in a way that I'm sure they wouldn't have done had a Labour government made this mistake. Instead, they refer only to 'areas' being regenerated. They are also fully behind Mr Anderson's campaign to demonise travellers, perhaps unsurprisingly for a paper that referred to them as a plague.

So anyway, this is fair warning: I'm still going to be wittering on about books, bikes (I bought No. 4 - a second-hand, heavily upgraded Boardman AiR Elite 9.0 - just before Christmas), music and the like over the coming year but there's also going to be a fair amount of petty spitefulness on my part. It'll be a stretch but I'm sure I can manage it.

Books read recently: Phineas Redux (Anthony Trollope) - hugely enjoyable, and featuring a dodgy Tory PM who first staves off and then springs an election while ducking any examination of principle whatsoever. Felt strangely appropriate. Then Nicola Ammanti's Anna: standard post-apocalyptic children stuff though featuring a compelling protagonist; Byatt's The Children's Book, which was largely wonderful. Now I'm reading Robert Frost's Selected Poems and Alissa Nutting's controversial Tampa. Marking is about to come in so I must make hay while the sun shines. Happy new year!

Always winter, never Christmas

In her own Christmas address, the Queen referred to 1992 as an 'annus horribilis': part of one of her castles had caught fire, a downmarket tabloid published pictures of Sarah Ferguson sans brassiere, and several of her children's marriages failed.

The castle was rebuilt at public expense, Sarah's body is of far less concern than what her ex-husband did with his to whom, and Brenda's children appear still to be influential, rich, married and dissatisfied once more. 2019, however, has few saving graces. Unless I missed some bright spots while I lounged around at home nursing a broken collarbone (thanks, inattentive driver!), a year of political misery, homelessness, food banks, economic decline and political cynicism looks set to be followed by another recession and the willed isolation of a nation that prefers xenophobia to actually accepting that modern life is (as Blur didn't quite put it) complicated. A friend's father, for instance, has been made redundant as a direct result of Brexit: he is still all for 'getting Brexit done' in the same way that the white American peasantry was persuaded that white hunger was somehow superior to being black and hungry. There's absolutely no solace in 'I told you so', and schadenfreude is best enjoyed from a considerable distance, but here I am - a citizen of an EU state determined to stay on with my friends and family (and also, it turns out, not wanted in Irish university jobs that have come up) while being uncomfortably aware that for a year or two at least, my middle-class income and occupation will keep me insulated from the worst effects. Black humour will also help when turnips become the national dish…and currency.

So anyway, I've finished teaching for this decade with a Friday afternoon class on Chris Mullins's A Very British Coup. The module is Populist Texts, examining how popular culture takes on current affairs and social issues - we started with Black Panther and finished with this politician's conspiracy novel to discuss how art and issues affect each other. In retrospect, perhaps it was an overly optimistic choice: Harry Perkins actually gets elected, whereas the current moderate-to-serious left can't even get over that initial hurdle. Mullins's novel (adapted twice for TV) was published in 1982, a period when the Thatcher government went from dead-in-a-ditch to triumphant, thanks to the Argentinians. Winning the Falklands ironically led to their dictator being overthrown, while a Tory hegemony was established. A Very British Coup is many things, including a consolation to the suffering left: there's a kind of carrion comfort in assuming that the permanent state or Establishment are what's preventing you from winning rather than your own beliefs, strategies, or the electorate. We discussed why Mullins wrote a dystopian novel rather than another socialist utopian one, and why it ended in defeat - perhaps it was a product of its time, or a sales gamble, or a genuine belief. If I ever get the chance to write my book on politicians' fictions, I intend to ask him, and explore why so many MPs from both sides wrote conspiracy thrillers in the 80s and 90s (Helen Liddell's Elite sticks in the mind as being the last one, and the most baffling, but also a harbinger of New Labour and the Third Way).

I felt physically sick for a few days after the election result, which has never happened before. It wasn't surprise, and I'm generally far too insensitive to let things affect me at a gut level, but the knowledge that things are going to get immeasurably worse on all fronts and that those who'll suffer most voted for it in droves left me nauseous. My immediate response was to take solace in my students (we were looking at Watchmen that Friday, which counsels against trusting in super-men of any sort), friends and in coping mechanisms. I listened to the recent Trinity Wall Street recording of Philip Glass's Symphony No. 5 several times, especially this movement.



Also on my playlist at the moment is Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás and Herbert Howell's Cello Concerto – escapist I know, but I'm in the mood for solace. Once the new year starts I'll be militant for lost causes once more. Climate change and electoral reform will be my focus, I think. I've also retreated into books (surprise!), though not particularly challenging ones. I've just started AS Byatt's The Children's Book which balances a shockingly bad attempt to render Stoke-on-Trent's dialect as Standard Northern with an evocation of Edwardian radicalism which fascinates me. Arts and Crafts, William Morris, Guild Socialism, Rational Dress and bicycles (talking of which, I also assuaged the savage breast by buying a six-year old, heavily upgraded Boardman Elite AiR 9.0 - my first carbon fibre bike: it's no Moulton but it's wonderful). I've long thought (and indeed blogged when Ed Miliband lost his general election) that evoking the utopian optimism of the late Victorian socialists would be good for the Labour Party and its left/liberal fellow travellers.

Other things I've read recently include Gillian Cross's pointed but slightly shaky teen novel After Tomorrow (British refugees in France find themselves unwelcome), India Knight's anthology The Dirty Bits – For Girls (the introduction is perfect for my session on women, reading and Jilly Cooper); the first Tracy Beaker novel for Children's Literature - superb; Armistead Maupin's Babycakes, which allowed me to talk about serial novels and non-heterosexual plot structures, Terry Pratchett's Dodger which I found too laboured, Beloved again, which never fails to move and horrify me, Jedediah Berry's The Manual of Detection which I thought was fun but too self-conscious without going the full Auster that would have justified such self-consciousness, Jeff Noon's first crime novel Slow Motion Ghosts which I thought was magnificent and Brian Aldiss's debut, Non-Stop. I've rather avoided Aldiss, put off by his late career as a crusty gammon, but Non-Stop is brilliant - a compact novel stuffed full of interesting ideas, satirical gestures and a great twist. It came out in 1958 and presumably was one of the earliest in the generation ship genre. I've read lots of them and none of them beat his novel for economy and wit. Its sexual politics are very dated and the satire on Freudian psychology feels a tad old-hat but everything else holds up really well. Oh yes - I also read Perrotta's The Leftovers which was rather a good exploration of public and private grief in the wake of 9/11 but really didn't need the Rapture-like framing (or an extensive TV adaptation). 

I seem to have read quite a lot this year, partly due to being off sick for a few weeks. The texts that most stuck in my mind were Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Stevie Davies's Impassioned Clay and Awakening, Melissa Harrison's All Among The Barley which I found problematic but was in retrospect too harsh about, Emily Dickinson's poetry – re-reading it for teaching just plunged me back into a wondrous world, Emerson's essays, Milkman (predictably), Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure, Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier, Emma Dabiri's Don't Touch My Hair (extra marks for the Solange reference), Kate Charlesworth's joyous but also moving Sensible Footwear, Niall Griffiths's Broken Ghost (disclaimer: we're friends and I'm in the acknowledgements for no reason I can imagine) and Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth even though it needed pruning. I've definitely read more books by men than women this year but the ones that stayed with me are mostly by women. 

Musically, the ones I mentioned above were recent purchases, but I've also listened to a lot of Kate Bush, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Julia Kent's Temporal, Audiobooks' Now, In A Minute, the new Nick Cave, The National and Sleater-Kinney albums. Speech Debelle's Speech Therapy feels like a forgotten classic already; Pauline Oliveros, quite a lot of medieval music and polyphonic choral work and Chvrches also featured prominently.

So that's it for 2019. I'll be in the office on Monday, then I'm going to lie down in a darkened room for a few days hoping that it will all have been a fever-dream. Nollaig shona duit, Nadolig hapus i chi, Happy Christmas to you all. All I want from Santa is enough students to keep my course open. 

We're gonna need a new electorate…

Dick Tuck, I think it was, once gritted his teeth in the face of an electoral defeat and muttered that 'the people have spoken, the bastards'.

The same sentiment is raging around the liberal and leftwing corner of the world that I inhabit, with the added implication in some cases that what we need is a new electorate, not a new party or policy. I am in the happy position (if possible) of never having had any illusions about my own place in the political world, nor that of the Great British Public. Once in a blue moon something I passionately believe in becomes briefly fashionable and then goes away again, just like my lifelong attachment to v-neck ganseys and corduroy is occasionally mirrored in the fashion world and then goes away again for another decade or two. The confluence of weird cultural, social and political pressures that made me what I am – plus those regular pedagogical beatings suffered in headteachers' offices and the playground – also blessed me with the awareness that I will always be out of step with the majority. This doesn't necessarily make me feel any better, and it always carries the temptation to become either smug or a Vanguardist, but it does mean that blows like today's election results aren't freighted with an element of surprise.

There are two common responses to defeat on this scale: either the public are fools, or knaves - Steve Bell's cartoon responding to John Major's surprise victory in 1992 tends towards the foolish diagnosis. It's a Gramscian reaction, I suppose. Gramsci sat in a fascist prison cell in 1920-30s Italy and asked himself why the people repeatedly supported policies and parties which acted against their economic interest, despite the efforts of generations of Marxists. His answer in The Prison Notebooks was culture: that the combined forces of religion, politics, education, the arts, sport and all the non-economic aspects of our lives produced a version of 'reality' that persuaded the masses to act in the interests of a dominant elite and against their own. A crude – though not necessarily inaccurate – version of this is the argument that American conservatism has successfully persuaded poor Americans that 40 years of earnings decline is less important than abortion or immigration.

It's hard, this morning, not to take that line. I live in a poor, left-behind city. It is overwhelmingly working-class and has a large immigrant and first and second-generation population. Skilled jobs are increasingly rare and where they do exist, they're subsidised by a council suffering massive funding cuts, and by the European Union. The day after the EU referendum I was in leave-voting Abertawe/Swansea, where every new building bore a plaque with the EU flag marking where the money came from. I thought then, and think now, that none of the people voting Conservative or Leave will ever be the priority of an English Conservative administration. The Conservatives (much like New Labour) have idealised a working-class electorate that is racist, paranoid, selfish and bitter, thus bringing this electorate into being. They will throw them enough red meat to keep the votes flowing, while continuing to serve primarily the finance sector's insatiable demands for deregulation and an ever-smaller state. Britannia Unchained, the collection of essays by Raab and his cronies is essential reading here: it explicitly describes the British workforce as lazy and ignorant, and makes clear their belief in the abolition of the state beyond nuclear weapons and a legal system designed to protect capital. This is the world of V for Vendetta: the hedge-fund economy represented by Jacob-Rees Mogg and untethered from the rest of us will dictate policy, while an electorate that has proved it just wants things 'done' will be encouraged to look the other way by the most cynical policies Dominic Cummings (who at least is honest, in a weird way) can dream up.

The Conservative campaign made this clear: environmental collapse is upon us but a denialist party didn't bother making even the weakest statement in favour of prevention or adaptation. It treated the regulated media sector with total contempt, and the BBC responded like a beaten dog, failing in basic journalistic duties such as fact-checking. The private media did what it always does – monster a Labour Party that threatened its economic interests, while Labour ran a campaign of staggering naivety.

The Tory campaign won because it was simple. It ignored the pressing problems and blamed the rest – despite being in government for a decade – on easy targets that made no demands on an electorate that always wants to put off a reckoning. Foreigners; IRA-loving killjoys; 'liberal elites'. The genius of this is that there will always be such enemies. When Brexit is the disaster that it absolutely will be, the government will blame an EU conspiracy aided by Remainer enemies within. The world is a complicated place: Labour made the mistake of saying so, rather than pandering to the demands of an electorate that wants to be told that it has no responsibility, that everything's going to be great, that it's somebody else's fault.

Of course there are other reasons. The UK's kindergarten electoral system which prefers dramatic moments and confrontation to boring old compromise and negotiation; an entire political class which hasn't addressed deindustrialisation despite having generations in which to do so; a Labour Party balanced between right wing machine politicians with nothing inspiring or interesting to say and left wing ones who have all the answers as long as you don't start from here.

I'm left with an MP who took office having been exposed in the national press as a thief and a hypocrite. My students - some of whom voted for this outcome - are going to find that their university, their subject, their careers and their communities are not just beneath the notice of our new rulers, but the targets of scorn and hostility.

Are there any consolations? For me, yes. An Ireland peacefully united is inching closer; Scottish independence looks like really happening. Not much consolation for me, living in England and sharing the consequences with everyone else, but the self-inflicted dismemberment of the UK seems both overdue and good for the world – it's long been a rogue state, and deserves to wither away until it comes to terms with being a small, post-imperial polity with much to apologise for. However, this doesn't even start to make up for the knowledge that students, friends and neighbours don't have enough to eat now, let alone in six months' time. Being right shouldn't give anyone a warm glow, especially me.

If we thought 2010-19 was bad, buckle up and be kind to each other.

Is Widening Participation REALLY the enemy of progress?

They're wearing hats and gloves in hell this morning, for Radio Four has provoked me to stand up for my Vice-Chancellor. This is worse than when I found myself nodding in agreement with Linda Snell one dark day.

It all goes back to 4.30 a.m. yesterday, when I got up to go to a recording at my university of BBC Radio 4's alleged flagship news show, Today. 24 hours later, having got the date wrong and endured a day's mockery from my dear colleagues, I tried again.

As part of the show, Mishal Husain (whose journalism and presenting style I rather admire) interviewed the boss. Rather than explore the HE landscape, the university's role in a hard-hit city or the decade of wage suppression that everyone in HE except its leaders have endured, Husain (private school, Cambridge) decided to ask whether places like mine were essentially running a pyramid scheme by accepting money from students with poor A-level qualifications who were bound to fail. The VC then had about a minute and a half to unpick the assumptions and errors implicit in the question, and did a great job. I've had a couple of hours more and don't feel constrained to be so polite about it.

There are many hot takes on the bin-fire that is British higher education, but this was a new one. Given the elite universities' notorious failure to admit poor, provincial, working-class and especially minority ethnic students (at all, in the case of certain colleges), it's a brave move to accuse an institution with a 40% BME, 90% working-class intake of being the enemy of progress.

A quarter of Oxford colleges didn’t admit a single black student in at least one year between 2015 and 2017
Eight of the 29 colleges at Oxford admitted two or fewer black students between 2015 and 2017 (less than 1% of all UK students admitted to the college). This means that in at least one year those colleges can’t have admitted any black students. We don’t know what happened in each of the individual years between 2015 and 2017, so it’s possible there were more colleges who didn’t admit any black students in any given year.

The interesting question would be why and how underfunded, unfashionable places like mine are expected to repair the damage caused by structural and systematic racism and economic injustice. Instead Husain's question implied a direct, uncomplicated link between individual effort and academic success. My students come from multiply-deprived families, communities and locations. They have been failed by an compulsory education system that has never done well with ethnic minorities and has been privatised to such an extent that pernicious activities like 'off-rolling' drive a league-table culture at the expense of students. A-levels are a snapshot of achievement with their own problems (in my subject, the direct result of Gove's move towards a mechanical, boring curriculum has been a collapse in English Literature applicants) which to a large extent reflect privilege rather than potential, something a rigid qualifications-based HE entrance system largely fails to acknowledge. My colleagues at selective universities largely aren't racists excluding anyone they think smells of chip-fat: that's not how structural inequality perpetuates itself. Unequal access to HE is the end-product of a rotten system, not an individual failing.

Presumably Mishal Husain believes that attending a fee-paying school had no bearing on her own academic success and entrance to Cambridge: if so, her parents should ask for their money back. In the meantime, I'll stick to spotting the talent other institutions overlook. Also: state-educated students tend to do better at university – they haven't been educated beyond their natural abilities as many private school kids have been, and they're more independent.

Teaching mostly first-generation HE students is both a joy and a challenge. There are issues of cultural capital and actual capital, but they have usually seen more of life than their peers, and can be more driven. That's why so many of us choose to teach in places like mine (not me: I lucked into this and lightning doesn't strike twice) – we don't have a white saviour/missionary mentality but we see the difference we make and we don't have to cope with the entitlement of those who take education for granted.

Someone on Twitter described Husain's question as the product of a 'stay in your lane' mentality, and I'm sorry to say that I agree. The ruling class clearly believes that higher education should be reserved for the affluent middle and upper classes. The Morlocks should accept their roles in the service economy and take enough vocational training to work in an Amazon warehouse. I hate this. I've seen too many brilliant students who should be running companies, publishing novels, lobotomising government ministers or presenting BBC current affairs shows get dumped by the wayside for being too black, provincial, common or badly-networked. If History of Art is or Medicine is open to a cabinet minister's offspring (acknowledged or not), it should be good enough for my neighbours' kids.  If teaching Anne of Green Gables, Welsh literature, politicians' novels (my current research project) Jilly Cooper's Riders, American Psycho, The Book of Mormon and Hamlet (to select a few of my recent classes) goes some little way to tipping the scales back in the right direction, I'm happy.*

Anyway, that's the rant you get when I'm forced out of bed at 4.30 a.m. I'll go back to book-blogging and random nonsense again next time.

*Happiysh: I still want paying properly.

Know your price

Yesterday saw the first day of the UCU strike: staff at 60+ universities walking out – against their instincts – to highlight the enormous drop in wages over time, the repeated reductions in pension provision, the virus of casualisation and the obscene gender pay gap at all levels in universities. HE institutions have never been richer, but staff haven't had an above-inflation rise since 2008, which cumulatively means an 18% pay cut.  At the same time, senior managements have expanded enormously and their pay packets have ballooned beyond all reason.

For me, casualisation is the worst bit: the generation behind me is being treated appallingly. Even the lowest-paid, fractional posts are attracting applicants with PhDs, publications and multiple books with reputable publishers who have never held a permanent or full-time post even by their 30s. They are expected to produce the work of a professor back in the day while being paid less than their peers who didn't contract the 6 years of extra debt required to take an MA and a PhD, the minimum requirements to get any hourly-paid teaching. Heaven forfend that they might want to have a family, live in a house or buy the occasional avocado. The result will be social shrinkage: only those with extensive family wealth will be able to take on even a bursaried PhD and casual teaching, and the skills and insights of those from poorer backgrounds will be lost.

My university union branch voted to strike, but the turnout was so low that we didn't meet the government's new 51% turnout minimum. I think my colleagues are exhausted, depressed and insecure - despite our leaderships' massive salaries for strategic thinking, student numbers have plummeted and the future is not looking rosy.

With their usual tin-ear for mood, our VC decided that the first day of the strike was the perfect moment to circulate this message:

FREE Thank You film screenings As a thank you for the hard work of our staff this academic year and their ongoing contributions to the University’s success, the Vice-Chancellor invites you to two special FREE film screenings at the xxxxx Theatre. There is a showing of the award-winning Bohemian Rhapsody on Thursday 28 November at 5.30pm, while you can get in the mood for Christmas with festive favourite Elf on Wednesday 4 December at 5.30 pm.

Now I'm struggling to imagine the Renumeration Committee offering the VC a free cinema ticket as a reward for his hard work, and I'm struggling even harder to imagine him accepting it in lieu of his habitual £10,000 extra every year. If this email had started with the second clause (Claus?), 'The VC invites you…', my vicious little brain wouldn't be filled with images of Marie Antoinette bearing cake* and mortar-boarded sans-culottes dragging a guillotine into the quad – I might even have been touched even though I don't particularly want to see a film about a band that knowingly broke the artistic boycott of apartheid South Africa (and anyway, I'm still teaching past 5.30: the academic schedule is 9-9). Seriously: that one clause demonstrates an entire world-view in which those who do the actual work (not just lecturers) are tiny ant-like creatures beneath consideration.

But no. This is a leadership which has colluded with its counterparts across the country to depress our wages while regularly rewarding themselves enormous pay rises funded by student debt, and they dare to insult us with this rubbish. Rather than treating us a fungible assets to be sweated then disposed of, why not reward us for our 'hard work' and 'ongoing contributions' with actual cash either now or in our pensions. I once worked night shifts at British Gas (don't worry readers: nowhere near any actual gas infrastructure but if your address isn't listed on any gas providers' databases, that's my fault). We were paid £1.98 per hour and when the proletariat flagged a little, the fastest workers were publicly 'rewarded' with a Mars Bar at around 4 a.m., while the slowest workers were publicly shamed and fired each week. Thank heavens those days are gone, eh?

It's not even a matter of one out-of-touch fat cat: this communication must have gone through several hands and nobody thought it patronising or provocative. My colleagues work hard. There's a massive culture of overwork: my boss is doing 14 hour days coping with increasing administration and demands that he find ways to save our subjects, while my PhD students and hourly-paid colleagues work way more hours than they're paid for. A chance for one of a limited number of free tickets to a second-run film doesn't cut it.

If this is going to be a regular thing though, I have some more appropriate suggestions:
It's A Wonderful Life (starring the VC as Mr Potter)



Scrooged



Oliver



The Lego Movie



Merry Christmas, one and all!

*Forget the cake: staff who work unpaid at open days were invited to use the water fountains at no charge.

Escaping into popular fiction

This has been an exhausting but exhilarating week, and next week promises to be more of the same. Lots of my colleagues have been doing Black History Month and Being Human events - psychogeographic walks, story-telling performances, masterclasses and the like – all of which are good for us as much as wider society: it's great to get out and talk to strangers about the things we and hopefully they are enthusiastic about.

I've also hit a run of good classes - today was Jilly Cooper's Riders, a novel which pretty much single-handedly encapsulates 1980s conservative feminism and is the perfect vehicle for all the cultural studies-influenced things we do here with popular fiction. For instance: we talk about how and why one could or should make room for a 900 page novel in one's life; about popular fiction as a vehicle for serious ideological and social perspectives, and how pop fic can be used to track social change.



In some ways Riders is fairly progressive: it's very positive about sex toys and women's sexual pleasure as an end in itself, but it's also deeply reactionary (posh people shouldn't be expected to conform to conventional sexual morality but admired for breaching it) and has aged extremely badly: it's attitudes towards older men having sex with younger women are echoed these days by Prince Andrew and virtually nobody else. It also contains two rape scenes, neither of which are taken particularly seriously and one of which is concluded with the rapist-hero making a knob gag. None of this, you may be unsurprised to learn, is mentioned in the breathless, cheery interviews Jilly gives whenever she publishes a new bonkbuster. Only snowflakes and academics ('hairy-legged' if they're female, 'bearded' and 'goaty' if they're male) care about this stuff. Oh, and teaching a book which praises Franco and whose German characters 'goose-step' and make Nazi salutes for a laugh is a bit uncomfortable in a class with more Spanish and German students than British ones.

Next week I'm teaching Armistead Maupin's Babycakes in American Literature - it's the fourth in his Tales of the City series and I picked it partly as an example of serial fiction, partly because it has a transatlantic plot, party because it's the volume in which Aids signals the end of the party, but mostly because it's a brilliant example of the wrenching you have to do to traditional realist fiction to include homosexual lives – when you can't tie everything up neatly with a heterosexual marriage and children, you have to wholly reconsider how novels work. Babycakes (like some of the others in the series) is funny, witty, chatty and moving, but Maupin struggles every time to convert stylish newspaper columns into a novel because he clearly knows that plots and resolutions are corny and artificial. Wilde knew that too, and employed irony and pastiche to signal it, but Maupin adds on plots in an unconvincing way – which is a shame because pretty much everything else about the series is perfect.

I'm staying in North America for the next class: Anne of Green Gables in Children's Literature, which I read it as a mix of colonial and postcolonial attitudes. Influenced by the other two children's novels I just read (Pixie O'Shaughnessy and Nancy Finds Herself), I see Anne as another Irish or Celtic subaltern whose romantic, impractical nature can infuse the Presbyterian Anglo-Scottish Canadian dominant culture with heart, while requiring her to submit to Anglo rationality and stolidity - both the other novels value the other-worldly ethereality and happy-go-lucky nature of the Irish and Welsh while accepting that those nations are helpless without English leadership, a very Arnoldian construction of Celticity (see also my paper on Celts in video games).



Once the two are united, Canada becomes a real place, eventually taking its place in the world by shedding the blood of its sons. In the sequels, Anne's hair gradually darkens and one of her sons dies in WW1. In real life, Montgomery was a leading supporter of Canadian involvement and one of the reasons she committed suicide in 1942 was guilt at her responsibility. I know this reading is a long way from the romantic comedy of popular perception, but it makes a lot of cultural sense to me. I'm also lucky that I'll be teaching it alongside my flame-haired PhD student, who will no doubt be responding to it in a more personal sense!

At the end of the week I'm teaching Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve but it's a long time since I read it and I can't remember what I thought then other than 'wow'. I'm sure I'll scare up some more detailed reckons by the time the class rolls by. There's so much going on that I'm opting out of keeping up with the election campaign's trail of lies, and the Trump Ukraine enquiry - exhaustion is no excuse for disavowing a citizen's duties but I get the distinct impression that the knowing employment of fake news tactics and extreme posturing is political tactic designed to leave us passive and incapable of coherent resistance. If so, it's definitely working. I'll still be voting though…

On not meeting Boris Johnson, and other stories

I've had a great week in terms of teaching: two Margaret Atwood novels either side of last weekend (The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman), Northern Lights (every time I schedule a text, the gods of TV programming air an adaptation), and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit today, a classic novel for discussing the intersection of alternative sexualities and alternatives to phallocentric narrative style. I'm not sure my mostly overseas students got the Lancashire humour elements, but I hope they enjoyed this class and the other texts as much as I did. It's so enjoyable to re-read old favourites, especially when they stand up so well. I bought my copies of the Atwood novels in 1994 on the proceeds of the Sir Henry Jones Philosophy Prize (alongside some Calvin and Hobbes, not Calvin and Hobbes), and the Pullman in 2000, immediately buying everything else he'd written and thus considerably delaying the process of my PhD.

I do have a tendency towards completism in books and music – once I decide I like an author or a band I'll read everything they've written or recorded whether they're any good or not. I've learned nothing from owning the complete works of every band and solo act associated with New Order, from Freebass (very much not the sum of its parts) to The Other Two (wonderful), nor from the endless ranks of Trollope, Hardy and Keith Roberts (tip: Pavane is essential, the rest less so).

There hasn't been much time for non-course reading, other than the massive list of REF outputs I have to attach a subjective number to, but I did get through Kate Charlesworth's A Girl's Guide to Sensible Footwear, which I can't recommend highly enough. I've always liked her cartoons, and this graphic novel combining post-war lesbian history and her autobiography is beautifully drawn (especially her affectionate pastiches of her favourite childhood comics) and just so enormously moving. Teaching Winterson's novel today meant I've been thinking about narrative and how to wrench traditional patriarchal/hegemonic forms to make room for non-heterosexual lives, and Charlesworth does it with apparent ease. It's funny, it's sad (especially her relationship with her mother, and the swathe Aids cut through her social circle), it's hugely knowledgeable and subtle. If it has a fault it's its self-deprecation: she's an important artist. Not sure what's next: perhaps Dan Simmons's Hyperion, through I really should refresh my memory of John Barth's short stories, Noughts and Crosses and Riders for next week's classes.

Apart from work, the high point of the week was a performance of Còsi Fan Tutte - not a full staging, just non-costumed singers doing a bit of acting, and an orchestra using period instruments. I'm not a huge fan of the baroque instrument thing - it can get a bit precious - but the singers were astonishing. Even though I prefer the rougher music of the medieval and contemporary periods, I was in awe of what the human voice can do. I could have done without the surtitles though: it turns out that this thing of beauty was essentially three hours of Italian Lads' Banter (plot: older man demonstrates to naive young men that like all women, their betrothed are slags, and that happiness lies in loving them anyway). The trickster maid, Despina, was the best part.



The Prime Minister was here on Monday. Assured of a slavish welcome from the local rag, he turned the remembrance day ceremony nearby into a stop on the campaign trail, doing his serious face for as long as he could manage before moving 20 metres into the nearest pub to do his man of the people act. If I were the organisers of the parade I'd feel used, but clearly others feel differently. At least I resisted the temptation to pop along and read out choice quotations from his comic novel about suicide bombers, some of which is set in this area, and not in a nice way. His father Stanley also wrote appalling thrillers - no doubt public-school confidence explains their slapdash, lazy style.

The one thing about being extra-busy at the moment is that I'm not glued to coverage of the cheapest, nastiest election campaign in living memory. I'll encourage my students to vote, turn up on polling day and pull the duvet back over my head. I'm thoroughly depressed by the diminishing space available for serious and informed debate - instead it's fake meet-and-greets for the cameras and lies in the studio and on the front page. There was once a political party in the US called the Know-Nothings. When did this become a collective national aspiration? I may have failed to get a job in Ireland this year, but my citizenship means there'll be a seat for me on the airlift when you lot turn to cannibalism in about 2021.

Anyway, that's enough doom and gloom - I intend to be out on my bike this weekend, blowing away the cobwebs. See you next week,

Mugged in Cheltenham

Week Six in the Big Academia house and the inmates are getting restless. Assignments are due. Attendance is down. Eyes are bleary.

My colleagues decided not to go on strike this time. A majority of those who voted opted for strike action on pay and conditions but the turnout was shamefully low - 29%. No doubt those in the first-class suites upstairs will assume that we're all delighted with the 0.1% pay rise that followed 10 years of below-inflation settlements, but that's far from the truth. The casualisation of HE is the major issue - whole generations of cutting-edge researchers and teachers have never had a permanent or full-time job, and yet are expected to produce the same volume and quality of research (in some ways more) as the tenured generation. Also, many of my colleagues feel that it doesn't matter whether institutions that cater for the poor and provincial go on strike anyway. It only makes the newspapers and politicians' radars when their or their kids' colleagues strike. There are – as recent discussion of election and term dates demonstrated – only two universities which qualify for attention.

As it happens I visited another non-university yesterday, in a delightful Georgian spa resort. Different intake from mine (pretty much all-white, all middle-class) but facing the same funding, staffing and entry challenges, but providing excellent, distinctive and enjoyable modules. I was there to examine a PhD – a scary but important thing to do. After that, I immediately went and blew the fee on old books. I was looking for RS Thomas poetry and Left Book Club volumes but bought one bilingual edition of Welsh mythology and some old children's books with Celtic elements - next year's Association for Welsh Writing conference is about childhood, learning and education (I'm co-organising it) so I'm thinking of doing colonial-Celtic constructions of children, including Anne of Green Gables: clearly a wild Irish girl who has to submit to WASP values while softening their edges.

A wretched hive of scum and villainy which left me bereft of cash 

Pixie is a 'wild Irish tornado' who needs taming by her English classmates in Mrs Vaizey's Religious Tract Society novel from 1902

A fine translation of Wales's oldest manuscript

Classic boarding school didacticism. For a history of such novels, read You're A Brick, Angela!

Not what you're thinking: in Olive Dougan's novel Nancy goes to boarding school and learns to dispense with the Welsh side of her Welsh-English heritage, to become a proper human being. 

Just a pretty sign on a now-converted old pub.

I'm off to teach Atwood's Handmaid's Tale now, and on Monday it's her Edible Woman, about which I'm very excited. I taught Comet in Moominland and The Owl Service earlier this week – Moomins weren't quite so popular but those who read The Owl Service seemed appropriately disturbed. I still think it's one of the most complex, dark and disturbing teen novels ever written. You can watch the whole terrifying 1970s ITV adaptation here. 

Thanks to all that, I haven't read much outside course texts. I'm most of the way through The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and appreciating its ingenuity more than I'm enjoying it.  Not sure what will be next. I also waved farewell to my Canadian astrophysicist friend. He bequeathed me about a decade's supply of fine whiskies and some bookcases, so I intend to get hammered and try to reshelve everything this weekend. The Dewey system won't know what's hit it.

More next week.

In weary haste

Apologies for the slight delay in transmission - no blog last week because I've been so busy. Lots of new lectures to write, a PhD examination to prepare and various other more tedious things getting in the way of me coming up with any new opinions on anything worth sharing with you all. The more heated public discussions become the less I want to participate. Oh well, at least my dentist's appointment was cancelled!

Still, however exhausting teaching was, it's been fun. A Streetcar Named Desire, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (up there with The Phantom Tollbooth in my view) and Caitlín Moran's How To Be A Woman all generated interest and opinion from the students (young Marlon Brando still brings a good many of the students to the yard). It was One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest today (not enough people had read it to get a good discussion going but we did introduce them to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters), Comet in Moominland and The Owl Service tomorrow, and The Handmaid's Tale on Friday. The problem with The Owl Service is that while it's one of the most complex and disturbing adolescent novels ever written, Garner got his structuring mythical interpretation of the core Welsh myth from Robert Graves, whose Triple Goddess theory is both bizarre and deeply misogynist.



I did manage to read a couple of things apart from course texts this week. Ken MacLeod's Descent has an awful lot of fun merging near-future Scottish post-crash economics, close encounters of the third kind, genetics, religious exploration and surveillance culture to make a clever, witty and thought-provoking novel. John Le Carré's new one, Agent Running in the Field was a bit disappointing. Some nice characterisation, some satisfying rants, but the central twist is unintentionally obvious from the first few pages – a bit problematic when the narrator is meant to be an elite spy. I liked Michael Frayn's The Russian Interpreter – a 1966 comic novel about an inept English graduate student in Moscow getting tangled up in espionage – very much. It hasn't really dated at all and is very funny. My next book will be Stuart Turton's The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle because it sounds clever and funny. Just what I need.

In the meantime, tomorrow sees the departure of my friend Dean for ever. Exhausted by the relentless hostility and incompetence of British HE (not my institution this time), he's heading back to Canada for the first time in 20 years, determined never to darken the doors of a university ever again. I'll miss his sense of the outrageous, his idea of what constitutes a well-balanced whiskey and ginger, his habit of hate-reading the Financial Times at weekends, his dry sense of humour and scathing disregard for any astrophysics on a smaller scale than galaxy interactions, which is his speciality. Having shared an office with a Nobel winner, he's allowed to describe most of his field as 'parochial' and 'planet-chasers'! He'll be much missed.

Treading carefully with words

Note: first paragraph uses the N-word in the context of classroom discussion.

Hello from the end of a long, draining, but also exhilarating week. I've been teaching a lot: The Great Gatsby (takeaway: rich people have something resembling feelings too), The Just-So Stories (fascinating, and more complex than I remembered them, and Gil Scott-Heron's The Nigger Factory. Even typing the word makes me uncomfortable, and we started the class with a discussion of when and by whom the word can be used. My classes are ethnically diverse and people have a wide range of views about race, so a lively discussion always ensues. The first question was a bit of a zinger: do people sing along when the word is used in a hiphop song? Answer: no, and that includes the black students who generally believed that they could use the word because they'd reclaimed ownership of it: there was a sense that it was OK to experience the word used in art but not to employ it oneself unless it's clearly marked off with quotation marks, such as in the book's title, and even then people were reluctant in case repetition took away the sting. In case you're interested, I relied on a couple of journal articles to guide the conversation: Randall Kennedy's 'Who Can Say "Nigger"? And Other Considerations and Emily Bernard's 'Teaching the N-Word' – Kennedy is against fetishising the word by making it taboo, while stressing the multiple signifieds it represents, while Bernard's piece is a more reflective piece about the lived experience. The word's history and power is terrifying, and an Emory University professor was recently fired for using the word within quotation marks in conversation with a student: he was quoting what some racists had said about his support of African-American causes.

Gil Scott Heron's title announces his novel's purpose: he uses the word to denote African-Americans who conform to white American cultural standards and therefore maintain an oppressive system in exchange for material comforts: the Factory is the black university which produces

 quasi white folks and semithinkers whose total response is trained rather than felt. Black students in the 1970s will not be satisfied with Bullshit Degrees or Nigger Educations. 

The book is on my module because we wanted something which raised the big questions about the relationship between art and activism, and the ideological positions that range from 'art is separate' to 'art is nothing unless it is activist'. In these days of the apparently apolitical student, it does no harm to remind them that universities and especially students' unions used to be something more than a marketing department with some deportment training attached. The novel extends the examination of historically black colleges found in Ellison's Invisible Man and less directly, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time from the previous generation, and explores the rise and fall of student militance in the late 1960s, ending on a very ambiguous note. We took in Scott-Heron's music too, always a pleasure. We discussed the Frankfurt School's approach to popular culture, the Black Arts Movement appropriation of revolutionary energy (hence the presence of the Bill Hicks routine), hegemony, didacticism and the role of art in political education, which is how I ended up playing them snatches of The Lark Ascending and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima as examples of art responding in very different ways to trauma.









You can tell from the text's presence on the module where I stand on this: I would never use the word independently or gratuitously, but I'm prepared – though not comfortable – to introduce it when used by those who've reclaimed it. We always start with an informed discussion of the word's history and establish a serious, thoughtful atmosphere, making sure that nobody has to say it and that its use isn't lighthearted. This is the second time I've taught this novel, and both times the students have more than risen to the occasion. It's been uncomfortable of course, especially for the BAME students whose emotional labour is obviously greater than that of the white students, but I think that they appreciate the intention and the atmosphere established. Also: it's a powerful book that justifies its use of the word.

So the teaching has been exhausting but also thrilling because it feels like we've been wrestling with the big questions about literature, form and content all week. I also played a minor role in a session on public speaking for the first-years, and observed a new colleague's teaching practice, learning a lot along the way. The older I get, the more I approve of vampirism. I've also spent the week reading an interesting PhD for examination at another university. I can't say anything about it for professional reasons, but doing this kind of thing does really make me feel like a part of a wider unseen community that does matter. There hasn't been much time for reading beyond the curriculum though and I was too exhausted for the deep stuff - I read the fourth Green Knowe novel, Stranger at… which was troubling and compelling (up there with Susan Cooper), a minor Pratchett (Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook) and I'm most of the way through Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger which is every bit as good as everyone says: a mixture of historical fiction and gothic melodrama which re-energises both those genres. I normally read her stuff the moment it comes out, so I don't know why I waited for so long with this one. Anyway, highly recommended.

After all that, I need some diversion, so tomorrow I'm off to see friends and colleagues acting in an am-dram country house mystery. It's not – officially - The Play That Goes Wrong, but I have hopes. And there's a raffle.