The Pequod

This blog has moved

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:33:00 +0000

This blog is now located at http://thepequodblog.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://thepequodblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Homeopathic First Aid

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:08:00 +0000

This is a story of a man in a hurry, in a hospital, and a brief encounter with homeopathy. I intend to follow up my experience more fully soon, when I go back to said hospital, but for now, and from memory...

...I had cause today to visit Lytham St. Anne's spanking new Primary Care Centre, which brings together doctors, pharmacists, X-ray facilities, minor surgery unit under one shiny, PFI-financed roof. The centre was developed by the Medic X group, who also run the pharmacy. In the waiting area for the pharmacy is a health care library, where you can buy books on all sorts of ailments, written under the auspices of the BMA. Also in the waiting area is a snazzy, touch-screen computer.

Geek that I am, I could not help sidling up to have a play. There, nine colourful buttons were arrayed, promising advice on healthy eating, stopping smoking, and other digital versions of those infinite advice leaflets that clutter surgeries. And, at the bottom, was a button for "Natural Medicine." Now since I have blogged on bad science in the past, regular readers will not be surprised to know that my interest was piqued, and I clicked through.

There, a list of further options appeared, including herbal remedies, acupuncture, and - you guessed it - homeopathy. In a hurry, because the surgery was about to close, I scanned the further options with horror. I clicked on "First Aid" and was advised that if I got a splinter, I should take 30C of (insert obscure name I can't remember), which would "gently expel the intrusion from the wound" (I paraphrase, but that's more or less it). I clicked on "Stings" and was instructed "to take 40C of Hypericum." Under "Heat Stroke," a similar set of options was listed. Now I am no medical professional - the Dr. in my name professes to my ability to read books, not bodies - but I know damn well that heatstroke, and even splinters, can be serious, carrying the risk ultimately of death in the case of the former, and infection in the case of the latter, and need cautious and pragmatic intervention, not a vial of magical mineral water.

What really scared me was that the glossy presentation of these "medicines" or "remedies" (and they were labelled as such) lent them a degree of unwarranted authenticity, that could only have been enhanced by the context in which this advice was found: beside a pharmacy, within an NHS building. All of the homeopathic options, like the advice pages for mainstream medicine, contained the usual disclaimers about seeking advice if symptoms persist. However, they equated doctors - those miracle men who worked in that building - with "Homepathic Professional" as the further advice to seek. There were no hyperlinks back to more mainstream medicines or advice elsewhere in the system.

Checking the MedicX Pharmacy website, I see they offer "a range of healthy living services." Especially in the context of first aid, healthy living is not something that homeopathy satisfies, for all that "natural remedy" tingles the same sensory synapses as are set off by organic food loveliness, or essence of camomile shampoo. So one has to wonder whether including a self-diagnosing, self-medicating computer screen, in a privately-run pharmacy which presumably (again, something I need to check) also sells said homeopathic remedies, is intended to advertise alternative medicine in order to turn a profit. Have the best interests of NHS patients here been compromised - albeit on a single computer screen in an otherwise exemplary health centre - because of a close, and possibly unregulated, tie-up with a private supplier?

In true Arnie style, and this time armed with a pen, and a camera phone, I will be back. Watch this space for some more detailed observations, and some (demands for) answers.

Daily Diary: The Language of Aspiration, and National Insurance

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 21:12:00 +0000

The Language of Aspiration
Stefan Collini lays into the Blairite (or, as he puts it, "blahite") language of "aspiration," which seems to be the coin of the realm across the political spectrum. Alan Milburn, one of Blair's most loyal talking dogs, recently wrote a report on Unleashing Aspiration. This report neatly encapsulate the faux Orwellianism that has regulated New Labour thinking and rhetoric since the mid-'90s: all are equal (but just don't mention that some are more equal than others). As Collini puts it in relation to the example of parental "rights":

In one of those phrases we have heard so frequently that we no longer register their absurdity, the Milburn report says we need to see how parents 'could be empowered with a new right to choose a better school for their children'. What does this actually mean? A 'right' is something universal, something everyone in the relevant category – in this case, parents – has. But if all parents have a right to choose a 'better' school for their children, won’t we have to maintain in each locality a number of ghostly 'worse' schools to which no children are actually sent, whose function is to show that some schools are ‘better’ than others? This rhetorical pattern has become depressingly familiar: each individual has a 'right' to something 'better', where 'better' tends, in practice, to mean 'better than someone else's'.

It is quite depressing. Nobody would want to deny that aspiration or social mobility are positive things. The question is the extent to which we acknowledge that you don't get something for nothing, and that for another class, race or other social group to move up, the existing wealth has to budge somewhere else. Recently, David Willetts' attention has turned to the entrenched wealth of the baby boomer generation that is leaving a social support, jobs and housing burden on the younger generations; Baroness Neuberger, meanwhile, has argued persuasively for allowing older people to work for much longer. In both cases, enabling social mobility for the young or old, or for the lower classes, is a good thing; but since one cannot conjure jobs or housing stock out of thin air, some groups are going to have to give these up. Hence the use of the term aspiration, which sounds good, egalitarian, democratic, but which does not actually require the party to tackle the root problems. Let's focus on encouraging people to aspire to social mobility, education, professional jobs, or housing; but let's try to avoid the awkward difficulty of them actually attaining these things.

As Collini sharply analyses, the solution is not to promote aspiration, which is rhetorically vacuous, but to redistribute wealth from those who can genuinely afford it: not the baby boomers or the old, not the middle classes either, but from the staggeringly small percentage of people who own a staggeringly large percentage of the national's wealth. For example, within the top ten percent of earners, the 91st percentile :

have approximately four times the median total net wealth of the population, but the top 1 per cent have almost 13 times that median figure.

Not only are some people rich (the average ratio of CEO to employee pay has gone up from 47 times in 1999, to 128 times in 2009), but a few people are so super-rich they don't even fit on the charts of the Report of the National Equality Panel:

It is repeatedly (and laconically) recorded that the income or wealth or other advantages of the top 1 per cent cannot be properly represented visually in this report because they would be 'off the scale of the figure'. All the distribution charts and bar graphs have this absurd appearance, with a huge chimney at the right-hand side disappearing off the page.

When not even bald statistics can incorporate the wealth disparity that is the greatest barrier to social mobility - and, if you like, aspiration too - you start ironically to understand why the mainstream political parties have desperately resorted to the rhetoric of aspiration in a kind of wishful thinking. How does one possibly distribute the wealth from this elite micro-percentage of the population, when they are precisely the ones most able to avoid any tax measures through offshore bank accounts?

National Insurance
OK, so the super-rich are pretty hard to touch, whether for Labour or the Tories. But I am glad to see that the real Tory party has at last stood up with a clear policy divide from the former. The Conservative's plan not to raise National Insurance for those earning above £20 000 is utterly, utterly absurd. Having spent the last month condemning Gordon Brown for failing to tackle the deficit, they now decide that they are not going to raise this tax, and will instead make efficiency savings.

What is an efficiency saving? It sound suspiciously like job cuts to me which leads, oh, that's right, to greater pressure on the benefits system that National Insurance pays for. Raising taxes produces a guaranteed additional income, that can be used to pay off the deficit. One might also note that with the country's median income at £21, 000, and the income scales so skewed at the top end such that this median is equally stilted above what many will actually earn, raising taxes above £20 000 will be a less painless measure for the many than cutting services.

In contrast to guaranteed tax income, efficiency savings are unpredictable in scale, and are ultimately disguised rhetoric for cuts in the public sector. At last, in an otherwise touchy-feely nascent election campaign with very little to choose between the two parties, here is a clear dividing line. And though big business may have come out behind the Conservatives - quel surprise, those same CEOs who earn hundreds of times more than their employees - I know my allegiances lie in any shade but blue.

Serendipitous Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:02:00 +0000

I suspect that if I told many of my fellow academics that I kept a blog, they would tell me that I am wasting my time, and should get on with some "proper" writing. To a degree, I can understand their sentiment. One assumes that blogs will not exactly register in any new Research Excellence Framework, for all that they represents one possible "outreach" activity that the government seems so keen to encourage in academia.

Nevertheless, I am continually surprised by how beneficial blogging can be, both as a way of maintaining my writing skills at times when the demands of teaching kick in, but also because of the number of times a post has developed my thinking about a particular topic, in a way that I could pick up later in my mainstream academic activities. A perfect example of this came the other day, when I was teaching A Doll's House for the Open University.

I have taught this play for several years at my other institution, but this was my first time teaching it at the OU, and the approach was somewhat different. Whereas I had previously taught the play for its relevance in terms of the advent of dramatic realism and the turn away from the well-made play conventions of the preceding nineteenth century, for the OU the play was treated in relation to its performances of gender. My students and I were asked to think about the ways in which the play might be updated to a more contemporary setting, and how this would affect our perceptions of Ibsen's original.

Whilst the play may have been well-familiar to me, this approach was new, then, but it did not take me very long to think of a way into teaching it. Last year, on this blog, I posted the day after I had seen a performance of the play which set it in the 1950s. In that long post, I wrote about the intriguing stage set of the Northern Stage production, which used transparent walls and a 1950s living room; both aspects were really thoughtful interventions. The transparency highlighted Ibsen's dramatic method in exploiting the gap between what an audience knows about every character, and what any one character knows about any other; the 1950s setting helped to construct Torvald as a man who we knew, with historical hindsight, would be thrust into the radical changes of the 1960s soon after Nora's final exit.

This, then, was one of my routes into teaching the play, and the implications of updating and directing.the drama. Now I am pretty confident that had I not spent a morning - at that time arguably a wasted morning - writing a semi-essay about the play last year, I would not have remembered it now. The delight of blogging, as with all writing, is that it forces one to develop and tease out ideas; had I not written about it, my immediate reactions after the performance would have drifted away almost as quickly as the crowd flowing from the theatre. Of course, one could say that I could have written about it without a blog. The theatre diary, for example, has a long and privileged heritage. However, I do feel that the public nature of a blog, where my thoughts would be shared and, in the case of blogging about a theatre production, picked up by others searching for reviews of the play, stimulated me into writing when I might otherwise have gone on with other, allegedly more important, things.

I will admit to feeling a slight sense of smugness, then, when my preparation for this topic came round. I could not have known when I blogged back then that it would be relevant. But a blog, capturing seemingly trivial and ephemeral incidents and thoughts, turns out once again to have been serendipitously prescient and relevant.

Daily Diary: Toffs, Toughs, and Taxes

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:42:00 +0000

I start the day reading Ian Jack's article on the photograph that defined the class divide. It depicts two coat-tailed Harrow "toffs," waiting outside the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match, and three somewhat Dickensian "toughs," looking resentfully on. The photograph is a symbolic snapshot of a class divide, which explains why it has a long heritage of reuse across the press, as Jack details. However, chasing the history of the five boys, it appears that it was not entirely candid. Jack adds that "As a way of describing the boys themselves – their circumstances and position in the hierarchy – it was also remarkably untrue." The boys were not entirely the true urchins that they were labelled as. Ultimately, there is something optimistic about the subsequent narrative, which turns on the second world war and sees the boys we might like to patronise emerging as respectable businessmen and civil servants.

The Budget
Over lunch, I tune in to the Chancellor's pre-election budget. As usual with budgets, most of the measures have already been well-trailed, though there is a clever political twist in there, as not only does he abolish stamp duty for some first time buyers, he pays for this by increasing it for those buying homes over £1 million. This puts some water between Labour and the Conservatives, nudging the former slightly back to the left and exposing the latter as more right-wing than they might appear. The irony is that the Conservatives proposed the abolition of stamp duty a couple of years ago; but what Darling's move does is to show their plan as a populist measure, whilst his is an actual redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.

The budget even has some humour in it, with Darling displaying perfect comic timing in his stand-up routine. He announces a crackdown on offshore tax havens - cue loud jeers from Labour, gesturing towards the Tories and the slippery Lord Ashcroft, lordly taxpayer of Belize and Lordly non-taxpaying Conservative deputy chairman. Then he announces three specific tax evasion agreements with Dominica (cue more jeers), Grenada (cue a Tory squirm of anticipation) and...yes...Belize (cue eruptions and gesticulations on both sides). Mr. Darling, keeping his cool, clearly dreamt up his next line in a moment of (for him) inspiration: "We expect these deals to be signed within a few days, which is rather quicker than the ten years it's taken the front bench opposite to exchange information with the deputy chairman of their party."

Aside from my own chuckle over cheese on toast, the budget has little of note for me. He announces more funding for universities to improve their knowledge transfer, and to provide more places for students in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects. Which merely continues a New Labour trend of ignoring anything that can't be quantified, tabulated, banked and taxed. Such as my own subject. But hey, I'll still not be voting for the boys in blue. They would do anything but rescue the humanities.

Three Plagiarism Cases

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:51:00 +0000

Maybe in the past I have been too naive, too trusting, or simply not quick-witted enough. But through my initial five years of university teaching, I had not encountered a single case of severe plagiarism. It is common enough to find the odd first year student forgetting to put a quote in quotation marks; so too might they quote or paraphrase a critic that they had heard spoken about in lectures, without chasing up the original source. Oddly, though, more common are students who diligently reference lectures and tutorials, so scared are they of being accused of plagiarism.

But if I had not come across serious plagiarism - more bad but understandable habits from new students - something must have been in the air over the last three weeks, when I have had to deal with three separate cases, all in students who were at level two, and who should therefore have known better. The three cases are instructive, though, because they show the very different ways in which plagiarism can manifest itself; they have also been a good learning experience for me, having discussed the theory of plagiarism at length (including on this website) but never having encountered it from a first-hand, teacher's perspective. Without compromising the anonymity of the students, I throw the cases up here in the interests of sharing my experience for new teachers, and also for proving to students that plagiarism will eventually get spotted.

Case One: The Lift
The first case was in some ways the easiest to deal with. The student in question had lifted large parts of a journal article and passed this off as their essay, without attributing the source either in footnotes or in a bibliography. It took about three sentences to spot this happening. Only an academic would be boring enough to want to write about the bodily functions of Finnegan's Wake.

Oddly, precisely because it was so extensive, the plagiarism here was more a symptom than the problem. For all their wiles, whinges, and late night essay-writing binges, I have a positive view of students - and I do not believe any would do this without some good or, rather, serious underlying reason. I was concerned not so much for the plagiarism itself, which was blatant, as for what it revealed about the student's welfare. Clearly, something was happening behind the scenes that had made them desperate enough to copy at such length, and blind enough to think they could get away with it.

In this case, then, I immediately referred it up the academic line, for someone with an overview of all that student's work and past history, who could probe the issue more deeply.

Case Two: The Sneak
In many ways, this was the most obnoxious of the three, even though the plagiarism was the least extensive. Here, the student had written an essay that was clearly their own work on the whole; the topic was so specific as to have made it virtually impossible for them simply to cull an entire paper. It was a good, but not spectacular essay. However, lurking in the middle of it were two sentences that simply did not sound right. To my ear they seemed just too, well, academicky. Literary academics have a way of writing that is sophisticated, precise, but also slightly clunking. They also sprinkle - nay, litter - it with jargon. Who in daily life uses the words "cultural paradigm"? One would expect the differences in writing style between a good student and an academic to be barely perceptible, but actually they stood out a mile here.

The two sentences that had been lifted verbatim were not referenced, nor was the source included in the bibliography. Ironically, this was probably a case of double plagiarism, because when I Googled the phrases, it led me to a discussion forum thread, where the entry had purportedly been written by a junior school student. I think not.

There were two depressing things here. The first was that my student had tried to deceive me. They were perfectly capable of writing a good essay on their own, but had slipped these in so as to make me think better of them. Of course, the student protested that they had just failed to note down the source when drafting the essay - which may well be true, but it is hard not to be more suspicious of a genuine motive rather than pure carelessness.

However, the more depressing thing is that the student had clearly discovered these quotes via a Google search, the same search that allowed me to pull them out. Rather than carefully selecting a journal article or library resources to read and summarise for their essay, they had turned to the search box as a quick way of finding something directly relevant to whatever terms they plugged in. As I said, the source was actually a discussion board for junior school students, which is hardly what one might call academically reliable (even though my hunch is that the school student here had themselves plagiarised from an academic source).

This, then, exposed the research habits that I suspect are common to many students - and which, I confess, I have slipped into as well. Rather than constructing an essay from the ground up, assembling and integrating diverse ideas from selected academic sources to develop a new concept in their work, this essay seemed to have been more built from the top down. The student had seemingly developed their own thoughts and written in a flow of personal ideas, then simply plugged in anything that seemed handily to correspond to their points.

This case, then, shows that referencing is not simply something one should do as an afterthought to the process of writing an essay. Rather, it is intrinsic to a whole research methodology and approach from the outset. Thinking about what needs to be referenced at the end of the writing process should encourage one from the start of the process to go directly to the most reliable sources - namely those on reading lists and in scholarly databases online - rather than to use a web search towards the end, scattering cherry-like soundbites on the surface of the essay.

Case Three: The Bad Habit
If both the above cases were clear in terms of their implications, this was perhaps the trickiest and most ambiguous of the three. Here the student had read a great deal of critical material, and diligently listed it in their bibliography. However, scattered throughout the essay were sentences or phrases that had been lifted from this material, without being referenced. The student had also given evidence from the primary text that corresponded with the evidence selected from some of the secondary criticism, whilst some of the general ideas were also interrelated.

Immediately, then, this was a grey area that applies to plagiarism in general. Including phrases without attribution was clearly unacceptable. But how about the places where the student had selected evidence for their argument that was substantially derived from the arguments of the critics? Given that at this level we would hardly expect any student to come up with original ideas, and indeed they would be expected to rely quite heavily on lectures, tutorials and course readings lists without necessarily needing to reference all of these, how far should one complain about something that is fairly derivative? Isn't this ultimately the case for most work below PhD level?

This is one of the tricky balancing acts that undergraduate students must learn. Tricks like introducing a paragraph by saying "Critic x has explored the possibility that novel y is about x" come in handy, because a student can then structure ideas and evidence that are derived from the critic, without having to litter their work with references for every tiny point of detail.

This case also highlights the importance of a bibliography. Even though the student had not referenced every relevant moment, at least I knew that they had got their ideas from somewhere outside of their own heads, even if I could not pin down precisely which were the student's words and concepts, and which the critics'.

But this also made me reflect on whether we as teachers do enough not only to press home the importance of referencing, but also to explain that using the work of others does not represent a failure on the part of a student. This particular student was otherwise really good. Their earlier work had been of the highest order. They had clearly put in a lot of effort to read around the topic in this case, too. I suspect, then, that they had not referenced every source not only perhaps because of poor note-taking habits, but also because of their fear that I would somehow see their essay as inferior because it relied on other critics rather than independent engagement with the text.

This is why I think we ought to do more from the outset of a literature course to explain that at this level, literary research may well be more like in the sciences. In the latter, there is no shame in citing any factual detail; indeed, it is the very test of a good research paper that it will do this, advancing new knowledge only by a tiny increment, pushing off against a far larger body of old knowledge in the background. Similarly in literary studies, what is being tested in an undergraduate assignment is not the soft skill of the student's ability to write creatively and spontaneously, and to have a passionate but critically refined assessment of literature, but the harder skills of reading around, researching and integrating different ideas into a new essay. This skill of synthesising the work of others is one reason why employers value English graduates so highly; it is the same sort of skill needed to write a business report, or produce a Powerpoint presentation.

We might like to pretend that the ideal English student follows the Arnoldian model, someone whose aesthetic ears have been carefully tuned so as to be pitch-perfect, able to identify and explain what makes good literature. But as Matthew Arnold showed in his "blind reading" exercises, even the best students can not be taught interpretation from the bottom; critical sensitivity is something that is only gradually acquired through practice and the continued effort of reading and critical writing. What those of us teaching at the undergraduate level ought to be stressing, then, is not that the best essays are necessarily the intuitive ones that emerge from the student's mind alone. Rather, the good essay will digest of the minds of others. Whilst we can't "teach" Arnoldian interpretation, we can teach the fundamentals of referencing, researching, selecting sources and so on, that can be the equally good route to a sound literary essay, and ultimately to the student's employability.

In Conclusion
Whilst impressionistic criteria cannot help but inform our marking, I do believe that a good essay will not only sound right, it will also do right as well. It will not only have some ephemeral sense of the student being a good, intuitive reader of primary literary texts; it will have the hard indications of the student being a diligent, thorough reader of secondary materials, and someone who gets their references correct.

Recently, at one of the universities at which I teach, the student newspaper's editorial complained about different standards across academic departments. Some subject do not give specific credit for referencing and bibliographies, whilst some award equal marks to getting referencing right as they do to the quality of the arguments themselves. Whilst I would not necessarily go this far, all the cases of plagiarism I have encountered above do make me think that we should specify a certain percentage for the quality of referencing and selection of sources, rather than what is written per se. Not only would this be a further check on plagiarism - students will do everything they can to get the "easy" marks - it would also convey the truer, modern view of undergraduate literary studies which is that it inculcates not just the soft ideology of originality, but the hard, testable skills of researching, summarising and referencing well.

This is my controversial conclusion from the teacher's point of view. The conclusion from the student's point of view should be less ambiguous: plagiarism will get discovered. Probably, the odd case slips a reader's eye. No doubt many students use search engines to pluck ideas which they then paraphrase, rather than reading selected secondary criticism which they explicitly summarise and reference. However, sooner or later, a teacher will discover plagiarism, and when it does it lays bear all those bad habits. No matter what the practical implications on marks, being accused (and, for that matter, accusing a student) of plagiarism is a nasty process to have to go through. There is no point running the risk.

Daily Diary: A History of the World in One Hundred Objects

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:40:00 +0000

Just one thing to flag up today, a BBC Radio 4 series that I have been listening to on my commute: A History of the World in 100 Objects. Each fifteen-minute slot features objects from the British Museum, with its director, Neil McGregor, taking us on a journey from pre-history to the present, looking at everything from flints to carved pestles, all the way to Dolly the cloned sheep and the credit card. It is a bravura series, uniting two of Britain's great institutions, the British Museum and the BBC.

Only the latter would have dared to turn over a whole four months of programming to serious history, and ousted book of the week from its evening slot, in order to present this series in full. Neil McGregor from the Museum is an exemplary encyclopaedia of the world's artefacts: lucid, concise and, above all, extremely enthusiastic about the messages from history that each object conveys. The programmes are beautifully produced, sharp snapshots in time; it is mark of its success in describing each object and the craftsmanship that has gone into it that one never feels it would have anything to gain by being shown on television, rather than just talked about on radio.

Nevertheless, the supporting website, which features high-resolution images, is a wealth of digital information. Both are an absolute must - and luckily it will always remain accessible, as the BBC has decided to keep all the programmes on a permanent podcast. This is an archive for the future, as well as a pleasure for the present.

Daily Diary: The Cherry Orchard

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:03:00 +0000

In between doing a hundred other things - that is to say, whilst I am on the bus commuting to and from my library job - I start to reread Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, in preparation for a tutorial in a couple of days' time.

I have taught this now for five years, but what amazes me whenever I teach already-familiar material is that it retains its capacity to surprise. Always, it seems, I spot something that I have not noticed before, some formal trick or moment that ties in with the broader themes that I plan to discuss with my students. In this case, I notice a moment from the middle of Act 1.

After Gayev recounts to his sister Ranyevskaia the death of their former nurse, Lopakhin, the successful businessman, turns to Ranyevskaia, and suddenly says, "I feel I'd like to tell you something nice, something jolly." He then proceeds to elaborate his scheme about leasing the estate to holidaymakers. At first glance, there seems nothing odd about this, other than perhaps his urgency to explain it amidst the fluster of her recent arrival from Paris.

But then one thinks critically about the back story of the play. Lopakhin has been living near the estate whilst Ranyevskaia has been away in Paris. He has, we imagine, been in close contact with Gayev and Varya, who effectively manage it in her absence. Why, then, does he wait until this moment - until the early hours of the morning and within minutes of Ranyevskaia's return - to expound it? The only difference, the only thing which can account for it, is Ranyevskaia herself. What matters is not just the plan and its cold economics, but the passionate possibility it signifies for Lopakhin.

We can well imagine that this plan has been hatching long in his mind, and now he cannot possibly wait until a more opportune moment. He, once her "little peasant boy," has found a way to come up to her level, in her intellectual and social estimation of him. But whilst Lopakhin's future plan for the orchard is tied to his acute awareness of his peasant past, Ranyevskia's rejection of his ostensibly sensible idea as being "nonsense" is tied to her familial past, and hence two concepts of what the orchard means in class, economic, and historical terms are diametrically and poignantly opposed.

As the scene moves on into Feer's reminiscences about the history of the orchard when the estate was a success, Chekhov cleverly and implicitly reveals Ranyevskaia's true feelings about the orchard through her response to the seemingly "daft" serf. As Feers' nostalgically waffles on about the cherries and the jam, Gayev tells him to be quiet. But Ranyevskia asks, "and where is that recipe now?" She geniunely wants to know, wants to cling to the orchard as embodying the possibility of economic salvation in its own right, and therefore marking some sort of continuity with the past rather than the need for change.

Throughout the play, Lopakhin is self-conscious that he is a mere peasant, a "sow's ear" dressed up as a "silk purse." Gayev, an outright snob, does seem to see him as such, calling him a "boor." But Ranyevskaia seems more accomodating, although she does reject the idea of country villas as being "vulgar." Her rejection of Lopakhin's plan is not to do with her objections to him because he is beneath her class. Rather, she is genuinely concerned for the orchard, and all that it stands for that is literally and figuratively rooted in history.

And what is doubly poignant about this point is that her plans and feelings are so at odds with those of Lopakhin. For Lopakhin feels love for her as revealed through the dramatic timing of his announcement of his plans for the orchard; Ranyevskaia, too, who married a solicitor rather than a nobleman, might be potentially capable of reciprocating that love, rather than ideologically loathing Lopakhin because he is a mere peasant. Yet her plan - which she hopes will save the orchard - is not to marry him herself, but to marry him to Varia.

Right from the start of the play, then, emotional and social aspirations are in conflict, as are different views of what the cherry orchard signifies, and future opportunities for resolution are already defeated. Lopakhin may buy the orchard and turn it into villas, but to do so will be to alienate Ranyevskaia, the one character who might potentially accept him as a free man of the post-emancipation era, rather than viewing him as still essentially a serf, as her brother does.

Daily Diary: David Runciman

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:16:00 +0000

No serious reading today. No time today. Only I do spot one article on the BBC that is of interest: David Runciman explaining why people vote against their own self-interests. As I have noted before on this blog, at least British politics make some degree of sense. The working class, mainly concentrated in the formerly industrialised northern regions of England, tend to vote Labour, for the party that stands (or used to) for the redistribution of wealth. The rich south, especially in the financial districts of London, votes for the free-market Conservatives. When this pattern is not followed, it is logically enough because the Conservatives have managed to appeal to other core issues that concern working class voters, such as immigration, or because Labour have moved to the centre to appease middle-class concerns, such as healthcare and education.

In the US, though, the whole scheme seems awry. It is almost as if the poorer you are, the more likely you are to vote Republican, against your own interests in receiving free healthcare, for example. In his article, Runciman does a good job of explaining this inconsistency. It is all to do with the patronising effect that comes about when liberals try to help the disenfranchised:

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

This still does not seem to me to be quite enough to explain how deeply-rooted suspicion of Democratic government is in the US, such that even its positive actions - or what would appear to be so from a European vantage point - are seen as negative and oppressive by those they seek to help. But it's a good start.

A Case Study in the Bureaucracy of Unemployment Benefits

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:34:00 +0000

This is a true story about how the jobseekers' benefits system is counter-productively bureaucratic.

Steve is 35 years old. He had been in work since leaving college, gradually moving up to a pretty good position in a computer firm, in a full time post. However, he did not get on well with some of the office politics, and so when his daughter started school eighteen months ago, and his wife returned to work, Steve decided to resign from his post, hoping to find some part time work that would fit in with caring for his child. Longer term, he hoped that the career break would allow him to switch from a career in computers, to one in the environmental sector.

In the meantime, Steve took up voluntary work, firstly with the British Trust of Conservation Volunteers, and then subsequently in a local Wildlife Trust. Steve's skills were an asset to both charities, and he became a contracted volunteer officer, still unpaid but in charge of supervising other volunteers. This is a common route into paid employment in the environmental sector (it is the route, in fact, that my partner, who works for BTCV and who told me this story, took after leaving university).

Lo and behold, last week and at short notice, a one-year post with the Green Space project, run by the same Wildlife Trust, came up. It was part-funded by the Department for Work and Pensions, and was intended specifically to be filled by someone who was long-term unemployed. Steve seemed the ideal candidate. He went into the Wildlife Trust office for a chat, rather than an interview, since they already knew full well that he would be ideal for the post, and suitably experienced.

Steve then phoned the Job Centre in order to get them to fulfil the relevant paperwork. After hanging on the phone for an hour or so, and speaking to several different people, all of who told him, wrongly, that he needed to contact the Wildlife Trust (which he had already done) he was referred to the Department of Work and Pensions. Later that day, they put a call through to the Wildlife Trust. Steve was not eligible for the job, they said, because he had not been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance for a year.

This was true. When Steve had left his post, he had opted not to claim Jobseeker's, because it was his decision to quit work for family reasons, and because he thought that he had a good chance of attaining paid employment again soon. Steve did not want to burden the state by demanding money to support himself.

And this was his failing: Steve had refused to become a statistic. He had, quite handily from the government's point of view, kept the unemployment figures one person lower than they would otherwise have been - and this must be true for many thousands of people who are not in employment, but who choose not to claim benefits. Nevertheless, he had been unemployed, as his voluntary records at the two charities could testify. He did want a new career, and this new job was his lucky break. Although work in charitable organisations tends to be project based and short term, invariably charities find a way to keep on their best staff, even if it means shuffling them onto different projects.

Instead, because Steve was not a statistic, Steve will continue to be without paid work. He may well decide to claim Jobseeker's Allowance, costing the taxpayer more - if he does not find a paid job soon - than it would have cost for the taxpayer to part-fund this one year post which would likely have led to ongoing employment. Steve was, understandably, devastated to have been a phone call and bureaucratic piece of paper away from employment. The Wildlife Trust were angry, too, because they will now probably have to fill this position through recruiting outside, rather than taking on an existing volunteer. Everyone is a loser in this circumstance; and it illustrates neatly but unfortunately the absurdity of unemployment and the way the system is skewed bureaucratically. It fails to see that unemployment happens to people, not statistics.

Daily Diary: West Side Story

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:06:00 +0000

In the evening, we go to see a student production of A West Side Story. As this is the second time I have seen it, I pay as much attention to Bernstein's music as to the action on stage, and am struck by just how complex a score it is - so much so that it might almost stand alone. Although I love the Lloyd Webber musicals, against Bernstein one realises that whereas the former's are very much pieces to sing along to - almost karaoke - the latter is music to listen to, with the libretto (can a musical have a libretto, or is that only for high opera?) being a secondary consideration. One hears this most obviously with the Maria song, where Maria is repeated over and over on a rising note, until it blurs into the echo: "marry her."

That I pay attention to the music is not to say, though, that the performance on stage is not interesting. For a student production...but why the qualification? By any standard, this is an excellent production. The choreography is great, and impressively the cast manage to sing in convincing "New Yoik" and Spanish accents. The only let down is Tony, who is (as I overhear an audience member behind say) a bit wet behind the ears, a kind of foppish Hugh Grant who could no more convincingly woo Maria in a night than Homer Simpson negotiate world peace. Maria herself, though, is a revelation. Out of a diminuitive girl comes a powerful voice. The old man in front is literally moved to tears. Maria. Maria, Maria, Maria.

Daily Diary: Barack Obama, Andy Murray, A Tale of Two Floods

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:09:00 +0000

I stir awake to Barack Obama, whose State of the Union address is enough to encourage me to keep one eye and ear open. This is a return to form for the classical orator, and reminds of those heady late nights during the elections last year, when we in Western Europe finally saw that America need no longer be the world's super-pariah.

Obama is offensive rather than contrite, and really does what he should have done all along (maybe he read my diary entry last week): he boxes the Republicans into a corner, promising to check the power of banks and big business, curtail lobbyists, drive through healthcare reform, and inviting them to try and stop these populist measures.

Interestingly, from this environmentalist's point of view, his focus on climate change is more blurred. He barely mentions global warming or climate change, and instead focuses more on energy security, which is a way of the Commander-in-Chief sneaking renewables in through the back door. Sadly, though, he also mentions offshore drilling and clean coal technologies, both oxymorons in an environmentally-friendly politics.

The day is spent mostly doing little admin bits, picking up all the digital post-it notes (i.e. Google tasks) that have been consistently shoved forward in my calendar to this, my first clear day not teaching or marking in two weeks. Happily, doing incidental emailing and so on allows me to keep half a mind and a tab on Andy Murray's semi-final in the Australian Open which, having dropped his first set against Marin Cilic, he cruises through comfortably. That is my Sunday morning sorted then, when Murray will take to the court as the first Brit in the final of this Grand Slam since 1977, where he probably will face a fading - OK, that's wishful - Federer.

In the evening, I read two essays on two very different floods. The great Paris flood of 1910 celebrates its centenary this year. Ordinarily, "celebrates" would be the wrong word to use, but in this case the flood seems to have been largely an excuse for Parisian excursions and photo opportunities. They seem largely to have viewed the spectacle of boulevards turned into canals as some kind of divine, impressionistic art work.

Not so the floods in New Orleans. In The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, Andrew O'Hagan follows a pair of working class South Carolinans into the devastated heart of New Orleans, using the experience as an opportunity to discuss America's odd blend of intransigent racism and militaristic patriotism.

Daily Diary: The Waste Land

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:26:00 +0000

Today sees me hold a tutorial on The Waste Land. It was hard to know how to set about teaching this in the space of an hour. There is no way we can possibly work through all the allusions, meanings, influences or cultural legacy of this most important (and one of the most complex) of modernist texts. So, instead, I get the students to read against meaning, or as if meaning does not matter - which seems to calm some of their feelings of inferiority at not getting all the allusions to obscure poets and religious writings.

The poem was originally called He Do the Police in Different Voices, but I had asked them to come to the tutorial having listened to Eliot's solitary, thin, affected Queen's English, reading the poem aloud on the Poetry Archive.

I asked them to do an automatic reading exercise, paying less attention to the sense and instead immediately writing down any images, motifs, words or sounds that seem to resonate intuitively, or that seem to recur and echo at different points in the poem. When I do this exercise myself, I pick out: earth, stone, dry, dust, bones, Thames, water, run. Maybe it is simply because I am not coming to The Waste Land as a new reader, but it does seem that certain words or themes, spring out, and fall quite neatly in line with the poem's structural dichotomy between death and fertility.

From Eliot's reading, The Waste Land's affinity to song becomes quite clear. In the Fire Sermon section we focus on, he reads Mrs. Porter and soda water like the troops' marching song it originally was. The "Weialala leia" - which I had always subconsciously associated with the "ulla ulla" of H.G. Wells's apocalyptic aliens - is actually quite lyrical. The final "burning, burning, burning, burning" rises in intensity and volume, until the meaning of the words themselves becomes burnt out, and the pitch alone conveys their fierceness. There are also moments of rhyme and rhythm that are hard to spot given the visual form:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Read aloud, however, this might almost be rhyming couplets:

The river sweats oil and tar
The barges drift with the turning tide
Red sails wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach past the Isle of Dogs.

I argue, deliberately contentiously, that Eliot's legacy can be traced in rock music, where we listen not for sense, but for the sound of words, or for antagonised phrases that seem to emerge from the background noise. The example I use is Radiohead's "Paranoid Android":

That's it sir
You're leaving
The crackle of pigskin
The dust and the screaming
The yuppies networking
The panic, the vomit
The panic, the vomit
God loves his children, God loves his children, yeah!

On more steady, rigorously academic ground, we also discuss the effect of Pound's alterations on the "typist" passage in The Fire Sermon. Pound cuts several stanzas of excellent poetry, scrawling in the margin of Eliot's typescript that the "verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it." I particularly like this one that Eliot cut as a consequence of Pound's intervention:

He munches with the same persistent stare,
He knows his way with women and that's that!
Impertinently tilting back his chair
And dropping cigarette ash on the mat.

The words "impertinently tilting" here almost rock against each other in mimicry of the action, whilst the finality of the "and that's that" and "ash on the mat" rhyme gives it a dramatic, almost conversational cadence. It seems that what Pound particularly objects to is the end-stopped line. In his essay on Imagist poetry, "A Retrospect," he asserts the following: "As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." He also warns, "Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs Don't make each line stop dead at the end and then begin every next line with a heave."

That is precisely what these lines from Eliot - good poetry though they might be in another context - do for Pound here. What seems to me important, and again trying to engage the students with the poem, is that they belie the possibility that there is anything lazy or random about Eliot's composition. The sprawling, irregular metrical form that we do have is structured that way for a reason, and not simply because Eliot was incapable of writing effective, conventional poetry. It is just that, according to the high modernist aesthetic, what must be rejected is conventional poetry where content is subservient to form.

Pound also seems concerned about Eliot's insertion of "perhaps" or "may" when referring to the feelings of characters, admonishing him: "you Tiresias if you know know damn well or else you don't." He also complains that the original description of the typist's one-room apartment - in which "a touch of art is given by the false/Japanese print, purchased in Oxford Street" - would not have been true "of that lodging house."

In a poem that seems to range widely and uncontrolledly across its subject matter, the cutting of this incidental detail focuses our attention on the poem's internal realism or coherence. Tiresias would see everything, like an omniscient novelist, so he cannot express doubts about characters' mindsets. The typist would not have a cheap print bought in Oxford Street.

At the same time, though, this attention to consistency also reduces the complexity of the characters who are presented. The typist is defined by her professional automatism, and nothing else; there is no sense of her history, or aesthetic taste for Japenese prints that might lift her out of her ordinary and small life. The young man carbuncular is defined by his pimple and not - as was originally the case in the draft - by his future ambitions to become an actor ("perhaps his inclinations touch the stage"), or by affectations to the upper class.

The poem, then, becomes curiously confined by some conventions, even as it seems to break others, such as metrical poetry. It becomes more realistic within the terms of Tiresias, the all-seeing eye, but less roundedly realist in its representations of characters.

The final thing Pound seems to do is to make Eliot's voice less judgemental, and more coldly analytical, a "poetics of impersonality" if you like. The word "abominable," originally used to describe the French of Mr. Eugenides, becomes purely "demotic." The "cheap house agent's clerk," which seems a perjoratively upper-class view of the working man, becomes "a small house agent's clerk," which is merely descriptive.

The effect both of the removal of detailed characterisations, and the impersonal poetic voice, is to equalise all the various other voices and personalities presented in the poem. Without judgement or fleshed out characters, all appear equal. Elizabeth and Leicester are treated with the same equanimity as the typist and the young man carbuncular and consequently the issue of frustrated love, which predominates in "The Fire Sermon," is seen as one inherent to (that overused phrase) the human condition in general. This unwinds the history of poetic canon, whereby the high love of Queens, and their poetic treatment in the Shakespearean poem (here just a "that Shakespearean rag") is a counterpoint to the love of the lower classes, not even worthy of poetic treatment.

So here, as my tutorial class observed, we have another contradiction. This elitist poem, a work of high modernism that seems to expect its readers to have a good classical education behind them is, in its treatment of the characters within it, remarkably democratic.

Daily Diary: Gary Kasparov

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:28:00 +0000

I have little time to do anything constructive - by which I mean reading creative works rather than emails or student essays. In fact, I appear to have done little reading since Christmas. Last week, I calculated that I worked around 60 hours, of which only six or so can have involved sitting with a book or journal in front of me. I do have time, though, to dash off a couple of articles in the evening.

Gary Kasparov writes of "The Chess Master and the Computer." It rehearses old ground in the history of artificial intelligence (well, to me anyway, because my PhD thesis touched on the issue). The early artificial intelligence proponents saw a chess beating computer as the hallmark of human equivalence. But once Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov by calculating 200 million moves per second, it was realised that this had been a blind alley. Deep Blue may have won the battle against the Grandmaster, but they were using very different cognitive and electronic weaponry.

Chess lends itself to computational solutions because of the numbers involved in a chess match. As Kasparov notes, "The number of legal chess positions is 10⁴⁰, the number of different possible games, 10^120". To put it another way, a player looking eight moves ahead is presented with as many possible combinations as there are stars in the galaxy. Yet a good, human player will not even consider these permutations:

As for how many moves ahead a grandmaster sees, Russkin-Gutman makes much of the answer attributed to the great Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among others: "Just one, the best one." This answer is as good or bad as any other, a pithy way of disposing with an attempt by an outsider to ask something insightful and failing to do so. It's the equivalent of asking Lance Armstrong how many times he shifts gears during the Tour de France.

What is intriguing and novel in this essay written by a grandmaster is his observation of how computer chess seems to have affected the perception of how great humans play, when what it should have done is illustrated the narrowness of the computer's abilities:

The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent. Instead of asking about Sicilian Defenses, journalists wanted to know about my diet, my personal life, how many moves ahead I saw, and how many games I held in my memory.

I soon realized that my answers were disappointing. I didn't eat anything special. I worked hard because my mother had taught me to.

Rather than accepting that Kasparov's talent was much about hard work, the journalists wanted there to be some underlying cognitive capacity that would have allowed them to make the leap from human to computer, equating the two. This is somewhat sad, as if the hallmark of human genius is to be able to count on more than two hands. It has also led to a marketplace in both players and computers. Ever more powerful, off-the-shelf computers are able to play as well as grandmasters in people's bedrooms, and the perception is that to beat the computer at its game of number crunching is somehow to have beaten the game of chess as well. But it is not so.

Kasparov - perhaps betraying some un-innoculated germ of Communist belief - sees this as symptomatic of a free market economy:

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

Daily Diary: Healthcare Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:52:00 +0000

I read Jerome Groopman on the difficulty of assessing the best treatment or practice in healthcare, something that will become prominent in Obama's health reform proposals which will be led by "comparative effectiveness research." As usual, the NHS gets some stick, in this case for rationing expensive cancer treatments, which lead some cancer mortality rates to be among the worst in Europe. This seems to be a pop at the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which determines drugs spending and best practice, but it fails to take into account that a large part of the problem seems to be a general lack of money. Cancer survival rates have improved markedly since 1997, since when Labour trebled the budget for cancer care, although there remains a large variance in success rates depending on where a patient lives, which implies that individual hospitals and social attitudes may have much to do with it, rather than anything systemically wrong with a government-run healthcare program.

Groopman's article, however, seems somewhat irrelevant, in the wake of Republican Scott's Brown's takeover of the safe Democratic seat of Massachusetts, meaning the Democrats no longer have the Senate majority required to push through healthcare reform. Being in the UK (or even continental Europe), it is hard not to see America's politics as socially and morally bankrupt, in the failure to provide some form of universal coverage. It is hard, too, not to be bemused by the fact that the lower-class groups which seemed to have fallen for Brown's everyman, pickup-driving image, are precisely those who would have most to gain from healthcare reform. It seems now that Obama's promises on the matter will firstly be bent by partisan negotiations in the Senate, and then ultimately broken once and for all.

I heard an interesting comment about the apparent Republican bounceback, though, which is that it shows that Obama was ironically not bold enough on healthcare. If only he had stuck with a truly radical, public option, he could have presented the Republicans as a dark force, in league with big insurers and pharmaceuticals. As it was, in an attempt to push a bipartisan bill through, Obama compromised so much that he neither sufficiently pleased those on the far left, nor sufficiently alienated those on the far right.

Interestingly enough, the news this morning seems to herald a change of tack in Obama's politics. Obama has just proposed stringent curbs on the power and activities of banks. The extreme nature of his proposals, which seem to go beyond anything suggested thus far in Europe, push the Republicans into a corner, as since they try to condemn the proposals, they may seem to fall in league with the bankers, who have been the prime target of public anger. The Republican's trick counterattack must be to try to attack the bankers, the personalities and leaders who instigated the proposals, but to defend the freedoms of the market in general. That, no doubt, will involve stabbing a few former friends in the back.

Daily Diary: The Waste Land Transcripts

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:26:00 +0000

Again, today I have virtually no time to do reading. I mark essays until midday, and then have to head over to Stockton, for meetings and a library shift from 2.00 to 8.00.

I manage to snatch an hour, though, to spill lunchtime lettuce onto the pages of Valerie Eliot's introduction to the facsimile edition of The Waste Land, featuring Ezra Pound's substantial annotations. The introduction is told largely through Eliot's letters, and the impression that comes across is of how difficult Eliot, now one of the most revered figures in twentieth-century letters, found it to make either a name or a living for himself, and of how tenderly he felt towards his first wife, Vivien.

The mentoring of Pound was vital to Eliot's ambition, as was the financial sponsorship of wealthy philanthropist John Quinn, although Pound's letter of introduction to the latter is hardly flattering. Eliot, Pound writes, "has more entrails than might appear from his quiet exterior." Although Eliot's reputation became more secure with the publication of "Prufrock," he remained itinerant, flitting around England (and disappointing his American parents in the process) in the hunt for a job that would sustain him financially whilst allowing him time to lecture and write.

Eventually, he settled at Lloyd's Bank (one wonders if, today, the taxpayer-owned Lloyd's might be forced to become a sponsor of unsettled academics and literary genuises by way of remittance for the bail-out). Whilst he enjoyed the bank work, having published The Waste Land in The Dial in 1922, one might have expected Eliot to be able to turn now to writing full time. Behind the scenes, indeed Pound developed a scheme known as the Bel Esprit, where he tried to persuade thirty guarantors to sponsor Eliot for £10 a year. Eventually, Quinn pledged £300 a year, but Eliot remarkably turned down this generous offer, in favour of keeping his £500 a year salary at the bank. Later the next year, Quinn offered an alternative, with Eliot becoming editor of Nation for $600 annually, paid by himself and Otto Kahn. Again, Eliot rejected this "extraordinarily generous offer."

The reason, touchingly, appears to have been the ill health of his first wife, Vivien. Thomas wrote to Quinn explaining that:

The Nation did not want to give more than six months’ guarantee and they wanted me at once if at all. I pointed out that this might be allright for a man who was already in journalism, but that it is quite different for a man who had to give up a secure post. I don’t know whether I have ever explained this to you, but the Bank is a secure job for life, with a pension at 60, and a year’s salary and a pension for my wife in the event of my death. The main point, in any question of leaving the Bank, is (as I explained to Pound) the security for my wife. She will never be strong enough to shift for herself, or to endure great privation, she will inherit very little...and I must make reasonable provision for her before undertaking any adventures. I have gone into these details, for the first time, because it might appear, and I daresay has appeared to people who do not know my circumstances, that I am either very cowardly or very grasping. If I appear in this light to you, please let me know.

I do regard it as a disaster that I could not come to an arrangement with the Nation, and if the same post, or any similar post, should be open to me in the future, I should take it. I mean to leave the bank, and I must leave the bank, but I cannot say how soon or in what way.

Eliot seems trapped between conflicting interests, his desire to leave the bank to take up an editorship, but his awareness that such a post would allow him neither time nor security to care for his wife. What is remarkable in the tone of these letters is that Eliot does not seem at all resentful. Elsewhere, to his brother Henry, he writes of a strict regime intended to get her well that she possesses "infinite tenacity of purpose...I have never known anybody stick to a thing with such persistence and courage." Eliot appears to have recognised that both himself and Vivien were victims of her illness; but not to have turned inward and started to blame her for restricting his own career shows remarkable dedication and tenderness. The relationship between Thomas and Vivien Eliot seems wholly different to that of the infamous episode in The Waste Land, where the "young man carbuncular" finds his caresses met with "indifference" by the typist.

Likewise, of his mother - left alone in America after the death of his father - he writes that "I am thinking all the time of my desire to see her. I cannot get away from it. Unless I can really see her again I shall never be happy." The Waste Land presents a devastating picture of solipsism, of humans disconnected emotionally and spiritually from each other:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Yet what emerges from the letters is an Eliot who is intimately caring, and at the centre of a circle of acquaintances who clearly feel genuinely for his situation, beyond their admiration for his art.

Daily Diary: Andrew O'Hagan

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:39:00 +0000

I read very little today, not even a blog or news report. Instead, I am busy from 8.00 in the morning to 7.00 at night, partly with preparing my OU tutorial, and partly with marking essays.

Around lunchtime, I run into town for a meeting about a report I am writing for one of the University's research institutes, before I jump back onto the computer. The trouble - though also great flexibility - of the OU's marking system is that it is all done onto digital versions of the essays. This does allow me lots of space - perhaps too much - to write detailed comments and track corrections, but does mean I am tied to the screen.

At 6.00, my OU teleconferencing tutorial on Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring" and Keats' "To Autumn" begins. The students are really excellent, teasing out the ambiguities and multiple possible readings encoded in the ostensibly transparent poems, and confident in using the technical, formal terms. A couple of them disagree with each other, and this is when the real problem of holding tutorials via telephone is apparent. In a physical group, I would be happy to let them get on with their own debate, using eye contact and body language to provide some sort of control, or to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak; on the phone, however, I have to be more systematic, inviting one person to speak, then the other. It lacks the organicity of a real-world tutorial, but even so, by the close, and with such a positive discussion, I am on a post-teaching high. It is no exaggeration if I say that I find that, when a session has gone well, I find my adrenaline flowing, and it is hard to sit down and relax. This is the buzz of the profession that makes marking, and dealing with emails, and admin, all worthwhile.

By 10.00, finally in bed, I get a quick chance to pick up a book, and I read Andrew O'Hagan's essay on the sludge boats of Glasgow. Apparently, the pair of these municipal craft used to carry 3500 tons of sewage twice daily down the Cylde, dumping it at sea. The ironic juxtaposition is that atop the tanks of festering waste, boat loads of pensioners would cruise in a smart cabin, eating cucumber sandwiches courtesy of the city council, who offered this as a perk. O'Hagan typically makes the most of this contrast. Sadly - or not, from the environmental point of view - the last boat sailed in the late 1990s.

Daily Diary: Keats to Autumn

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:03:00 +0000

Today, Friday, usually a productive day for me as I realise with terror that I need to finish all the things I have put off from earlier in the week, is frustrating and slow. I begin by finishing off my OU tutorial preparation, with a reading of Keat's "To Autumn":

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
       To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
       For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
       Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
       Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
       Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
       And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It is clearly a highly evocative piece, with a whole host of poetic special effects on display. That enjambment in "to set budding more,/And still more, later flowers for the bees" is the clearest possible example of form and content working together in harmony, and perfect for my purposes as I am trying to show this to my OU students. They seem very capable of noting particular poetic techniques being used, or at understanding the narrative of a poem, but not necessarily of connecting the two, to see how the techniques draw out what is being said.

One of the criticisms often levelled at the poem is that, though clearly a highly achieved work, it lacks by being too perfect, too transparently evocative of the moment of Autumn, and lacking an ambiguous or complex engagement with the subject (of the sort evidenced, say, in Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring," which I discussed yesterday).

However, I find that lavish superabundance especially in the first stanza, somewhat ominous: conspiracy, clammy cells. These are not the terms of a definitively positive sentiment. And I also find that personification in the second stanza deliberately deceptive. Explicitly, it may be an effeminate Autumn who lies careless on the granary floor, or watches the last oozings of the apple press. But if the standard claim is that the poem conjures up the real atmosphere of Autumn, here we have an odd substitution that actually obscures reality. After all, the reality is that it is people who reap the harvest, get drunk, laze in the sun. Autumn is actually exploited by man, the product rather than the recipient of its own bounty, and so its treatment here seems an ironic kind of reversal. Finally, of course, we have that sense of decay in the final stanza, and although often read as Keats having come to terms with his imminent death - note the "soft-dying day" - that line "in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn" seems, to me, genuinely dark (as well as, for my didactic purposes, an excellent example of assonance).

All this study takes at best an hour, and I then switch into marking my OU essays on poetry, which dropped into my inbox in the small hours this morning. The first is positive and genuinely insightful, though as is common at this level the essay structure does not do justice to some of the insights, and the overall effect is patchy. By the time I get to number three, late in the afternoon, the alt-tab key testifies to my lack of concentration.

Instead, then, I finish off the first draft of a report I am writing for one of my university's research institutes, which involves dragging text boxes around the screen, and not much that requires intellectual concentration.

Daily Diary: Haiti, Wordsworth, Band of Brothers

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:05:00 +0000

I turn on the radio to a traumatic report by Matthew Price. He can only have been on the ground for a couple of hours, but his coverage is detailed, descriptive and moving. It is probably more than just the jet lag that makes his voice sound exhausted, and as ever I admire these BBC correspondents who can turn out a report from any condition, whilst still sounding human rather than like detached, writing robots. I send some money over to Oxfam. I would like to think that I would have done this anyway, though I suspect Price's words have caught me at a moment of sympathy: me bleary eyed from sleep, he exhausted and horrified by the scene he has woken to.

Moving to a different extreme from this, I spend the morning working on Wordsworth's "Lines Written In Early Spring," preparing the poem for an OU tutorial next week:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

Superficially, the poem seems simple enough, a case of the poet able to communicate with nature, whereas Man - at this point in history engaged in the French Revolutionary Wars - leaves him in a state of frustrated "lament."

But my argument, and the path I want to lead the students down, is that a lot hinges on the ambiguity of those lines "And I must think, do all I can,/That there was pleasure there." There are two ambiguities here. Does that "must" mean he cannot do other than perceive pleasure in nature, because it is so self-evident? Or does it mean that he feels that he ought to, given that this is part of "Nature's holy plan"? And where exactly is the pleasure located at this point? Earlier in the poem, he confidently and clearly perceives that the flower takes pleasure in breathing the air, and the birds in playing. Is this to be read similarly, that the twigs take pleasure in catching the air? Or, coming back to that ambiguity of the word "must," is it that there ought to be a pleasure in his memory of the natural scene, yet there has, over the course of the poetic recollection, developed a sort of mental blockage, wherein nature is no longer so openly a source of pleasure to him. That "do all I can" seems a little too stressed, too desperate, as if he is struggling to find pleasure in the moment of recollection; the subject, then, has switched from nature to the poetic ego, from being about the pleasure that the organisms take in the world around them, to being about the lack of straightforward pleasure the poet finds in revisiting and thinking about the memory.

Rather than being a simplistic commune with nature through an easily accessed memory (and given that these are lines written in early spring, about spring, we assume that there is not much temporal gap between experience and writing), the poem seems to me to dramatise its difficulty. Hence the movement from "much it grieved my heart to think/What man has made of man" to the question "Have I not reason to lament/What man has made of man?" Perhaps he has not reason to lament. After all, if Nature (or God) has a "Holy plan," it (or He) presumably has one for Man too, and it may just be that the poet is inconsistently incapable of seeing the reasons for God's plan for Man, though the poet is too easily capable of projecting the superficial pleasure birds and flowers take in the world around them.

This is clearer in the 1798 version above, where the theology of the work is explicit. The 1802 version we are going to be studying is less clear, with the final stanza being changed to:

If I these thoughts may not prevent,
If such be of my creed the plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

This heightens the ambiguity of the previous stanza up a notch. What are the thoughts that he cannot prevent? Thoughts of the pleasure nature takes in the spring around it? Or thoughts that nature may not be so pleasant, and hence should not be such an unmitigated source of pleasure to the poet, after all? Maybe nature is not so simply the positive double of a lamentable mankind.

As ever, I started off my reading of Wordsworth's poem dismissing it as yet another dismally dull nature poem, to go with that horrid "I wandered lonely as a cloud," which I loathe not because I am an anti-populist snob, but because of its saccharine quality. And, as ever, when I go more deeply into it, I realise that Wordsworth is not directly writing about nature at all, but about man's perception and process of memorialising nature. The process of memory, rather than the world itself, is key, and is far more interesting and dramatic than a first reading gives Wordsworth credit for.

After this insight, the day crawls to inertia, as I have to go and pick the car up from the garage. Usually a pleasant two mile bike ride on a track through the woods, the lethal snow that persists anywhere that is not a main road means that I have to take a six mile dog leg, going into town and then out again, on a busy dual carriageway. When I arrive, the mechanic says the clutch is fine, which has saved me some money, but has flushed some magic potion through the fuel injectors to solve a misfire, leaving it purring like a cat.

When I return, I singularly fail to pick up on work again, and instead watch the first episode of the Band of Brothers box set that H picked up cheap. It looks set to be a very absorbing drama; unlike Saving Private Ryan, the medium of the (remarkably high budget) television series means that the characters have room to breathe and develop as individuals, rather than mere grimy faces shooting off behind a smoking gun.

Daily Diary: Harold Pinter, Psycho, The Waste Land

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:10:00 +0000

News this morning of more snow chaos brought to the South West of England, juxtaposed with an earthquake in Haiti. The two things - vans stuck in drifts, bodies buried under rubble - hardly seem equivalent; so it is editorially sensible that, in comparison to last week when the snow dominated the headlines and hours of bulletins and smothered terror attacks and the economic crisis into silence, the earthquake is top story, whilst the snow drifts to number three. Interceding between the two, it appears Google now plans to pull out of its operations in China, realising that it is futile to offer a search engine onto the world, when an autocratic regime is determined to prevent it from focusing sharply.

On the bus to Stockton for a library meeting, I read Michael Billington's account of the relationship between Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser in the Guardian Review. Seems Pinter was not so interminably temper-prone as people make out, and both Fraser and Billington recall occasions when he demonstrated his sensitive side - including strewing their new house with flowers.

Making first trip to the library in ages, I pick up the London Review of Books, to read two articles which were not available freely online. Jenny Diski condemns a rather pointless academic/populist book about the Psycho shower scene. More interestingly, in the process she reminisces about the days when movies played in a continuous loop, so that one could come in midway through and then leave once one has come round to a recognised scene (as she notes, the experience predates 1960s postmodernism by a few years). Psycho is groundbreaking, she says, because it is the first film which needed to be watched from its intended start to finish (which is important, given that the main character and star draw of the film, Janet Leigh, dies mid-way through, and would therefore leave viewers who come in after an hour somewhat disappointed). Apparently, cinemas showing Psycho had cardboard cutouts of Hitchcock erected in the foyer, with a voice bubble explaining that no one, but no one, was to be let in after the film started, "not even the President of the United States...not even the Queen of England, God bless her." The thought of the Queen rudely knocking over Hitchcock's cardboard bouncer in order to catch a glimpse of Janet Leigh's nipple is an amusing image.

Diski is right that the shower scene has a special status. Like a myth, it is a scene everyone knows about and can visualise unconsciously, without ever having to have watched the whole. At this point, I note Psycho ought to be pushed to the top of my "films to be watched" list.

I also read Alan Bennett's New Year diary. Among others, his well-observed anecdote about people observing the 11 o'clock Armistice remembrance, and not only falling quiet but remaining "fixed in whatever attitude (handing over money, examining a vase) the silence caught them" seems destined for a minor scene in a future play.

More academically, I pick up F.B. Pinion's book on T.S. Eliot, and begin to read the chapter on The Waste Land. It starts promisingly: "What is peculiar about The Waste Land is the collocation of images and scenes in a manner calculated to evoke feelings and accordant ideas, without overt statements of meaning," which is obvious, but put much better than I could have done myself. Then I come across I.A. Richards' rather more pithy way of saying the same thing, in that it is like music in this respect, "a music of ideas." Having opened by saying that its images cannot be pinned to particular meanings, Pinion goes on to do just that, listing meanings and references in a dull, detailed, dictatorial way. I give up.

Daily Diary: The Waste Land, Don Juan, Meatloaf

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:08:00 +0000

Trouble getting the bus out this morning; it takes four of us to push it through the accumulated sludge, which seems to be lingering on the ground. The insistent drip from the roofs tells that the snow must be melting, but there is so much ice beneath it that cars are still having difficulty, as their wheels only expose themselves to the compacted skiddiness beneath the fluffy surface.

CL has gone up to Aberdeen for a course, then off to Denmark. He says that the snow is patchy up there now.

In idle moments, I dip into the BBC's coverage of Alistair Campbell at the Chilcot Inquiry. Campbell is sticking very much to the smoothly prepared script, and gives little away, excepting the fact that Blair had written a letter to Bush a couple of years before the Iraq war agreeing to support the US: "If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there. That would be the tenor of the communication to the president." This does not seem to bother Campbell, or imply that the war was a done deal long before the permutations ran through the UN, since it shows that Blair commendably put the diplomatic route first. What he does not acknowledge, though, is that given that the US was the only state to have genuine diplomatic leverage in the region, and given that the US was pandering to the UK in seeking a formal UN mandate for war, the US's knowledge that the UK would go to war anyway must have a priori undercut any diplomatic efforts, making them half-hearted at best.

Re-read "The Waste Land" and am struck - though it is of course made explicit in Eliot's notes - by how central a figure Tiresias is, in that by crossing gender lines he/she allows us to perceive that all the other characters are versions of each other. Ponder doing some sort of automatic reading exercise, whereby one immediately and spontaneously jots down anything that seems to echo or resonate with earlier parts of the poem. Though not willing to pick up my pen - I am no Madame Sostoris - I hear emerging from the rhythms and recurring motifs: hair, stone, water, eyes.

Also finish reading Canto I of Don Juan. Byron's obscene rhymes raise a smile on numerous occasions. What impresses me most, though, is his squeezing the new word, "burglariously" into an iambic pentameter line:

What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt's
KingCheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other rummaging,
Burglariously broke his coffin's lid:
Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.

A man with an equal capacity for verbal noise-making, Meatloaf is interviewed on Front Row, as he prepares to judge a new opera-reality TV show. He seems very articulate, and gets angry when Mark Lawson asks him what the "I won't do that" is in the song "I would Do Anything to Love." Reading aloud the lyrics, it is clear that this is not an ambivalent phrase designed to allow the listener to complete the gaps with their dirty mind, but actually quite touchingly related to the preceding phrase from the song, as in "But I'll never stop dreaming of you every night of my life...No I won't do that."

What is the Difference Between British and French Politics?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:49:00 +0000

The answer, it seems, should be quite dispiriting for a Brit, and quite pleasing for a Francophile.

In Britain, when Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to boost his approval ratings, he broadcasts trite tributes to an ageing, if popular, radio presenter. In France, by contrast, Nikolas Sarkozy aims to increase his popularity by interring Albert Camus in the Panthéon. Two nations separated by 25 miles of sea, and a gulf of taste: Gordon Brown has loved listening to Sir Terry along with a million builders; his opposite number across the Channel reads existential philosophy to please his classy compatriots.

Who is Our Modern Marinetti?

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:00:00 +0000

2009 sees the centenary of one of the most important works in the history of Modernism, Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto." In celebration, the Tate Modern recently held a major exhibition on Futurism which I heard and read much about, but sadly missed. This year, however, is certainly a good one on which to teach a course on Modern Literature, which I am currently doing for the first time.

I prepared my first tutorial for the course around the theme of "Manifestos for Modernism." Whilst many of the literary and artistic legacies of modernism can be traced back to the Victorian period, making the periodisation implied by the term "Modernism" somewhat problematic, there is no doubt that Modernism made itself known as a break with the past through a whole raft of self-conscious essays, statements and editorials explaining and justifying the new aesthetic and rebelling against the Victorian tenets of realism. Not only do we have Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto," but also the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting," the editorial manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist magazine Blast, Ezra Pound's "Imagist Manifesto," and Virginia Woolf's essays such as "Modern Fiction," to name but a few that spring immediately to mind. Tangentially, and somewhat earlier than these, we also have arguably the most important manifesto of them all, Marx's Communist Manifesto.

All of these manifestos shout, rebel against the establishment, stake a claim for the new and the youthful and the energetic. Just read the rhythms and bold, urban metaphors of the opening two paragraphs of Marinetti's piece:

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Marinetti goes on (naively, with the hindsight of World War One) to celebrate the anarchic power of technology, especially the automobile as a symbol of liberation:

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

It is startling to read a work like this. It is also, to my mind, vitally important that we look at the manifestos for modernism, as well as the literary and visual aesthetics that resulted. This is because, in the present moment, we are able to accommodate modernist art and literature fairly smoothly, blunting the radical edge it once had. What our postmodern age lacks is a sense of the really reactionary art work, the truly rebellious, and as a consequence modernist works from the pre-war period can seem conservative rather than stimulating.

Consider the case of contemporary or "modern" art (that is to say, work produced over the last half century or so). Modern art galleries today are generally happy places, integrated into cities (such as my local, the Baltic). They have cafés and baby changing facilities and are places to take granny visiting on a Sunday afternoon. The accessibility of art in the UK is something to be celebrated. However, integrated into public life in this way, art rarely disturbs or shocks; it does not occupy a place in the avant garde of culture in the truest sense of that term. With the possible exception of images of naked children - such as Tierney Gearon's I Am the Camera, which led to a police raid on the Saatchi gallery - rarely does art raise the hackles, or seem to break with a tradition that can be traced back to the dawn of Marinetti and his fellow modernists.

Contemporary art draws on the full spectrum of horror, sex and violence in a vain attempt to cause outrage in a culture that is used to seeing all laid bare on the daily news, or in cinema; responses to images neatly and safely confined in a gallery are, therefore, typically liberal and mild. One knows that the visionary or rebellious artist has been incorporated by society when Samuel Taylor Wood struts down a red carpet hand-in-hand with a 19 year old hunk, wearing a ball gown that would not look out of place on a Hollywood actress. Now Wood is a brilliant artist who probably knows full well the irony that she is part of celebrity culture. Her video of David Beckham sleeping is one of the most haunting installations I have seen at the Baltic. But that is precisely the irony: how can one offer a critique or observation of contemporary celebrity society, which Wood seemed to want to do in this piece which cast Beckham as a kind of sleeping beauty, when the artist is a celebrity themselves? Marinetti and other modernists put themselves against the mainstream of society, which they saw as bourgeois and decadent, and producing art which was smugly realist rather than subversive. In the postmodern period, rather than artists and writers being reactionary, rebellious, or strongly analytical of a society from which they separate themselves, the artist and their works have become folded in with society.

Back to modernism, then. And the trouble with studying modernist aesthetics is that it seems - well - less than modern, in the sense that the manifesto writers proclaimed it to be. In a modern art gallery, one may grumble of a Damien Hirst that "It's not art." But rarely, if ever, would that viewer say the same of Picasso's Guernica. T.S. Eliot was recently voted the Nation's Favourite Poet. Unless people were voting purely on the basis of having read the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, this must be a striking indication that The Waste Land, in its day so groundbreaking and visionary, now seems fundamentally normal, accessible. The same goes for Ulysses, regularly voted the most important novel of the twentieth century, and recently claimed as a being a work for "ordinary blokes." In a postmodern artistic culture that expresses itself to excess in a vain attempt to differentiate itself from the "noise" of a mass media, the modernist poem, painting or novel may even seem quiet and controlled.

In one of the most important essays about postmodernism, Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson talks about the way modernism was passionately repudiated

by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial."

Jameson goes on to argue, however, that in the postmodern era - with the folding of subversive art into wider culture that I have mentioned above - such attitudes have become archaic:

Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s.

Whilst modernist writings were once seen as radical, today the radical is the canonical mainstream. Thus the single most important thing about teaching and learning modernism is, it seems to me, to recapture the sense of energy, verve, and sheer guts that drove many of the modernist writers and artists.

When teaching my topic on manifestos, I asked a question to illustrate this point. Although modernism is often associated with the avant-garde elite, the Bloomsbury group rather than the common reader, Marinetti's "Futurist Manfisto" appeared not in some niche literary periodical, but on the front page of Le Figaro. Just consider that for a moment.

Le Figaro is and was a respected, fairly conservative newspaper. In 1909, it was arguably the most prominent daily paper in France. To publish a "Futurist Manifesto," with all its anarchic sentiment and glorious rebellion on the front page is something the word "chutzpah" was invented for (the Hebrew word appropriately acknowledges that unlike other modernists such as Pound, Marinetti campaigned against anti-Semitism). Just imagine the Frenchman, chocalat au lait in hand, spluttering croissant crumbs across the broadsheet, as he scans from reading about the King's activities in the Elysses Palace and the Caillaux conspiracy, to the sweeping, assertive, bold and brash statements of the Futurist.

An indication of how far we are from the possibility of such a shocking juxtaposition today comes when we try to hypothesise a modern parallel. Thinking of our newspaper is easy: the equivalent of Le Figaro of 1909 must be the Daily Telegraph.

But who is to appear on the front page, dominating that left hand column, incongruous alongside the picture of a soldier returning from Afghanistan, or David Cameron wafting his hands? Where is our modern Marinetti? Who would be his parallel today?

In my recent tutorial, someone sensibly suggested Nick Griffin. But the bumbling leader of the BNP, though certainly anarchic, would also utterly lack any of Marinetti's imagination. As already mentioned, Samuel Taylor Wood has already graced the front pages in her ball dress, so she is too well-known to qualify. Damien Hirst would be a bit predictable, and might just be trying to raise the value of his works. Turning to the literary arts, one might think of the fiery Norman Mailer, or the quirky Thomas Pynchon. But the former has now passed away, and the latter's more recent fiction like Inherent Vice seems almost, dare one say it, accessible. All these examples are also past their 50s. Marinetti was just 33 when he published the "Futurist Manifesto," and there is a definite sentiment across the modernist manifestos that to be physically old is also to be tied to the ideas of the past, whereas it is the young who must carry the flag of modernity.

My lack of examples is not intended to bemoan that we no longer have a new generation of truly reactionary, truly modern artists. It is, rather, to highlight - - within a postmodern context whereby the modern seems fairly traditional and conventional - just how radical and thrilling that early 1900s moment was. It was a true paradigm shift in the arts, ranking alongside the advent of perspectivism in painting, or the rise of the novel. Where our next paradigm is coming from, that will take us beyond the post-modern, I for one do not know. Any ideas?

The Open University: First Impressions of a Unique Institution

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:10:00 +0000

Over the summer, I was (more by luck than skill, I suspect) appointed as an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. This is the first of two posts contrasting the OU with the more conventional university at which I have taught part-time for several years. This post gives my impressions of the OU as an institution; the second will look at the differences between OU and conventional students.

I have long felt that the Open University does things differently. When I was younger, I remember our kitchen table continually covered with papers, and colourful textbooks; DVDs and software CDs would randomly drop through the letterbox; and, in the middle of the night, the video player would suddenly start whirring, recording some OU broadcast. This was because my dad took an OU course every year, finally earning his second BSc after twelve years hard slog.

Today, I stand on the other side of the OU fence. I recently got a post as an Associate Lecturer on one of the OU's English Literature courses. Having seen the way the OU worms its way into the home life and domestic environments of students sitting courses, suddenly the OU has infiltrated my own kitchen table and scattered its papers on the floor of my bedroom, as I grapple with the demands of teaching a new course, and integrating myself into the rules and procedures of this organisation.

Whilst I always knew the OU was unique among universities, I never realised until now quite how remarkable an institution it is. Over 200 000 students enrol to study with the OU each year. Of these, around 20 000 students are studying an OU course outside the UK; many are ex-pats, or members of the armed forces, but many too are foreign students who welcome the opportunity to make contact with a world-recognised institution. Over two thirds of students will be working whilst studying. 15% of students come from disadvantaged communities.

Even for those not studying formally, the OU makes itself felt. Each week, there are around 50 000 downloads of OU podcasts from iTunes. Two million people access the freely available teaching and learning materials from the Open Learn website. Millions more watch OU supported television programmes, such as the BBC's Coast.

The sheer scale of the organisation is mind-boggling, and utterly unlike any other, mainstream Higher Education institution. And yet what strikes me most as an Associate Lecturer is that at its heart lies an intimate relationship between teachers and students. The idea of an OU course is that the actual teaching is done through the carefully-prepared study materials, such as course books and audio-visual materials. The tutor is not a lecturer in the conventional sense, delivering information and setting tests. The role of a tutor is simply to be on hand to offer some pointers and clarification when a student becomes stuck, to deliver tutorials which again help to draw out some of the issues on the course, and to mark assignments with detailed feedback.

With this theoretically proscribed remit, it would be easy for the OU to offer tutor support for courses en masse. In the digital age, students could post queries on message boards, and a central team of tutors could moderate and respond to them. Largely, the student community could be self-supporting, with students offering each other advice. This does happen to a degree, with students setting up lively Facebook groups, for example. However, although the OU might be run as a purely distance learning organisation, with staff too kept at arm's length, core to student support in the OU remains the allocation of a single tutor, to one small group of students (around 20 in my case).

Students may never get to see me in person (since my students are based in Europe), but they will always know that I am at the end of an email or phone line. In that respect, the student-teacher relationship encouraged by the OU is even more intimate than in a traditional university, where a tutor might lecture to 200 students, or have dozens of small tutorial groups to supervise. Already this year I have had more "contact" with my OU students than with my students at my other, conventional university.

It is quite clear that the OU is a student-centred organisation. It has to be. Its whole raison d'etre when founded forty years ago was to widen the availability of Higher Education to students. At the same time, though, the OU has had continually to attract students in order to sustain itself. Albeit often with generous financial support available for those who could not otherwise afford it, students have always paid fees and the OU is conscious that without students, it would cease to exist. It was, in this sense, forty years ahead of the game of tuition fees, which turned students into consumers.

As I have been complaining recently on this blog, conventional universities have no room to provide more contact hours or support for students who are now paying fees, because it is still the research which brings in most money. As an OU lecturer, though, I am told that I am expected to support my students based on their needs. If a student needs additional help, there is a mechanism to reimburse me, as I can request overtime payments. By contrast at my mainstream university, if any student needs more than the basic tuition, or additional pastoral care, I have to support them at my own time and expense.

On the flip side, the OU also seems genuinely to care about its Associate Lecturers, all of whom teach purely on a part time basis, often alongside other jobs. It would be easy to pass the buck of professional development on to other organisations, or expect lecturers (who may already be established academics) to fend for themselves. Instead, from the moment I received my training pack it was clear that the OU will invest and support me, in a way that sets a good example for my own relationship with students.

For example, the OU offers a course fee waiver for Associate Lecturers, and runs a range of courses that might be relevant to teaching within and beyond the OU. Part of my salary is stipulated as professional development time, and although it is left on trust whether I will actually do any, the fact that it is highlighted as a separate payment speaks volumes. I am allocated a mentor who I can approach with the picky concerns that are not worth raising with a line manager. A sample of my essays will be double marked, and I will get to see the moderator's comments; in my other university job, by contrast, I have never been told about external examiners' reports, despite me marking half the year group for one module last year, and have had specifically to ask whether my marks had to be pushed up, down, or were just right.

But. I would not be an academic if I did not judiciously balance the positives with negatives. And although my view of the OU has been very positive thus far, and I am proud to be associated with an organisation that does so much to support those who would otherwise be disenfranchised from Higher Educations, already there are some things that gripe.

There is - what else? - that old issue of pay. The OU at least has the decency to state that I should be working for 6 hours a week, which puts to shame my other university which assumes that it takes 1 hour to prepare for a 1 hour tutorial. Joke. Even so, the 6 hours very easily vanishes. I am probably working twice that each week at the moment, because I have to learn the course for the first time, as well as to teach it. Given that students on my course should be studying for 15 hours a week...well, you do the maths. Having said that, I expect that next year, with more experience behind me, the 6 hours should become a fairer representation.

The issue which has surprised and frustrated me most, though, is the awful and incoherent IT infrastructure behind the OU enterprise. There are several different websites all doing comparable things within interfaces that all look different and un-integrated (Open Learn, Student Home, Tutor Home, Platform First Class, Intranet Home). The email and forum software belongs in a museum of early 1990s bulletin boards: there is no threading, 100 MB of storage, no search function, poor attachment support, an awful address book, no mobile or push email support. A project is underway to replace this old system with something that may live up to the vain name First Class. But we have had richly interactive websites and communication tools for the last decade, and given that part of the OU's remit is to drive forward educational technologies, it is shockingly behind the times with its own virtual learning environment (VLE).

Similarly, the way my tutorials work is ridiculously quirky. Because my students are scattered across Europe, we hold tutorials via a telephone conferencing system. This involves an operator phoning round each participant in turn, which occupies 5 to 10 minutes of a 45 minute tutorial; we then hold a conversation across a time-delayed, echoing line. I must not overrun my tutorials, since the international operator-assisted calling charges are significant. Neither must the calls go through to students' mobiles.

But there is another way of running conferencing cheaply and easily, with me in full control. You may have heard of it. It is called VoIP. It would be easy for me to install software on my own PC that would allow me to conference call students, either to their phones or computers or mobiles, for nothing more than the cost of a local rate phone call. Like all large institutions, I guess the OU must be slow to turn on to new technological opportunities. But as the one at the sharp end of a rubbish and costly phone line, who could run a VoIP conference with the click of a mouse, the rigidity of the old system is frustrating and, again, surprising given the OU's remit to promote virtual and distance learning.

To be fair to the OU, it is not alone in being a Higher Education institution that struggles with the internet age. My other university uses the god-awful, snail-slow, user-unfriendly Blackboard. However, whilst in mainstream universities such VLEs are an addendum to conventional teaching methods (lectures and tutorials), the VLE is increasingly the main face of the OU for students and, for that matter, for Associate Lecturers.

Even so, a gripe about technology should be set in the context of the fact that the OU works, and works brilliantly for a large and diverse body of students who would otherwise not have access to study. In my second blog post, I will look at how these students seem to differ from "conventional" ones who have slipped directly from college into university.

University Contact Hours

noreply@blogger.com (Ishmael) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:17:00 +0000

A.C. Grayling has just written a comment piece in The Guardian complaining that more "contact hours" do not equate to a better education. This is the belief apparently held by Peter Mandelson, who in calling for universities to become more commercially responsive to their consumers (i.e. students), has focused on contact time as a prime way in which universities should compete to attract students.

Grayling remarks that Mandelson has misunderstood the nature of a university, especially in Arts and Humanities subjects:

University is emphatically not about spoon-feeding and hand-holding through courses, but the very opposite. It is not about maximising contact hours, but about autonomy in thinking, researching and writing.

This is fundamentally true. The job of a university teacher is not just to deliver the maximum amount of information in the most efficient way (one can imagine this idea might appeal to Mandelson, though) but to encourage students to learn independently. This is why the single most popular career destination for English Literature graduates is business and consultancy. It does not matter to an accountancy or financial firm that a student can recite twelve Keats poems, or tell you the plot of Pride and Prejudice. What matters is that in discussing texts in tutorials, in reading critical material, and in writing essays about literary works, the English student becomes able to summarise information, write accurately, and present confidently. They have also proved that they can study independently in a library, without needing a teacher to look over them and crack a whip.

Giving an arts and humanities student the equivalent number of contact hours as a science student - where the delivery of raw information, which can be applied to a relevant vocation such as engineering, does matter - would entirely negate a key benefit of having a pool of graduates emerging from non-skills based courses. Again, one suspects Mandelson will rather miss this point.

The hard core of Grayling's argument, then, is difficult to dispute, for all that he whimsically recites soft Aristotelian ideals: "We educate ourselves so that we can make a noble use of our leisure." However, as I have commented recently on this blog, the leaders of universities - who did not have to pay tuition fees themselves - grossly underestimate the financial hardship of current students, and consistently take the attitude that students are a problem to be minimised, rather than fee-paying consumers. When staff are torn between giving more contact time to students, or researching more, the former invariably gives way.

Whilst universities, especially in the Arts and Humanities, should be concerned with allowing students to learn independently, and contact hours are not the be all and end all of a good education, this does not mean that universities currently give value for money. Indeed, the lifetime earnings of arts and humanities graduates may not beat those of people who leave school aged 16, and so if students are to take a hefty loan burden long into their lifetimes, universities need to ensure that they offer value for money in the broadest possible sense of "value," which may mean providing more teaching for the crucial three years.

Students on a typical Arts and Humanities course may have only around 10 contact hours a week. With current tuition fee levels, that works out at around £40 per student per hour, and considerably more (into three figures) for a body of students in a seminar or lecture. Surely students have the right to feel aggrieved when lecturers remain uncontactable, or unable to offer any more than the minimum, or when other resources do not come up to scratch?

How does it help a student to learn independently when it can take two months for them to get an essay back from a tutor? How does it help students to learn independently when the only comment at the bottom of an essay is "well done"? How does it help students to learn independently when course books are not accessible or even stocked in a university's over-stretched library? How does it help a student to learn independently when a tutor does not have time to offer pastoral support if a student is encountering domestic, personal or financial difficulties beyond their control?

All of these examples are things I have encountered first hand as a student and university tutor. All of these examples speak not of staff who do not care, or of students who expect too much, but of universities and staff stretched on the rack of teaching and research, with the latter currently dominating.

I also teach for the Open University, and the quality of contact and support students have from tutors is astonishing in comparison to traditional universities. Yet the OU is also one of the best institutions educating through independent learning. Universities ought not to aim to maximise contact hours in any quantitative sense; but they have a long way to go before they offer value for money through quality of contact, in the way the OU has done since its inception as a student-centred organisation.

Maximising contact hours would not automatically give students a better education; indeed, for Arts and Humanities graduates who prove their ability to work without supervision, it might even be counter-productive. However, that badge of "contact hours" offers a very useful focal point around which to have the necessary debate about whether fee paying students are really getting the quality of experience they deserve. It should also focus the minds of deans and vice chancellors into realising that you cannot squeeze more out of overworked staff if they must do both teaching and research. If teaching needs to be improved, then more staff need to be employed. This is the simple equation that will, almost certainly, become the outcome of higher tuition fees.

It may not be good for the idea of the university, where those doing the cutting edge research are, currently, also those who provide inspirational teaching; it will almost certainly lead us to follow the American model where graduate teaching assistants do as their name suggests, whilst a few faculty Professors do research full time. However, these consequences are only to be expected when students have become consumers. For student-consumers as they exist now, the quality (and perhaps quantity) of teaching matters, and it is a good thing that Mandelson has raised that "contact hours" spectra, to give students a hook on which to hang their demands, and to give them hard figures to force their universities to respond to their current imbalance in favour of research.